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Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: phil@philrockstroh.com. Visit Phil’s website: http://philrockstroh.com/ or at FaceBook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000711907499
Wednesday, February 1, 2012 A Journey To The End Of Empire: It is always darkest right before it goes completely black (7 comments)
The times have bestowed on us a shuffle to the graveside of our culture, and, we, like members of a New Orleans-style, second line, funeral procession, must allow our hearts to be saturated by sorrowful songs...When the service is complete, the march away from the boneyard should shake the air with the ebullient noise borne of insistent brass.
Wednesday, January 25, 2012 Occupying Libido: Negotiating a landscape of hypocrisy and hungry ghosts (7 comments)
Obama and Romney manage to hide the malevolent, hungry ghost of empire behind a veneer of soul-defying, daylight normalcy. But Newt Gingrich's bloated carcass displays imperium's murderous id. What has become of the diminishing resources of the world? Newt grows ever fatter and more grotesque as he greedily devours these things. What terrible fate befell the U.S. constitution? Newt dry humped it to dust.
Friday, January 6, 2012 Secrets of Empire & Self-Deceptions Of Partisans: Yet a howling defiance into the darkness of the corporate state night (9 comments)
Barack Obama's true nature and authentic identity remains elusive. After all this time, he still seems less man than marketing rollout, less of a political leader than an object lesson in product placement. The situation is like having the role of chief executive of the nation filled with a disposable razor or a heavily hyped iPhone application.
Friday, December 16, 2011 Liberating America's Worldview (15 comments)
Occupy Wall Street protesters appealed to the broader U.S. population -- and even the police -- as fellow members of the 99 percent, but many Americans still fear breaking with the oppressive status quo and most police will follow orders in harsh crackdowns.
Friday, December 16, 2011 Dying Empire Bebop: The Sedition Of Ecstatic Novelty
John Coltrane reported that the conception and creation of his timeless masterpiece, "A Love Supreme" ended his addiction to drugs and alcohol. This soul-reviving suite should be made the suggested soundtrack of every drug and alcohol rehab unit in the United States -- if not played on a repeating loop at every gas station, convenience store, and shopping mall on the planet.
Thursday, December 15, 2011 Recovering from Authoritarian Simpatico Syndrome (ASS): "Because the cops don't need you and man they expect the same" (7 comments)
Occupy Wall Street protesters appealed to the broader U.S. population -- and even the police -- as fellow members of the 99 percent, but Phil Rockstroh observes that many Americans still fear breaking with the oppressive status quo and most police will follow orders in harsh crackdowns. Or as Bob Dylan presents the case in verse: "Because the cops don't need you and man they expect the same"--Just Like Tom Thumb's Blue.
Wednesday, December 7, 2011 "By Imbeciles Who Really Mean It": Lost Verities and Dirty Hippies (7 comments)
Because the vast majority of the populace are deemed "losers, due to how the system is rigged, techniques must be created to displace the rage, born of a sense of powerlessness, that grips the system's exploited underlings. OWS is beginning to change the narrative, align it with reality, & that is an alarming development for the 1 percent; hence, the retooled, amped-up propaganda campaign we're seeing signs of at present.
Thursday, December 1, 2011 Amid The Architecture Of Declining Capitalism: Memes, Death Genes And Real Estate Schemes (3 comments)
Memes are ever-replicating, exponentially reproducing, collectively evolving bits of human thoughtware as our bodies are the hardware. If their resonances remain on in the realm of pixels and soundbites, a meme will translate into little more than pop culture ephemera. Memes must be carried by flesh into the non-virtual world; their human carriers might even be peppered sprayed themselves and carted off to jail.
Wednesday, November 23, 2011 "The Degree To Which You Resist Is The Degree To Which You Are Free" (6 comments)
The first vibrations, closer to tremors, transpired because the ground below us has been fracked of dreams " the void engendered seismological activity. Now, from Cairo, Egypt's Tahrir Square to Syntagma Square in Athens, Greece, to Liberty Park, in New York, New York, to Oscar Grant Park in Oakland, California, we have become like tuning forks, in sympatico with the resonances of the tormented earth.
