Progressive Calendar 10.31.06
From: David Shove (shove001tc.umn.edu)
Date: Mon, 30 Oct 2006 04:38:09 -0800 (PST)
             P R O G R E S S I V E   C A L E N D A R    10.31.06

1. Walk for democracy 10.31 11:30am

2. Immigration        11.01 8:30am
3. Chante/peace       11.01 11am
4. Palestine report   11.01 12noon
5. Pond lit drop      11.01 2pm
6. Bridge vigil       11.01 4:30pm
7. Roseville scam     11.01 6:30pm
8. Pentel/panel       11.01 7:30pm

9. Phil Rockstroh  - Iraqi war dead & collateral damage to America's soul
10. Phil Rockstroh - Six flags over Neo-Nuremberg
11. ed             - Yes sir boss  (poem)

--------1 of 11--------

From: Krisrose02 [at] aol.com
Subject: Walk for democracy 10.31 11:30am

Walk For Democracy
10.31.06

Come join Dave Berger, Green Party Endorsed Candidate for State Auditor
for a "Walk for Democracy" from 11am to Noon this Tuesday, October 31st in
downtown St. Paul at Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) 480 Cedar Street.  Dave
and friends will be protesting his exclusion from the MPR debate which is
scheduled from 11:30am to Noon.  Dress warm and bring your cell phones so
we can call into the show.  Halloween costumes are optional!

If you cannot come to St. Paul, please consider calling MPR during their
Midmorning show with Karrie Miller (9am to 11am) and ask that Dave be
included in the debate at 11:30am.  Or call during the Midday Program with
Gary Eichten

between 11am and Noon on the 31st and ask that Dave be allowed to debate.
The MPR call in line is: 1-800-228-7123 or (651)  290-1212.
THANK YOU for making a difference!!

--
MPR EXCLUDES GREEN CANDIDATE FROM STATE AUDITOR  DEBATE
10.27.06

Minnesota Public Radio (MPR)...91.1 FM has informed Dave Berger, Green
Party Endorsed Candidate for State Auditor, that he is the only candidate
running who is not invited to the State Auditor debate this coming
Tuesday, October 31, 2006 from 11:30 AM to Noon during the Midday program
with Gary Eichten.  Pat Anderson (R), Rebecca Otto (DFL), and Lucy Gerold
(I) are all invited to debate.


--------2 of 11--------

From: Ellen Tveit <tvei0002 [at] umn.edu>
Subject: Immigration 11.01 8:30am

Getting Some Perspective on Immigration
Wednesday, November 1, 2006
8:30am-3:30pm
Cowles Auditorium, Humphrey Center
301 19th Ave. S., Minneapolis
Sponsored by the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance,
Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota

For more information or to register, please contact Lisa Thalacker at
cspg [at] umn.edu or call 612-624-8842. Registration is $25 before October 25.
The conference agenda is available online at
www.hhh.umn.edu/centers/cspg/events.html. (Students may attend at no
charge, but must register in advance.)


--------3 of 11--------

From: Charles Underwood <charleyunderwood [at] hotmail.com>
Subject: Chante/peace 11.01  11am

Month of November, Monday to Saturday, 11 am to 3 pm, Chante Wolf has a
photography show "Generations for PEACE" telling her story from Air Force
warrior to Veteran for Peace, St Martin's Table, 2001 Riverside Ave, Mpls.
lhowell [at] visi.com


--------4 of 11-------

From: Kelly O'Brien <obrie136 [at] umn.edu>
Subject: Palestine report 11.01 12noon

"Dispossession, Occupation and Resistance: Reports from a Recent Visit to
Palestine"
Ziad Amra, attorney with American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee

Wednesday, November 1, 12noon (reception to follow)
University of Minnesota, 235 Blegen Hall, west bank campus
Free and open to the public
Directions/parking: http://www.onestop.umn.edu/Maps/BlegH/

FFI: Institute for Global Studies, www.igs.cla.umn.edu
<http://www.igs.cla.umn.edu/> ; 612-624-9007

Ziad Amra was a legal advisor to the Norwegian Agency for Reconstruction
and Development (NORAD) between 1995 and 1998 in Palestine. His work for
NORAD involved building the institutional capacity of the nascent
Palestinian Ministry of Planning and International Cooperation (MOPIC). As
a legal expert in MOPIC, he managed and developed the first environmental
legislation for Gaza and West Bank, and developed a unified planning and
building law for both areas. As the lead coordinator, researcher, and
developer on these two legislative initiatives, he worked with NGOs,
local/regional/national government, and community organizations as well as
with Israeli NGOs and Palestinians. In 1995, he worked on the negotiations
of Oslo II regarding the transfer of planning and building authority to
Palestinian Authority.

