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Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/phil.rockstroh
(25 comments) SHARE Sunday, January 14, 2018 Thus Spake Oprah as the New York Times Spots UFOs Over The Comb-Over Empire
The aspect of Trump's ascendancy is shunted from the duopolist dynamic and the narrow, acceptable discourse of political and media elites: Trump's pathetic dye job, fake tan, and comb-over mirror the US empire. Its decline and deterioration simply cannot be covered up by the desperate application of cosmetic measures.
(6 comments) SHARE Friday, December 22, 2017 When The Unthinkable Becomes Quotidian: Thermic runaway and Strangelovian palaver
At present, the whole of humankind is held in the thrall of a trajectory of doom. Yet their power is hinged on the ability to dominate the storyline. Withal, complicity translates to destiny usurped. Conversely, the first measure towards a restoration of equilibrium is to call out a lie.
SHARE Sunday, December 17, 2017 What Was Verifiably Great About America: Fragments of a Memoir Set To A Musical Soundtrack
I have come to conclude, people born into situations providing economic advantage, both liberals and conservatives alike, experience difficulty, more often than not, envisaging the lives of those born into a labouring class existence. Worse, a wilful obtuseness, in combination with a supercilious posture is, all too often, evinced, by reflex, towards those scorned as "hillbillies," "trailer trash," and "genetic retreads."
(1 comments) SHARE Friday, December 8, 2017 Capitalism's Failure of the Flesh
A bitter irony of modernity is that the age-old dream of freeing people from work's tedium has been answered by robots, but capitalism has turned that "freedom" into a barren life with little left to lose, writes poet Phil Rockstroh.
(8 comments) SHARE Monday, November 20, 2017 The Soul of the Nation is a Casualty of War
If reality is met head-on, if empire, external and its inner analog, is renounced and challenged, then a liberation staged by the heart's partisans can begin, thereby freeing up a great amount of acreage -- a fructifying landscape -- wherein both the earth's ecosystem and the architecture of human desire can begin to co-exist and cross-pollinate; thus a crucial re-visioning of oneself and the culture can begin.
(16 comments) SHARE Saturday, October 28, 2017 The Voiceless Left Stands Before The Monster Of History
The notion that the dismal circumstance will recede by the banishment of Donald Trump from the scene. Trump is merely a representation of one of the genera of imps squatting in the dark recesses of capitalism's forsaken soul. He is the very embodiment of a crackpot realist. If you do not take hold of the monster within, he will take hold of you.
(5 comments) SHARE Tuesday, October 24, 2017 Escaping the Colonised Mind
In our late-stage capitalism, every inch of humanity has been exploited and maximized for profit, creating "colonized" minds and emotions, a challenge for humans to free themselves and save the planet, says poet Phil Rockstroh.
(8 comments) SHARE Tuesday, October 17, 2017 2 or 3 Things I Know About Capitalism (with apologies to Jean-Luc Godard)
"Superficial explanations for today's social anxiety and political discontent miss the underlying reality: the crisis of late-stage capitalism in its frantic death throes, explains poet Phil Rockstroh" -- Robert Parry, publisher and editor of Consortium News
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, October 11, 2017 Citadels of Paranoia; Panoramas of Despair: An Occupation of Phantoms.
The frantic fear-mongering of American culture -- Russians, North Koreans, Iranians, the Others are out to get us -- has generated an alienation that fuels violence, globally and in random acts of murder, writes poet Phil Rockstroh.
(3 comments) SHARE Saturday, September 16, 2017 Shelter Within The Storm: a dialog on politics and culture
Adialog, between myself and playwright and essayist John Steppling and artist and essayist Hiroyuki Hamada on the artist's role in times of extreme societal and cultural alienation e.g., including worldwide and increasing Climate Chaos and numerous other subjects, political and cultural.
(17 comments) SHARE Saturday, December 21, 2013 Walking in an Anthropocene Wonderland: "But I'll know my song well before I start singing"
Just what kind of suicidal clowns flounce through life gibbering on about bacon straws, cupcakes, online images of kitty cats, and the latest Playstation model when the specter of extinction looms and their psychotic leaders are doubling down on the criteria of doom?
(15 comments) SHARE Saturday, November 23, 2013 Fear In A Handful Of Dust: The Sacred Vehemence Of Imagination In A Soulless Age
The economy is chronically depressed. Isotopes of Fukushima are carried on currents of wind and wave. The oceans and seas are rising from humankind-created Climate Change. The world's oceans are being destroyed. The human element evinces the pathology displayed in psychoanalytic consulting rooms: The economic elite are psychopathic; Tea Party types exhibit paranoid displacement while liberals exhibit neurotic insularity.
(5 comments) SHARE Sunday, June 2, 2013 The United States of Whatever: Ecocide and the Soul of a Nation
To turn a blind eye to the natural world, as we have done, translates into psychical ecocide. Perception is degraded. Language truncated. Life becomes dispossessed of purpose and meaning. Apropos, the rise and banal persistence of: The United States of Whatever...[Yet] where there exists the implicate order of the soul there exists the wherewithal to rise up and resist the forces that lay siege to one's innate humanity.
(5 comments) SHARE Friday, May 31, 2013 Ecocide and the Soul of a Nation
At the front of the political madness enveloping the United States are anti-government, anti-science extremists who reject evidence of global warming and block any response to this existential threat. But the disconnect between environmental destruction and today's humanity goes deeper.
(3 comments) SHARE Saturday, April 27, 2013 Within The National (In)Security State: Fear as a Constant Companion
Ask me about my sense of patriotism, and you will receive only silence" because what does not exist cannot speak. But ask me about my sense of affinity with the whole of humanity--about the golden fire of our imagination that binds us to all things, about the cathedral of our bones that binds us to the sorrows of the earth--only if you desire to risk having your ear bent beyond repair by my soliloquies.
(2 comments) SHARE Friday, April 26, 2013 America's Locked-Down Insecurity State
Emerging evidence from the Boston Marathon bombings suggests the brutal attack on innocent civilians was motivated by the fury of two brothers against overseas crimes of the U.S. government. In that, the martial-law lockdown of Boston may be a glimpse at the future to come.
(4 comments) SHARE Wednesday, April 10, 2013 Tyranny of Deception
Truth has always been a challenging pursuit, often resulting in the persecution of its pursuers. But the modern era offers a special challenge as lies are now the mass-manufactured product of an industry that relentlessly serves the interests of the powerful.
(6 comments) SHARE Saturday, April 6, 2013 Tyranny Of The Reasonable: Popular Complacency In An Era Of Economic Exploitation And Perpetual War
The individual who finds an implicate order within -- who keeps hold of the golden thread of his true nature as he wends through the baffling labyrinth of social convention and official deceit -- will make an ally of fate. His true name will be emblazoned upon his heart and will ring across the devouring abyss of a conformist age.
(4 comments) SHARE Friday, March 22, 2013 The Cusp of Ecological Disaster
In a world where all emotion is translated into a sales pitch and each thought becomes a talking point, the existential question is how to live a life that embraces real emotion and articulates original thinking.