Tuesday, November 15, 2011 The Police State Makes Its Move: Retaining one's humanity in the face of tyranny (3 comments)
When anyone tells you that dead soldiers died for your freedom, it is your duty to occupy reality and inform them of just how mistaken they are. And if you truly cherish the concepts of freedom and liberty, you just might be called on to face mindless arrays of fascist cops and lose your freedom, for a time, going to jail, so others might, at some point, gain their freedom.
Tuesday, November 8, 2011 Dehumanizing Late-Stage Capitalism (2 comments)
As the populace of the corporate/consumer state, we have been induced, by means of small bribes and hyper-authoritarian coercion, to sign a social contract that sells our essential nature on the cheap, i.e., to be defined (hence diminished) as a consumer, a commuter, an employee, a Republican, a Democrat, a member of a demographic group, a cipher, a s
Thursday, October 27, 2011 We Shall Not Be Moved: Police Repression, Official Mendacity And Why OWS Has Already Overcome (4 comments)
Behind the bland face of the political establishment (purchased by the bloated profits of the plundering class) are riot cops, outfitted and armed with the accoutrements of oppression, who are ready and willing to enforce the dictates of the elitist beneficiaries of the degraded status quo.
Thursday, October 13, 2011 Punching a Hole in Bubbles of Denial and Addiction: Late Capitalism and Its Discontents of the American Autumn (5 comments)
Many situations in this life are rigged e.g., the gamed system of the corporate state. But life itself is too vast, too intricate to be rigged; it is truly too big to fail. Now: To the streets, glistening with renewing rain"to the flaming barricades"its flames caress the future. Come out of self-exile; you are the change you can believe in.
Wednesday, September 21, 2011 "Rome Wasn't Burned In A Day": Replacing Liberal Timidity With Leftist Passion (1 comments)
The inspired, enduring (very threatening to some) art, music and political action of the era [the 1960s] were not the result of liberal accommodation and compromise. Antithetically, the cause of peace and justice (briefly) made some headway despite liberals not because of them
Monday, September 5, 2011 A Labor Day Tale Of Three Cities: Pittsburgh, Birmingham and New Orleans (2 comments)
At present, in cities such as Birmingham and Pittsburgh, the structures, built in the mechanized fury of the Industrial Age, stand idle"decaying around legions of the unemployed and the woefully underpaid and under-compensated. In the oxidized scream of rust, one can almost hear the wails of rage of those souls who surrendered their life force to erect and work the now abandoned factories, mills and foundries of the nation.
Saturday, August 27, 2011 Idiot Wind: The Eternal Return Of The Politics Of The 1970s (2 comments)
The empire is too pervasive and invasive to avoid our being carriers of its proliferate pathologies; this system weaned us and socialized us, and, even when we rebel against it, our actions are generally restricted within limits set by it.
Otherwise, the consequences would be too crushing for most of us to endure: financial ruin, destitution, homelessness.
Friday, August 12, 2011 Life in an Age of Looting: "Some Will Rob You with a Sixgun and Some with a Fountain Pen" (6 comments)
Here's the lowdown: The Wall Street fraudsters of the swindler class want to refill their coffers and line their pockets (that is, offshore accounts) with Social Security and Medicare funds. That's the nature of the unfolding scam, folks. Oligarchic rule has always been a system defined by legalized looting that leaves a wasteland of want, deprivation, and unfocused rage in its wake.
Thursday, August 4, 2011 "We Would Rather Die In Our Dread" (2 comments)
The so-called "debt crisis" involved a similar dance of deceit and distraction. As was the case, early into the Obama presidency, with the healthcare "debate," the deal was struck before the faux rancorous music began. The fix was in. The moneyed class works the system and those without power and influence get worked over.
