Late Stage Capitalism and the Shame Haunted Life: You Can't Kill Trauma With A Gun
by Phil Rockstroh
"Memory believes
before knowing remembers." - William Faulkner
In an era of
corporate-state colonization of both landscape and mental real estate, when the
face of one's true oppressors is, more often than not, hidden from view, thus
inflicting feelings of anxiety borne of powerlessness over the criteria of
one's life and the course of one's fate, often, to retain a sense of control,
people will tend to displace their anger and shame. Firearms provide the
illusion of being able to locate and bead down on a given target. (How often
does a person without wealth, power, and influence have any contact with -- or
even a glimpse of -- the financial and political elite whose decisions dictate
the, day by day, criteria of one's existence?)
Beginning in childhood,
carrying the noxious notions of the adult world, the viral seeds of mental
enslavement to shame and the concomitant attempt to protect ego-integrity
through psychological displacement are spread child to child.
All too often, internalized
shame robs a child of his innate identity before it has a chance to jell. This
is one, among multiple social factors, by which the collective mindset of
capitalist/consumer state forcefully usurps an individual's mind and holds it
in torment.
Therefore, it is imperative
for an individual, marooned in the shame-haunted miasma of the
capitalist/consumer paradigm, to reclaim his/her own name. Even if the process
entails (as it as played out in my own story) a descent into the underworld of
memory and a confrontation with the ghosts therein.
A personal encounter with
the raging ghosts of memory: Late autumn. 1965. Atlanta, Georgia.
At my back, as I stepped
from the yellow school bus, and hurried in the direction of the small, two
story apartment building, a seething cacophony of taunts and insults seemed to
buffet me forward. Marc Leftcoff had sneered that the apartment complex where my
family dwelled was, "The Projects" -- that he proclaimed to be
"a roach nest for losers, unemployed rednecks and divorced hussies -- only
a place white niggers would live."
(And no, I didn't grow-up
in a Quentin Tarantino movie. People, even children, spoke like that in those
days.)
Months earlier, on my first
day of school -- after our family had moved from Birmingham to Atlanta, where
my sister's and my new school district included white, laboring class families
(often shattered and reconfigured by divorce and second and third marriages)
and neighborhoods of affluent, upper middle class Jewish families -- I was
debriefed by Josh Corbin.
"So," he clicked, his tongue producing a percussive, supercilious sound by creating a vacuum at the top of his mouth. "Are you upper-class, upper-middle class (like we are) just plain middle class, lower-middle class, or poor (he emitted that clicking sound at the word, poor). You look poor. What is that you have on -- Kmart Specials (click). My clothes come from Saks in New York. My Mother and I buy them there when we visit our relatives in New York City, three or four times a year."
I had no idea what he was
talking about. But, I detected, through the mind-diminishing haze of my
naivety, a discernible menace in his tone.
"You should really have your parents buy you some presentable clothes: What's the matter, can't they afford to buy you anything decent?"
I scanned his outfit. A
little alligator seemed to be smirking at me from his shirt. Why did this kid
have shiny dimes glinting from the surface of his oxblood loafers? ("Why
insert pennies when you can afford dimes," Corbin was inclined to boast?)
And what was the meaning of
that clicking sound that he kept making with his mouth?
Later, I apprehended the
sound pertained to the fact that I, and my family, had been labeled,
"White Trash."
Of course, I was ignorant
of the social implications of the term, but, nevertheless, an image formed in
my mind: My family had been dismissed as tossed-away refuse, reeking like
garbage in the Georgia sun, weightless as windblown litter. Inconsequential: our
existence, only a foul odor, fleetingly detected, and deserving, when noticed at
all, of the contempt of society's betters.
My heart felt as though it
had been ripped into tatters in a windstorm of shame. It seemed as though all I
knew about myself had been negated.
This is how shame works on
a person. Internalized shame seems to commandeer a person's DNA and replicate
itself into the cellular structure of his being.
In the thrall of
internalized shame, one is gripped by the compulsion to hide his face from the
world. One's own thoughts and feeling seem a foul pestilence from which to
flee. Thus, a person will come to believe that the only way to absolve oneself
of one's inherent reek (Marc Leftcoff claimed he had seen my father shirtless
and announced to our classmates that he "stunk like a rutting
nigger") was to become someone else to have a family blessed with money
and nice things to have a smug alligator gazing upon life from Saks Fifth
Avenue-procured shirts, and have dimes glinting unto creation from the tops of
one's polished loafers. This is one, among multiple means, that the
capitalist/consumer state forcefully usurps one's mind and holds it in torment.
After school, buffeted by
these sessions of shaming, I would take refuge in the wooded areas near my
home. There, sheltered among the pines, popular trees, and ancient oaks
of the Georgia Piedmont, I would seek solace in books and my own wild
imaginings.
I recall writing a story in
my loose leaf notebook involving a lonely, bullied boy, who, shaken by shame
and humiliation, played hooky from school.
