Some Call It Freedom But It Smells Like Death

Some Call It Freedom But It Smells Like Death
by Phil Rockstroh

(Swans - March 28, 2005)   It has been proclaimed: Worldwide, freedom is on the march. The footfalls of the marchers echo from the shopping malls of America to the bazaars of Syria. The resounding joy is captured on surveillance cameras monitoring the shooting sprees at the nation's high schools to the dying exhalations of Iraqis whose violent deaths have been chronicled on self-made DVDs, filmed and produced by amateur, US serviceman videographers; and, freedom's voice is heard in the triumphal exaltations when these masterworks of the American Cinema of the Psychopathic are privately screened, as is occurring at the present time, to cheering, whooping, fist-pumping the air, homeland audiences, comprised of the soldier/auteur's family, friends, and other assorted casual acquaintances in homicidal complicity across the length of this land...a land whose inhabits rise in reverence at the very mention of the word freedom and who yowl in primal satisfaction at the sight of foreign blood spilled in its name.

We Americans love our freedom; apparently though the freedom to revel in acts of mass murder ranks high upon our list of national pleasures. Nothing new and surprising here, folks: From Wounded Knee to Fallujah, genocide has always been our favorite blood sport. As proof of this, one simply needs to consider the impressive body count of Iraqis that we've rung-up in only two short years of our freedom fructifying crusade in their country. No need for a congressional hearing into this matter: We've rung up the high score without any steroid enhancement.

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It would seem that the stock and block and public burnings were the Puritans' early version of news infotainment. And, even though, through the centuries, the methods of persecution have been refined, the intent remains little changed...subdue, break, or destroy the nonconformists, the outsiders, and those with darker complexions, and, at the same time, entertain the general population with the spectacle of show trials and public punishments -- and, of even greater importance, instill fear within the populous...as, all the while, more wealth, control and power are accrued by and for the ruling elites, by the means of the age-old canard of creating the illusion of their own moral superiority. Sounds familiar, huh? ...We'll be right back to more Jackson/Blake/Peterson/steroid hearings/Schiavo/Janet Jackson's boob/latest loner's shooting spree coverage after these commercial messages...

And if your start to sink under the weigh of all that top-heavy control, you have the freedom to medicate yourself...but only with the proper, corporate-approved drugs...only the sort of drugs our Puritan and Calvinist forefathers would have approved of...only those substances that do not provide pleasure nor expand the mind...those that do not make one question the necessity of -- or any manner inhibit an individual from -- giving over a large measure of their existence to mindless work. Particularly sanctified are the drugs (caffeine, SSRIs, Provigil) that enhance one's ability to endure long hours of tedious labor, but without getting one too high to impair the ability to work...until, at shifts end, one is left restless and empty -- hence craving the palliative of consumerism. Late capitalism is a Woodstock Nation for legally medicated automatons. But the comedowns are a real bitch...Your head pounds, your stomach seizes up -- as the realization comes...that you've been made a slave to the addiction...your existence is not your own...somewhere along the way your life went missing.

http://www.swans.com/library/art11/procks43.html

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