Thursday, July 21, 2011 "The Arts Of Life They Changed Into The Arts Of Death:" Bachmann, Palin and Robertson and the limits of logic (2 comments)
Granted, the sense of unease displayed by right wing, fundamentalist Christians regarding the state of the nation is understandable; although, their attribution as to the origin and cause of the destructive drift of U.S. culture is so far off the mark they would fail to get wet if they fell into a baptismal pool the size of Lake Michigan.
Monday, June 13, 2011 On "The Issue Of Character" And Empire (4 comments)
How many times do the prigs, ninnies, and scolds of the U.S. have to repeat this sort of inanity before they grow up and realize that human beings have strong libidos? Libido propels both creativity and contretemps, and it is wise to aver that "the issue of character" should best be evoked and debated, as a general rule, when the situation involves hypocrisy.
Sunday, May 29, 2011 Descartes Pilots a Predator Drone: René, Can We Begin A Dream Collaboration Project? (7 comments)
Dualist mind, enchanted by your mastery of things you deem dead, you have bred seething clouds of black flies infesting Cartesian slaughterhouse holding pens and bequeathed to us dying oceans and endless wars waged from vast distances by bloodless technocrats within cubicles.
Tuesday, May 17, 2011 Leaving a Church of Free-Market Miracles (6 comments)
It is a common (unspoken) fear of the men I grew up around down south that if they were to let go of what little they clutch, nothing would arrive to replace what would be lost.
There will be no place reserved for them and their families in the new situations and novel arrangements that (by their addled take on the situation) elitist environmentalist snobs contrive to force upon them.
Thursday, May 5, 2011 The Politics Of Revenge And Submission: "When the individual feels, the community reels" (2 comments)
Since 9/11/2001, due to the lust for revenge of the people of the U.S., hundreds of thousands of innocent Islamic people are dead. These human beings were killed in our name. Be very careful when you proclaim: "I'm glad 'we' got bin Laden. He deserved it." Be very grateful most of us don't get what we deserve.
Tuesday, April 26, 2011 Among Ciphers, Barn Burners and Confidence Artists: a comb-over treatment for declining empire (9 comments)
Born into wealth and privilege, Trump -- this cross-hatched haired, reality television popinjay -- is marketed as a man of the multitudes. Perhaps, he is: On one dismal level, he is the very emblem of the callow, infantilized, highchair tyrants spawned by the Viagra Capitalism of late U.S. empire.
Thursday, April 14, 2011 Interstates And States of Grief (2 comments)
On US Interstates, we meet the US empire coming towards us. In this evocative video, we meet confederate ghosts and demons of consumer emptiness. We travel down the highway, propelled by engines of extinction, towards empire's end, where we find ourselves bearing much grief yet are stranded amid ferocious beauty.
Tuesday, April 12, 2011 Why Americans Are So Easily Conned (5 comments)
While nice liberals retreat to their comfort zones, the forsaken laboring class constructs insulating walls of resentment. [...] These conditions create an existence as redolent of the aromas of existence as plastic covered cheese-food. In cultural terms, it is as if the people of the US have become mummified in plastic packaging wrap" have been rendered -- Body Bag People.
Sunday, March 27, 2011 The Mark Inside: Joseph Beuys And Coyote meet "Humanitarian" Bombing Campaigns (1 comments)
In the last few days, I've noticed a marked rise in the levels of anxiety and apprehension in the minds of many of the folks with whom I have contact. Images of irradiated rains and bombing campaigns have left many riddled with dread, haunted by the uncertainty of it all"gripped by the feeling that events are hurtling at an exponential rate of speed towards some ill-defined but tragic reckoning.
Friday, March 18, 2011 Why the Jokes about Japan's Tragedy (1 comments)
Over the last three decades, anyone (who has been even nominally conscious) can see how destructive to the health and well-being of the general population of the nation, conservative, "market-driven" economic dominance has been.
