The Corporate Monkeys in Our National Mirror

This article is so well written and profound I could not pass it up.


Reflections On Our Inner Bush: Corporate Monkeys In Our National House Of Mirrors
Phil Rockstroh—09/2006

Bush is not the problem, but merely a symptom of a society that has sold out to corporate capitalism. The President is now just a commodity, substantiated merely by PR campaigns.

On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their hearts' desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

— H.L. Mencken, Baltimore Sun, 1920

AS AMERICANS WADDLED into the new century, overweight, overworked, and as self aware as a cloister of sea slugs — so too arrived, affecting his bandy-legged, fake cowboy swagger, George W. Bush, to usher in this era of unquenchable, consumer craving and perpetual, martial emergency


...There is little mystery as to why Bush is now beating a war drum, in time to that all-too-familiar election time, Rovian rag. Bush's handlers are desperate: Recent polls have revealed that suburban males, Republican women, southerners, and even Christian fundamentalists are starting to have misgivings about Bush. Why? One would guess: Since Bush has proven himself incapable of changing Iraqi blood into cheap, ever-available oil, this has caused, for a portion of his base, the sheen of beatitude to come off Jesus' earthly emissary. ...

The sad and tragic circumstances of our time are much larger than Bush. Bush's grandiosity mirrors us, a people who have lost all sense of proportion. Look around: notice how huge and grotesque the objects and accoutrements of our age have become: colossal motor vehicles; the portions of food we crave; gaudy, land-devouring mcmansions; American consumer's enormous, sea-to-shining-sea asses. These things are manic compensations antecedent to the crash to come. Apropos, our SUVs, oversized pickup trucks, and hummers are no longer large enough to compensate for our feelings of powerlessness; our epic servings of food no longer serve to push down the sense of dread; we cannot find enough room in our mcmansions to hide away all of our anger, sorrow, and regret.

...Mojo Nixon sang, "Everybody has a little Elvis in them." Nowadays, regrettably, we must sing: Everybody has far too much Bush in them. Internally, to one degree or another, we're all George W. Bush. Bush is the corporate state's dancing monkey — as, to one degree or another, we all are. The corporate state necessitates that we become, like Bush, all puffed up phonies, in order to face a daily life ruled by its mandates — as well as — to compensate for our inner emptiness, borne of our internalization of it.
If we choose to face our inner Bush, our habitual verities and sacred beliefs risk being shattered and scattered asunder. Because the situation is larger than us and it's larger than Bush: Bush is merely a reflection of it all. Ergo: to listen to the mangled syntax of Bush's speech patterns is to hear the sound of the national infrastructure crack and buckle; his booze and cocaine decimated brain cells mirror the earth's diminishing bio-diversity; his snits of entitlement and his ruthlessness echo the entropic forces of global capitalism that are driving the engines of extinction.

...

There is a feeling of flimsiness and haphazardness present in our daily lives here in the empire. Even the landscape before us has been inflicted with an ugly, ad hoc quality. The structures of our age evince a lack of substance. The shoddy, quick buck-snatching stripmall/big box store/fast food outlet, prefab nowhereland of the present day United States is reflective of our shoddy, quick buck-snatching leaders, who are, in turn, a reflection of us. We have come to dwell within this Architecture of Denial; we have come to call this House of Distorted Mirrors, our way of life.
As, all the while, the parallel narratives of compulsive consumerism and Christian End Time Mythology surround us.
Contemporary Christian fundamentalism is a religion of consumer instant gratification. It is a religious cosmology resonating from a junk food paradigm: a Gospel of The Drive Thru Jesus; when The Rapture comes, our corporeal bodies will be cast aside like fast food wrappers.
...
On the secular side of our sickness: Big Pharma factories and rural crystal meth labs can't manufacture enough product to prevent this sinking spell. Soon, even the ruling elites will begin to buckle beneath the weight of their self-deception. We the laboring classes already know the feeling, due to the fact, we've been carrying those bloated bastards, plus their delusions of infinite entitlement, on our backs for quite some time now. We strain beneath the load, because the plutocrats have grown very fat gorging themselves on the nation's seed crop.
...


Bush (substitute Harper if you are Canadian) is our hidden intentions made manifest before us: We live in an empire bent on murder/suicide; our nation has become a global-wide spree killer… unrepentant… seemly devoid of conscience.
Then what hope remains for us, here, in this age, where self-serving lies promulgated by public relations hacks have hijacked the verities of the human mind, heart, and imagination, as all the while, so many genuine voices of humanity have been lost amid this seemly endless bacchanal of bullshit and blown blood?
That is up to us: Personally and collectively, our fate might well be determined by how honest we're willing to be with ourselves. After all, by way of our passivity, we're at least partially responsible for letting a million Rovian Turd Blossoms bloom. We have summoned Bush by the incantation of our hidden intentions; perhaps, if we were to awaken to the George W. Bush concealed within, we might understand our own collaboration in creating him — and then, at long last, we can begin the process of dismissing him and all he represents.
Copyright © 2006 Phil Rockstroh The complete article is available at:

http://www.energygrid.com/society/2006/09pr-innerbush.html