A Journey Through The Mind Of Contemporary Conservatism
by Phil Rockstroh

Day-to-day life within an empire consists of the deceitful leading the disengaged. Although when the artifice shielding a nation’s populace from the ruthlessness of their leaders begins to fall away, hysteria and displaced rage rises in the land. Ergo, in the American empire, we’re witnessing these demented days of congressional boy love and despotic rockets.

Day after day, the pace at which insane tidings arrive quickens: it’s as if we’ve become passengers on a high-speed train, commandeered by lunatics, that only stops at insane asylums in order to board more lunatics ... Naturally, it follows that the train has gone runaway, careening down the buckling tracks, blue spark spraying from its steel wheels, while any approaching curve becomes a threat to derail the whole hurdling madhouse.

For many years, these episodes of mass psychosis have been gaining velocity. Empires are inherently bughouse crazy, because, by their very nature, they grow conservative to the point of becoming totalitarian. After a time, the singular raison d'être of this form of pathological conservatism is to fiercely cling to the things it has gained through expansionist practices and policies. In addition, it must find ways to rationalize the brutal and deceitful means required to sustain itself.

Accordingly, when its imperial ambitions are thwarted, rage and hysteria will seize both its elites and hoi polloi alike. The ensuing scene is similar to an inmate riot in the cafeteria of an insane asylum when the traditional Saturday night dessert of chocolate pudding has been withheld.

At this point, in the brutish life of an empire, the term conservative becomes a misnomer. What exactly is being conserved by policies of expansive militarism and environmental and imperialistic plundering? That is -- other than conserving policies of expansive militarism and environmental and imperialistic plundering? To claim this is conservatism is analogous to claiming that an army of rampaging fire ants are, only, at times, prone to becoming a little excited about their property rights. Since when is a rampage regarded as a worldview?

We have endured an era reeking with the miasmal runoff of “conservative values” spewed by these toxic totalitarians, as, all the while, they have employed classic Orwellian Newspeak as a means of perfuming its stench, thereby terming their brazen acts of exploitation – freedom, and calling their smash-and-grab economic looting -- free enterprise.

Yet, the conservative mind is obsessed with the notion that life could … should -- must! -- be returned to the values of a simpler, purer past. Perhaps, this is a compensatory fantasy, an attempt to escape the enervating machinations of their own rationalizing minds: a desperate coping device that allows these scheming cartels of aging frat boys to be in deep denial of the ruthless desires of their own rapacious ids. Among their pathological wishes is: the compulsion to slip the entire planet a date rape drug then, along with their frat house brothers, molest her.

Indeed, it’s unnerving to realize: we are being ruled by a collection of totalitarian, frat rat, date-rapists endowed with the introspective capacities of rampaging fire ants.

For the conservative (oxymoron alert) imagination it’s a psychological imperative to believe in the possibility of returning to a more moral past (even if this Helicon land never has nor ever will exist). This variety of cognitive dissidence, roiling the minds of those at the head of our one party, corporate state, in combination with the rapid dissemination of spurious information and contrived imagery ubiquitous in the mass media, has suffused contemporary life with an unreal quality. Within this bubble, we’ve become benumbed; consequences become diffuse; history and political acts carry no more weight for us than a television commercial for chewing gum or toilet paper.
 
Although in diametric opposition to our weightless misapprehensions: To live in these times is to be subject to the madness of an era wherein those possessing personality profiles matching those of Grand Inquisitor Tomás de Torquemada have been given access to high-tech surveillance devices, the plunder-prone European imperialists have global communication satellites at their disposal, and Genghis Khan has the means to solicit the duplicitous talents behind public relation and advertising firms to re-brand his image.

If the corporate media had existed in Khan's era, it doesn't strain credulity to imagine the 13th century's equivalent of CNN's Kyra Phillips – who, during the invasion of Iraq, asked the attending physician of an Iraqi child who had lost three limbs and suffered the loss of his entire family as a result of the so-called Shock and Awe bombing campaign: "Doctor, does he understand why this war took place? Has he talked about Operation Iraqi Freedom and the meaning? Does he understand it?" -- This is tantamount to asking the orphaned children of lands sacked by the Mongol hordes -- if they understood the glory of the Great Khan's Operation Enduring Plunder.

It’s small wonder the conservative keepers of the present order insist that the world must be returned to what it was ... But, inevitably, when these fervent desires are thwarted, the desire grows into an endless feedback loop of aggression, accompanied by more self-justifying lies -- thereby creating the self-resonating circuitry of thwarted triumphalism and perpetual paranoia that passes for the belief system of the contemporary conservative … As, all the while, the feedback loop continues to build in pitch and intensity, growing ever more insistent that the world be changed back to what it never was to begin with ... and then, again, being thwarted by reality ... then, exponentially, building in pitch and intensity ... rinse and repeat ... ad infinitum ... ad nauseam ...