Unlocking the secret sounds of language

[Richard Smith]

I don¹t know why people do what they do
But obviously I wonder a lot...
After leaving the Santa Fe area
And moving here in Oklahoma
on the very gut bulge above the bible belt
I see people existing
A kind of automated living
Who sell out for very little
Life slashed half/price

One can live and die here
Leaving only garbage in the woods
And its acceptable patriotic living.
Human beings reduced
to herds of mall clones
happy littering churchgoers
the inevitable walmart shopper

Its no wonder why a few americans
All of a sudden want to leave it all
To pack up and head for the jungles,the reservations
To become a missionary to ³save² the poor ndns
Or to become an archaeologist to study coprolites
Escaping to go study some OTHER people
as anthropologists, as an anywhere-but-here-ist
Far AWAY from this seducing pull towards sameness
This relentless drive towards standardizing the humanbeing
To get out of this sink hole sucking after our souls

And because there seems to be no cure
For this standardizing of the humanrace
Alarmed, people escape to any distant holdouts
Places where soul-beings still exist freely
But at what price?
What we have called the march of civilization
Isn¹t it truthfully a form of cultural-domestication?
 We need to look carefully at what¹s become of our animal relatives.
A living traditional sensory sharpened human-being
Is reduced to ³data for study, conversion or betterment²
Once domesticated a species no longer retains sharp senses
To detect actual threats to its survival,
And instead usually develops weird phobias of all kinds
Ripe for mass definition and control
And eventually and inevitably becomes
The educated and true world class citizen
Where culture is expressed on the tee-shirt
And not from the heart
The perfect walmart shopper

Richard Zane Smith
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/ilat/attachments/20060511/674ef858/attachment.htm>