Since 2001 Amra has been assistant vice president of corporate banking for
USBancorp, in Minneapolis. He is a board member of the Minneapolis chapter
of American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), a steering committee
member of the local chapter of National Lawyers Guild (NLG), and is a
member of the Coalition for Palestinian Rights.

Amra's appearance is part of an ongoing series at the U of M titled The
Middle East and U.S. Foreign Policy: Alternative Voices, sponsored by the
Institute for Global Studies in the College of Liberal Arts. Other
speakers appearing this fall will include Beirut Daily Star
editor-at-large Rami Khouri and Virginia Tilley of the Human Sciences
Research Council in South Africa. More on the series can be found at
www.igs.cla.umn.edu <http://www.igs.cla.umn.edu/> .


--------5 of 11--------

From: Jonathan Fluck <jonathanfluck [at] yahoo.com>
Subject: Pond lit drop 11.01 2pm

Hi all!  Here are the times and areas the Pond campaign will be lit
dropping the final week + of the campaign.  Please email me with what day
you will be joining us so we can arrange to meet up and coordinate the
effort.

Tues Oct 31, 2 - 5pm: Mpls Ward 11 Precinct 2
Wed Nov 1, 2 - 5pm: Mpls Ward 11 Precinct 6
Thurs Nov 2, 4 - 7pm: Mpls Ward 11 Precinct 8
Fri Nov 3, 4 - 7pm: Mpls Ward 12 Precinct 11
Sat Nov 4, 3 - 6pm: Mpls Ward 13 Precinct 1
Sun Nov 5, 3 - 6pm: Mpls Ward 13 Precinct 5
Mon Nov 6, 2 - 5pm: Mpls Ward 2 Precinct 2

Again, please let me know what day(s) you want to help so we can make sure
we meet up! - Jonathan Fluck 612-600-7439


--------6 of 11--------

From: Charles Underwood <charleyunderwood [at] hotmail.com>
Subject: Bridge vigil 11.01 4:30pm

Wednesday, 11/1, Lake/Marshall vigil changes to 4:30 to 5:30 pm, due to
going off daylight saving time.


--------7 of 11--------

From: Amy Ihlan <amyihlan [at] comcast.net>
Subject: Roseville scam 11.01 6:30pm   [ed head]

There are 2 important Twin Lakes meetings coming up this week --

On Wednesday, November 1 at 6:30, at City Hall, the Planning Commission
will have a public hearing on Rottlund's new proposal.  The new proposal
does not include a big box retail development -- but this is because it
does not include the property where the big box shopping center was going
to go under the previous plan.

On Thursday, November 2, from 5:30 to 8:00 pm, the City of Roseville is
having an open house on the "update" of the environmental review for the
Twin Lakes area.

There are many questions that need to be asked about both the new Rottlund
proposal and the environmental review process.  My greatest concern is
that there will be an attempt to get the original Rottlund plan (including
a large retail component) approved in pieces, and that the process will be
timed so that key approval votes occur before a new council is able to
take office in 2007.  I'm also concerned that the environmental review
"update" will be designed to pave the way for higher density development
than the previous environmental study allowed.

Please plan to attend these meetings if you possibly can to express your
views and concerns, and feel free to contact me for more information.

[It's been one long battle against big money developers and an
unresponsive arrogant city council 3/2 majority. Nothing so tenacious and
so destructive as the bulldog jaws of the undeserving rich on the pantlegs
of easy public money. -ed]


--------8 of 11--------

From: Ken Pentel <kenpentel [at] yahoo.com>
Subject: Pentel/panel 11.01 7:30pm

Ken Pentel - Green Party endorsed for MN Governor
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 1ST
Harriet Tubman-Governor Panel 3111 1st Ave S Mpls 7:30pm


--------9 of 11--------

Selling Satan: Iraqi War Dead and the Collateral Damage to America's Soul
by Phil Rockstroh
www.dissidentvoice.org
October 27, 2006

"United States numb to Iraq troop deaths: experts"
- Reuters headline

"O Nature, and O soul of man! how far beyond all utterance are your linked
analogies! not the smallest atom stirs or lives in matter, but has its
cunning duplicate in mind."

