We who oppose contemporary politics as it has been played in the arenas of states across our globe have also helped create a cultural weakness in itself a strength only in its power to debilitate. We do not write; we do not read; we cannot. We have been engaging the ritual practices of the dual cults of the Now and the New for so long that there is no other time than now, there is no future and there is no past. Ours is the best of times or in other words, the worst of times, more exactly, the only time. Ours is the season of light or darkness depending how you flip your coin. Our age is The Great Displacement. We do love to flip coins to reach consensus as much as we do love to play hop-scotch with the truth. We no longer serve the subjectivity of little ‘t’ truths, let alone the once assumed objectivity of larger ‘T’ Truth. We instead preach the salvation of doubt. Thus, we serve only Mammon inside the ritual practices of the most degraded materialism.
American materialism is a religion where we worship a new God as ourselves, doing so as no one devout anywhere in the world at any time would have for his God or Gods. Religious faith has transferred its manifest forms. One of the greatest tricks of our culture has been to convince us in our liberalism that all organized religions are the enemies of freedom, while we maintain a fervent religiosity for all things secular, for all things material. Ours is an existence that displaces all essentials. There is no essence in our metaphysics, neither for democracy, for freedom, nor for human rights. We have only existence, existence, existence preceding nothing.
We must look at our contemporary civilization’s guiding beliefs, look to our participation in our culture’s assault on reason, on truth, how in love with doubt as a form of wisdom we have come to be. The limits of knowledge are at the tip of our noses; we cannot see further than ourselves for what is knowable; finding veracity today is a simple act of closing one’s eyes. We need to look closely at our most recent historical precedents over the last one hundred or more years, particularly the last fifty or sixty–there is a pervading nihilism at the heart of our culture, worse, at the core of our civilization; doubt, doubt and more doubt we use to disenable us, the people, you, I, him and her, all of us, each one of us, WE.
The people, though, are no longer able to wrest power from either the state or the monied oligarchies that the states and their police and armies serve. Our sons and daughters dying in Iraq have been for the rich to get richer, for bankers to get more money, oil corporations to get more oil, and for the people no longer to be a people but a state serving public, taking fewer and fewer crumbs from the table, all as Obama parties with gangsters and other celebrities in a world where there is only right and wrong for people too poor to higher their lawyers. The spin doctors wouldn’t have a job if the bottom were better educated, or if they were at least expected to read at several levels higher than they have been allowed to achieve, mostly because a semi-literate population such as ours is more easily controlled than a literate one or a traditional non-literate one would be. The illiterate peasants of 1789 France and 1917 Russia were actually smarter than we are en masse.
The Falling Leaf Review 