Old Man in the Corner

In the dark corner of the bar 

an old man crumpled in his seat

can barely lift his glass

—each pint gets heavier

each day takes more to numb the pain.

He has given up trying to understand the source

of his grief, the reason for his expulsion

from a place, like joy, peace, or belonging.

He knows like blood coursing through his veins 
he was robbed.

Of what? His manliness? His hope?

His tribe. He has lost his tribe.

He has lost his job. And someone

has to pay.

Yes he knows about NAFTA

and the jobs that went to India

and the slick talkers in suits

cutting him loose from the plant

and he knows like the knife

in his stomach that they can’t

be hurt, can’t be touched

by anything he does.

And he can’t tell his buddies

they have cut off his balls.

So when he screams

get rid of all the others,

he means those who are not like him

and throughout his years

of becoming a man

he has become the foreigner

to his own heart.

(Infinite Power, Janet Vickers. Ekstasis 2016)

Who Am I Better Than?

Important because it’s an unconscious question

that sits below the screeching headlines 

yet informs my actions

I am better than the killer who shot an unarmed man

and got off free and the killer of 17 students

with a rifle he cradled like a baby

better than the NRA who say everyone should carry 

then shooters wouldn’t - but feel it doesn’t matter 

who lives and dies as long as the economy is good

and all those who know the economy is a religion 

so that billions die before climate change

and all the suffering will create more mass shooters

more wars, more disease while scientists predict 

the threat of artificial intelligence

and if we manage to arm ourselves to the mind

and not just the teeth we shall see the winners 

stride across an emptied world in triumph

and who will care who is better then?
No-one.

Naming the Disease - Social Atomization

Henry Giroux writes in his recent Truthout article titled "Donald Trump and the Plague of Atomization in a Neoliberal Age" of Leo Lowenthal who warned back in the forties about the atomization of human beings under a state of fear. "What he understood with great insight, even in 1946, is that democracy cannot exist without the educational political and formative cultures and institutions that make it possible."

This confirms my sense that we are trying to fight a social disease with rational arguments while the supporters of fascist movements just want a messiah who will deal with the big problems so we don't have to, but who have no idea of the danger in giving unconditional power to a single ego. A functioning democratic society can be annoying and tiresome but it has many conditions that challenge power.

In a free and democratic society that pays taxes for education, justice, and social protections for the most vulnerable - we are continually being updated with facts that challenge assumptions of how we can instinctively know the leaders we pick will protect us. That we have social standards that can't be broken. Or that we will be okay as long as the economy is okay. Or, even that we have progressed and would never push a woman in front of a train because she was wearing a headscarf.

In the fifties and sixties I was given an education based on social justice. It wasn't in headlines but it underscored all that I learned. It didn't guarantee fairness or security but assumed we had a responsibility to care about one another. We didn't read Giroux, Lowenthal or Arendt, but we knew of Socrates and Orwell.

Yet many who graduated from this era were quite happy to throw it away because it wasn't perfect.

Now we are at such a stage of civil entropy we shrug while finance capital rules and public benefits are eroded. Those at the bottom are left without a means of earning a living wage, without hope, continually ground down by endless poverty and denied human dignity.

"Mass fear is normalized as violence increasingly becomes the default logic for handling social problems." Giroux writes.

If we stop to read this age and condense all the hostility around us, we will see that life itself is the enemy of fascism. Fascism silences conversation, it wants unquestioned obedience, human sacrifices, the glorious sunset, robotic armies.

Totalitarianism wants power without the human stain, without competing organisms, without reflection or question or thought. It is the muscle without a brain, The sperm without the egg. The knife without flesh. The future without compassion. The masculine without the feminine.

The corporate media keeps telling us this over and over again, in a thousand different scenes and sound bites.