After the Great Depression the Rich had the impression we were ripe for revolution. Their solution? A New Deal.
But this "gift" they gave us was merely to enslave us temporarily amaze us 'til they could tear that mother down.
After World War Two they gave us credit. Did it work on us? You bet. It's worked so well we're all in debt up to our ass.
We got little Levitt mockups of their mansions, sprawling highway expansion of veins ready for the oily needle in the nation's arm.
And they let us go to college, but they're afraid of knowledge 'cause it's POWER (TO THE PEOPLE). Can't have that! You have a dream? You just dream on.
Basic education is outdated on the corporate plantation. All the world's remediation can't undo the devastation done by whole word reading and new math.
And this theft of skills makes a mockery of participatory democracy, sending us down the corporate Manifest Destiny path.
Advertising's their predation for our seduction and sedation so without evaluation we'll submit while they feed on us like jackals, slap our souls in shackles and have us branded by age three with corporate logo loyalty. Our only future is the next thing that we buy.
Pharmaceuticals push legal drugs for shyness and bad moods. Huge conglomerates sing our love songs to alcohol, SUVs and fried foods. They've tranquilized and supersized us with material goods and ubiquitous depictions of degrading sexual juxtapositions laid like land mines in all the media's neighborhoods.
Yet after all this depredation we've let the corporate plantation become our American Idol(atry). We want our ship to come in so we can be just like them. Meanwhile we take our place in the new U.S. "serve us" economy.
Ask not what your country has done to you, because there is no remorse. And don't you know nobody knows you when you down(sized) and out(sourced).
- Vi Ransel
Vi's works appear widely both in print and online. She conducts Poetry Workshops and gives readings in Central New York. Her latest chapbook is "Sine Qua Non Antiques (an Arcanum of History, Geography and Treachery).
This is it. You want to know who you really are? Then Read this poem very closely. Compliant, Complacent Consumers. It's Ironic that an Education used to be the way to individuation, self actualization and perhaps enlightenment. Something happened, Somehow modern institutional education took the self out of the equation.
Now Self Education starts when you, finding your Being has been put in box by programming, you put your programming in a box. Then you will rediscover the world as a whole new creation. Same world, but a 180 degree different relation. Suddenly, A place you've never seen before With an eye that has never before, seen.
If your waiting for politics, consumerism or world peace to set you free, or even just make you happy, You will be waiting for a train that was designed to never leave the station.
Vi really gets it. I'm a fan.
by
"Hoss" David P. (51 articles, 5 quicklinks, 14 diaries, 338 comments)
on Friday, January 5, 2007 at 12:25:14 PM
Nice work, and I don't really care for poetry because I don't usually get it or find it equal to prose for expressing myself.
But I did especially like, "sprawling highway expansion of veins ready for the oily needle in the nation's arm", "the corporate plantation", and "Ask not what your country has done to you".
by
Yaybob (12 articles, 0 quicklinks, 1 diaries, 174 comments)
on Saturday, January 6, 2007 at 8:56:18 AM
2 comments
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