Look at the evidence: We're engaged in an ongoing act of murder/suicide by our engagement in a state of perpetual war termed the War on Terror. In this way, our unconscious wishes are being granted in Iraq and Afghanistan -- and we're, most likely, not done yet. Accordingly, our need to relieve our sense of emptiness and powerlessness has grown so insatiable that we roam the world, relentlessly, in search of the means of mollification: But where we go, we leave a wasteland in our wake, including the manner we have fouled our own nest.

Furthermore, I'm willing to hazard a guess that neither industry, nor thrift, nor a PlayStation 3's razzle dazzle, nor another round of lowered interest rates nor a surge of consumer spending, nor a miracle military victory in Iraq, nor a sleepless fleet of terrorist-spotting spy satellites in space, nor a billion surveillance cameras trained on every person, place and thing on the planet could keep the oceanic vicissitudes of earthly existence from rising, nor the gales of contretemps from blowing, nor the casuistry-sundering storms of uncertainty from making landfall -- and could, at this late date, keep the American Empire from collapsing from the rot festering within its spoiled rotten populace.

This is due to the sad fact that, thus far, all our attempts to defeat our feelings of powerlessness and sate our emptiness have been vain, shallow, self-serving and authoritarian; hence, our acts have only managed to defeat and suppress the life-vivifying forces of freedom and imagination within us. We may give lip service to Jesus, but we outright worship the spurious Eros of the corporatist advertising/entertainment/consumer paradigm -- and it has risen before us as manifest Thanatos.

In spirit-desiccating accommodation to this punitive and petty age, we have merely managed to submerge our fires of authentic human passion. This is a gambit fraught with hidden danger. I've heard stories of fires that burned unseen in sealed-off, abandoned mines -- wherein years later, miles from the original location of the blaze, dead trees burst into flames...the fire having traveled underground the length of the mine and up the dry kindling of the tree's root system to explode in open air. We witness these sorts of sudden conflagrations, constantly: road rage, workplace and school shooting sprees, spittle-spraying right-wing pundits, George Bush's oscillations between dead-eyed blankness and prickly anger (I don't know which state is more terrifying) and a culture that willingly accepts the outright murder of civilians, for no discernible reason. As if there exists a good one.

If the fires of passion burn, unseen and untended, in subterranean denial -- how can an individual or a culture learn to temper those raging fires of passion into warmth and compassion? Hence: the coldness of the corporate culture and the lifelessness of existence in contemporary America, resulting in chronic dissatisfaction (the feeling something is missing) and the attempts to ameliorate the discomfort with the dark Eros of perpetual war and enslavement to the shallow distractions of the consumer state.

The fire, next time -- indeed.

The corporate media is never going to level with you on the subject: It would put them out of business. Such a development is about as likely as the arising of a mass social movement, led by pimps, called, "The Pimp's Crusade For The Promotion of Universal Abstinence."

Accordingly, in our shallow and self-defeating era, a million lies are told; a million promises are broken. The poor starve; the rest of us rot from within. As everything we hold precious is imperiled, as we engage in a planet-destroying struggle for the attainment of junk.

Yet, it need not play out this way: For our minds are honeycombed by multiple universes of possibilities, ideas, and imaginings. Accordingly, we sense that the "information" we receive from the commercial media, official Washington, and the business sector is far from complete -- that it is merely a few, meretricious fragments of a subjective account, splintered from a small shard of a hasty conclusion, broken from a vast mosaic of a larger prevarication.

But like the dimwit protagonists of a Country and Western song, too many of us plead to be plied with sweet lies. Pervasive corporatism creates the illusion we have little choice in the matter. Freedom is no more available to us than finding undying love in a Honky Tonk.

Moreover, the ideas contained in The Bill of Rights and the tenets of The Enlightenment are quaint notions to corporatists. Within our empire of mammon, cant and incommensurate privilege, concepts such as freedom and liberty lie forgotten, languishing like the statues of forsaken gods within the crumbling temples of some dead religion.