Perhaps if we were to take a closer examination of these sorts of everyday misperceptions, distortions, and lies that, over time, grow into cultural delusions -- it would reveal a great deal about not only Atlanta, Birmingham, and Manhattan’s East Village -- but our present day lives within that hack-conjured narrative know as the present day United States of America.

Is it possible for some scion of the corporate state to wail-out the blues of the present era -- for some bluesman born of the hybrid lawn-seeded soil of our nation of vast suburban subdivisions and weaned on its pharmacological subsistence crops -- perhaps going by the moniker Medicated Willie McMansion -- to sing out, "I got the medication blues/ from my iPod head to my sweatshop-shod shoes..."

But more likely, the progeny of Margaret Mitchell, now newswriters and producers at CNN, will continue to contrive the spurious narratives of the times: storylines that are about as accurate as the one their forbearer, Miss Mitchell, confabulated, within the pages of Gone With The Wind, regarding the Civil War era American South; both tales are vain, shallow, narcissistic, self-serving spectaculars -- inane, melodramatic mélanges, riddled with cultural clichés and casuistry, reality-denying rationalizations, and pulp novel plot devices serving to mask the realities of brutal classism, blood drenched racism, and wars waged on behalf of a corrupt ruling class.

So where does this leave us? Are we condemned to live out our lives in the enthralling dazzle of these glittering fragments of self-serving lies?

Or worse: What of the dreaded Law of Eternal Poultry Return (LEPR) -- which is known, in everyday parlance, as the "chickens coming home to roost"?

I'm having this recurring vision of flocks and then more flocks of returning, roost-seeking chickens. There will be so many flocks of roosting, rampaging, revenge-reaping chickens (Also known as: the collective enmity of the people of the world beyond our shores … peck, cluck, cluck peck; ad this to, our nation’s financial insolvency (personal and collective) … cluck, cluck, scratch, peck, scratch peck; those – combined that with the increasingly apparent realities of Global Warming … peck, peck, peck, scratch, CLUCK!; as well as, our Nation’s crumbling infrastructure; plus, the vast catalog of other ills looming over us …CLUCK! CLUCK! PECK! PECK! PECK!) – Returning chickens, all … thronging the streets, boulevards, Interstate highways, back roads, and private driveways of the U.S.A.  Such a proliferation of barnyard fowl blowback -- it will look like Col. Sanders, OD'd on bad acid, having a vision of his eternal damnation to come.

Are we utterly defenseless against these pervasive and pernicious narratives? I don't believe so -- if we practice the imperative of the free: That being: Question everything -- from street signs to sacred assumptions; from the cant of local boosterism to the hagiography of the famous, both living and dead. There may be hope for us yet: If we face down and call out those everyday, soul-grinding, life-defying lies that begin the process of acceptance of -- hence complicity in -- the preventable tragedies that have come to define our times.

=================

Phil Rockstroh, a self-described, auto-didactic, gasbag monologist, is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: philangie2000@yahoo.com

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