Wednesday, March 16, 2011 From Celebrities To Tsunamis: "If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answer
The "culture wars" serve the ruling elite. This is a technique the operatives of corporate duopoly have down. Unloose social conservative activists to kick up dirt with divisive issues e.g., the rightwing wants to roast Big Bird on a spit and legislate that every unborn fetus be declared Jesus Christ himself. All the while, above the obscuring dirt cloud, the financial elite fly off in their private jets
Wednesday, December 8, 2010 Amnesia As A Way Of Life: WikiLeaks Amid The "Careless People" (2 comments)
Lamentably, the US Empire, as was the case with any imperium throughout history, has grown into a bloated abomination kept provisionally alive by self-deluded apparatchik and ignorant killers. What can one do about the situation, other than try to get out of the way of this wounded giant and stand clear upon its inevitable collapse? Unfortunately, damn little.
Thursday, December 2, 2010 Amnesia As A Way Of Life: WikiLeaks Amid The "Careless People" (1 comments)
"News is what somebody somewhere wants to suppress; all the rest is advertising." Lord Northcliffe, British publisher 1865-1922 Accordingly, at present, there arrives a paucity of news, but, hour after hour, comes a drowning deluge of advertising. Enveloped in this commercially dominated hologram, on a cultural basis, it has proven difficult to arrive at a common lexicon to tell the tale of truths buried & freedoms imperiled.
Thursday, November 11, 2010 Public Like A Frog: "Where all are guilty, no one is" (7 comments)
The difference between the Soviet Union during its last few decades and the US Empire in its death swoon is the people of the Soviet Union knew it was all a fraud. In contrast, our corporate masters are too wily to display their corrupt carcasses on the reviewing stand on May Day as the fraudulent parade trundles past.
Tuesday, October 26, 2010 Everyday is Halloween in Empire: The Zombie Apocalypse Of Duopoly (2 comments)
Culturally, a profusion of nightmare imagery warns: paradigm shift or perish The hack-scripted B-movie of the current political system could be titled: Duopoly Of The Dead: The Democratic/Republican Zombie Apocalypse. By devotion to maintaining the status quo, these hulking, putrefying parties of the undead shamble through public life risen from the grave to tear the flesh from the present and eat the brains of the living.
Monday, October 4, 2010 Economic Inequity, Manufactured Populism, and the Bigot-Whisperers of the Right (1 comments)
As a rule, the right's lies and displacements are most effective when liberals offer working people only bromides, platitudes, and lectures on propriety and good taste. Obama and the Democrats, time and time again, present demagogues with an opening the size of the cracks in Glen Beck's gray matter.
Thursday, August 19, 2010 Part Tinker Bell, Part Predator Drone: The Fantasy of the Presidency as Deus ex Machina (4 comments)
Unlike theatre, there won't be a plot reversal by deus ex machina. Still we demand our president both heal the wounds of capitalism and smite our enemies. We insist he be both warrior-king and our collective killer Christ. Democratic presidents become possessed of this errant archetype too. Accordingly, to be viable as commander-in-chief, they need to prove their toughness, preferably, in a he-man act of resolute stupidity.
Wednesday, August 4, 2010 Hanging A Hammock Between Death And The Abyss: A Götterdämmerung Of Kitsch (3 comments)
Does one get the feeling that the more powerless we feel, collectively, about the rising levels of economic exploitation exacted upon us and the accelerating rate of ecocide committed on the planet by corporate oligarchs, the more celebrity "news" and other tropes of empty distraction and denial will froth forth from the idiot imaginings of the pop culture douche-scape?
