Getting Your Rock 'n' Roll Whilst Immersed in Listlessly Stagnant Commercial Environments
by James Albert Barr
"Try to run. Try to hide. Break on through to the other side!" - The Doors
Just this afternoon I was visiting my local Goodwill store, perusing their DVD selection looking for wonderfully cheap, great finds - I was not disappointed. For a mere two dollars, I found a two-disc special edition copy of the 1985 cult classic, H.P. Lovecraft's Re-Animator, which was directed by Stuart Gordon and starring Jeffrey Combs and Barbara Crampton.
The irony of finding that very film on DVD, while I was immersed in said store's borderline moribund atmosphere, was both amusing to me and quite telling, given what I observed while exercising my right as a consumer to purchase "second-hand goods". It was not so much the case of witnessing a store accommodating a couple dozen apparent, lower-end customers (myself, notwithstanding) with typically non-descript visages atop of their uniformly sloped shoulders, but the utterly mouse-like, under-their-breath, defeatingly-subservient tones in their voices, customers and workers alike, that sounded so sad and insufferable.
We weren't in a church or at a funeral or in a library, for crissakes; we were all in a frickin' store! An all too common, run-of-the-mill, goods 'n' services store... with a "security guard" posted at the store's front entrance, interestingly enough. What exactly is the point of this security guard being there now, after the COVID restrictions were lifted this past February? I mean, wasn't that the main reason for deploying security guards at establishments like Goodwill or Value Village in the first place; to uphold the pandemic mandates and restrictions? I don't remember ever noticing any security guards at these particular businesses in the pre-COVID era. So, why are they still there now? The answer of course is: "new normal". And there's the undoubted understanding that, by this late-summer/early fall, the COVID restrictions will almost definitely be returning, as the "Great Reseters" continue to whittle away at the collective spirit and will of the common population until we finally surrender our constitutional and chartered freedoms, reasoned and informed voice, and confidence in actual democracy.
Anyway, while scanning said DVD selection, I was a few feet away from the changing rooms. I noticed one of Goodwill's worker-bees shut a changing room door with her foot, because she was holding a couple of garments in her arms - I wasn't at all taken aback by her actions, and didn't really see a problem here, but that's just me. She was then approached by what I would hazard a guess to be a female store manager. This manager, who was only a few feet away from worker-bee, gingerly went up to her and whispered in her ear asking if she'd like to keep her job with a very "Karen-like" tone in her voice. The worker, in my estimation, reluctantly proffered an affirmative, so said manager "warned her" not to do such a thing again. This kind of demoralizing behaviour, both giving and taking, is becoming a more and more prevalent, default-setting disposition in people; especially people without any firm consciousness and critical acumen in terms of how they perceive themselves, others, culture, and the world in general. That renders them more easily docile, compliable and malleable; they'll represent little to no trouble at all to their HR-educated superiors in our "equity and diversity-strong PC culture".
All the while, observing the patheticness of the socially stagnant environment around me, I could hear several rock 'n' roll classics sequentially blasting from the store's P.A. system with its attendant irony screaming beyond my ear drums and into my very internal constitution. There were songs like Trooper's "Raise a Little Hell", Joan Jett's "I Love Rock 'n' Roll", and even The Doors' "Break On Through" emitting, with unbridled, pre-millennial spirit, from the ceiling speakers for all to hear! The disheartened sense I irrepressibly felt, mentally juggling these glaringly incongruous phenomena, was indeed palpable.
The truly harrowing irony of course is the blunt realization that rock 'n roll itself - thanks in great part to the Telecommunications Act of 1996 being signed into legislation by Bill Clinton, which enabled a few corporations to buy up all radio and T.V. stations and deliberately kill program quality - has long since been captured, de-clawed, appropriated, absorbed and fed back into the system, the Matrix, the now de-cloaking authoritarian state, accelerationist capitalism, the coming Great Reset, the potential Singularity, ergo, the "post-human age". I do seem to be noticing some push-back in response to all the oligarchical/totalitarian nefariousness being so obviously imposed by most western leaders, and the heartless, power-mongering globalists those leaders ultimately answer to, but a far more concerted, power-of-the-people effort is needed in order to pacify or "reset" their minds and attitudes toward their far less-privileged fellow human beings.
