In short, our empire's dependence on the resources (the life's blood)
of others renders us a nation of vampires. Moreover, the corporatist
character (our national character) is defined by the vampire's trait of
taking, never giving. Accordingly, what do the big monsters at the top
take from us, the little monsters?
To name one: our time, the precious hours of our finite lives. The
corporatists are Time Vampires: For a moment, reflect on all the hours
of life you've wasted away — in office cubicles, in commuter traffic
jams, in the addictive pursuit of consumer dreck, or simply numbed-out
and exhausted, rendered inert from the incessant, soul-sucking stress
of the corporate state.
The corporacracy devours our time and, like the charges of a vampire,
has made us dependent and slavish in return. In our bloodless
enslavement, we lose the vitality borne of existing within life's
inherent mysteries and grow estranged from the deep resonances of
participation mystique.
How does one begin to take back one's soul from these elitist usurpers?
Start with this: The ebullient skepticism engendered from calling out
soul-numbing, self-serving authoritarian lies.
In an era as perilous as ours, it's imperative we act with utmost
urgency. Yet, tragically, the exigencies of our age are being played
out against a panorama of longer, more stressful work hours,
superficially ameliorated by a mass media culture comprised of
ceaseless trivia and mindless distraction.
This pathology began years ago when our ancestors offered up their
life's blood to the early corporatists of the Industrial Age. Henry
Ford was a gray ghoul who measured out our flesh with his
productivity-measuring stopwatch; he was a cunning practitioner of the
black art of convincing human beings they're mere cogs in an inhuman
machine. It was only a short trudge from there through history's
slaughterhouse to Adolf Eichmann, insulated within his vampire's coffin
of cold calculations that shielded him from the horrific implications
of the system of mechanized extermination he devised.
The corporate vampire's creed is defined by ruthless efficiency; the
fear of a "loss of productivity" is the driving force of the death
machine. The system is so ruthless and inhuman that it must conceal its
true face, hence the rise of the telegenic undead known as the
corporate media. Do not look to them to report the facts of our
condition: After all, a mirror can't reflect the image of a vampire. A
vampire is empty to the core; therefore, there is nothing to reflect.
Furthermore, his emptiness is the progenitor of his destructive nature.
Rather than face himself, his appetite for death will devour all in its
path: rain forests, Arctic glaziers, the people of Iraq, the hours of
your life, as well as your inner being.
It is the force that holds Democratic politicians in the thrall of
their own fecklessness, because they answer to the same blood-sucking,
corporate masters as the rest of us. Quite simply, they're afraid of
their bosses too. The Washington Beltway is a version, in miniature, of
the entire soul-dead, American corporacracy. The careerist politicians
within the Beltway are afflicted with the same diminution of choice —
the same hyper-attenuation of the will to freedom — as the rest of us.
And what remains for us: an existence (or lack thereof) within this
hierarchical hellscape of narcissists. What sort of a pathetic mode of
being is this, a life shackled to the service of a monstrous system
wherein one must evince the obsequies of a vampire's bloodless lackeys?
To reverse this situation: Now is the time to drag the lies of the
corporate state into the sunshine where they will writher to dust. We
are not powerless: We live in a world where our collective, hidden
intentions are made manifest by our outward actions. This is why Gothic
— even b-movie — metaphors are not an overwrought description of our
present condition. Ergo, by the vehicle of cultural collaboration, we
are a nation of world-destroying, b-movie monsters — we are a
hack-scripted, second-billed feature at the drive-in movie of existence
— a laughed-off-the-big-screen of the cosmos, box-office poison of a
people.
We are soul-sucking creatures of kitsch. Flesh-eating zombies of
conformity. Road-rage werewolves. Right-wing, talk show demons whose
wrathful voices rage into empty air. Hungry ghosts wandering the aisles
of supermarkets, convenience stores, restaurant chains and the food
courts of shopping malls. We are: The Fat, Mindless Blobs That Ate the
Planet.
To survive, first, we must find the monster within, then drive a stake through its heart.
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@yahoo.com
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