This is a journey past the Disneyland economies of downtown Chicago, past the manicured parkways, the pricey public artworks, the flowerpots placed on every corner. Stroll down South Michigan Boulevard, beyond the home of Chess Records that happened to be one of the birthplaces of African Americans having invented Rock and Roll. What you will find is a raging, silent American Apocalypse buried under the hubris of the consumerism and entertainment of mass media. Detroit if armed to the teeth fighting over the contents of a dumpster. There are no words that can match an image.
A close personal friend of mine happens to be both a forensic psychologist dealing with homicides as well as providing treatment for addictions. We were discussing this or that when he suggested that all we live in a world of sublimated addiction as opposed to the more obvious examples of self destruction.
The question arose that perhaps genocide can best be illustrated as having the layers of an onion. Genocide and self destruction as a raw wound in the side of a antiseptic portrayal of reality as portrayed on television where neurosis, a fascination with the grisly details of homicides, and scripted realities are laced with artificial sweeteners to induce a torpor of all things being equal in the haze of ambivalence, where fiction and reality are meshed into a synthesis of artifice where the victimized may as well be computer generated filler in between advertisements for the latest way to remain eternal, to drive the most advanced car, to swim off a warm beach into the sunset.
Enough bullshit to float a ship. Community denial can be a game played with the passive aggressive merry-go round of circuses fed by willing shills, syncopates,and generalized hucksterism.
Where the Romans may have been poisoned by lead pipes, we have been shilled by the toxicity of television.
Some do not have this luxury of commercialized escapism. That is reality not painted over by diversion.
Chicago was my hometown where I was born and the promised land of African Americans seeking an exit from the racial torments of a South that had barely changed despite a Civil War. Chicago is one of the most segregated cities you will ever come upon. For all the rhetoric about how simply superior America is, one would have to go over to Africa itself to find the same level of grinding poverty and hopelessness in the 21st Century. Technology means nothing, serves nothing in this regard. It may as well be 1860.
For all of the political football and cheer leading this country uses to shill preemptive wars or police actions, you will not find the same impetus to create jobs on the South Side. Foreign aid counted in the billions atop the billions that has largely become the equivalent of a mob bribe.Its called buying influence that follows the same in DC by our corporate masters. The sweet smell of rancid detritus.
All of the nonsense about a post apocalyptic about citizens turning on other citizens to survive might not be so nonsensical here and now, there in Englewood.
36 dead over a single weekend. The second record breaking carnage on one weekend that followed another. I lost a son.I know what its like and you never "recover". I hope you never know this particular misery but then again one half of a an entire city does. Writing about it doesn't do a damn thing.
That made an association in my mind to the meta-novel by William S Burroughs, The Nova Police and the role of culture steering outcomes wherein the question of the chicken or the egg becomes blurred. Then it came to mind that morality as attached to the definition of wealth is a sword that cuts both ways as a sort of quantum valuation that depends on who is looking. What if no one is looking, or chooses to look away? Morality as driven by a self organizing control system set by defaults that depend on appearances alone...based upon suggestion, inference and consensus. All of the aforementioned facets of addiction, morality, mass hypnosis and observation appear to be self referential and progress underneath the skin of culture can appear to be akin to riding a stationary bicycle.
“All that they [the Nova Mob] offer is a screen to cover retreat from the colony they have so disgracefully mismanaged. To cover travel arrangements so they will never have to pay the constituents they have betrayed and sold out. Once these arrangements are complete they will blow the place up behind them.
“And what does my program of total austerity and total resistance offer you? I offer you nothing. I am not a politician. These are conditions of total emergency. And these are my instructions for total emergency if carried out now could avert the total disaster now on tracks:
“Peoples of the earth, you have all been poisoned. Convert all available stocks of morphine to apomorphine. Chemists, work round the clock on variation and synthesis of the apomorphine formulae. Apomorphine is the only agent that can disintoxicate you and cut the enemy beam off your line. Apomorphine and silence. I order total resistance directed against this conspiracy to pay off peoples of the earth in ersatz bullshit. I order total resistance directed against The Nova Conspiracy and all those engaged in it. “The purpose of my writing is to expose and arrest Nova Criminals. In Naked Lunch, Soft Machine and Nova Express I show who they are and what they are doing and what they will do if they are not arrested. Minutes to go. Souls rotten from their orgasm drugs, flesh shuddering from their nova ovens, prisoners of the earth to come out. With your help we can occupy The Reality Studio and retake their universe of Fear Death and Monopoly – (Signed) INSPECTOR J. LEE, NOVA POLICE"
-William S Burroughs
The buried psychology of the abnormal as consensus accepted as business as usual. The war on poverty, the war on drugs...Which war if your context? Korea, Vietnam, Panama, Iraq, Afghanistan...?
History as innuendo twisted into interesting shapes. Domesticating ignorance as a crop yield to sway mass hypnosis in order to create a coherent narrative of division to create distinct identities. Nation states and the indoctrination of states of mind.... This as opposed to that poised against uncertainty as a defensive barrier which harkens back to the territorial prerogatives of the animal kingdom which was mistakenly labelled as evolution. Possession as a demonic activity versus the equal ruse of personal possession, from a blade of grass to a Toyota always to be fueled by the convenience mislabeled as necessity..pragmatism that has enough holes in the torn fabric of errors to fill one's mind with cynicism in the face of opportunity.
Old songs whose plaints are seemingly universal in the sense of remaining relevant in a disturbing manner.
Organised crime, legalized or otherwise, robbery as a law in juxtaposition to weaponry and the term "non lethal weapon" as an innuendo twisted into a facade of reasonable men exploiting those who have weapons versus those that have not as an economic ploy.
My recent post on my travails during the year 1969 float without a tether to the quiet conflagrations that become historical footnotes rather than a story in of itself, a narrative lodged in a proverbial genetic variability that has at it's axis, a constant, the fruit of reaping what has been sowed by others long ago.
The self immolation of LSD versus the same in gang warfare all within the contests that are a consistent barometer of institutionalized conflict. the prerogative of a Nova Police. The news becomes a footnote to what is being sold between broadcast segments. That new Ford truck with increased fuel economy is superimposed on genocide.
Old songs whose plaints are seemingly universal in the sense of remaining relevant in a disturbing manner.
Our attention shifts to Chicago....where nation states mirror one another in a microcosm within a macrocosm.
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