By Phil Rockstroh
Gonzo Today Contributor
Glaring sign of intellectual dishonesty of a society that has sunken into a psychical pit of fascist depravity: Terming an armed, racist terrorist, intent on murder, a “vigilante.”
The US has entered into Freikorp/Brownshirt territory. The development, which has been building over the years, is mortifying — but is not unexpected, considering the degraded realities inflicted by the nation’s cruel — to the point of sadistic — social/cultural milieu.
Yet the more the US degrades into murderous depravity the more the nation remains the same. The so-called Founders of the US insisted on the Second Amendment for the purpose of armed White men intimidating slaves and hunting down those slaves who attempted to run away, and for the agenda of inflicting genocide on First Nation peoples. From the enforcers of the US police state to racist terrorists brandishing and discharging firearms… has always been the go-to option of the White Supremacist order.
And no, the hideous phenomenon cannot be laid solely at the feet of the hideous phenomenon of Donald Trump and Republicans. The Democrats’ rainbow facade hides the inherent racism of the capitalist/militarist order. The system requires its Black/Brown/Red/impoverished White underclass to exist in a state of perpetual terror because a unified uprising in which the powerless citizenry demand self-determination — as opposed to forced obedience to a exploitative order — would collapse the structure of engineered inequality — to wit, a social/political/economic structure that is a de facto extortion/shakedown operation.
Meanwhile at their Convention, Republicans, as a tribute to their Prince Of The Dung Heap, Republicans played, not once but twice, Leonard Cohen’s epic anthem to poetic grace before overwhelming forces: Hallelujah.
Did they even listen to the lyrics? The song’s theme limns in lyric the surrender thus annihilation of egoism. Its theme is anathema to Trump’s manic, toxic, hyper-inflated sense of self-regard and the hero worship of his hyper-authoritarian, lickspittle followers.
Cohen was the anti-Trump. Any and all forms of (soul-resonate) poetry stand as a rebuke to the crass reality show con man’s narcissism. US capitalism works as reverse alchemy: it transforms gold into shit-dust.
Then the Democratics, standing firm against the red baiting shitegob frothed by the klavern of neo-John Bircher Republicans at the fascism-a-thon known as their political convention — a Nuremberg rally staged for the after mentioned couch-bound brownshirts-in-Crocs set — Democrats embrace Wall Street, reject Medicare For All, promise to drain the swamp…of (phantom) Russians, and restore US economic dominance… by nuclear power and fracking.
Democrats, per always, will fight fascism by careening rightward and hyperventilating hot air into the flames of Republican demagoguery.
“No one’s standard [under a Biden Administration] of living will change, nothing would fundamentally change.” — Joe Biden to the predators of the financial/corporate/war profiteer class (i.e., his true constituents.)
William Butler Yeats limned the yowling of the ruling class of the end stage capitalist order in verse:
“And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.”
The pathological soil of US society is going to continue to seed fascists in the form of the clutches of bloated cowards strutting the streets and public spaces (and shopping for Cheetos and Mountain Dew at Stop-And-Go outlets) clad in camouflage and brandishing automatic weapons and the election of Trump-like demagogues.
The nation refuses to face both its history of and present day manifestations of White supremacy. The nation was formed and expanded by a settler-colonialist culture wherein acts of violence, to the point of genocide, were rewarded with social advancement and lasting advantage. Of course, members of the majority culture, by atavistic habit, will reach for deadly weaponry when they feel threatened when minority people push back against the US societal structure — an architecture that is forged and is dependant on racism and its inherent police state violence against minority members and the White underclass. Moreover, members of the latter haves been induced, by the operatives of the capitalist overclass, to displace their angst and rage on minorities struggling for self-determination.
Rightwing demagogues understand the situation and exploit it while liberals fuel the fires of rage by their classism-based condescension. The combined phenomena of societal/cultural/government corruption and concomitant, internal rot and class/racial polarity are tearing the nation apart. From all indications, it appears there is no turning the situation around. The tatters that will remain after the coming and exponentially increasing upheaval will have to be woven into a novel cultural fabric.
As a general rule, when things come undone, the dynamic unfolds, at first, slowly — then all at once. Then unfolds the long slog involved with the reinvention of both an individual and collective humanity. Novel forms arrive from reconfigurations of the rubble of collapsed systems.
And no, yet again, Biden — like Trump, the very embodiment of the failing order — does not possess the will nor capacity to bring remedy to the situation. The hideous system produced Biden. He is an agent of change only insofar as he, again like Trump, is a two-legged, half-senile catalyst of the system’s irrevocable undoing.
Response, In Free Verse, To Political Conventions:
An enveloping cacophony within a deep forest of ignorance. Unbearable…the palaver. A prattling rain pelting the skull.
There exist disembodied spirits — and then there are spirits disembodied from the salubrious body of both dreams and wit.
I’d rather slip under the bed and converse with a congress of dust bunnies.
Traverse among motes of coffin dust.
Dance amid the spindling glory of worms.
The worst nightmares — unfolding, unacknowledged, within those who refuse to recognise dream’s dominion — crouch, lying in wait, in an air of predation.
Parasites hide themselves in the stultifying air of commodified day.
Soulless hunters pick what is left of you from their teeth.
Last and only hope:
Refuse to act as a collaborator in the devouring of your heart.
Do not fly, like a caged bird, bereft of homing instinct, into the hands of the oppressor.
Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living, now, in Munich, Germany. He may be contacted: philrockstroh.scribe@gmail.com and at https://www.facebook.com/groups/513128662505890/
