SC123-5

http://kulturcritic.wordpress.com/posts/dark-night-of-the-soul/

Dark Night of the Soul

Does anyone else smell the foulness of the air these past many days, months, and years. It is not just the oxygen content being sucked out of thin air in concert with global warming and increasing human pollution, but there is an increasingly foul gas enveloping the globe itself. Lately, its point of unfettered generation is right there, in Washington, D.C. Let us call it Stench Central! Insinuation, allegation, vile name-calling, threat, and ultimatum. Leaders of all stripes, from the top down to the lowliest press secretary speaking through their assholes, on behalf of the asses to whom they report up the chain of command.

Ever since the birth of nation-states in the Fertile Crescent some six millennia ago, the increasing accumulation of property (state and private), and concomitant reorganization of social relations away from simple egalitarian bands into complex stratified hierarchies, we have seen the increasing use of force, threat, and violence to enforce ownership, and reestablish relative place in proper hierarchic institutions. And, of course, we have learned to do likewise with other nations, as we do to our own citizens; we freely invade, undermine, or otherwise dispose of enemies of the state and its sacred institutions by using all means at our disposal. In fact, the line between external threat and internal threat has been effectively eradicated today. As once was the case in the USSR, we now see is the case in the USA. Control of the populace by the institutions of state is maximal. TSA, NSA, ATF, FBI, CIA, as well as a host of associated institutions, some of which are still covert, make the call (err., intercept your calls!).

The current atmosphere in the USA is like that before a Championship Football game in Green Bay in December (or a contest in the Coliseum). We cheer on our home team (THE HOMELAND; the Gladiator), and jeer menacingly at the other (like Christians being thrown to the lions) apparently standing in our way. There is a ludicrous fundamentalism running rampant through the rank and file of America. We refuse to see the blinders we are wearing. The other is the enemy. Right now, Russia occupies the spot of prime suspect and scapegoat in this competition.

We categorically refuse to look at our own weaknesses and warts; we deny our menacing and intentional involvement in ‘mission-impossible’ plots and overthrows around the globe, we turn an ignoring cheek to the weapons, military and other support we send to those who might help us in our designs, and provide us an edge in this endgame of kill-and-take. Instead we turn our unacknowledged self-loathing inside-out and project all of our own evil by design onto the global screen, onto the Other, the shadowy, the Unwashed. Those living up in the high seats of hierarchy sit around in air conditioned comfort patting themselves on the back for ‘a job well done’, while those of us in the bleachers scratch at the bedbugs, and swat at the mosquitoes, satisfying ourselves with hotdogs and the Spectacle before us, readying ourselves for the Big Show that is currently being announced on the airwaves, and about to begin. And the news hounds, like whores to a bachelor party, all line up just to get a piece of the action… singing the praises of empire and vilifying the competition, as we ready our knives for the final kill.

There are no innocent victims in this endgame. Hierarchy admits of none. Especially those within the hierarchy itself. China, Israel, Palestine, Russia, America, we are all to blame – some to greater or lesser degrees than others at different times in this history we call civilized life. But, right at this juncture, at this “end of history,” the hierarchy of the USA, its financiers and its minions, they are by far telling the biggest lies, going for all the marbles in this game of Russian roulette. I have never seen such pathological propagandizing and the fear and loathing it encourages, in my brief sixty-one years on this planet.

If there is some way for the people of this land – not as citizens but as simple homo sapiens – to raise their voices in one flesh and tell the guys (and the neutered women trumped by hierarchy and doing their bidding) running this Amway show to CHILL OUT, that would be an incredible achievement. Unfortunately, I think the hierarchy here has already made it so that the conditions for the possibility of an uprising by the populous, verbal or otherwise, is now impossible. But, one can always hope… against hope!