You know what I mean, I don’t have to spell it out. I’m not referring to the necessary healthy kind, the kind that has gotten a bad rap on account of its necessary smell.
No, the kind I mean is odourless although it really stinks to high heaven, and it’s everywhere. It’s in the cafes where, in search of a quiet cup, we get the same old sickening stupid melodies and vapid ‘harmonies,’ the same old lyrics reminding us of saccharine sentimental myths of living.
It’s in the pages, digital or virtual or actual, of the dailies we peruse to take our minds off the mundanity and idiocy of busting our chops to make somebody else rich(er)—it’s where we ‘read’ about the so-called lives of the nouveau Celebrity-Olympus of unreal Reality Stars and Real Stars and Politicians who wannabe stars so much they can’t help screwing us every which way whether we’ve voted for them or not.
It’s in the spectacles of sport where bone-headed gladiatorial prowess is rewarded as virtue, despite the meaninglessness of hitting a ball, shooting a ball, kicking a ball, throwing a ball or doing something else involving little more than sweat and repetition.
It’s on the dying blue or crystal screen that’s taken the place of a home’s hearth and flickers inanities at us, and which shill for the Big Corporate Powers that tell us what to like and how to live: sugar, tobacco, patriotism, war, nuclear energy, and sleek powerful sexy automobiles.
It’s in the articles of our most respected media making the endless case for violence and war while trumpeting the benefits of a sham democracy.
It’s in the cool and the hip and the modern, the schools that purport to teach us how to write ‘creatively’ by conforming to a formula.
It’s in the drumbeat of the Right and the slimy acquiescence of the Left.
It’s in words and phrases of workshops: “skill set”, “outcomes”, “rocket science”, “collaborative”, “strategic”, “people driven” and such drivel designed to stun one into submission by obfuscation and boredom.
It’s in the faith-based religionists who preach only to the converted, or try to convert the unimpeached to their own iron-clad exclusionary ways and means.
It’s on cereal boxes showing the faces of lost little kids, but not those gunned down by paramilitary police at ‘routine’ colour coded traffic stops.
It’s in all the committees and societies and journals and TV shows and live streams telling us incessantly that we should be afraid and very afraid, all the time, that what we have will be taken away from us, while extolling a system founded upon slavery, waged or unwaged, the exploitation of labour and the sanctification of selfishness and greed.
It’s on the mug of your dear friend who asks you how you are but interrupts to tell you what he or she just got a bargain on.
It’s in Shakespeare that has to be modernised by pratfalls, ‘action’, ‘relevant’ contemporary settings like Laguna Beach, at the expense of real word-music and poetry.
It’s in all of Andrew Lloyd-Webber.
It’s in cell phones and Facebook and Facebook and Facebook and cell phones and little smileys or worse, emoticons that let us get away without having to try to describe the least little bit of what we may be actually feeling.
It’s in Homeland Security and Motherlands and Fatherlands and flags and detective action novels with mouth watering descriptions of a Glock.
It’s in insurance policies for your funeral or your life, whichever comes first.
It’s in banks—loads of it, and stocks and bonds, and the feeling that the bigger your hoard the better and holier and grander a person you must be.
It’s in Internet sex and sex without sense and it’s in the deification of love without love, as in “I love my shoes!”
It’s in truth-seekers without peripheral vision.
Frankly, it’s everywhere, except perhaps in a few works of art honest enough not to worry about the ‘demographic’ they need to appeal to, just the rendering of something deep enough to be a source of joy and wonder.
And, honestly, I’m sick of this ‘it’, and all I want to do is take a walk in the non-deforested woods or along some unpolluted stream and breathe some fresh un-irradiated air.
Dr. Garcia is an American-born writer and physician who resides in New Zealand where there is also a lot of it too, though less than in some other places, he hopes.
The good doctor has accurately depicted the world’s malaise. His is an authentic voice.
Boycott the corporate media and not only will you fight much of the cultural corruption described by Dr. Garcia above but you will be happier and healthier for the exercise.
I got to this one late in the week of its posting, but in time to save a morsel of my sanity from the morass of woes Garcia so ably depicts here. Bravo!