Hiding out in a section of
woods near his school, he was bitten, while exploring a deep ravine, by a
venomous copperhead snake camouflaged by a carpet of pines straw. The incident
was witnessed by a grizzled hermit/wizard who dwelled in a secret cave in the
woods. The boy is revived by an elixir of anti-venom of the wizard's devising
that had the unattended side effect of bestowing the boy with the ability to
bring inanimate objects to life which, the boy, much to the distress and
consternation of the old wizard, utilizes to transform the Izod alligators
adorning his school yard tormentor's clothing into agents of vengeance that
devour the offending parties.
Anger dwells as deep as the
pain leveled by being shamed and humiliated. From road rage, to internet
trolling, to the compulsion to humiliate women in certain forms of porn, to
right-wing radio ranters, to violent video games, to gun-sown episodes of mass
murder -- the shame-besieged psyche of the American male, in vain, attempts to
mitigate a psychologically devastating sense of powerlessness.
The actual progenitors of
his torment reside in the ghostly domain of personal memory as well as are
veiled from view by a class-stratified economic system that serves as an analog
of childhood humiliation.
But such prodigious amounts
of pain do not remain buried. In the current day U.S., there are multiple
factors that bar access to collective memory: the heap of fragmented images
constituting the mass media multi-scape and its attendant 24 hour news cycle;
suburban atomization and urban alienation; a cultural refusal to confront the
true nature of the nation's history, other than through hagiography, because to
face our past would serve to bring us to a rude awakening regarding where we
stand at present.
Cue: Existential dread. We
are approaching the endgame of (global) capitalism; the system is headed
straight to the landfill (its own creation) of history (that is, if global,
late stage capitalism doesn't bury the human species first by means of
ecocide). Therefore, it is imperative, as we move towards the future, that we
straddle the past, as we become attuned to the lamentation of the ghosts of
memory, personal and collective.
Otherwise, the unhinged
among us, psychically bearing the things we bury, literalize our denial, even
by acts of murdering the living (even school children) in a futile attempt to
kill the raging ghosts of memory deferred.
There has been a deadly
legacy wrought by social structures that inflict shame and thus sows seeds of
inarticulate rage. By the malefic vehicle of these tormented individuals, who
are lashing out like a wounded animal, we can apprehend much about the
death-besotted trajectory of U.S. culture.
Deep emotional scars can
warp libido; thus, in our age of corporate state hyper-authoritarianism,
obsessive materialism, and neo-puritan pathology, all too many people have
become terrified of their own passion, from sweat plangent lust to incandescent
enthusiasm, right down to even accepting the shadows and perfumes borne of an
inner life, and have withdrawn into forms of self-exile, such as addiction,
alienation, depression, compulsive materialism, and narcissistic striving.
We are convinced we know
our own mind…that the decisions we make are based on logic and the wisdom
gathered from experience. We believe our night-borne dreams and seemingly
random, daylight imaginings are furtive shadows, inconsequential to the choices
we make moment by moment as we navigate the linear timescape of our days.
Yet, what if you were
visited by a rude angel who revealed to you how your mind had been usurped --
the moments of your day harnessed for agendas not your own; your life had been
waylaid by interlopers (e.g., Madison Avenue, family legacies, social
pressures) who you do not remember granting entrance into your mind?
What kind of a tale of
horror is this, you would demand? How did it come to this? Angel, you would cry
out, what kind of a cruel joke is this? Why me?
And the angel would simply
flash you eternity's impersonal grin and tell you it is not personal. You have
done the very human thing of gathering thoughts and beliefs like a bower bird
gathers shiny objects. You have mistaken the bauble-stippled nest of found
material for the honey-hive of your soul.
In contrast, passion
arrives as a surging flood; the caress of silver moonlight on dark water; a
golden fire blazing through one's blood. But its purpose does not end there
i.e., in a fleeting incandescence of the soul. The energies of a fast moving
wildfire must be transmuted into the persistence inherent to a stalwart heart
-- the maintenance of an interior hearth.
Those who evince passion
will suffer. Worse, those who demur will suffer confinement in a cold,
protective lock-up of their own construction. The union of passion and
suffering, with much patience and persistence, transforms winged passion into a
deep-dwelling compassion. Luminous angels are drawn earthward to weep.
Life beckons, but all too
many ignore the call or defer adherence until it is too late…Too often people
confuse a sense of purpose with an obsession for seeking safety; they long for
purity, and fear the sublime awkwardness that allows you to lose your balance
and fall into your essential self.
By embodying the latter,
you have entered a realm that exist beyond success and failure, because when
you venture into the heart of creation, you venture deep into your own being.
The more passion you evince in life the deeper you inhabit your own humanity.
The only failure in life
comes to be when you dismiss destiny's invitation to dance.
The death-besotted,
collective psyche of the late capitalist state reveals the consequences of a
culture-wide refusal to heed the call.
"Until you
make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it
fate." - C.G. Jung
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