THROUGH THE CRACKS

I’m perversely fascinated by ordinary people going about their ordinary business. They all look so normal, so blandly prosaic, so boringly phlegmatic, so blissfully unconcerned, so energetically empty ... as if they hadn’t a care in the world. How do they do that?

Maybe it’s a subconscious thing, a mental defense mechanism, that shields them from the consequences of thinking about anything too deeply. Certainly, their conditioned selfishness and consumerist-oriented egocentrism have significant -- perhaps decisive -- roles to play; as far as there being any self-awareness involved, who the hell knows. Just a startling mess of artificially up-beat, cheap plastic automatons sporting strychnine grins and pumping endless wafts of hot wind through gaping maws that never seem to close ... is what it looks like to me.

Yes, it’s merely another hopelessly trying day for your wooly-brained, foul-mouthed chronicler here. Fuck.

As mentioned, the seemingly homogenized group-think behavior one constantly butts up against is strangely compelling, in a clinical sort of way. Being stranded in commuter traffic or buying a loaf of bread at the grocery store or sitting in a bright and over-cheerful coffee shop across the street from a “fitness center” surrounded by SUV’s -- not to mention the endless parade of other ridiculous monkey-motion that constitutes our collective experience -- it all provides a 24-hour a day front-row seat for viewing, analyzing, and ultimately giving up trying to understand this interesting phenomenon. That it exists, there’s no question. There’s also no question that there’s a relatively small, hard-edged coterie of disaffected individuals out there who, for some inexplicable reason, have managed to defy the dominant programming by which everybody else is largely animated and controlled. You all know who you are.

Now, how is it that some members of this cockeyed culture of conformity and corruption have actually managed to fall through the cracks, as it were, in the seemingly air-tight and otherwise comprehensive web of indoctrination and thought control? I don’t mean those who might oppose, say, the misapplication of power for merely tactical reasons -- those whose malcontent is paper-thin and highly malleable, to say the least: opportunists who are integral components of the power structure, such as so-called “opposition party” politicians or fence-sitting corporate types awash in cash, and all of that ilk. No, what I had in mind was that atomized collection out there of the puzzled and angry; that compact corps of round pegs in a world full of square holes; the relatively small band of thinking people whose intellects, for whatever unknown reasons, still manage to function on some sort of independent basis. What strange set of circumstances conspired to burden a few of us with the ability to use our heads as something other than ambulatory haircut platforms?

Yes, of course -- more idiotic questions nobody could possibly answer. For me, the fundamental issue is this: how do you come to an accommodation with a political-pop culture that is a sheer, premeditated fraud, without being debased or compromised in the process? Or can you? Or should you even bother? Should you just suck it up and blindly embrace a system that produces newspaper headlines like “BAGHDAD BOMB VICTIMS DON’T COUNT IN U.S. TALLY” (Sacramento Bee, 26 April 2007) -- or, rather, remain aloof, contemptuous, viciously cynical, monumentally angry, bile-spittingly enraged, and utterly uncompromising?

I can’t speak for anybody else, but at least I know what side my sore flat feet are not-so-firmly planted on ... But then, a new post by Riverbend comes along and smashes this self-indulgent snarky bullshit into the tiny shards of perspective-less nothing that it truly is ... I need to have my head examined ...