Fastened to a Dying Animal

[trof]

Someday, historians will have to dissect this decaying carcass of a political system like medical examiners autopsying a rotting corpse. But for now, poet Phil Rockstroh offers up what he calls “a short jeremiad regarding that affront to the nation's dignity known as the U.S. election process”:

Here in this crumbling empire once known as the American Republic, here in a nation that, at present, for all practical purposes, only produces Cheetos and killer drones, whose architecture is being winnowed down to thriving rural meth houses and foreclosed upon suburban MacHouses, whose corrupt corporate culture has bequeathed upon our suffering planet dying oceans and the hyper-caffeinated tsunami of Red Bull Capitalism -- the essential question confronts us -- how does one retain (not retail) one's humanity amid the catastrophic machinery and inane accoutrement of our age?

Yet, we, against all evidence, believe we are free actors in a spontaneous, unfolding democratic drama. When, in reality, we have been cast as dehumanized supernumeraries in a lethal farce that renders all concerned both oppressor and oppressed.

This is the central paradox that binds us. And it is why the average American cannot see our imperial occupation of Iraq and our increasingly dangerous belligerence towards Iran for what it is.

"Sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity."
-- W.B. Yeats

The rest is here:
http://www.consortiumnews.com/Print/2008/042808b.html


And that's about how I feel right now.
:-(