Reflections in a Petri Dish – November 29, 2008
I don’t particularly like criticizing Americans- or any nation, for that matter. However, if I am going to do it, this is the blog for it; “Reflections in a Petri Dish.” Maybe I should have called it “Smears on a Glass Slide.” Maybe that’s a future blog for the heavy artillery.
I don’t like criticizing in general. I don’t like sounding like a scold. We are all prone to it. Curbing your tongue is a high art. I realize I do a lot of it at Smoking Mirrors blog but if you look at the geo-political landscape today, there isn’t much to strike up the band for. In my mind it isn’t criticism as much as it is the act of putting up cautionary highway signs and warning about who is really doing the things you are beguiled and motivated into blaming on someone else …and we’ll be talking about the interesting, third party provocation of a conflict between Pakistan and India, later on.
This is the cultural blog however and before I get into today’s shining example of contemporary culture, let me say that it takes a certain amount of low brow proliferation to make possible the violent depravities of the time. As Hillary likes to say, “It takes a village.” Yes, it takes a village. It takes a village of idiots. One idiot won’t do.
Yesterday in Long Island, a collection of idiots trampled a man to death; caused a pregnant woman to miscarry and injured several other members of the idiot’s brigade outside a shopopolis of shit. Wal-Mart is a fine example of American culture and so too are these rampaging swine; gathered outside a feeder pipe of useless, plastic crap.
Not only did they achieve the results already mentioned but they kept right on going and, in a feeding frenzy, they grabbed all the useless substitutes for love that caught their beady little red eyes and made as high a pile as they could manage in the shopping cart under the shadow of their looming bellies which hung into the child seat beneath the cart handles. Then they raced to checkout counters, indifferent to whatever they had accomplished on entering; their minds already fixed on the next act of pig enterprise.
They riot outside chain link fences, like drunken soccer yobs, hoping they will get one of the $250. Laptops that you need fingers, not hooves, to operate. They send their sons and daughters to die in corporate wars against nations that are framed for the offense they are seeking retribution for. They morph their children into a country filled with Pillsbury doughboys and girls who can’t think or read or run. They are proud Americans. They had their Thanksgiving dinner without any thanks and then they went out and showed each other what they were made of. You can see what they are made of in the pork ‘n Styrofoam section of the meat locker at Food R Us.
I’ve watched them in their drunken brawls outside of sporting events and bars. I’ve watched them move like packs of wild dogs through the parks and subway systems. I’ve seen them at the country clubs and beaches. I’ve watched them fall from two feet to four and change like a werewolf under a blood red moon. I’ve seen them singing their tedious hymns to their anthropomorphic Gods while the minister delivers the corporate line from the corporation Jesus out of the corporation approved Bible.
In my travels I have seen them outside the restaurants and theaters and seen the infra-red heat of their ‘contents under pressure’ sexual anger looking for something to fight or fuck or eat. Their eyes are as glazed as the donuts that they order by the dozens as an appetizer before the main feast.
The contents are under pressure because one cowboy in a black hat tells them copulation is a sin while another cowboy in a red hat shows them videos of Desperate Housewives and Jerry Springer specials. Another cowboy in a blue hat sings about Heaven in the sky and the cowboy at the front in the yellow hat holds up pictures of Heaven on Earth and they follow him through the chutes and on to the killing floor; trampling their fellows to be the first in line.
They paint makeup on their sad, tired faces and it really does look like lipstick on a pig. They do the same to their children and then sell them to the corporation pimps because they are going to be stars. It has to be done a certain way. It has to have the corporate seal and then it’s all legal and appropriate… not like the guy in the car outside the elementary school or the guy with dream dust in the parking lot. There’s no room for entrepreneurs. They have to be wearing the corporation jacket with the emblem over the pocket. Then they can fuck your children and sell you bad dope and alcohol to kill your will and you’re just that glad that they picked you. Then they parade you in front of the world and they laugh at you and knock you down and piss on you and everybody laughs, including the next guy in line.
It’s all Jesus in hotpants leaning into a curbside, car window. It’s twenty-four hour asparmate Mozart in the elevator from Hell. It’s Einstein playing Wheel of Fortune and Martin Luther King hosting Let’s Make a Deal. “Come on Down!” “It’s finger-licking good.” Get yourself a season ticket to the Kentucky Fried Cremora-toriums.
The greatest country in the world is blind drunk and vomiting in the alley. The Land of the Free is on its knees and torsioned up in bondage gear with a gag reflex, ping pong ball in its mouth and a vibrating butt plug in its ass on national TV. It’s the Home of the Brave, hiding in the subway tunnels from the 2:05 Beelzebub Express. It’s One Nation under ZOG with ketchup and mustard for all. It’s a lie and that’s what burns you and makes you want to kill because you’re not going to look at it… no, you’re not going to look at it. You’re going to paint a big smiley face on the 25 foot pitcher of Kool-Aid and get yourself a Big Gulp container.
It’s a crying shame but it’s only those who want no part of it who can see how deep the misery runs and how much deeper it can go. There’s some small movement out on the fringe. You can see small parties and individuals packing it in and heading for the exits. They know that the next stampede is almost due.
If this were a metaphor, I would say that those who led you here to the gates of Hell knew where they were headed all along. They were always going there. The payoff is that they get to do more to you there than they got to do to you here and it’s better to be a prison guard than a prisoner. It’s better to be the whipper than the whipped. Sure, it takes a certain temperament but they got that. They got that.
On and on it goes and where it stops nobody knows. On it goes into Boschian nightmare. On it goes into Clive Barker’s bad dreams. On you go… chasing the Sony PlayStations and RockStar 3’s. You do it all for Love. You trample your fellows to buy useless crap for the people you want to love- if love didn’t require so much- in the hope that they will love you too. But they know you don’t love them. You can’t fake love for very long and you certainly can’t buy it and they’ll turn on you and let you know that sooner or later and you’ll wind up in a dark room listening to “Tears of a Clown” over and over and over again… alone.
Your children and your friends know that you don’t love them and you know that they don’t love you. It’s all an air-kissing masquerade in a bad manners production of a wasted life. Materialism doesn’t satisfy the hunger for human understanding and natural affection, prostituted and destroyed by a raging buck fever for worthless goods in place of the one thing you were too cheap to provide and which cost you nothing but the vulnerability and sacrifice of delivery. Real love has been buried under a landfill of garbage that is the headstone over the shallow grave of the people you might have been and never were.
Nothing More
Original source: http://zippittydodah.blogspot.com/2008/11/something-i-saw-scrying-into-glass.html
Last updated 30/11/2008
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