October 12, 2010

Rally to Restore Sanity: What Sanity?

How can you tell if you are the least crazy person in the nuthouse?




You’re watching the Punk Patriot. You can subscribe to my channel by clicking here.

So I will not be at the Rally to Restore Sanity. I will be at work, in a factory repeating the same motions for hours on end, making things that you will one day use without thinking about the labor that went into it. My friend Davis Fleetwood however, he WILL be there. I’m interested to see what he comes away from it with as far as analysis and such. You can subscribe to his channel here.

I’m wondering how far this rally will go to restore sanity. First, you have to ask-- did we ever HAVE it? Sanity is an odd and elusive thing. When you are surrounded by a collective insanity, insanity seems sane, and it’s deviation from that insanity that seems insane. In conditions such as these, the craziest people in the nuthouse will point their fingers at the sane and berate them for their insane behaviour.

As you know, I covered a gathering of some of the most truely sane people in America, the Veterans For Peace National Convention. They’ve been at the front lines of our empire. They know what is going on outside of the iron gates of the nuthouse.

I came away from that convention with my head filled with their stories, and it dawned on me, there really should be a new field of psychology, not for diagnosing individuals, but for diagnosing societies. Because the Society of USA, at it’s core, is mentally ill.

It’s not like traditional mental illness, where it’s just something that happens to you. Oh no, this social mental illness is a contagion, like a virus. And we are pumped full of the viruses of this illness every day. It’s not anything deliberately done by anyone. It’s just a viral illness, like the common cold, Herpes, or HIV.

Television is the main culprit for spreading this disease. TV spends all day trying to convince us that the abnormal is normal, and the normal is abnormal.

In the breaks between shows, some celebrity is talking to you, in a deliberate and calm voice, like a sane person, about how they are so scared of being seen in public with skin blemishes that she avoids leaving her house. So much so that it interferes with her lifestyle. She can’t go grocery shopping anymore. She’s afraid of doing publicity to promote her TV shows. But she was able to cure this by using Proactive, and now she “loves it” and feels that “she can never be without it.”
I’m sorry but you don’t need a skin cleanser. You need therapy.

The History Channel has a running series of shows dedicated to glorifying the latest, most effective tools for killing on the market, as though they were toys, or lawnmowers, or refrigerators-- something that everybody should have. As if this fetish for killing was normal, rather than indicative of a cultural psychosis.

This same show parades “non lethal weapons” used on peaceful protesters here in the USA, but doesn’t talk about that fact. Instead they say that they are for nonviolent interventions in Foreign Wars. If that’s true, are we waging a war on Dissent and Freedom of Expression here in the USA? Because those ideas certainly seem foreign as of late.

“Fun Facts” are presented between commercial breaks for this weapons show, and include the factoid that “prolonged exposure to loud music has been used by the US military to ‘soften up prisoners for interrogation’” The playlist includes Eminem, Rage Against the Machine, and Barney the Dinosaur.

What they leave out is that this took place in Guantanamo, that the prisoners were chained in stress positions and exposed to volume levels capable of damaging hearing permanently, and is legally defined as TORTURE. But they don’t say this. They present it as though it were harmless fun. Something funny to laugh about at the water cooler. It’s no wonder, with this as our normal, that we’re raising a nation of psychotics, that our kids shoot and kill one another at school.

Take a good look at yourself America. You’ve completely lost your shit.

When you hit rock bottom you are going to hit so hard-- but on account of how your head is so wrapped up in the flag that you can’t see where you are going, you also can’t see the ground rushing up to meet your face, and you won’t shake off your denial that you are falling until all your teeth are broken, your lips shredded, and you pull your head up from the dirt, your mouth bleeding, your gums receding, your eyes no longer seeing stars and bars as you finally pull the flag away from your face, and you’ll come to learn that your body has been entirely eaten by cancer, America. You’ll have no legs to stand on any longer-- atrophied from the fact that you haven’t actually stood for anything for a long long time.

This is the Punk Patriot signing off. To Life, Liberty, and pursuit of a less fucked up Government.

No comments:

Post a Comment