"I noticed at the ceremony, your corrupt ways had finally made
you blind/ I can't remember your face anymore, your mouth has changed,
your eyes/ don't look into mine."
--Bob Dylan, excerpt, Idiot Wind
In my own experience, I first began to take note of the acceptance of authoritarian impulses in the cultural banalities evinced in the 1970s. I noticed my peers (teenagers born during the peak years of the Baby Boom) were not the progeny of The Woodstock Nation, as our beleaguered authoritarian elders had feared. Instead, we were the free floating spirit-incarnate of a pop culture Weimar Republic e.g., unlike our predecessors in the 1960s, we used drugs neither to expand our awareness nor as an act of social or political rebellion; rather, they were appropriated as apolitical agents of anesthetization.
Like the sound and fury of our pinball machine distractions, our Muscle Car imperialism, and the pseudo-edginess of the so-called FM radio revolution (that was, in reality, the advent of corporate rock) -- our surface-level rebelliousness was, below the lank-haired, faded denim-clad, reefer-reeking exterior, the metastasizing of an insidious indifference -- to a large measure a radical renunciation -- of anything more challenging than those things available within the immediate confines of our comfort zones.
Our mode of being, even then, revealed our obsession with comfort, the devices of escapism and an avidity for insularity -- our right to the pursuit of numbness. We were fledgling Weimar Republicans, clad in faded, frayed bell-bottom jeans"primed to surrender freedom to the corporate/national security state for the illusion of safety and control.
All along, beneath the pot reek, redolent on polyester fabric"the Muscle Car rumble"Quaalude spittle"the tribally-administered, prototypical serotonin/dopamine/norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (perhaps precursors of the Huxleyesque pharmaceutical authoritarianism to come) we baby boomers were scions of the Cold War military/industrial/consumer empire's death-sustained dynamo.
The empire is as noisy, distracting and meaningless as a vintage, 1970s pinball machine -- as self-aware as a baby boomer, suburban pothead teenager who, as the years have passed, transformed into a self-absorbed, Starbuck's-slurping, SSRI-popping consumer zombie, possessed of mindless appetite, begot by deep, inner desolation who has spent his existence devouring the resources of the entire planet in the manner he devoured food from his mother's pantry while possessed of a bad case of reefer munchies in the 1970s.
As the decades have passed, an internalize mall and mcmansion -- an architecture of instant gratification and compulsive insularity -- has supplanted primordial forests of collective imagination; hence, our roots no longer reach deep into the dark, renewing loam of ancestral intelligence; our branches no longer lift towards the sky of possibility. We feel devoid of nourishment and hope, because the internalized empire has clear cut it all, reducing sequoia forests to toothpicks in order to pick the bits of charred flesh of those slaughtered in our wars of imperium from its rotting teeth.
Consequently, If our corrupt political parties did not exist, we would need to invent them, for they are emblems in the flesh of the true face of U.S. empire"What rises from the toxic soil of the inverted totalitarian powers of the corporate/military state.
Yet, more than likely, the readers of this essay are as mortified, heartsick, and enraged by the actions of the U.S. government and the corporate overlords who own and operate it, as is this writer. Nevertheless, we carry U.S. imperium within us as deeply as we hold the imprint of our parents' faces. 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.
Accordingly, here's a plot spoiler regarding the stagecraft of the next presidential election cycle. Republicans -- Bachmann, Perry et al will play their roles as scary, scary psychos -- escapees from the Right Wing Christian Madhouse For Social Program Ax Murderers -- as Obama will play the calm, reasonable, deliberate authority figure who, after the crazies are dispatched, will calmly and deliberately slash to bits Social Security and Medicare -- and then feed the remains to the economy-devouring cannibals on Wall Street.
Mojo Nixon (no blood relation, I suspect) sang, "Everybody has a little Elvis in them." Nowadays, regrettably, we must sing: "Everybody has far too much Nixon in them." Internally (even those born long after the 1970s) in larger and smaller degrees, carry Nixon's dismal legacy.
Apropos, proceed to the closest mirror, look yourself in the eye, and repeat the risible (as well as demonstrably false) phrase, "I am not a crook"-- then, at long last, face the Richard Milhouse Nixon within, and thus come face to face with the cause of why, collectively, we in the U.S. seem perpetually in the thrall of the corrupt political forces and degraded social criteria that have gripped and grappled us since Nixon slunk from the scene in the summer of 1974.
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