Tuesday, July 13, 2010 A Heap Of Broken Images: Social media and the architecture of anomie (5 comments)
Social media sites are no substitute for communal fabric. There is no animal musk nor angelic apprehensions to en-soul the flesh and tease wisdom out of obdurate will. No matter how many restless shades want to friend you on FaceBook nor ghostly texts descend in an unholy Pentecost of Tweets, online exchanges will continue to leave you restless, hollow, and yearning for the colors and cacophony of an authentic agora.
Friday, July 2, 2010 A Day In A Dying Empire: An intimate fable on current events (19 comments)
"We stare at our glowing appliances while exquisite things are extinguished, forever ... mistaking configurations of pixels for the breath and brilliance of the world."
Wednesday, June 16, 2010 A Zionist State of Mind, A Dreamscape Of Ghosts: One Jew's Hard Awakening (4 comments)
he Jewish state demands its neighbors make amends for crimes they did not commit -- to cower before the steel-toe might of its military and make perpetual penitence for the sins of Europe.
Even if they did so: Such an act would not restore my mother's childhood ... would not return to flesh the ashen remains of the millions who made their graves in the winds of twentieth century Europe.
Wednesday, June 10, 2009 Beyond The Soaring Rhetoric of Obama's Cairo Speech: A Toxic Innocence At Home (2 comments)
A collective tantrum rages on the right, as their ranks hold their breath and hoard bullets. In the enveloping darkness of political powerlessness, they are sleeping with their Sarah Palin night-light on, then tossing fitfully awake attempting to mollify themselves by gazing mindlessly at Fox News crib mobiles, then scanning the heavens craving a Happy Meal apocalypse.
Wednesday, May 27, 2009 The Audacity of Hopelessness (5 comments)
There is the banality of evil, and then there is the evil of banality. Both, the present era has produced in abundance. From about the late 1970s to the present, the United States all but ceased manufacturing products and went into the business of manufacturing marketplace hype, baseless fears, and illusionary enemies.
Tuesday, May 26, 2009 Against the Tortured Logic of Obama's Placebo Presidency: A Call for the Audacity of Hopelessness (19 comments)
President Obama and the Democratic Congress could have ridden a wave of public discontent towards meaningful reform, but instead they have hugged the shore. And they seem to be surveying the property, scouting locations to build beach house retreats for their elitist benefactors and the militarist fantasists whose tsunami-sized arrogance wrought the present destruction in the first place.
Thursday, September 20, 2007 A Conservative's Garden of False Narratives: Who are you calling a moonbat, anyway? (21 comments)
All progressives have experienced the following nonsensical encounter of the conservative kind. Present a reasoned argument to a conservative, and, all at once, ignoring the tenet, tone and thrust of the point, they begin hallucinating a creature, only known to exist in the rightwing bestiary, known as a "moonbat" -- a mythological beast that, ironically, seems to appear when a conservative is confronted with reality
Monday, August 13, 2007 A Disneyland of Militant Ignorance: The American Normalization of Mass Murder. (3 comments)
If, during a rare press conference, George W. Bush's face were to suddenly shed its skin, right on camera, live on national television, on all channels, broadcast and cable, to reveal the countenance of a Gila Monster -- the elitist beltway punditry would begin to catalog the merits of his reptilian single-mindedness.
Thursday, July 12, 2007 What Lies Beneath: Privileged Grotesques, Ordinary Monsters and the Iraqi Deathscape. (8 comments)
George W. Bush is unpopular with the majority of the American public not because of the murderous mayhem he has unloosed in Iraq; rather, his standing has plummeted, due to the fact, he didn't deliver the goods. Americans are fine with fueling our republic of road rage using the blood of Iraqis (or any other distant and darker people) as long as "the mission" doesn't drag on too long or reveal too much about ourselves.
Thursday, June 28, 2007 Mcmansions, SUVs, Mega-Churches and the Baghdad Embassy: Life Among Dim and Brutal Giants (3 comments)
In addition, we Americans continue to believe our fables of righteous power: Big is good, goes our John Wayne jack-off fantasy. Our leaders must be large: Only Mcmansion-like men, such as Mitt Romney, are acceptable. We believe: Dennis Kucinich is too diminutive in physical stature to be president -- with the length of his body being roughly the size of Romney's head.
