Djelloul Marbrook

There are African elephants and Asian elephants, but nobody talks about The Great Invisible American Elephant whose herds roam the cultural scene.

There they are, standing in hospital waiting rooms, in news rooms, in class rooms, in back rooms. And here we are,  navigating around them like waiters with a tray of cocktails over our heads. Problem? Cocktail, anyone?

Anyone who has ever tried to schedule a test with a hospital or a laboratory and encountered a telephone tree, in fact anyone who has ever encountered a telephone tree anywhere, has been run over by one of these elephants.Human beings are disappearing from the service landscape as surely as jobs are disappearing from America. We are said to live in a service industry society: where is the service?

Here we are pretending not to see the elephants in the room, even though they’re standing on our toes and crushing us into wallpaper.

We know something is terribly wrong with our way of life. It simply isn’t what we say it is. It isn’t what we say we want. We’re a nation of churchgoers, espousing compassion for one another, and yet we have allowed Corporate America and its political stooges to fashion a society that doesn’t give a damn about us. How do they do that? Well, they game our individualistic tradition against our concern for each other, just as they game the race card and the sex card and call them by other names.

We know the energy crisis isn’t going away, but the politicians keep on pretending there are quick fixes, such as drilling offshore. They think a democracy can thrive on their lies, or do they really believe in democracy anymore? Is democracy what they can get away with?

We know many of us are sickening and dying because our health care system is inferior to that of thirty-six other nations, according to the World Health Organization, but the politicians act as if they’re patching old tires with tired ideas.

We know our wages are inadequate, but the politicians tell us to spend more for God and country. The banking, real estate industries and credit sold us defective and risky instruments and now they’re blaming the borrowers and asking for tax money to bail them out.

We know the flag represents our ideals, but the politicians tell us it belongs to an exclusive club to which many of us need not apply. They tell us it belongs only to those who support reckless military adventures in support of our largest industry, the defense industry.

The elephants are popping the walls, crushing our feet, and yet we have agreed to play this terrible game of not noticing that something is wrong.

We open our mouths to talk about the deterioration of our quality of life, and the politicians and preachers say, Let’s talk about family values, right to life, gay marriage, stem cell research, and all those other issues that loom so large when your grandmother is dying of medical neglect and your kids are flipping burgers because you have no money to send them to college.

We notice our jobs slipping away, and the politicians say, Hey, let’s kill some Arabs or bomb Iran or have conniptions because the sovereign state of California is allowing gays to marry.

Just as long as the CEOs get their bonuses for ruining companies and lying to shareholders, just as long as the press remains a corporate press release, just as long as the politicians keep stuffing their pockets with legalized bribes, forget about the elephant in the room.—DM