Got A Light?

I broke down and cried in the car after the radio hit me with the double-whammy of “The Pretender” by Jackson Browne and “Roadhouse Blues” by the Doors. Unblinking vicious truth followed by a hefty dose of fatalistic nihilism, y’know?

I cried, and Susie was so taken aback she pulled over to talk to me for 20 minutes. To let me talk. So I talked about consumer units, and profit über alles, and how fake and phony everything is. The buildings around us, in an L-shaped plaza, were a perfect example: Movie set non reality. Façades that could be razed in a day and the property in a week looking as if none of it had ever been there. Existing only to suck money from us. And when we are no longer profitable, we remain exploitable.

I talked about what Browne called “…our paint-by-number dreams…” How we are programmed into the illusion of free will when in fact the choices are Product A or Product B from the same multinational corporation. I pointed to the vehicles around us and said, “They’re all the same basic unit, with a few of the external parts interchangeable so we think they differ.” Each model year they slightly alter a component or two and call it “new” and “different”.

We live in a movie set world where things are made not to be real, but to fool the camera, or the camera of the eye. House-LIKE things, car-LIKE things, candidate-LIKE things. All interchangeable and made from the same components assembled here or there but made everywhere and imported. It’s all bullshit.

Which was Philip K. Dick’s basic revelation that drove him into clarity, which was called insanity by the squares.

So I guess I’ve gone insane, by corporate standards.

Again.

Still.

Here is what I had written for a Facebook post that morning, Solstice Eve:

A Cri de Coeur

We have almost nothing left. Everything good from our childhood is gone, either abandoned in our despair or corrupted by our greed, hate, and lies.

We live in pollution, radioactivity, and poison. Air, water, and food are toxic and being controlled as commodities for the rich. Seas are dying or dead. Forests are slashed and burned for room to raise millions more cattle for slaughter so the rich can choke down more death. Glaciers and snow caps are melting or gone. Wilderness is shrinking and contaminated.

Today is the Solstice, shortest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere. All it seems to mean is slightly less time for half the planet’s population to do further damage, but we all know it goes on around the clock, and that most of us live north of the equator. It is the season to bring in the light, to celebrate warmth and togetherness, yet all we get is dark foreboding and shadowed harbingers. Warmth we’ll have, as the planet heats toward the flashpoint. Seas will boil and evaporate, but we won’t see that. We’ll be long gone. Suicides dead from greed, hate, lies, and stupidity.

Happy fucking holidays. (Wouldn’t want to “offend” any self-important little meaningless group clinging to the illusion of distinct sub-culture, now would we?)

HAIL YULE. Bring in the light. If you can.

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You can see the bitterness of unfiltered contemplation of our sub reality. Reminds me of another Jackson Browne song, “Doctor, My Eyes”.

Pardon my bitterness. Pardon my disillusionment. Cling to what ever keeps you afloat. Just remember, it’s probably not real and not safe, even if it’s approved by some corporate owned inspector. I’d enjoin you to wake up but I doubt it’s possible on these long northern-tier winter nights.

And if you’re reading this south of the equator, don’t worry. Litha’s coming in six months. Wonder if we’ll see it together?

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Many will dismiss all this as typical holiday depression. It is not. I’m actually contented and happy. My wife asked me, if I am so upset and dissatisfied, what I would rather have in its place? Humanism over damned religion, is one answer. Real things, as opposed to cheap corporate fakes, is another. I’d rather have paradise on earth instead of the majority of us allowing the 19% of us who are sociopaths and worse to make it hell for everyone. Altruism over sadism would be good, too. I’d rather inclusion than exclusion, care and concern over apathy and callousness, and yes over no. Us instead of Them thinking. No more Zero Sum greed, to be replaced by sharing and cooperation with plenty for all. From Profit über alles to People über alles. Governments of, by, and for the people. Kindness in place of cruelty. Economic and all other help instead of war.

Ideals, the cynics sneer. Can’t be reached or achieved, they say, rolling their eyes and smirking at my naiveté.

Ideals are goals to be pursued, shy states to be approached respectfully, truths to be cherished. We can and should raise our standards and struggle toward improvement for all, rather than exploiting the base and low and corrupt in us all.

Marketing and advertisement became the rapacious world-spinning raveners they are now after World War Two. Yes, they were always there, but for the most part were not sciences of manipulation and control. Psyops, or psychological operations, honed in war’s fear, hate, and greed are what supercharged the old Pub and Inn Signs and Barber Poles. Why else call them advertising and marketing campaigns?

All’s fair in love and war, we are told. Gain trumps all. (The Donald would rephrase it to Trump gains all, I’m sure, but his gold-plated ego is a symptom of our Gilded Age Redux malaise, not a cause.) Neurolinguistics, semiotics, and subsensory prompts and cues play us like puppets. We can do better than this.

Philip K. Dick called the current reality the Black Iron Prison and postulated a never-ending Unholy Roman Empire holding sway over duped masses. It is a superb metaphor for how superstition, willed ignorance, and blind faith keep us chained to outmoded models of thought and deed.

As fascism’s darkness once again subsumes too much of the world, more of us snap awake and see it for the doom it is. Will we survive as a species, let alone as a civilization? That depends on whether we can accomplish a very simple Yuletide wish and bring the light in, to illuminate us from our core outward to the world our thoughts create. If our thinking continues to be dictated by corporate fear, hate, greed, and pain, then we will soon go dark and other species will perhaps rise to dominate Earth or, better yet, simply live in harmony with each other in nature’s splendor.