Desolation Row.
"Right now, I can't read too good. Don't send me no more letters, no. Not unless
you mail them from Desolation Row." Bob Dylan.
The computer is the extension of the brain that is allowing the already wealthy
to gain absolute control over everyone else and leach them of every bit of
economic substance and kill a large number of them by rendering them homeless.
There are no longer any Desolation Rows as in Bob Dylan's era of the late
sixties. Now almost gone are the hobo jungles, the tent cities, the cardboard
hovels. Now all that remains, perhaps even for you, O reader, is nothing more
than a cold wet curb, an anonymous death, a pauper's un-marked grave, or a waste
disposal plant in a Soylent factory somewhere (as in the 1970s movie Soylent
Green).
They have convinced the politically gullible to eradicate governmental
supervision and enforcement and now what remains is an anarchy of the wealthy,
where they cook the books and nobody knows, they torture their opponents and
nobody sees, they lobotomize the masses and nobody realizes, because they
downsized the cops.
And by cops, I don't mean the thin blue line that stands between you and the
global riot. I mean the governmental cops. Put in place by the duly elected
officials to ensure the domestic tranquility, and so on and so forth. When you
bought that line they slipped you about how they wanted less government and that
these business guys could take care of themselves, man, did they pull the wool
over your eyes.
What the heck is wrong with you people? This didn't happen back in the 1700s,
when the founding fathers were really on the ball and wouldn't let anybody
hustle them. Perhaps this is a pattern of history. Perhaps this is history
repeating itself. Well, whatever it is we're all in for a rough ride and it
didn't have to be this way.
But you know if you look in the history books you'll see that these periods of
upheaval happen, and maybe even some of the people at work on the situation
today trying to hustle everyone else have even studied a bit of history, enough
to know certain patterns they can manipulate. But you don't care, do you? As
long as you get your big old SUV and the luxurious house in peace and quiet on
the right side of the tracks.
My guess is that the majority is not dead as a door nail as they seem, but
perhaps "indebted as a door nail." Aha, I knew it. No culture. They claim they
have the so-called pop culture, but "pop culture" really and actually means no
culture at all. When you have culture, there is an abundance of -- or at least
some -- intellectual stimulation. With the culture you have proliferated in
contemporary United States of America, there's nothing at all. No culture at
all, not even Boy George and his culture club.
Now here's the thing with culture: at first it's something a person might not
want to do, but after a while really gets into it and enjoys it. And the result
is intellectual stimulation to the extent were the person becomes an operable,
integral, functional part of not only society, but also successful endeavors of
renowned achievements. There. That sort of puts it in a nutshell for you. Only
what we have in this contemporary society and not just United States -- this is
happening elsewhere in the globe in developed nations -- what you've got here is
a real nutcase in the person of every walking around individual out there,
instead of a nutshell description of uplifting and intellectual stimulation.
Now, back in the Bohemian days, there was this sort of Desolation Row where at
least you could go ahead and live there and pursue an intellectual life of
poetry or artwork or music or something enriching. This started way back in the
days of the Bohemian kings around the Czech region of old Europe and went as far
as the beatnik era of the famous beatnik poets such as Allen Ginsberg and so on
, who eventually in my opinion confronted their dead-end streets of drug abuse.
I know the type of desolation row Ginsburg lived in, I once stayed in an
apartment next door, back in the seventies. But eventually he ended up in
that Buddhist monastery.
But now , there's no more of that. No more cheap slum housing, at least not the
type that you could use for anything unless you're in some kind of derelict city
such as Newark, New Jersey, part of the ancient Megalopolis of old-time America.
No, with computerization it enables the merchant minded to ferret their way into
every nook and cranny, ringing the life out of every possible walking around
person that they can transform, even involuntarily, into that mindless consumer
that they so dearly desire for their burgeoning ranks of impulse-buyers with no
longer any governmental oversight to even so much as blow a whistle. There's not
even a Desolation Row anymore. Anybody think anyone would ever want to bemoan
the trans-juxtaposition of all desolation rows? Well, it's come to that.
They're not even selling postcards of the hanging, they're not even painting the
passports Brown. And forget that Sailor bit, they were the first to go down. No
more circus in town. Oh, you can get out there. You can live in the slum, but
it's going to be even worse than ever, because all you've got there anymore are
the drunks and the drugged, who have sunk all their paychecks into their super
sound systems, triumphantly blasting every neighbor on the block away with the
voodoo drums of their favorite machete hacking genocide music, which they need
to mask the sense of guilt they feel over their criminal life-styles,
evaporating every possible inspiration you could've ever gotten for poetry,
music or art.
Hey, who knows? Maybe there's something out in Calcutta, or maybe out there way
up in Tibet, "Early Tibet".
Copyright (c) 2005 by
Paul A. L. Hall. All rights reserved.
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