[dropcap style=”font-size:100px; color:#992211;”]E[/dropcap]very U.S. presidential election cycle unlooses a seemingly endless season of relentless inanity and irredeemable derangement – a carnival of false hope and manufactured fear.
“Bernie will make the corporate Wicked, War Witch of the West Wing Hillary feel the burn…”I’m melting…I’m m-e-l-t-i-n-g…” “The Donald will restore receding U.S. power with a power combover – a Viagra Republic will rise from the impotent swoon that has stricken the body politic.”
Enter: Hillary, Donald, and a clutch of Republican homunculi. Is this the best we can do? Whether the answer arrives in the form of comedy or farce, the answer is yes. The predicament is wholly predictable. What other cast of sub-cretins do you expect to preen and strut upon the stage of capitalism’s Attention Deficit Disorder Theatre? What other script could play out in the duopolist sham that fronts the present dictatorship of big money?
Yes, the candidates are a grotesque gallery of frauds and psychopaths. Yes, the situation is unnerving. Yes, awareness of the dimness and depravity of it all makes the flesh crawl, seizes the gut in revulsion, and incites rage borne of powerlessness. It can render down hope into desperation.
To wit, one can grow desperate enough to believe that Uncle Bernie can spark an insurgency or, at least, cajole Hillary into embracing progressive values or that Trump can conjure some form of monetized mojo, that only billionaire boy wizards are privy to, and restore America to its God-anointed greatness and the uppity, dark races of the earth will once again tremble and bow before our towering magnificence.
Yes, the collective psyche of the U.S. has become that craven. Late stage capitalism’s destruction of imagination and atrophy of empathy – soul-defying imperatives of capitalist state despotism – reduces the worst of a populace to self-involvement and the best to resignation.
And that is not the worse of it. The citizenry longs for deliverance from the fear, humiliation, and degradations which grip and grapple them. Enter: Hillary, Donald, and the field of Republican homunculi. Two-legged, destruction-drunk stooges of The Second Law Of Thermodynamics.
Why have events gained this hideous trajectory? History reveals that bloated, over-extended empires either decay over time or collapse overnight.
By either fate, empires die ugly.
Thus we arrive at the reason Trump, Hillary et. al. haunt the public sphere and usher in the inevitable fate of empire.
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.