- Herman Melville, Moby Dick

All human beings have a talent for the denial of the more unpalatable
aspects of ourselves, but we Americans have turned denial into a form of
collective genius. There is no need to burn books, if the public is too
ignorant to know they exist, or too benumbed to resonate with their
content.

Regarding the death of well over half-a-million Iraqis, the majority of
the citizenry of The Corporatist States of America have experienced a
comparable degree of regret and remorse that their oligarchic overlords
experience when topping off the tanks of their corporate jets with fuel
purchased with money plundered from their employee's retirement accounts .
. . sans conscience above - sans conscience below.

Dante posited Limbo (that quiet suburban community ringing Hell) was a
place reserved for those who evinced indifference to the world around
them. It would seem our corporate/consumer version of Damnation (which now
includes Casual Fridays in Hell itself) requires prescriptions for
anti-depressants, urine tests, and Reality Television competitions to
enter its inner most circles.

As stated, human beings have always possessed an immense capacity for
self-deception - but, at present, we Americans can no longer afford
stupid, naked monkey business as usual: The stakes are too damn high. When
we, as a people, cannot or will not connect the needless deaths of well
over half-a-million Iraqis with the oversized motor vehicles in our
driveways, the situation has grown dire indeed.

How can we go on this way? At this point, a guilt-induced, collective
nervous breakdown in the middle of our morning commute would seem to be in
order.

By existing in this degree of denial, what have we conjured? What sort of
a society do we call forth when our lives are as isolated, benumbed,
inauthentic and devoid of conscience as they are at present? The answer
is: We're living in the midst of it . . . this hideous era of pervasive
flimflam and permanent war. Call it: The Halliburtonization of everyday
life.

Again, as above - so below.

We live in a nation dominated by salesmanship (commercial, political,
religious).  Accordingly, the salesman's credo is: a facile mendacity
trumps a stubborn truth - because an honest mode of being would cause the
buyer to become wary of the giddy lie of the pitch. Hence, complicity in
its duplicity is what the corporate/consumer state demands of us.

The salesman's counterfeit smile is, of course, camouflage. Beneath it is
hidden a face more closely resembling that quintessential corporatist and
Halliburton-alumni-in-good-standing: Dick Cheney. His joyless,
thin-lipped, psychopath's half grin is the true countenance of our
death-enamored empire.

A salesman's repertoire of manipulative enthusiasm and sham amiability
fronts the whole criminal enterprise. Is it any coincidence that Las Vegas
and prisons are the fastest growing population centers in the United
States? We've become a country comprised of clip joints and jails. A land
of suckers and criminals, with a cultural landscape peopled by corporate
scam artists, congressional bagmen, and war criminals (hiding in plain
sight in the highest offices of the land). It's a natural progression, due
to the fact that capitalism has always depended on a predatory class of
sociopaths, has always relied upon thievery and murder, and, therefore,
needs an endless supply of suckers and victims.

Yet, most of us Americans are no one's victims. Any con artist worth his
smarmy smile is aware of this fact: As a rule, a mark is made the victim
of his own greed. Moreover - by means of our complicity in allowing our
identities to be molded by a culture dominated by proliferate propaganda,
empty salesmanship, and our own lies of omission - the fate of a hapless
mark, bamboozled by self-inflicted selfishness, is the criteria we live
out daily. Apropos, we're now condemned to shuffle through our lives as
somnambulating ciphers, dim denizens of a world made manifest by
mountebanks.

We should be cautioned. History reveals that what a nation inflicts upon
the world, its own people will, sooner or later, inflict upon each other.
There is no need to warily scan the horizon line for its arrival, because
we're already living in the midst of the angst and emptiness we have
wrought. Ergo, when dreams mean nothing - when words and images are
rendered meaningless - our lives reflect these dismal states.

