Blog PostsIn America
By Charles Dickey at Mar 11, 2008 |
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Angry at the morning for opening me here in this post-consumer waste of landscape wastefill culture. Angry at my dreams for filling me with restless energy and images to mull over in the evening that is morning. Angry at history, at culture itself and all the heartless processes that have brought us to the current aggregation of machinery, greed, and forceful convergent media exploitation. Angry at the degradation of sound, its commodification into a weapon. Angry at the missing silence of morning in nature, angry at the urban streets and suburban blight. Angry at the machine vehicles that crunch and hum, devastating any calm peace and processing it into a braking and buzzing. Angry at the garbage dump. Angry at the concept of the state. Angry at the individual. Angry at the going-along.
My stomach is a bitter turnover, my bowels full of immanent shit. The toilet flushes it away, another debt I owe to the mechanics of grid society. My spirit is a piece of plastic warped and wrapped around a tinker-toy cashbox cross.
In the distance, a pretentious flag waves red, white, and blue, contemptuous of lived experience, of individuals and freedoms, whipping against what is human and tying that up for the sake of paper profits and black gold. In Iraq, permanent bases guard oil, pumping weapons and soldiers into broken Mesopotamia, scourging everything into desert and oil fields. One hundred and twenty degrees, the sun bakes and burns. Children lose limbs, have their heads stitched with no anesthetic. Men insurge, take up more guns that flood the market, join militias that will be bought with American money. The work is to be found in the arms race, not the oil fields; behind the Kalashnikov. Engineers lose limbs, faith, have their hands bound, heads bagged, are tracked off to secret prisons to be abused for safekeeping. All the while, troops are told they keep the peace to soundtracks of heavy death metal, white-heat aggression, American style. Baghdad burns on the skillet, a grilled cheese of American supremacy.
That was a home.
That was a factory.
That was a restaurant, a business.
That was a mosque, a church.
That was a life.
This is all such a waste.
By Carter, Joseph at Mar 11, 2008 11:51 AM
That was very deep.
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