Dear America (Freedom from Desire)

Dear American citizen, what makes you a part of this great nation we call the United States? What part of your being do you sacrifice to ensure this great Capitalist machine perpetually churns ad infinitum? Or are you an individual par excellance? a model American due to your perpetual indifference and ignorance of the issue at hand? Is the standard of the American ideal the absence of the government altogether? Are you only all too happy to slave off all responsibility of conscious effort to be perpetually driven to the polls with the spoon fed ideals of Freedom, Democracy and progressive promises of Rights you didn’t even know you possess, or better, didn’t even know you desired? Are you even aware the great nation you call yourself proud to be a part of is in the midst of war? The most repressive, intolerable war far beyond the imaginary devastation enacted in physical violence, the battlefield is all around, underneath your very feet and yet far off in another world. We few who recognize the struggle popularized and masquerading in the semblance of the war in the Middle East, the very violence perpetuated and made into a great cause for the ideals that the masters bombard upon our most personal, exploitable recess of the thinking mind; in this we see the symbolic struggle for human desire.

What do we desire more than anything as human subjects in the highly advanced and forever evolving awe inspiring pinnacle of western civilization we call home? Are we only all too happy with a stable job and roof under our heads with the occasional exotic trip to the movie theater, local restaurant or bar? We might say here that the war we fight is for desire itself. We are losing comrades. “Well,” you tell me, “it’s not so bad, we’ve fought for and won civil rights for all peoples, marriage equality is garnering support, and there is even talk of legalizing marijuana!” Well sir, there are numerous achievements in this great nation such as the abolition of slavery, the right to vote for all, etc. but are these at the heart of the issue? Or can we only see the cyclical pattern of suppressing authentic desire in the highly dynamic political apparatus that guarantees us our enjoyment? Is not the executor of our rights the same force that tells us to enjoy all our glorious freedoms? Well I say that the most fundamental human characteristic is to refuse any given for an intuitive, transcendental ideal of mankind! When was gay marriage or drug use even a thing to be refused to people in the first place? When, if not with the instantiation of the law, was the desire to marry issued forth in the first place? What, during this country’s profound showing of the egalitarian spirit, were the issues at hand? civil rights and anti-war solidarity. Can we not see that the nation thrives on these very moments? Events conceived in their time as general anarchy and chaos? Can we not see some of the truly greatest American souls to be in the persons of MLK, Jr. or Malcolm X? Or can we see, even, a darker side of this process that is only all too easily exploited in the so-called democratic process? For in the age of manufacturing consent (it’s an investigation by one of today’s most empirically minded souls for Gods sake!) the nation's elected officials are now null and void. The fundamental Voting Rights Act was recently ruled by the holiest of courts as no longer relevant to today’s society that now recognizes all individuals as equal: save for a few million immigrants, hundreds of victims of police violence, and the peoples enslaved to the swelling prison systems. They can’t vote anyway right? For only true citizens have the right to vote. But what is a right if not something that can’t be taken away? Are we a privileged society then if not a society of rights? Aren’t privileges something to be fought for and then taken away?         

Maybe in this age of a dead god the only sovereign entity left to look to is a just as capricious government imbued with the almost divine presence of the seat of the president: the cultural ambassador to the peoples. Is he not our god, the entity that guarantees hope, inspires change, solves our problems: the entity we pray to? And is he not just as much the authority we blame for our problems like the God in the book of Job? In this war on desire the mind is the battleground, and what constitutes our mind more than the continual narrative and thoughts that explain our every-day life? The republican gods penetrate our minds with their phallic signifiers, addressing you the well to do, conservative, middle class corporate worker! He tells you the migrants are ruining this country; what? well god damn, I want immigration reform! The democrats want to take away your constitutional rights! Well god damn, I want more guns! What else could I possibly desire? Tell me, tell me! In a hedonistic world of gratisfaction and all possible fulfillment of animal desire, a human comes to desire desire itself. In this human, all too human world of nihilistic possessions, we are desiring machines. And what is the most pathetic desire of this the modern man? The continual ego stroke from his divine authority of the corporate masters who simultaneously tells him what he desires and tells him his suffering means something: all for the greater good of America! "Your one and only son died fighting the war? Well he died for Freedom! For the ideal of Democracy! Better yet, he died fighting for your Freedom citizen! so enjoy it!" Who else died for the good of the people? On a cross? His teachings bastardized for the control of the peoples of the Holy Roman Empire? Aren’t we beyond being told our suffering has a meaning for a higher glory? Aren’t we, as American citizens, beyond being controlled, manipulated and systematically lied to? We all know that the politicians don’t serve us, but are filling a void formed from the structure of global capitalism that dominates the human world today. Perhaps we know it all too well, but the false passions of the other keep us absorbed in a false individualism borderlining on solipsism. Can’t we project a higher standard of individualism? An individualism not of selfishness, but of a individualism for all? A radical, egalitarian showing of solidarity that each and every individual can feel and control himself? Perhaps we know too much today and don’t feel enough where in a world of historical action limited to the contrived vote for superfluous ‘rights’ that should never have been an issue in the first place and merely serve to enslave us to the desire of the Other, the divine executor of capital, that controls our true passion, we should instead seek a self knowledge more true than any finely crafted rhetoric telling us what we want, a knowledge of our own desire. It might be a naive world view but, how hard is it to imagine happiness in a life lived amongst peoples you love and a peaceful world free of meaningless violence? We desire this, and nothing else. We prefer not to desire the positions of servitude expected of us embodied in the office cubicle, crunching numbers for the profit of the masters; we prefer not to desire money based off the economy of debt: burdensome, terrifying debt for an ‘education’ we too do not desire. We cannot rationalize our understanding: we only commit to a polite refusal grounded on a freedom from desire, a feeling that is necessarily discarded upon entrance into the discourse of the masters, the rhetoric which dominates the very fabric of every-day reality.

-Nothing in Color