The United States of Dixieland: Corporatism, Jesus, and the Death Genes

[Guest guest]

http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_phil_roc_050808_the_united_states_of.htm

 

 

 

 

The United States of Dixieland: Corporatism, Jesus, and the Death Genes

 

by Phil Rockstroh

 

http://www.opednews.com

 

In a small, prefab house on the coastal Carolina lowlands, an old man,

the son of a son of a tobacco sharecropper, my wife's father, lay

dying. Even though the St. James Bible had been placed at his bedside,

Fox Cable News served as his Psychopompus, conducting him up from this

fallen world towards the flawless spires of the Beulah Land.

 

A vision: Across a blacktop highway, beneath a weather-flayed

billboard that proclaimed " One Nation under God—Bush/Cheney 2004, " in

a field of desiccated corn stalks, gaunt, bearded, mullet-haired,

crackhead Jesus rose from the shrouds of coke-smoke and drifted across

the blacktop highway to raise the road kill from the dead.

 

" Crack makes me feel like Jesus ought to, " the billboard should have

proclaimed ... perhaps then an impassioned chorus of hosannas would

have arisen from the country crackies congregated there.

 

Upon the perch of a mustard-yellow vinyl sofa cast out into the

abandoned field amid the scrawny pine saplings and rusted-out farm

tools, the old man's grandson brought his bony knees to his chin and

began rocking upon his meatless haunches, then he raised the crack

pipe Eucharist to his parched, quivering lips, inhaled, and gave his

life over to the Lord God of Dopamine.

 

Across the Low Country, the family farms are gone.

Brutal trucks fulminate on the cracked blacktop highways. The swamps

are being drained; its lumber plundered.

 

As doomed as the drought-desiccated cornstalks, the lives of the sons

and daughters of moonshine-makers are now decimated by crystal meth

and crack cocaine.

Dust squalls in the dry fields; the future burns to crack ash.

 

The swamp has receded: Bear and bobcat are gone.

Convenience stores, Wal*Mart superstores, strip malls and fast food

joints choke the landscape where tenant farmers once struggled to survive.

 

The surrounding swamplands were once astoundingly beautiful. Even

strangling vines of wisteria draped their dying hosts in exquisite

purple blossoms.

Although, in the eyes of the human inhabitants of the land, the beauty

was only incidental -- superfluous -- only a relentless drive to

survive was needed ... All else fell away.

 

Presently, that inexorable drive remains only as a meaningless and

hollow appetite. Fat people, clad in stretch clothing, are everywhere,

while others are morbidly thin, having only an appetite that craves

crack cocaine highs and crystal meth tweaking. Their hardscrabble

survival instincts are gone -- yet the relentless appetite remains.

It's terrifying: the way the urge towards life, when thwarted, can go

over to its opposite, with equal vigor, revealing the death skull

beneath the skin.

 

Our tragedy: This drive, this eternal appetite that forces life to its

zenith, but instead delivers it to dust. This is what Walker Percy

wrote of that internal

landscape:

 

" Death in the form of death genes shall not prevail over me, for death

genes are one thing but it is something else to name the death genes

and know them and stand over against them and dare them. I am

different from my death genes and therefore not subject to them. My

father had the same death genes but he feared them and did not name

them and thought he could roar out old Route 66 and stay ahead of them

or grab me and be pals or play Brahms and keep them, the death genes,

happy, so he fell prey to them. "

 

Yet this variety of tragic consanguinity is not limited to the doomed

hinterlands, for it rules the order of the present day as well. The

Death Genes lord over the American empire. Accordingly, an empire

destroys nearly everything it touches, because, after a time, it

begins to exist for no other reason other than to perpetuate its own

existence. Within it, its subjects' lives lose meaning and purpose:

meaningless work, petty ambition, and endless appetite define the

days, resulting in a decimated (internal as well as

external) landscape -- the hollowed-out lives of its populace —- and

the concomitant death cult convergence of religious fundamentalism and

habitual consumerism that follow.

 

The corporate empire has imprinted the Death Genes within us -- and it

is made manifest before us in the world we have created. It is as

visible as the noxious vapors of pollutants veiling the horizon line

at sunset. It shimmers like heat spires above our traffic-stalled

interstates. It reeks like the endless archipelagos of overflowing

landfills spanning the length of the land. The Death Genes hold us, as

we hold a TV remote in our hands and when the news turns tragic it

moves us to tremble with excitement and barely concealed glee.

 

Fox Cable News, like the jackal-headed, carrion-eating god, Anubus,

leads the old man through the land of the

dead: Through the now dried-up swamplands of his youth ... through the

limbo of suburbs and exurbs that displaced it ... The old man is led

past rural, crystal meth labs, and pharmaceutical plants, and

Starbucks Coffee cafés, where pale shades receive the libation needed

to provisionally pass for the living; the guide and his charge linger

in pawn shops, gun stores (so many gun stores) and firing ranges --

all temples devoted to the true higher power of the American empire --

the God of Death -- locations where the grim God gathers sustenance

and strength, drawing energy from the nation's emanations of hatred,

fear, and aggression like a reptile luxuriating on a sun-heated rock;

and finally, they arrive at a small mortuary where they listen to a

self-satisfied Baptist minister delivering the old man's eulogy -- a

sermon devoted to the love and worship of the God of Death (for the

joys of this world are wicked and will deny entry into the perfect one

to come) as all the while, the preacher takes measure of the old man's

shrunken corpse, laid out in his open casket, like a used car salesman

accessing the resale value of a Ford Pinto with a cracked engine block.

