The United States of Dixieland: Corporatism, Jesus, and the Death Genes

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Yet these confounding and contradictory attributes of the southern psyche will not be dissolved into dirt:
Traits of habitual submission to authority, of hostile defiance against any hint of outside interference in their lives, of fierce loyalty to one's kin and unquestioning devotion to the place of one's birth, of reflexive racial hatred and resistance to change, of moonshine revelry and anguished come-to-Jesus recantations of sin will live on through the old man's progeny.

Those characteristics worked to the benefit of the ruling elite of the post-plantation southland and now provide the same service for the lords of the corporate empire: At present, given that our lives must be surrendered to long hours of exploitive labor and that we're offered little hope of ever removing the overseer's boot from our throats, we have come to share an affinity of exploitation with the laboring class rabble of the old south. From the cotton and tobacco fields of the (allegedly) bygone feudalist order, up to the present-day low pay, no benefits jobs of the so-called service sector economy (where vast numbers of us can only keep a roof over our heads, inexpensive junk food in our bellies, and Wal*Mart quality clothes on our backs by assuming crushing
debt) -- those hope-decimating, labor practices and company town credit schemes (although, nowadays, slicker and less overt) are still with us.

Also, mirroring the values of Old Dixie, so many of us Americans, regardless of region, share an unquestioning loyalty to military tradition -- a pernicious, collective pathology that glorifies the squandering of one's life in wars that serve to profit the narrow interests of a small, self-serving, aristocratic class. Ergo, from the so-called War of Northern Aggression right up to the equally absurdly titled Operation Iraqi Freedom, the mistaking of blind faith for heroic sacrifice persists.

Moreover, as was the case with so many
poverty-stricken whites in the Deep South, the inequities of the present order have endowed many contemporary Americans with a sense of nebulous rage and nettling resentment begot by having one's spirit repeatedly crushed by the inhuman demands of a seeming implacable system. Then as now, these anguished sentiments rise, tragically, displaced as fear, resentment, and hatred of minorities, homosexuals, reformers, and outsiders ... From the Klan meetings, the Jim Crow laws, and the lynching of the bad-old-days of Dixieland, right up to the right wing hate-speak of talk radio, the de facto segregation of gated, suburban subdivisions, and the Christofascistic queer bashing of these bad-new-days -- the hateful legacies linger.

But an existence comprised of such criteria depletes one's life of meaning, in a similar manner as the repeated planting of cotton leeched the life-sustaining soil of the old south of vital nutrients. The vitality of existence withers and falls away and is soon supplanted by the seeds of the Death Genes. Then the landscape turns ugly; children grow hollow-eyed, empty, and ignorant; passion and purpose dry up and are replaced by insatiable cravings and nameless dread; dreams turn to dust and rise from the arid land as blinding squalls of paranoid delusions.

Thus Empire holds us in its death embrace. Grasping for air, we besiege the indifferent sky as to how we might loosen its pitiless grip.

So then, how might we gain our freedom?

Shall we proffer a polite request to the masters of the empire ... that they might consider, at their leisure, removing their bony hands from our throats?
Yes, and that would yield about the degree of success the old man would have if he petitioned the devouring earth to reconstitute his decomposing flesh.

Shall we always take care to speak reasonably, with cautious words, uttered in measured tones to our betters -- then, perhaps, the elites of the corporate media will, for a moment, cease their shilling for the prevailing order and begin to disseminate a modicum of our perspective? Yes, and the song of cicada will soften into a soothing hymn.

Shall we bow our heads and humbly ask the mindless mobs of the consumer state to abstain from looting the planet of its life-sustaining resources? Yes, and the draping Spanish moss of the lowland marshes will henceforth show mercy to the trees they suffocate.

And then, perhaps, the bright day will dawn -- when the rulers of the empire will alter the course of its death-bound trajectory and suffer remorse for the fates of those they have crushed beneath them. Yes, such an event will come to pass -- around the time the alligators of the swamp cultivate a fondness from vegetarian cuisine.

The neo-plantation system of the corporate empire stands before us and within us: It has molded our lives and perceptions as thoroughly as the old south's stratified society of landed gentry and tenant farmer rabble molded the life and perceptions of my wife's departed father.

We, the subjects of this empire, bear the Death Genes.
As my fellow southerner, Walker Percy pointed out, the best way to survive our Death Genes is to face them and name them -- and never suffer from the deadly delusion that you can deny them, reason with them, or outrun them ... for you carry them within you.

When we face the empire, we face ourselves. To survive, it is imperative that we cease to lie to ourselves about our condition.

Although to do so will not prove to be our redemption:
Those pat solutions are only to be found in crack pipes and fundamentalists' sermons. The Fox News Channel will not guide us to the Beulah Land. And Jesus will not raise the road kill from the dead. Yet knowing a few sad truths about ourselves will allow us to see the world and its terrifying beauty with greater clarity.

And by this act we are strengthened. It gives us the courage to love. We can meet one another in spring fields of green corn, where the Death Genes loosen their grip and the wit of the world remains.

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http://www.philrockstroh.com/

Phil Rockstroh, a self-described, auto-didactic, gasbag monologist, is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at:
phil@philrockstroh.com Visit more...)

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