[dropcap style=”font-size:100px; color:#992211;”]S[/dropcap]ince the election of a certain blowhard, ego-bloated, tangerine-tinged, boxy suit-garbed shit-nugget, there has been incessant palaver about the rise of a Combover Reich.
In fact, the cultural criterion that most resembles the rise of the Nazis right now is the presence of a propaganda-hypnotised populace disconnected from the trajectory of events. And the events and trajectory are the same under Trump as they were during Obama, Bush the lesser, Clinton, Bush the elder and Reagan.
The aforementioned propaganda consists of the commercialist culture and its attendant mindless consumerism on which hyper-industrial capitalism is dependent, and the trajectory of events is the destruction of Earth’s environment wrought by the soul-defying system.
In Nazi Germany, the citizenry went through their days as if nothing had changed. A veneer of normalcy was maintained… as events unfolded that would lead to the devastation of the world they knew and clung to. In a similar manner, regarding Climate Chaos, we have hurtled passed the tipping point. As is the case with the average “good” German, it is the compulsion to cling to the illusion of normalcy and order that has sealed our doom.
The Brownshirt gear of our time is sweatshop-made off the rack clothes and designer athletic shoes. The Blitzkrieg armies are consumer hordes. No book burning is required when the masses of the consumer state do not read books. The invading Red Army has taken the form of dying oceans. The participants of mass, torch-lit Nazi Party rallies are now atomised consumers slouched upon their couch, remote in hand, hypnotised, binge watching some somnolence inducing inanity — a Nuremberg Rally of one.
The greatest achievement of Capitalist/Consumer Age propagandists has been producing the illusion of normalcy, as all the while, their corporate media counterparts have induced the masses to fear all the wrong things: the resentment-inducing fantasy of Immigrant job usurpers and swarthy terrorists (when they are not waxing hysterical over shark attacks or a blonde woman gone missing) to the overwrought notion that the present Pussygrabber In Chief is Hitler himself; not simply the son of a millionaire, garden variety, arrested-in-adolescence, decrepit frat boy whose privileged capitalist despotism has allowed him to fail upward.
Image by Dan Booth. Not to be reproduced without express prior permission.
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.
