I wish to ask this: Who is missing from our dinner table? Who hasn't been extended an invitation? Who has been disinherited? Where are the black sheep of the family -- those members neither invited nor spoken about (in a similar manner as those aforementioned dead soldiers, Iraqis, and oak trees) when our clan gathers? What of the inspired misfits, indomitable freaks, defiant outcasts, and magnificent failures -- the sorts who might broach uncomfortable topics, reveal family secrets, or too vividly display our flaws? Where are those who have been cast out, orphaned from our family, and therefore, who, like a tragic hero from myth, are free to blunder upon unbearable truths. Where are the scorned and forsaken ones? All those banished from our thoughts, because they see our family for what it is, not what it strives to appear to be.

We need these wayward members of our family now, more than ever. For this reason: As is the case with nature herself, a nation needs its mutant strains of innovative freaks, because, by introducing variation, they have the ability to transform the closed, negative entropy-generating genetic systems on this inbred planet. Thus, they enable life to diversify and flourish.

In this manner, we might avoid the fate of becoming a global clan of thin-blooded, wall-eyed trailer court imbeciles. Perish the thought of: Planet Alabama. Though it might already be too late. How else can we explain the Bush presidency?

This is why we must perpetrate acts of everyday antagonism; why we must not supplicate ourselves before the bloodless gods of false propriety; why it’s imperative we rage and weep at the memory of squandered oak trees, dead soldiers, and forsaken freedoms.

Now is not the time for paeans to the polite and appropriate. Systems (including empires) don't collapse in a polite and decorous manner. The Second Law of Thermodynamics is one rude bastard. Negative entropy did not attend the finest finishing schools and will not be presented to genteel society in an elegant debutante ball.

There are harrowing reasons for our fear-engendered obduracy and compulsive complicity. For deep within the gated communities of our minds, we Americans know this: That if we continue to ignore the storm gathering outside the insular subdivisions of our cultural awareness, then those who survive us on this abiding earth will remember us and grieve our passing to the same extent the residents of Oakdale Estates mourned the memory of its namesake oak trees.

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

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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