Words, images, and dreams are our internal analog of the vast, manifold,
and incomprehensible sublime of the cosmos. When we dream, we are
spiraling supernovas and spindling stalks of slime mold. We are schools of
silent fish and we are the fulmination of thunder. We are uniquely
ourselves; yet, we also contain all of existence. To lose our dreams is to
lose our soul. Hence, to have the verities of our inner selves twisted and
distorted towards the selfish ends of corporate capitalism and the
dishonest agendas of mass media-driven political discourse is to become
estranged from passion, empathy, and imagination; thereby, we grow inured
to phrases such as preemptive war, collateral damage and acceptable losses
- expressions that we should find repellent, if not, flat-out mortifying.

If not, then it should follow: We should change the names of the civilian
casualties of war, inscribed upon their respective tombstones, to simply
read "Collateral Damage". Moreover, narratives of bereavement should sound
something like this: "You see, when the bombs of the Preemptive Warriors
fell on our home - our child, now named, 'Collateral Damage,' was asleep
in her crib, and she became 'our little Acceptable Loss'"... Now try this:
See how the statement above sounds when you substitute the names of your
loved ones - or even the names of your pets.

In opposition to empathy, the corporatist mode of being instructs us that
human life, like material objects, exists merely to be used, used-up, then
discarded; nature is to be subdued, exploited, and decimated; trees
toppled; rivers dammed up; mountains ground down to silt; words degraded,
attenuated, and stripped of meaning. Finally, they will come for us.

Instead, what if we were seized and shook by shamanic visions sent to us
from an ensouled earth that had grown enraged by our ignorance and
indifference towards its plight? What if these fantastic and terrifying
narratives warned of dire events and augured destruction, in which, oceans
rose, hurricanes churned, glaciers melted, the very young and the very old
perished from extreme heat and cold, as clouds of pestilence descended
upon the land?

Are these visions crackpot ravings or last summer's news and weather
reports? What difference would it make whether these dire and dreadful
circumstances are wrought by wrathful gods or Global Warming? The
structure, plot, theme, and dnouement are essentially the same: Hubris and
ignorance transform nature (human and otherwise) into a force of blind
destruction, thereby rendering arrogant folly rending tragedy. Whether
engendered by gods, or memes or molecules, suffering is suffering;
untimely death is untimely death, regardless of the cause.

We Americans have numbed ourselves in order to be able to live with our
complicity in the crimes of empire. We have carpet bombed our rational
minds into oblivion by the belief in chimeras such as "smart bombs".
Reason tells us a truly smart bomb would be able to distinguish the
innocent from the guilty. Therefore, for a smart bomb to exist, it would
have to be a Frankenstein Monster Bomb, because, in order to exterminate
the truly guilty, it would first have to kill its creators. Then it would
go after the soulless bastards who ordered its use. Accordingly, smart
bombs would be flying into Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld's front doors as
thick and fast as moths toward a glowing porch light on a warm summer
night.

Only a society of numbed-out, reality-adverse imbeciles could believe in
the existence of smart bombs. In a related matter, recent public opinion
surveys have revealed close to seventy percent of the population of the
United States does not believe in the Theory of Evolution, yet believes
that a mythological character called Satan is a literal entity.

How did this epic ignorance come to be? How did we leave the 21st Century
and blunder back to the 14th? Maybe this type of hocus-pocus, hoodoo and
religious legerdemain is necessary to keep an increasingly angst-ridden,
over-worked populace from rising from our enclosures in Hell (also known
as cubicles and work stations) and demanding a system that offers greater
depth, meaning and resonance than the one presently afforded under
corporate hegemony.

Is this how we became so passive and benumbed - because the life we're
offered and have accepted within the corporate/consumer paradigm is so
limiting in its possibilities: it being a system that occludes and
eventually destroys the natural world (both external and internal)? Is
this the reason we have grown so dim - because our imaginations have been
so deeply suppressed that its imaginings now rise as a living nightmare of
literalization? Perhaps, Americans don't believe in evolution due to the
fact we no longer believe that meaningful change can occur. And, perhaps,
we believe in the literal existence of a soul-collecting Devil because we
know that we have lost our essential selves to a mysterious force that
seems beyond our control. Having been seduced by the illusions of
corporate capitalism (a false mythos that tantalizes us with promises of
freedom but instead shackles us to exploitive labor and mind-numbing
consumerism) we know we have made an ill-advised bargain with some dark
force that has robbed us of our humanity. We know (maybe ineffably) that,
here within the empire, our lives have lost an essential, soul-enhancing
element.

