[dropcap style=”font-size:100px; color:#992211;”]T[/dropcap]he concept of endless economic growth, accepted as sacrosanct by both U.S. mainstream political parties, and internalized as the dominant mode of mind by the general population of the corporate/consumer state is mirrored in the exponential mathematics of a malignancy.
Cancer, if given voice, would proclaim itself to be a believer in “free market values”…devoted to the principle of endless growth…until, of course, it would silence its own voice by killing its host.
Likewise, all life seeks limits or prematurely dooms itself.
The same holds true with addiction to unlimited economic expansion…the craving for incessant ascension is, in fact, a doomed Icarus flight.
Politics as usual has failed
In our time, politics as usual has failed to address the most pressing issues of the age: The manner by which neoliberal economic agendas exploit the masses in the service of a corrupt elite, and in so doing, decimating individual hopes and aspirations, as, all the while, the environmental dangers, endemic to the unchecked system, imperil the survival of humankind.
Although, alarmingly, both political parties continue to serve the status quo: Contemporary conservatives promote – in fact, seem to outright revel in – the litanies of a gospel of global destruction (in the case of religious fundamentalists even going so far as to implore the forces of heaven, with fervid prayers, to expedite doomsday’s date of arrival) by means of militarist aggression and environmental carnage–while squeamish liberals are devotees of the cliché-worshipping temple of incremental change.
From the right flank of this disastrous cosmology of convenience, Rick Santarium insists that a literal interpretation and societal application of “The Scriptures” i.e., an ad hoc collection of the laws, legends and beliefs of Middle Eastern, Bronze Age, hill country barbarians will remedy our national woes. Accordingly, what is one to make of this lovely bit of wisdom from Isaiah (13:9,15-18)?
“Behold, the day of the Lord cometh, cruel both with wrath and fierce anger . . . Every one that is found shall be thrust through . . . Their children also shall be dashed to pieces before their eyes . . . and their wives ravished. Behold, I will stir up the Medes against them. . . [T]hey shall have no pity on the fruit of the womb; their eye shall not spare children.”
Lovely, huh? Surely, we’ve evolved past such barbaric sentiments. What kind of a blood-besotted people would accept such an abomination to the tenets of modern civilization and basic human decency?
Tragically, this is who: Both political parties of U.S. duopoly and their supporters, comprising a nation of people, who by large majorities support, for example, the Obama administration’s policy of warfare waged by predator drone attack. Military actions that often result in an Old Testament-style “dashing to pieces” of the bodies of children.
What does it matter now to the dead whether the reason given for perpetrating these monstrous acts are based on Santarium’s psychotic concretization of religious lore or Obama’s slick, national security state rationalizations?
Political clichés
As neocons press the petal to the metal of the war machine, mainstream liberal apologists for the status quo, luxuriating upon the hurtling juggernaut, counsel us that any change in direction and velocity must be incremental, as they proffer other brain-dead, political clichés about the need for “civility” and “political realism” involving the criteria of sausage making.
First, clichés are zombies; they are dead to the novelty of the living moment, and they eat the brains of inspiration. They are worse than lazy thinking–they are putrefied thought. Worse, clichés will not die, because they are already dead. Burn them with fire…reduce them to ashes…let the ash mulch the soil where future inspiration will grow.
Second, an incremental approach is an utterly useless, if not delusional, response to the situation. The U.S., through the decades of the post-war era, has been moving with increasing rapidity towards becoming an outright national security/corporate authoritarian state. At this point, this much is evident regarding mainstream liberals who tout the virtues of “incremental change”: they, from their comfortable perch of privilege, do so, because they harbor scant desire to alter the present order.
Still, mainstream liberals are baffled as to why people find them so unbearable, when, in their swoons of self-regard, they believe themselves to be oh-so reasonable sorts who selflessly wish everyone the best.
If you are an advocate of incrementalism, then you co-sign the present order–and the present order consists of corporate/military/police state dominance over almost every aspect of life in the U.S. In short, “reasonable”, “well-meaning” liberals – you are complicit in crimes against human dignity when you bandy your incremental change fantasies.
[quote]Their concept of what constitutes
acts of trade and commerce is
analogous to what pornography
is to erotica[/quote]
This is what your reasonable, well-meaning, piecemeal approach is worth…. Not a drop of blood of the innocent slaughtered in your predator drone-besotted president’s wars of imperium, whose blood-drenched deeds you co-sign with your casuistry. Your faux civil pose is worth about a handful of dust. Obama has proven himself to be a stalwart defender of the dominant order.
Regarding which, the defining trait of the financial and corporate elite, who lord over the present system, has proven to be an all-consuming lust for riches that an individual could not spend in a thousand lifetimes. Their concept of what constitutes acts of trade and commerce is analogous to what pornography is to erotica. Accordingly, one would regard the greedheads of the one percent with the same compassion that one grants to a porn addict, if not for the fact that acts of autoeroticism are not responsible for climate chaos, nor did the activity bring down the global economy.
In contrast, this ongoing, noxious, degrading circlejerk of the elite did.
Skyscraper image: Mugley
City Image by Dima Bushkov
Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City.
Yet a bio amounts to dharma for dimwits: It defines a human being in the same manner and degree of veracity as a restaurant menu describes the various slabs of meat offered … commodified things that were once living beings.