Thursday, June 21, 2007 Within the Architecture of Denial and Duplicity: The Democratic Party and the Infantile Omnipotence of The Ruling Class (33 comments)
I could never reconcile myself with the Judea/Christian/Islamic conception of god -- some strange, invisible, "who's-your-daddy-in-the-sky," sadist -- who wants me on my knees (as if I'm a performer in some kind of cosmic porno movie) to show my belief in and devotion to him -- I can't delude myself into feeling any sense of devotion to the present day Democratic Party.
Tuesday, December 19, 2006 Expanding Markets and Dying Oceans: Eating the Planet Like a Bag of Doritos for Jesus (15 comments)
The largest social faux pas of all, in the contemporary US, might be to remind a person of their powerlessness.
The present paradigm must (and will) collapse: Rising gross national products, imaginative ad campaigns and faith in some mythological being returning from the sky will not cause the earth's rising oceans to recede nor its melting Polar ice caps to reconstitute.
Thursday, November 30, 2006 Prisoners of Envy: Wal*Mart Nihilism Versus the Punk Rock of Blogging
The frustrations of a life defined by the narrow confines of corporatism produces these lethal states of mind, whereby the homicidal urges that are encoded into the genetic makeup of all human beings become magnified into impulses both monstrous and preposterous: Resultantly, many Americans view life and death issues as having the weightless consequences of a thrill-kill video game.
Wednesday, November 22, 2006 America Has Left the Building: An Open Missive of Anger and Hope (7 comments)
Corporatism has rendered us analogous to the last days of Elvis ... Puffy, bloated -- we wheeze our way through our set ... Guarded gate communities are our own private Graceland where we die in excess and isolation. The electric lights sequined across the entire planet, now glow from space like one of Elvis's Las Vegas costumes. But does no one see the dying man beneath the jeweled jumpsuit? The land and The King are one.
Wednesday, November 15, 2006 To Hell with Centrism: We Must Reclaim the Inspired Edge (12 comments)
It was leftist outsiders -- not reasonable, accommodating Centrists -- who were right about the disastrous consequences that would befall an invasion of Iraq; as we were and remain right in our revulsion to the fascistic fraud that is the Patriot Act and the War on Terror.
Tuesday, October 31, 2006 Midterm Elections 2006: It's Always Darkest, Right Before ... It Goes Completely Black (2 comments)
Does anyone believe that the denizens of K Street have, as of late, begun enriching the coffers of the Democratic Party because the lobbyist class now harbors a secret desire to create a system where a greater diversity of views can be promulgated? Yes, and Jack the Ripper stalked the streets of East London because he wanted to draw attention to the wretched plight of underclass women in class-stratified Victorian England.
Wednesday, October 25, 2006 Selling Satan: Iraqi War Dead and the Collateral Damage to America's Soul (23 comments)
All human beings have a talent for the denial of the more unpalatable aspects of ourselves, but we Americans have turned denial into a form of collective genius. There is no need to burn books, if the public is too ignorant to know they exist -- or too benumbed to resonate with their content.
Thursday, October 5, 2006 Six Flags Over Neo-Nuremberg: Bush, Oprah, The San Diego Chicken, And A Proto-Fascist Panopticon Of The Mind (3 comments)
Commercial advertising is a form of political speech: A very potent one and its effects are far from benign. By means of its cultural dominance, commercial advertising is promulgated, to the point of total market saturation, without any form of effective opposition; hence, by its very nature, it amounts to corporatist propaganda and serves as a vehicle of mass indoctrination.
Saturday, July 2, 2005 Baby George In The Land Of The Bubble People
An exploration as to the reasons why the bubble of unreality that the administration of GWB exists within will burst.