It is possible we fear our souls are imperiled by the Devil because, on
some level of awareness, we grasp we have forsaken our ability to
experience a life imbued by meaning, depth and resonance, due to our
systematic suppression of those vital aspects of our character that are
capable of imagining then creating a future containing greater
possibilities than the shriveled pickings of the present.

We fear the licking flames of hell, I suspect, because we realize we have
sold our souls at fire sale prices.

Phil Rockstroh, a self-described auto-didactic, gasbag monologist, is a
poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be
contacted at: philangie2000 [at] yahoo.com.


[We don't spend enough time realizing all the ways capitalism destroys our
souls, humanity, imagination, spontaniety, joy in life and nature. We get
smaller and grayer and more brittle, made into zombie ants to work and
shut up and be no threat to the tarantulas who run the system, sucked dry
and lifeless. It's a very clever and necessary strategy for the tarantulas
- if we had any vital juices in us, we'd overthrow them. Slave-masters
have to make slaves think like slaves; capitalism depends on a pervasive
crapaganda system to lobotomize our independent thoughts and thoughts of
independence. -ed]


--------10 of 11--------

Six Flags Over Neo-Nuremberg
Bush, Oprah, the San Diego Chicken, and a Proto-Fascist Panopticon of the
Mind
Six Flags Over Neo-Nuremberg

by Phil Rockstroh
www.dissidentvoice.org
October 6, 2006
http://www.referralblast.com/rblast.asp?sid=7227

Many believe fascism will come to the United States of America resembling
contrived spectacles such as The Super Bowl, The Academy Awards, and
American Idol, with the proceedings intercut with teary, yet ultimately
triumphant, Oprahesque tales of how redemption can be gained through the
renunciation of one's rights, liberties, as well as, the dutiful turning
in of one's subversive neighbors.

Don't reach for that remote, folks: It's already here.

Our journey to fascism began at the end of The Second World War when the
tenets of the hyper-commercialized entertainment/military/corporate state
became sacrosanct by means of our internalization of it from constant mass
media reinforcement. What purported to be only a message from our sponsors
metastasized into the 24/7, corporatized UberCulture of the present day.
The Revolution will not be televised - because The Corporatist Coup is
being continually broadcast.

Commercial advertising is a form of political speech: A very potent one
and its effects are far from benign. By means of its cultural dominance,
commercial advertising is promulgated, to the point of total market
saturation, without any form of effective opposition; hence, by its very
nature, it amounts to corporatist propaganda and serves as a vehicle of
mass indoctrination.

By way of a ceaseless bombardment of advertising imagery, we exist in a
nonstop, holographic, corporate Nuremberg rally of the collective mind. We
need not participate in old school, torch-lit processions of Brownshirts
through the streets: This brand of all media penetration proto-fascism has
been internalized. We, like maggots born into a pile of dung, find nothing
malodorous about our place of birth.

Karl Rove, Roger Ailes, et al are not evil geniuses. Well, at least,
they're not geniuses. They're simply cocktail party-variety, confidence
artists of the electronic age. They're media professionals who understand
the proto-fascistic fantasies of the populace of the consumer state.

Hitler and Goebbels grasped what any advertising copywriter is taught
early on: People can be manipulated, if an appeal can be addressed to
modern man's yearning to break free from the constraints of his existence
as an economic animal. Whether it's the promised dawning of The Thousand
Year Reich or the empty facsimile of freedom promised by the purchase of a
new automobile, both provide the feckless sucker with the illusion of
shaking up the old order; hence, the quotidian prison will collapse,
allowing one's imprisoned longings to escape to freedom over the rubble.
But first, paradoxically, one must surrender their rational mind to the
individuality-destroying agendas of the state and/or corporation.

When people habitually surrender their free will to the irrational
dictates of a dominant order, an inner anxiety results. Outwardly, one
feigns strength, yet inwardly one is ridden with doubts. To compensate, an
individual will grow, over time, more rigid, even totalitarian.

Enter George W. Bush, a man affecting a massive measure of feigned
toughness - yet, at the same time, riddled with such a high degree of
concomitant inner doubts that when he attempts to speak, his words trip
and stagger over his lips like drunken dwarves attempting to clear a high
curb.

