To Hell With Centrism

During times of universal deceit, revolution if I can't dance.
Rumsfeld is gone. Mehlman is gone.

Delay is gone. Yet -- let's not have our progressives' version of a strutting on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier moment. Because mission has not been accomplished.

were busy with other concerns, many of our rights and liberties went missing. Moreover, along with them, have went or are going fast: our nation's true power brokers); as well as, a sense of place, history, and even a cursory understanding, among a large percent of the populace of the US, of the precepts of civilization and of democratic discourse.
These circumstances, like the melting of the polar ice caps, have transpired, incrementally, and have been going presidency.

For example, regarding the increasingly authoritarian terrain we negotiate our way through daily: In American work places, web-surfing practices. How did it come about that so many Americans have grown to accept such demeaning intrusions into our privacy?
totalitarian measures such as forced deportment to Siberian labor camps.

Threats, overt and covert, to one's economic security and social standing serve to dissuade most of us from political and social dissent. In the class stratified structure of the US work force, where the personal consequences borne of financial upheaval are swift, punitive and severe, the implicit threat of being deported to America's urban exploitive dictates of corporate oligarchy.
Where did this all begin?

How did it all get away from us? Furthermore -- why do we stand for it -- when these In part, the proto-fascistic inevitable, because our concept of what it means to be a human being has been incrementally defined downward. There has been much discussion of the dumbing down of American life.

And these assessments are accurate and unnerving. (How else does one explain that 37% of those Connecticut peace candidate?) But there has been little discourse given to the renders the nation's landscape monotonous and ugly.

insidious. In such an environment, there is no need for mass rallies overt bribes and tacit threats. This social and cultural criteria causes an individual to become fearful and cautious -- and, after a time, flattens out one's inner drives and longings.

As a result, a Triumph of the Bland comes to pass, internally and externally.
Ergo, the oligarchs atop the present neighborhood block captains. We have become our own, ever-vigilant minders; within us, we have in place vast networks of secret police nothingscape that surrounds us.

employees render themselves fecklessly pleasant. One doesn't want to be team player. Such accusations bring to an individual a similar decree fallen regime of the former Soviet Union.

election victory, this problem remains mirrored in the leadership of the corporatist rule and, therefore, have been trained to act with the kind corporate state. Apropos, the odd combination of fecklessness and a course of sensible centrism. From refusing to fight stolen elections the history of the republic -- we bear constant witness to it.

In this regard, it's very considerate of congressional Republicans who, in synergy with the Bush cartel, perpetrated one of the most vicious, vindictive and exclusionary reigns in congressional history to now want to play nice and reconcile. It's Democratic peers in congress for cowering before them, day in and day out, for the past four years of one party rule.
Moreover, it was we leftist outsiders -- not reasonable, accommodating liberals -- who were right about the the Patriot Act and the War on Terror.

the closed club of mainstream punditry. Although, to avoid being cruel, such an event might prove to be unfair to the slow children therein. We'd be hurling our ninety mile-an-hour, progressive fast balls past class.

Is it any wonder they've enabled Duyba for so long. He's on their tee-ball team. The little Beltway Oligarchs.

In short, mainstream Democrats and habitual amiability. It remains to be seen whether this habit can be broken or modified. I have my doubts.

Yet, one aspect of election day 2006 was the corporate class: Owing to the fact, that, at least, for one day, the our office cubicles -- and into the soul-reviving vastness of life.
longings and passions. The absence, in contemporary life, of (non virtual) public space, wherein human to human discourse can flourish has megachurches.

This loss of communal connection, in confluence with consumerism and the influences of American Puritanism and Calvinism, has wrought, within the US populace, a desperate longing for group one's rational mind found within the excesses of a totalitarian mob.
Likewise, the phenomenon plays into the pernicious sin/shame continuum, psychologically, at the root of the of the corporate state.
Huge, corrupt and bloated out, like Elvis in his final years, this is how religions die.

As was the case demands one be prone to excess (from their enormous, Graceland-gaudy churches to their over-the-top myths of world-wide, time-ending wars) -- a scenario plays out, time and time again -- whereby a Saved*Mart devotee breaches the rigid moral code of the group, then, overwhelmed by exhibitionistic displays of phony redemption.
Within this paradoxical dynamic, the excessively, yet, simultaneously, dictates one suppress one's lusts and passions, hence creating an unbridgeable psychological splitting process. As a consequence, many are bound to stray into the realm of the the aforementioned need for a come-to-Jesus repentance.

Conveniently, hapless flock's Elvis.
These ruthless phonies, in combination with the cunning apparatchik of the UberCulture, have become adroit at threaten their cultural hegemony. They have far too much at stake -- too much money and power might be lost, if freedom's voice were to be heard unfettered; hence, they serve up the spurious ecstatic states proffered by both pop culture and megachurch hucksterism.

soul we on the left must reclaim. Traditionally, music has aided progressives in the struggle. Accordingly, Woody Guthrie believed all songs are political.

Songs take up residence in our hearts and in the non-verbal areas of our minds where we harbor our deepest longings. There, they inform our perceptions of the world. It is this sublime terrain, existing beyond the material, that progressives have abandoned to the frauds and flimflammers.

Lost, in our retreat, has been our night, crossroads barroom freedom of Delta Blues -- or the likes of our finding refuge from the dehumanizing, daylight demands of mid-twentieth century, industrial, urban existence in the midnight transcendence of Bebop and Free Jazz. Also missing has been an atmosphere (cultural and personal) of creative risk and abandon, whereby Jimi Hendrix would Coltrane, plus toss some Malcolm X into the mix -- and, a short time later and further down a southbound road, Duane Allman would resurrect a redneck hippie, guitar Jesus who fed the post-honkey tonk multitudes Red Dirt Mount fusing the spirits of Tim Leary, Martin Luther King, and the Carter Family. Then, a few years later, across the gray Atlantic, the Sex Pistols would howl like Post-Industrial Age demons, trapped within the detritus of the crumbling British Empire .

.. much like, nearly a decade and a half later, Kurt Cobain would have his short, Icarian flight across the flaming-out sun of the American Empire.

In addition, the realm of sexuality has been claimed and exploited by moralizing hypocrites and opportunists. Hence, it's high time, we progressives ceased to be such priggish the human genitals. It's time we addressed and confronted the (mundane beyond one's immediate shallow, self-serving needs, concerns, and overgrown infant tyrants dropped from the poisonous womb of corporatism.

Possibly, in this light, the words sin and sinners are too loaded with cretinous religious connotations and, accordingly, their meanings should be reinterpreted more along the lines of self-centered fuck-ups.
range of ecstasies and excesses back to American life, we must not only wrest back ecstatic states from the bible-brandishing, brown shirt-prone class -- but the very definition of what constitutes spirituality, passion and sin as well. We re not talking about so-called blue states or red states here -- but states of inspiration.

Very few folks are ever even well reasoned arguments. That's not how human beings are made up -- Praise be! -- to the happenstance of evolutionary grace.

In conclusion, we must strive to live preachers do -- when they're seeking out converts and hookers.
auto-didactic, gasbag monologist, is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: philangie2000@yahoo.

com.