Friday, August 17, 2012

BEHOLD THE WALKING CADAVER

The cadaver I'm talking about is you. Is me. Is all 330 million of us in this 21st C America which moves while at the same time remains dead.

Think about it. Our psyches are dead in the sense they've been battered into submission by so much 24/7 stimuli. The noise...the traffic...the crowds...the jack-hammer assault of images from our screens, phones and billboards. The only authentic silences left are in summer-night forests and isolated hill country.

It wasn't always this way. Most of us aren't really sure how we stumbled into this sight-and-sound-around zone. But because we have, a strange thing has happened. Like any addict, the more stimuli we experience, the more we need to feel alive.

The people of power who would use us understand this. And so they continue to pump up the injections:

* films and television throb with more vile & violence, sex & sensation, manic & maniacal behaviors
* music and lyrics pulse with more screeching dissonance and taunting obscenities
* rock concerts compete for the wildest, weirdest and most wanton they can fit on stage
* political campaigns dig ever deeper to trigger the worst psychoses hiding in our voter hearts

The plot here is really as simple as it is threatening. The over-stimulated cadaver that is modern America can be reached only with still greater and more sweeping stimuli. To get our attention, the drugs we live on must be relentlessly increased.

Limit the drugs...? How dare you limit my liberty to impose them! Reach the patient instead with quiet logic...? Please, don't be naive!

Now, hand me that needle.


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