In temperament, Bush is as vain and brutish as any tin-plated dictator.
Worse, Bush, more closely resembles an abusive pimp - tragically, Lady
Liberty's. Habitually slapping her around, accusing her of holding out on
him, and paranoid of betrayal, Bush, a preening caricature of Macho
Narcissism, like any run-of-the-dark-alley pimp claims to be her
protector, as, all the while, he abuses, exploits, and degrades her.
Apropos, Bush's vast collection of outfits for every occasion should
include a plum purple pimp suit; accordingly, the presidential limo should
be tricked out to sport 1970s-style Cadillac El Dorado opera windows, a
two tone paint job, and be accessorized with plush, white fur-lined
upholstery.

It was the black magicians of advertising who sold us George W. Bush. Bush
was initially marketed as a box of detergent (though he's dumb as a box of
rocks) - a cleansing, Christian soap to be used as directed to wash and
scour the stain of Satanic jism left on the fabric of American life by the
sinful Bill Clinton. Bush, a former drunk, now "cleaned-up," was ready to
lead America to a whiter-than-white future - plus provide round-the-clock
protection from the offensive odors emitted by the body politic.

But, after the Eleventh of September 2001, Bush was marketed as a Humvee.
The biggest, most powerful vehicle traveling the perilous roadways of a
hostile world: It's O.K. kids, daddy's at the wheel . . . just sit in the
backseat and watch your DVDs . . . You're safe and protected: anybody or
anything stupid enough to get in our way will be crushed beneath us.
Challenge us you evildoers and you'll join the rest of the smoking
wreckage and pulverized road-kill in our wake.

Although - after wildly fluctuating gas prices and a series of deadly
rollovers on the roadways of Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Post-Katrina Gulf
coast - the Hummer presidency of George W. Bush is sputtering: the DVD
player is running an endless tape loop of Bush strutting, clad in a flight
suit, while Iraq burns and bleeds; in addition, the vehicle's passengers
are carsick and road weary.

The fool's gold standard for this form of
governance-by-marketing-subterfuge was set by former soap and nuclear
missile salesmen Ronald Reagan who was successfully sold as a kind of
grandfatherly Marlboro Man. Reagan, whose fantasy-prone hagiographers
still believe, by some cryptic act of telegenic alchemy, brought down the
Soviet Union - somehow - by simply reading a teleprompter. Later, Bill
Clinton was a rock-a-billy cool Elvis who fattened up the economy like it
was binging on a round-the-clock, fried peanut butter and banana
sandwiches and chocolate cake diet.

At this point, hapless George W. Bush, as was the case with his geeky,
hyperthyroid father before him, must be beginning to cause his corporate
creators to drastically up the dosages of their respective SSRI
prescriptions, because, while they intended to market Bush II as the heir
apparent of the iconic cowboy Ronald Reagan, it's clear he couldn't handle
the responsibilities of the San Diego Chicken.

Bush should serve out the rest of his term wearing a chicken costume. Such
an act would be emblematic of the man, as well as our era: Bush as an
emblem of the populace of the United States - a people who have lost
their dignity, by way of surrendering it to the corporatist order.

In a more literate age, F. Scott Fitzgerald, in his masterpiece, The Great
Gatsby, limned characters emblematic of his era. Yet the words he wrote in
the 1920s still resonate today as a powerful indictment of those who
created and enable men like Bush - the corrupt corporatist classes of the
present time:

"They were careless people, Tom and Daisy - They smashed up things and
creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast
carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other
people clean up the mess they had made ..." (Pg. 180-181)

Carelessness is the manner by which extroverts manifest despair. Being a
nation that considers introspection a loser's gambit, carelessness has
been our national mode d'etre since the countries inception. Bush is only
its latest manifestation.

And the mess is piling up by the hour. As was the case with Gatsby,
beneath the carefully constructed image and manic consumption of the
UberCulture, the American empire is doomed. Although, we, unlike Gatsby,
for all our cunning artifices and desperate subterfuge, are not flaming
out and falling amid the glittering debris of frenetic, jazz-imbued
bacchanals - we have only managed shopping spree debt, over-priced coffee
jags, McMansion-enclosed anomie and porn habituation.