 

The ground now holds and begins the process of decomposing the remains

of the old man's body, in tragic symmetry to the manner in which the

neo-plantation system of tenant farming held his youth and composed

the contradictions of his gentle/angry, generous/spiteful,

humble/racist mind.

 

Yet these confounding and contradictory attributes of the southern

psyche will not be dissolved into dirt:

Traits of habitual submission to authority, of hostile defiance

against any hint of outside interference in their lives, of fierce

loyalty to one's kin and unquestioning devotion to the place of one's

birth, of reflexive racial hatred and resistance to change, of

moonshine revelry and anguished come-to-Jesus recantations of sin will

live on through the old man's progeny.

 

Those characteristics worked to the benefit of the ruling elite of the

post-plantation southland and now provide the same service for the

lords of the corporate empire: At present, given that our lives must

be surrendered to long hours of exploitive labor and that we're

offered little hope of ever removing the overseer's boot from our

throats, we have come to share an affinity of exploitation with the

laboring class rabble of the old south. From the cotton and tobacco

fields of the (allegedly) bygone feudalist order, up to the

present-day low pay, no benefits jobs of the so-called " service sector

economy " (where vast numbers of us can only keep a roof over our

heads, inexpensive junk food in our bellies, and Wal*Mart quality

clothes on our backs by assuming crushing

debt) -- those hope-decimating, labor practices and company town

credit schemes (although, nowadays, slicker and less overt) are still

with us.

 

Also, mirroring the values of Old Dixie, so many of us Americans,

regardless of region, share an unquestioning loyalty to military

tradition -- a pernicious, collective pathology that glorifies the

squandering of one's life in wars that serve to profit the narrow

interests of a small, self-serving, aristocratic class. Ergo, from the

so-called " War of Northern Aggression " right up to the equally

absurdly titled " Operation Iraqi Freedom, " the mistaking of blind

faith for heroic sacrifice persists.

 

Moreover, as was the case with so many

poverty-stricken whites in the Deep South, the inequities of the

present order have endowed many contemporary Americans with a sense of

nebulous rage and nettling resentment begot by having one's spirit

repeatedly crushed by the inhuman demands of a seeming implacable

system. Then as now, these anguished sentiments rise, tragically,

displaced as fear, resentment, and hatred of minorities, homosexuals,

reformers, and outsiders ... From the Klan meetings, the Jim Crow

laws, and the lynching of the bad-old-days of Dixieland, right up to

the right wing hate-speak of talk radio, the de facto segregation of

gated, suburban subdivisions, and the Christofascistic queer bashing

of these bad-new-days -- the hateful legacies linger.

 

But an existence comprised of such criteria depletes one's life of

meaning, in a similar manner as the repeated planting of cotton

leeched the life-sustaining soil of the old south of vital nutrients.

The vitality of existence withers and falls away and is soon

supplanted by the seeds of the Death Genes. Then the landscape turns

ugly; children grow hollow-eyed, empty, and ignorant; passion and

purpose dry up and are replaced by insatiable cravings and nameless

dread; dreams turn to dust and rise from the arid land as blinding

squalls of paranoid delusions.

 

Thus Empire holds us in its death embrace. Grasping for air, we

besiege the indifferent sky as to how we might loosen its pitiless grip.

 

So then, how might we gain our freedom?

 

Shall we proffer a polite request to the masters of the empire ...

that they might consider, at their leisure, removing their bony hands

from our throats?

Yes, and that would yield about the degree of success the old man

would have if he petitioned the devouring earth to reconstitute his

decomposing flesh.

 

Shall we always take care to speak reasonably, with cautious words,

uttered in measured tones to our betters -- then, perhaps, the elites

of the corporate media will, for a moment, cease their shilling for

the prevailing order and begin to disseminate a modicum of our

perspective? Yes, and the song of cicada will soften into a soothing hymn.

 

Shall we bow our heads and humbly ask the mindless mobs of the

consumer state to abstain from looting the planet of its

life-sustaining resources? Yes, and the draping Spanish moss of the

lowland marshes will henceforth show mercy to the trees they suffocate.

 

And then, perhaps, the bright day will dawn -- when the rulers of the

empire will alter the course of its death-bound trajectory and suffer

remorse for the fates of those they have crushed beneath them. Yes,

such an event will come to pass -- around the time the alligators of

the swamp cultivate a fondness from vegetarian cuisine.

 

The neo-plantation system of the corporate empire stands before us and

within us: It has molded our lives and perceptions as thoroughly as

the old south's stratified society of landed gentry and tenant farmer

rabble molded the life and perceptions of my wife's departed father.

 

We, the subjects of this empire, bear the Death Genes.

As my fellow southerner, Walker Percy pointed out, the best way to

survive our Death Genes is to face them and name them -- and never

suffer from the deadly delusion that you can deny them, reason with

them, or outrun them ... for you carry them within you.

 

When we face the empire, we face ourselves. To survive, it is

imperative that we cease to lie to ourselves about our condition.

 

Although to do so will not prove to be our redemption:

Those pat solutions are only to be found in crack pipes and

fundamentalists' sermons. The Fox News Channel will not guide us to

the Beulah Land. And Jesus will not raise the road kill from the dead.

Yet knowing a few sad truths about ourselves will allow us to see the

world and its terrifying beauty with greater clarity.

 

And by this act we are strengthened. It gives us the courage to love.

We can meet one another in spring fields of green corn, where the

Death Genes loosen their grip and the wit of the world remains.

 

 

Phil Rockstroh, a self-described, auto-didactic, gasbag monologist, is

a poet, lyricist, and philosopher bard, exiled to the island of Manhattan.

He maybe contacted at: philangie2000.