[dropcap style=”font-size:100px; color:#992211;”]I[/dropcap]s it denial, historical ignorance or intellectual dishonesty — or a combination of all three?
Blaming Reaganomics for the US’s extant and deteriorating condition.
When, in reality, the policies at play, since the late 1970s, should be termed: Carter/Reagan/Bush the Elder//Clinton/Bush the Lesser/Obama/Trumponomics. That is: neoliberal capitalist economic despotism. It is media-fed and military-maintained.
All the bristling, military armaments of the Pentagon cannot turn back the raging storm.
The mere existence of vast arrays of weapons, deployed or not, does great harm to the soul of a nation. The nation’s collective psyche becomes the roiling abyss of a death cult.
The specter of violent death pervades the imagery of the culture’s entertainment industry and stalks the citizens’ dreams. Squadrons of militarized cops become garrisoned within. (Yet the faux left scolds that taking a posture of self defence is the moral equivalent of being shod in jackboots and clad in the gear of a brownshirt.)
The heart becomes occupied territory – the degradations of Gaza are inflicted by brutal security forces deployed in the form of oppressive and paranoid thoughts.
Close your eyes and images of cross burnings, lynchings, mountains of bison skulls, flaring napalm and mushroom clouds rise from within.
US Americans are fearful, day and night. We would not feel secure if we ensconced ourselves in an armory. These raging phantoms of the soul and of nature cannot be repelled by weapons of any make. We bow, daily, to despotism.
A despotism which cannot fail to result in, say, isolated scenes of looting after a hurricane landfall. Any disease will have its symptoms. If you are obsessed and enraged about the scattered looting of the poor and societally disenfranchised, since birth, by a few individuals from its ranks, as opposed to being angry about the inherent racism and attendant vast, race-based wealth inequity, past and present, of the capitalist order — as well as the global wide devastation wrought by human kind created Climate Chaos — then you are a noxious and obnoxious tool of the worst sort.
Attempt to think the situation through: It is not as if the victims of the deprivation and attendant and perpetual degradation and humiliation inherent to the racist, capitalist status quo can proceed to loot a decent education and life-sustaining work.
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.