Gatsby remains an emblem of the hollowness howling beneath the convivial
veneer of capitalist man. An updated version of the model is Oprah
Winfrey.

Yes, I realize Gatsby is a fictional character, imagined and realized by
F. Scott Fitzgerald within the context of a novel; Gatsby is a construct
of the mind sent out into the world to synergize with the imagination of
the reader. Yet the Oprah we hold in our mind's eye is also an imagined
character - a character wholly created by Oprah, fully imagined and
realized inside the media hologram.

Oprah is a corporate capitalist, performance propagandist. Her rousing
tales of personal redemption are very useful to the plutocratic order of
the present day, an elitist order in which she's comfortably ensconced.

In a time when the besieged laboring and middle classes would benefit from
an honest expose detailing the ruling class machinations that belie their
sense of powerlessness, Oprah, instead, proffers twelve step-usurped
platitudes, "Self Help" bromides (suggested book club title: An Idiots
Guide To Idiocy) and shop-worn Horatio Alger doggerel, all refitted to the
media age.

The Gospel of Oprah reeks of faux redemption. Even when Oprah addresses a
topic such as the wage enslavement of minimum wage jobs, she avoids the
obvious question of who benefits from having this exploitive system in
place. Such disingenuous story telling is analogous to Charles Dickens
penning "A Christmas Story" sans Ebenezer Scrooge.

Oprah is a plutocratic enabler disguised as the populist underdog who made
good. She is a shill for the status quo. She will never point a pampered
finger towards the corrupt ruling elitist of the corporate class -
because that finger would end up pointing back at her.

The UberCulture's frenetic come-ons and false promises flatten people out
emotionally, rendering them depressed, passive, and conformist. Moreover,
in a culture where success is deemed the end all/be all of all things -
even a measure of God's love and grace, when contemporary Americans risk
straying from the mainstream and fail, the repercussions are terrible,
more than most people can endure, economically as well as psychologically.
And within the parameters of a corporately controlled economic structure
- rigged for the benefit of a privileged few - failure is altogether
likely. Then combine those noxious realities with the puritanical idea
that failure is due to some character flaw (a toxic notion Oprah has given
a makeover for the media age) and we're left with a populace who are
conformist, terrified to risk, yet cling to the defining delusion that
they live in a society where industry, innovation, and pluck are rewarded
with success.

For this reason the corporatist order needs a consummate propagandist like
Oprah; a charismatic mountebank who, by means of her stem-twisting tales
of personal redemption, dangles before her credulous audience the elusive
and illusionary carrot of success. Success and personal fulfillment are
possible for one and all, she lies, if only one will surrender their
rational instincts and avail oneself to her gospel of self-help salvation.
In doing this, Oprah simply sells a variation of the old totalitarian
snake oil.

Oprah Winfrey is a sleight-of-hand artist. One of an order of corrupt
illusionists who have conjured an all-pervasive, corporatist narrative, a
ceaseless mass-media phantasmagoria, wherein empty imagery deluges
authentic apprehension and our minds are whirled within a virtual-reality
vortex that drowns out resonate experience. The Virtual States of America.

In reality, a large measure of our lives are comprised of long work hours,
rounded by tedious, time-decimating commutes, while in unison, mass media
manipulation creates a psychological and societal dynamic whereby we must
work, nearly continuously, so that we can afford to purchase the empty
distractions needed to stave off the demoralization attendant to this
soul-numbing arrangement; yet, for all our efforts, we only accumulate
more enslaving debt. Ultimately, condemning ourselves to exist indentured
to our corporate bosses, by means of our own consumerist compulsions.

These circumstances and our own complicity contrive to fetter us to the
global company store of late capitalism as, all the while, our perceptions
remain imprisoned within the proto-fascist panopticon of the UberCulture.
Part prison, part holographic theme park of the mind, it spins a ceaseless
spectacle of commercial propaganda. Call it: Six Flags over Neo-Nuremberg,
U.S.A.

Phil Rockstroh, a self-described auto-didactic, gasbag monologist, is a
poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be
contacted at: philangie2000 [at] yahoo.com.


--------11 of 11--------

 Yes sir boss I'll do
 it right away. (Bury my
 heart at bended knee).


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   - David Shove             shove001 [at] tc.umn.edu
   rhymes with clove         Progressive Calendar
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