Listen to a reading of “Manufacturing Culture”:

In Hollywood the Pentagon rewrites scripts about the military
to manufacture consent for a globe-spanning empire
to make US soldiers look like good guys
to make US wars look like good wars
to ensure continued recruitments
to ensure a steady supply of young bodies
to feed into the engine of a giant mechanical dragon
that is fueled by human blood.

They pipe our heads full of John Bolton brainworms
and Lockheed Martin dreams.
Our minds are colonized by shock and awe invasions
through a neighborhood in Los Angeles with no soul,
no art, no heart, no life, no love,
just cackling plastic smiles overmasking bestial snarls
and screenwriters with cocaine habits and nothing to say.
An invasive culture that is devoid of culture spreads across the globe
like the metastatic tendrils of a malignant tumor
saying “Isn’t global capitalism working out great?”
and “This is all perfectly normal and sane actually!”
and “Hey maybe billionaires are crimefighting superheroes?”
and “This is definitely the nation that should be leading the world!”
Depicting an America with no homelessness or obesity,
whose streets are clean and whose people are not hanging on
by the skin of their teeth in squalor, poverty and dilapidation.

“Politics is downstream from culture” they say
as they manufacture culture in Hollywood, Arlington and Langley.
Conveyor belt culture.
Plastic culture.
Franchise culture.
Vulture culture.
They funnel death into our minds
so on election day we will vote for death
and we will buy death from our stores
and pump death into our atmosphere
from fuel pumps made possible by orgies of death in the Middle East.

The news man teaches us how to think and Hollywood teaches us how to feel.
They pour death and plastic over our hearts like concrete
to make us more like them,
to make us dim and unimaginitive,
to make us sharp-toothed and stitch-eyed,
to drown out the song of our planet,
the song which grows the trees,
the song which replicates the cells,
the song which swims the fish,
the song which chirps the sparrows,
the song which stirs the fetus in the womb,
the song which moves the energy up the spine,
the song which opens up the eyes.

They pour death and plastic over our hearts like concrete
to sedate our terrestrial intuition,
to silence our song,
to divert our sacred sexuality,
to stifle the thunderclap aliveness of our being,
to keep the holy hominid from opening its eyes,
eyes which do not recognize the authority of the mind mages,
eyes which do not recognize the validity of mind cages.

They pour death and plastic over our hearts like concrete.
But the movement of tree roots can make cracks appear,
and from within those cracks
sprouts emerge.

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8 responses to “Manufacturing Culture”

  1. https://www.beyondplastics.org/staff/judith-enck-presidentBeyond Plastics

    Judith served as Deputy Secretary for the Environment in the New York Governor’s Office, and Policy Advisor to the New York State Attorney General. She was Senior Environmental Associate with the New York Public Interest Research Group, served as Executive Director for Environmental Advocates of New York and the Non-Profit Resource Center, and is a past President of Hudson River Sloop Clearwater. Senior Fellow and visiting faculty member at Bennington College,Judith appears on a weekly public affairs radio show on a local NPR affiliate, the Roundtable on WAMC in Albany, NY.
    CHECK OUT! https://www.wamc.org/show/the-roundtable

  2. You’ve got to admire the government of a country whose chemical industry has rendered nearly half of its population obese in forty years (striking record rates in every OECD disease known to man) lecturing people on public health issues with the mantra “trust the science” and forcing into them experimental drugs not even approved by their health control system even though it is 75% funded by the very pharmaceutical industry it is supposed to oversee – accounting in large part for the opioid epidemic – which also owns Congress:
    https://finance.yahoo.com/news/congress-big-pharma-money-123757664.html
    And all this in spite of its main vaccine producer having been hit in 2009 with a record-breaking $2.3 billion fine for repeatedly mispromoting medicines and paying kickbacks to compliant doctors.
    https://www.theguardian.com/business/2009/sep/02/pfizer-drugs-us-criminal-fine
    Imagine the Taliban lecturing the world on women’s rights, sartorial laissez-faire and religious freedom and you won’t even get anywhere near!
    Yet it is to be feared that if it wasn’t for double standards, the USG wouldn’t have no standards at all :o)

  3. If you do not want More Of The Same, do not vote for another R or D, ever, no matter what an R or D promises!
     

  4. Poignant images. The new Chick-fil-A near me off big interstate crossroads in big inner suburb of major US upper Midwestern city has 30+ minute wait in drive-thru every damn minute it’s open…

  5. Thank you, Caitlin! Your clear narrative cuts to the quick every time!

    It’s amazing to view the level of success accomplished by a lifetime of ever-more-sophisticated propaganda! When a group has unlimited time and an unlimited budget to advance an agenda (and no conscience), it can throw money at everyone and everything which could possibly yield results. It’s brilliantly orchestrated… just due to the level of saturation if nothing else. Over decades of consistent push, the masses have become blind minions, unable to recognize or discern the truth. Cognitive dissonance and demonization are incentivized at every turn. If they can get away from acts as blatant as 9/11 & Bldg-7 while the entire world watches on TV… for more than 20-years, what could possibly wake up the masses?
    Perhaps, if the money train stopped rolling, and the media train was no longer funded…

  6. I’m amazed at how it works. It’s an organic process. I don’t believe there’s direct government collusion, yet it’s extremely direct and effective.

  7. With a bass and drum backbeat, a Fender and some background harmonies, I can hear a dark rap playing.

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