Author: Phil Rockstroh

Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. Yet a bio amounts to dharma for dimwits: It defines a human being in the same manner and degree of veracity as a restaurant menu describes the various slabs of meat offered … commodified things that were once living beings.

Reclaiming The Commons: Part 1

31/03/2012

The USA gets its own version of the Criminal Justice Bill, only there are no riots, merely more faces buried in iPhone screens. Reclaiming The Commons: Human Lessons in the Era of Corporatism and...

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On Regaining a Spirit of Defiance: Part Two

11/03/2012

"Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go. — T.S. Eliot The vehemence of the imagination motivates. It rages against oppression, as it, in equal...

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On Regaining a Spirit of Defiance: Part One

05/03/2012

 'I'm Worried Now but I Won't Be Worried Long' The course of action taken by the present day U.S. political class in addressing the era's rising tide of economic hardship and...

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End of Empire: Part 2

25/02/2012

I ask you this, if the defining aspects of our existence were constructed of concrete, would not the world be made of the material of a prison? Moreover, is this not the building material and psychic...

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Phil, rockstroh, politics, trebuchet, magazine, article, consumerism, capitalism, ows, activism, occupy

A Journey To The End Of Empire: Pt. 1

18/02/2012

It Is Always Darkest Right Before It Goes Completely Black "When the poet stands at nadir the world must indeed be upside-down. If the poet can no longer speak for society, but only for himself,...

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Spirits, Madness, and Love.

10/02/2012

Life as lived in a late empire, in which one's humanity is deemed only worth its value in dollars to the corporate state. Wherein one's identity is flooded by the come-ons and emotional...

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Negotiating a Landscape of Hypocrisy

30/01/2012

When Bill Clinton and his scary, scary libido stalked the public realm, Republicans warned his presence was so anathema to all things holy that his hot breath served to salt the wings of choirs of...

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OWS 2012: Still Resisting

07/01/2012

In my opinion, when people opine that the OWS movement is about — or should be about — the airing of this particular grievance or that it must bandy this or that particular demand —...

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Idiot Wind: The Eternal Politics of the 1970s

31/12/2011

Unpopular wars drag on, gas prices erratically rise and inexplicably fall, as clouds of cynicism, dark as Richard Nixon’s perpetual five o’clock shadow, brood over the length of the U.S....

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“By Imbeciles Who Really Mean It”: Lost Verities and Dirty Hippies

24/12/2011

Regardless of the dissembling of corporate state propagandists, free market capitalism has always been a government subsidized, bubble-inflating, swindlers’ game, in which, psychopathic...

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Dying Empire Bebop

17/12/2011

Outside my apartment window, across a wind-blown courtyard, the crimson leaves of a white oak are falling into a swirling breeze, revealing the gnarled limbs and stark branches of the time-battered...

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The Degree To Which You Resist Is The Degree To Which You Are Free

10/12/2011

I've noticed a meme beginning to fester among liberal insiders who are positing that the Occupy Wall Street movement is starting to "distract" the citizenry from the wicked machinations...

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The Police State Makes Its Move

03/12/2011

Retaining One's Humanity in the Face of Tyranny For days now, we have endured demonstrably false propaganda that the fallen soldiers of U.S. wars sacrificed their lives for "our...

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Denial and Addiction

19/11/2011

Punching a Hole in Bubbles of Denial and Addiction: Late Capitalism and Its Discontents of the American Autumn The global designs of the neo-liberal agenda have met the living architecture of a...

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Why OWS Has Already Overcome

05/11/2011

Police Repression, Official Mendacity and Why OWS Has Already Overcome Until recent events proved otherwise, the hyper-commercialized surface of the corporate state gave the appearance of being too...

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Phil, rockstroh, politics, trebuchet, magazine, article, consumerism, capitalism, ows, activism, occupy

Rome Wasn’t Burned In A Day: Wall Street 2011

16/10/2011

Replacing Liberal Timidity With Leftist Passion Why is it that self-termed progressives are in full retreat (and have been for decades) from the witless army of angry clowns and hack illusionists of...

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Occupying the Heart of the Beast: Wall Street Protest 2011

13/10/2011

Occupying the Heart of the Beast: Observations, Amid the Multitudes in Liberty Plaza where both the winged spirit of commitment and the rag and bone shop of the heart abide. The ongoing exercise in...

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Life in an Age of Looting: London 2011

17/08/2011

Life in an Age of Looting: "Some Will Rob You with a Sixgun and Some with a Fountain Pen" As the poor of Britain rise in a fury of inchoate rage and stock exchanges worldwide experience...

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The Arts of Life They Changed Into the Arts of Death

05/08/2011

As of late, Pat Robertson has been waxing apocalyptic regarding mankind's imminent reckoning with wrathful divinity… …while liberals have been sharing scary bedtime stories by the...

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Leaving The Church of Free Market Miracles

27/05/2011

Where does one find succor and seeds of renewal in times such as these? Everything that everyone is afraid of has already happened: The fragility of capitalism, which we don't want to admit; the...

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“Crack makes me feel like Jesus ought to”

20/05/2011

Drugged under one Crack nation - The United States of Dixieland: Corporatism, empire, Jesus, and the death genes....

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Interstates and States of Grief

13/05/2011

On US Interstates, we meet the US empire coming towards us. In this evocative video, we meet confederate ghosts and demons of consumer emptiness. We travel down the highway, propelled by engines of...

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The Politics Of Revenge And Submission

06/05/2011

Transmuting Lead into Gold: America's Politics Of Revenge And Submission. When the individual feels, the community reels Osama Bin Laden is dead. And so is the U.S. republic. We had to destroy...

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Why Are Americans So Easily Conned?

06/05/2011

Our blind optimism allows us to live in comfort zones, but it turns vast spaces of the world into death zones. The technologies that inflicted upon the world the ongoing tragedies in both the Gulf of...

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Among the Ciphers of a Declining Empire

29/04/2011

Among Ciphers, Barn Burners and Confidence Artists: A Comb-Over Treatment for Declining Empire. Like postmodernist architecture, in which the aesthetic criteria of a structure's exterior often...

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To Hell with Centrism: We Must Reclaim the Inspired Edge

27/03/2011

During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act. – George Orwell I don’t want to be part of your revolution if I can’t dance. – Emma Goldman...

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Amnesia As A Way Of Life: WikiLeaks Amid The “Careless People”

26/03/2011

As many wags have noted, the disclosures of Wikileaks have subjected the US Empire and its operatives to a full-body scan. Turnaround is fair play, because, until now, in the US, the powerless masses...

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