Image of Planet Earth taken from Apollo 17
Recently, discourse, within the free-range pathogen zone of the U.S. political realm, has been infected and inflamed by the use of verbiage (applied both in the metaphoric and literal sense) related to disease and contagion by editorial scribes and political hacks.
For example, we have been informed that Occupy D.C. sites were attacked and destroyed by police authorities for reasons related to public health and hygiene.
These actions (part of a series of ongoing coordinated, anti-democratic measures) carried out on orders from the current governing class of the U.S. display the tendency of the hyper-authoritarian mindset to regard the inherent messiness of freedom -- including those individuals who engage in acts of dissent in public space -- to pose a danger to civil order and the well-being of the general public on the level of that of bio-hazardous material.
(In a vain attempt to assuage his germophobic mania, J. Edgar Hoover had a throne-sized commode constructed for his exclusive use that included an appurtenance that allowed his feet to perch upon an elevated pedestal to prevent contact with the subversive-enabling floor of his bathroom where, presumably, seditious microorganism seethed and plotted his doom.)
Hoover's OCD pathology is axiomatic of the anti-freedom mania gripping the nation's capital where the concept of freedom has become so repellant to the ruling establishment that expressions thereof have been relegated to be almost exclusively expressed in cold marble statuary and soldier's tombstones.
Not only is this approach fitting for late empire's cult of death, it is convenient for D.C.'s insular culture of prevaricators, for the dead don't protest; hagiographic monuments cannot mic-check liars.
Authoritarian personality types favor empty spectacle, such as sporting events and parades, over occupations and protest marches, because there is little danger of the primary taking on a life of its own, of evolving a consciousness beyond simply a provisional surrender to the intoxication evinced by an immersion in the mass. People are transformed by social movements, while they are benumbed by spectacle.
Calcified power structures detest the living architecture of social and political movements, wherein individuals, by engagement in the messiness of life, forge identities distinct from those favored by a self-serving elite who have rigged the dominant order to their benefit.
"When the individual feels, the community reels"-- Aldous Huxley
Mortified by this, authoritarian personality types are obsessed with the fantasy of scouring (a panopticon/predator drone mode of mind) life of all disorder. Not only making the trains run on time but demanding that the passengers on said trains psyches be cleansed of impure thoughts ... sanitized for their protection, then covered in a sort of societal prophylactic plastic to safeguard the principles of societal propriety -- in short, have the populace rendered Body Bag People.
Better this, they are convinced, than allow the person-to-person contagion of dissent to spread. Perhaps, this provides a clue as to why the enforcers of our fear-driven, ruthless authoritarian power elite go so far as to don Hazmat suits when attacking and dismantling Occupy sites.
As well as viewing dissenters as a dangerous contagion, the one percent, along with their operatives and enforcers, are convinced that we are just plain filth and are as dumb as dirt to boot"that we who revolt are ourselves, by nature, irredeemably revolting, or, as Mel Brooks, impersonating Louis XVI, in his movie, "The History Of The World, Part One," sniffed, "[The peasants] -- they stink on ice."
The architects of neoliberal imperium have built gleaming towers and sterile high-rises into the pure, blue heavens to avoid our perceived reek. What they detest, in fact, is the musky redolence of humanity; although, they don't seem to be troubled by the stain of the blood of the innocent that is forever affixed to their names, for these are people who believe they can ascend to heaven by scaling the mountain of corpses that their imperial pursuits have created.
Yet, they claim we are unclean. Granted, the endeavors of liberty can get messy -- but not so much as the orgies of blood wrought by the militarist agendas that maintain the privilege of the 1 percent. One would think they would have the presence of mind to clean up their own act before they go about lecturing us on the finer points of hygiene.
"Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity," wrote Vladimir Nabokov
The Romantic Age poet, John Keats, believed earthly existence -- life as lived in the muck, mire, and uncertainty of mortal circumstance -- to be what he termed, "a vale of soul-making," wherein an individual is challenged to descend from life-devoid towers of habitual action and insular thought into the eros and accountability of the human condition, and, in so doing, one descends into one's humanity.
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