For lo, I have seen the great surges of flesh and credit card debt and obesity at the local Wal-Mart, big-box stores erupting like a plague across the land, the relentless American craving for cheap-ass Chinese-made crap and toxic garbage food continuing unabated like some sort of perpetual tsunami that continues to crash against the ravaged shore of common sense. I saw them there yesterday ~ hunting down items at 75% off and they all got bigger over the holidays! I have seen major industry steep the landscape in enough unchecked pollution to make the ice caps melt and the animals gag and the forests hack like dying emphysema patients, watched massive Midwestern megachurches maim the notion of the healthy self-defined individual soul, borne witness to the inexplicable success of Ashlee Simpson and Mariah Carey while trying, every single day, to allay the shuddering effect of Tom Cruise and Paris Hilton and the Olsen twins with ointments and salves and fine single-malt scotch.
Like granny used to say "A whore can become a slut - only problem is: once you're a slut you can't charge o more." Against the backdrop of a leering and spiritually depraved leadership, I have witnessed the death of poetry. As my friend Rob Brezny points out in his outstandingly odd and delicious book of divine conspiracy, " Pronoia," an estimated 37 million Americans take antidepressants.
By the time they hit age 17, 78 percent of teenage girls are unhappy with their bodies. The United States is the biggest arms dealer in the world, by a long shot. Half of all war casualties are civilians caught in the crossfire.
And so on. [Drum beat heard in the background.] I have watched the rise of the morally bankrupt Christian fundamentalist mind-set in America with equal parts disgust and sadness and bemusement, all overlaid with a general sense that just about everything these people do is pretty much the exact opposite of what Jesus had in mind.
Which is exactly what makes them so dangerous. I have seen the big pharmcos work like intestinal worms to create a nation of jittery and confused prescription-drug addicts, Big Auto refuse to improve mpg or cop to the overall abusive idiocy of the monster SUV, heard the president mutter the actual words, "We do not torture," as the United States quickly becomes, in its global actions and disregard for all things humanitarian, little better than the fundamentalist terrorists it claims to despise. You know, I have the same feeling.
And lo, it is bleak and nasty and gray as death's own gum disease. On the other hand, I have seen new voices of protest being born straight out of the pious machinery of fundamentalist ignorance. I have seen the coolly blasphemous alt-spirituality segment of the bookstore explode and flourish and make a calm mockery of the belief that godhood is somehow unattainable to calm and open-hearted people right here, right now.
Community is flourishing in new and astounding forms, via 10 thousand blogs and 10 million photo-sharing Web pages and countless bizarre blinking winking communication devices, our frayed human interconnections constantly regenerating in new and unexpected ways, like nerve endings after a traumatic accident. And total lack of work ethics. For lo, I have seen the great surges of flesh and credit card debt and obesity at the local Wal-Mart, big-box stores erupting like a plague across the land, the relentless American craving for cheap-ass Chinese-made crap and toxic garbage food continuing unabated like some sort of perpetual tsunami that continues to crash against the ravaged shore of common sense.
News RSS