A Zoo of Our Own Making (why Americans "will kill for empire and a parking space")

[marmar]

from Consortium News:



A Zoo of Our Own Making

By Phil Rockstroh
December 31, 2010


Editor’s Note: At the end of one difficult year and the start of what is sure to be another, there are natural questions about the purpose of human endeavor, doubts that touch us all. For journalists who try to do the job honestly, there are gnawing doubts about the value of this work, uncovering information for a public that often seems distracted or disinterested.

Sometimes, the only answer is an internal one, living up to a personal code of what’s right or what the tradecraft of a profession demands. In this essay (and companion video), poet Phil Rockstroh notes that the barren landscape of American culture presents such an existential quandary to us all: What have we become as a people who “will kill for empire and a parking space?”

In an age, when nature is besieged and the political landscape blighted, and one stands, stoop shouldered and wincing into the howling wasteland of epic-scale idiocy extant in the era, a solitary person can feel lost ... marooned inside an increasingly isolated sense of self.

Whether urban, suburban, or rural dwelling, the sense of alienation, for an individual, is profound ... as discernible to the eye as the constellations of foreclosure signs stippling overgrown front lawns across the land ... as hidden as the abandoned dreams within.

The fraying ligature of the landscape of the United States reveals an inner geography of alienation and anomie.

Living on the island of Manhattan, I daily negotiate an urban layout of practical, but identity-decimating grids -- a cityscape of harsh, inhuman right angles ... a geography that renders street encounters abrupt, curt and intrusive.

After a time, one begins, by reflex, to buffer oneself against such intrusions, withdrawing inward ... becoming a self-enclosed, walking fortress, shielding oneself from the degradations of these impersonal affronts (that feel altogether personal) -- with I- Pods, Blackberries, and other vestments attendant to the muttered prayers of the self-absorbed. .................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.consortiumnews.com/2010/123110b.html