"My facts are correct. The far left is nothing more
than the new set of communists looking to take over. Just a call me a southern
god fearing commie killer who cannot wait to put more notches on his weapon if
the day ever arises again. I did enjoy killing them so. Your sheep I will never
be. That's a fact. [R]eal Americans have better things to do that listen to
your drivel. I'm out of here."
Just what kind of demented cultural circus produces these crack-brained
battalions of killer clowns for Liberty? A culture with a brutal and rigidly
enforced (but furiously denied) class structure that inflicts constant
humiliation, yet, because of its nebulous structure, remains hidden from view.
Therein exist the allure and tenacity of neo-confederate hagiographic nonsense.
Pride is held near, and clutched closely to oneself, because the corporate
state has left the white underclass bereft of little else.
It is painful to admit to being powerless and devoid of a
means to change the trajectory of one's fate. One feels demoralized and
diminished as a result.
Moreover, nationwide, under the present system, riddled with vast economic
inequity, the negative repercussions for disobedience and failure are more than
most people can endure, economically as well as psychologically.
In a culture where success is deemed the end all/be all of
all things, failure is devastating. In a corporate structure rigged to benefit
a privileged few, and upward class mobility is merely a mind-fogging, cultural
myth -- then failure is altogether likely.
Combine this, with the pernicious, puritanical/Calvinistic notion that failure
is due to flawed character, and you have a troubled population " staggered by
self-doubt, roiling in the unfocused rage of the humiliated, and primed and
stoked for demagogic displacements.
While nice liberals retreat to their comfort zones, the forsaken laboring class
constructs insulating walls of resentment.
In the U.S., more and more, the criteria that forges
personality and informs our condition is wrought by the calculus of enclosure:
guarded-gate communities; isolation in motor vehicles; the insular pixel
fiefdoms of the Internet; long work hours, often spent in cubicles, comprised
of meaningless labor, and cut-off from both the norms of nature and resonate
human contact.
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
U.S. have become mummified in plastic packaging wrap " have been rendered --
Body Bag People.
Of course, one yearns for the void to be filled. But with hearts and minds mortared closed, sealed off from the shock and humiliation experienced from the daily economic exploitation of a hidden, intractable class system -- what penetrates these self-constructed prisons is loud, stupid, even fascistic in tone and theme e.g., violent video games; the empty spectacle of steroid-fueled professional sports hype; the exercise in Rock and Roll imperium that U.S. militarism has become; fundamentalist sermons that long for the blood and thunder of Armageddon.
In short, all the Sturm und Drang necessary to pierce
protective walls, yet, at the same time, insure one remains ensconced in one's
comfort zone.
Yet the sense of powerlessness is not mitigated for long, a nebulous sense of
unease nettles. The world appears to bristle with threats " a low-grade
hysteria is maintained and ceaseless war is both convenient and inevitable.
Yet all the ramparts and fortifications of the national
security state still do not create a sense of safety; instead, its siege
mentality increases the interior void of the U.S. populace, and, as a result,
the vitality of life is barred entrance.
Blood sacrifices must be made to the god of the inner abyss ... corpses are
tossed into the void.
Over the top? Given the fact of the hundreds of thousands of corpses the U.S.
empire has lain under the native soil of nations from the Persian Gulf to
Central Asia (and now North Africa) in only the past decade up to the present
-- which, in combination with a government that practices and a general public
that is indifferent to the use of torture -- the image limned above doesn't
seem hyperbolic in the least.
At what point, does it become incumbent upon an individual to seize back his
identity, to reject being defined by the exploitive, dehumanizing demands
imposed (and small bribes proffered) by corporate/governmental elites?
The ongoing tragedy in Japan reveals how dangerous it can be to refuse or defer
the challenge.
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