To Hell with Centrism: We Must Reclaim the Inspired Edge
by Phil Rockstroh
"During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act". --George Orwell

"I don't want to be part of your revolution if I can't dance."--Emma Goldman


Rumsfeld is gone. Mehlman is gone. Delay is gone. Yet -- let's not have our progressives' version of a strutting on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier moment. Because mission has not been accomplished.

For those who haven't noticed: While we were busy with other concerns, many of our rights and liberties went missing. Moreover, along with them, have went or are going fast: our planet's polar ice caps; accountability of the corporate sector (our nation's true power brokers); as well as, a sense of place, history, and even a cursory understanding, among a large percent of the populace of the US, of the precepts of civilization and of democratic discourse.

These circumstances, like the melting of the polar ice caps, have transpired, incrementally, and have been going on for longer than that Reign of Terror in Tiny Town known as the Bush presidency. For example, regarding the increasingly authoritarian terrain we negotiate our way through daily: In American work places, bosses routinely snoop into underlings' personal e-mails and monitor our web-surfing practices. How did it come about that so many Americans have grown to accept such demeaning intrusions into our privacy?

In such a repressive societal milieu, there is no need to threaten would-be dissidents with old school totalitarian measures such as forced deportment to Siberian labor camps. Threats, overt and covert, to one's economic security and social standing serve to dissuade most of us from political and social dissent. In the class stratified structure of the US work force, where the personal consequences borne of financial upheaval are swift, punitive and severe, the implicit threat of being deported to America's urban gulag archipelago of homelessness renders most of us compliant to the exploitive dictates of corporate oligarchy.

Where did this all begin? How did it all get away from us? Furthermore -- why do we stand for it -- when these practices are antithetical to everything we claim to believe in as a nation?

In part, the proto-fascistic transgressions of corporate rule have made these circumstances all but inevitable, because our concept of what it means to be a human being has been incrementally defined downward. There has been much discussion of the dumbing down of American life. And these assessments are accurate and unnerving. (How else does one explain that 37% of those Connecticut voters who cast ballots for Joe Lieberman did so believing he was the peace candidate?) But there has been little discourse given to the pervasive corporate blandification of American life -- the manner in which its criteria both numbs out the personality of an individual and renders the nation's landscape monotonous and ugly.

The effects of corporatism are insidious. In such an environment, there is no need for mass rallies replete with bon fires blazing against the totalitarian darkness: Corporatism establishes an authoritarian order by way of a series of overt bribes and tacit threats. This social and cultural criteria causes an individual to become fearful and cautious -- and, after a time, flattens out one's inner drives and longings. As a result, a Triumph of the Bland comes to pass, internally and externally.

Ergo, the oligarchs atop the present order have no need for reeducation camps nor the ever-vigilant gaze of neighborhood block captains. We have become our own, ever-vigilant minders; within us, we have in place vast networks of secret police informers -- our own personal bully boy enforcers of blandness who leave us as passionless and empty as the architecture of the corporate nothingscape that surrounds us.

In addition, corporatism demands employees render themselves fecklessly pleasant. One doesn't want to be caught being "negative" nor be accused of the treachery of not being "a team player." Such accusations bring to an individual a similar decree of ignominy as being denounced as a counterrevolutionary under the fallen regime of the former Soviet Union.

Accordingly, despite their midterm election victory, this problem remains mirrored in the leadership of the Democratic party -- most of whom are the bought and sold products of corporatist rule and, therefore, have been trained to act with the kind of ersatz public congeniality demanded of all underlings in the corporate state. Apropos, the odd combination of fecklessness and smugness they delude themselves into believing is conducive to steering a course of "sensible centrism." From refusing to fight stolen elections -- right up to the present Democratic leadership of congress stating they will not press for the impeachment of the most corrupt president in the history of the republic -- we bear constant witness to it.

In this regard, it's very considerate of congressional Republicans who, in synergy with the Bush cartel, perpetrated one of the most vicious, vindictive and exclusionary reigns in congressional history to now want to play nice and "reconcile." It's very magnanimous of them to forgive us leftists for being right on all fronts -- and generous of them to forgive the majority of their Democratic peers in congress for cowering before them, day in and day out, for the past four years of one party rule.

Moreover, it was we leftist outsiders -- not reasonable, accommodating liberals -- who were right about the disastrous consequences that would befall an invasion of Iraq; as we were and remain right in our revulsion to the fascistic fraud that is the Patriot Act and the War on Terror.

This is the reason we're not let into the closed club of mainstream punditry. Although, to avoid being cruel, such an event might prove to be unfair to the slow children therein. We'd be hurling our ninety mile-an-hour, progressive fast balls past them -- while they're playing tee-ball ... Only the insularity inherent to a life of privilege can render folks as outright slow to the realities of the outside world as evinced by our present day pundit class. Is it any wonder they've enabled Duyba for so long. He's on their tee-ball team. The little Beltway Oligarchs.

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