The Rise And Fall Of

in Life/Philosophy — by David Sparenberg 

When a house is on fire an alarm must be sounded.  An alarm is not always sounded solely out of fear.  Sometimes an alarm must be sounded out of love, for fear that the house will be destroyed in the tyranny of conflagration.

The political function of contemporary America serves corporate capitalism.  This is capitalism as overwhelming force geared to sedate or subdue the majority while aggrandizing wealth of a monopolizing minority; also, capitalism as a Fascist policy melding political and economic power.  The chronic frustration of the working poor is turned against itself to stupefy and induce intercommunity animosity, social cannibalization, and political inaction.

The God of America is money.  The creed is greed.  The culture is saturating violence.

Without violence, global exploitation, Earth-rape and the racial exclusionism needed to feed insatiable greed does not continue.

Without the national creed, the Money God cannot be worshipped.  Without the patriotism of worshipping deified money through superfluous but perpetual consumerism, capitalism hemorrhages.  The hemorrhaging of corporate capitalism, aligned with stupendous military capability, is not a system merely bleeding out but the existential threat of bloodbath.

Despite accelerating fantasies of the Floating World of Empire Living—the virtual matrix progressively replacing natural reality; despite material semiotics, junk semiotics, polluting, congesting and poisoning; systemic propaganda and eviscerating denials; the American people know they are imprisoned in silicone technologies of death.  Yet, like prisoners confined to all other former and contemporary prisons, instead of demanding change and the empowering break out of Socialist Democracy, people acquiesce to crime and addition.

Deep down the American worldview contains not only the perfidious histories of Manifest Destiny but the color-line entitlement of old word empires as well.  These dark demons maintain the engines of corporate capitalism and the illusionist paramour of smiling Fascism.  This is what yet waits to further seal the fate of America, or to be democratically deconstructed through a transvaluation of shared values.

Back in the 1930’s, Europe sinking into a colossal nightmare of bloodlust, Ludwig Binswanger; one of the founds of existential psychoanalysis; warned that if you want to see into the future of a nation, study the pathology of its criminals.

It was Binswanger also who developed the experience-category of Extravagance, where a nation uses up all vital resources in one extreme, ideological direction and has nothing left to counter impending ruin or rescue itself from a cataclysmic fall.

Laws of evil teach the unteachable that what occurs once can be repeated (and even made more fatally efficient) and what is enacted on a small scale, that is, locally in ghettos, barrios and border towns, can, diligently, be enlarged.

A secret of national security gradually shows its hand in plain view: malignancy is normalized.

Meanwhile, proliferating barbarians (who are mostly native born) emerge from shadows—hell bent bands marching to slogans of perfidy and perdition in the pale dark of torchlight and guns, stinking of methamphetamine and heroin.  Eventually a rumbling terrorizes the home of the brave betrayed and land of the free deceived.

This is not a future forecast on heavy thunder or a category five tornado.  But of tanks in streets.

David Sparenberg is a world citizen, environmental & peace advocate & activist, actor, poet-playwright, storyteller, teacher and author.

https://countercurrents.org/2018/05/06/the-rise-and-fall-of/