Fat City and the Rat Scratch Fever

Dog Poet Transmitting.......

May your noses always be cold and wet.

Tick... Tick... Tick... Tock... The cosmic clock counts off the seconds, minutes and hours of our passage through the mix of monstrous lies and murder most foul. We are inundated with smiling psychopaths in office and another smiling psychopath who wants that office and whose company owns a whole lot of voting machines. We're two weeks away from the decisive day of vote manipulation. Whose manipulation will be most effective? Did you ever imagine that presidential campaigns would amass over a billion dollars? The modern day operations of the American ruling class, are starting to look more and more like the court of Louis the 14th.

Patronizing smug and snarky humor pays in a big way and those wondering about the silence and endless charity mills of celebrities, need to keep in mind what they get and don't want to lose. This is the burden of money, juxtaposed with the burden of conscience. This is that invisible, generally unspoken bind, that hamstrings the heart and tunnel blinds the mind. This is the surrounding countryside, of endless rationalizations and confirmation logics, whose only purpose is confirmation of rationalization. Ah... the conversations that go on inside our heads, seeking harmonious union, with the conversations and conditions outside our heads; the deals we cut as we slip slide by, the dragonflies hovering over the infinity pools, with their teal wings and turquoise eyes.

Fat City has a zip code for gated communities and walled estates. Money flows like a river into the banking wells, of temporary periods of fortunate karma. Every day is a feast day and a trip to the high towers. Hypnotized eyes stare out of floor to ceiling windows 60 stories in the air. Tiny proles march by on the dusty fire-hewn streets below. There are stratified levels of progressive pain. Somewhere it hurts everywhere and somewhere it hurts only in certain places. Somewhere the pain is at a distance and the source of it is hard to place. Perhaps it is someone else's pain, sensed in telepathic or vibrationary resonance.

People seldom make the connection between the movement of a fountain pen and the motionless state of blasted bodies on a foreign landscape. The hypnotized eyes in the high rise don't make the connection between their station and status and the suffering in the streets below and at a further distance, in punished and pacified lands. Legions of Judas Goats, march forward on the television, on the movie screen, across the radio airwaves; beckoning from the iPods, whispering up out of the sewer grates, booming from the billboards, bunny hopping in the boardrooms. They are glittering and cosmeticized, with their goodie bags in their hands, standing in front of the corporate logos, simpering in the flashing reflection, of the paparazzi vampire fangs. Moguls with trademark fever, hobnob with presidents and dream of launching clothing lines because money is still tight somehow, or more likely there is never enough. Mammon is rampant on a field of blood. Saturday nights, the cries of “Hail Satan”! Ring out in the basement rooms of estates. Posters of missing children are everywhere and they might run out of milk cartons eventually.

Turns out that Warren Buffet is not simply that sweet, avuncular old man, who looks like he should be hosting a nostalgia, radio show on PBS. Lake Woebegone is moving inexorably toward Lake Woeisme. I don't know how true some of the things I come across are. Usually I measure credibility in relation to the level of hysteria. Still, just because you are barely this side of Nutjob, does not mean all your references are without some degree of truth. I don't mean to be disparaging, flaming fundie speak tends to militate against my desire to believe. Still... one wonders.

There are no cockroaches or rats where I live and I have not seen them in 13 years in these locales; an occasional mouse will surface. Sightings are as rare as seeing a police car. I was several years here before I saw one in town. Festivals happen here a few times a year. Thousands of people show up from surrounding towns and you will see an emergency ambulance, parked discreetly to the side of the affair and very rarely will you see a single policeman walking through. People drink wine and beer all day and there is never an altercation.

I remember apartments in NYC and Philadelphia; late night you walk into the kitchen and turn on the lights. Oh yeah! Baltimore used to have seven rats for every inhabitant. It might be more now. Rat population and cockroach populations, increase in direct proportion to the level of corruption in the culture. Culture pundits and economic pundits, are generally paid shills for certain interests that employ them to advance their agenda. This is why they are usually full of it and why things keep going on the way they do, because fixing things is not on the program. Fixing things requires maintaining a system that serves the needs of everyone it contains and that is most definitely not the objective.

The rich want to get richer and because of the nature of this pathological illness, they will go to any lengths to achieve the greatest possible economic disparity, between their fellows and themselves. The poor want to be less poor but they are far less organized and motivated. The Middle Class is the glue that holds society together and is the barometer for the health of that society. The rich war on both of these segments of the culture and create an unfortunate balance in the necessary give and take that allows for a culture to be uniformly prosperous and balanced. For some reason, when the rich get too rich, the poor get too poor and the middle class begins to disappear, things go to Hell. Everything functions well, when the needs of everyone are taken into consideration. The poor can't get too poor and the rich can't get too rich. It upsets the balance. It just doesn't work and you can see that. It also leads inevitably to tyranny. When you base a free market system on the concept of individual liberty, it will eventually turn into its polar opposite. Serial killers and cannibals are the logical outcome, as is a burgeoning trend toward Satanism, because Satanism is the applied worship of material culture ...and the pursuit of one's success, by any means, in the acquisition of it. Rules are for the weak, who are best exemplified by a t shirt I once saw; "New York, where the weak are killed and eaten".

When things go out of balance, it is only a matter of time. When the natural balance and order of things is upset, due to the ugly activities of the most seriously deluded of the Earth, it is only a matter of time. Repression and oppression intensify. Endless war becomes a feature of the day to day unreality. License replaces liberty and people compete to see who can be more outrageously embarrassing, even though they themselves cannot see it. Notoriety replaces fame. When politicians and entertainers get into discussions about the relative merits of Snooki and Honey Boo Boo, you can ♫turn out the lights, the parties over♫

Bought and sold whores trumpet the wonder and beauty of the decadence. Talking heads talk up the lies that appear on their teleprompter. Sleazy comics make jokes about it. It goes on and on and down and down; down to the bottom. Balance is a law. When balance goes missing, certain forces are automatically put into action to address the condition. Lady Nature steps in but she is not unattended. She has retainers and associates. The worse things get, the thicker the shield of ignorance becomes. Were you to be able to project yourself into the future, so as to look back upon what presently holds most people in subjective thrall, you would look back in horror, not comprehending how conditions could be what they are and continue as they do.

Things apparently have to run their course; rocking the cradle or driving the hearse, the rituals and routines of existence follow one another in a dreadful spectacle of ominous portent. It's a Danse Macabre. Are we to be buried in The Cask of Amontillado, or with a Cask of Amontillado? Are some of us going down and some of us going up? That's a good question. Is someone going to disappear from a field and someone remain? Where is the essential truth that lies concealed within the words? When you see the lies that appear within a single day and turn into another lie the next day, you have to wonder about what likely might have taken place over hundreds and thousands of years.

I believe in enduring truth. I seek it at all costs because the cost otherwise is too great to bear. I proceed with great curiosity, concerning all of those who do not recognize this cost, even though they pay it out in full every day, even though it is often unseen, beneath the surface of all the things distracting from the perception of it. I reflect and think upon this every single day and cannot fathom how it continues across the generations, through the mud and blood of history. I do fathom it. I can see it in the vacant and often glazed eyes of the passersby, who look out upon a world that I do not see because the values and price tags are all different in my world. We all live in a world of our own creation and the similarity of common desires, appetites and aspirations, causes people to think they live in a common zone. Perhaps this accounts for them sharing a common, as opposed to, an uncommon fate.


End Transmission.......

Visible and The Critical List: ♫ Overweight Lover ♫
'Overweight Lover' is track no. 3 of 9 on Visible and The Critical List's 1993 album
'Jews from Outer Space'
Lyrics (pops up)


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