Random Radio 250702 (470)
Freeform music, Wednesday night from 8-10 MDT on Gila/Mimbres Community Radio, KURU 89.1 FM in Silver City, NM and online at GMCR.org. Support Community Radio!!!
Excerpt from “The Synthetic Flag Salute: A Tape-Loop Epistle”
They pump a 4th of July message straight into the veins - no antiseptic, no warning, just flash-powder optimism burning down the synapse like a firecracker on a tenement rooftop. Don’t fence me in, the screen blares, while the real fences go electric around detention centers stacked with deportees caught between a plane wreck at Los Gatos and a classified executive order. Kids in heatstroke-yellow shirts still humming “Lift Every Voice and Sing” while ICE buses hum under the overpass like something out of the Inquisition, digitized.
There’s a kid named Johnny they rolled out again for the camera - the usual “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” number. Pinned medals. Born on the Fourth of July with three tours, half a leg, and enough synthetic dopamine to convince himself he’s living in a sweet America, until the VA tells him no more scripts, no more housing, no more republic. Mister 4th of July in a Walmart lot, fireworks ricocheting off the shopping carts like misplaced ordnance.
Meanwhile, the tourists wave plastic flags made in Malaysia. Rally ’round the flag, stitched by offshore children. One nation under a groove, piped into the earbuds of Starbucks waiters and Lyft drivers. There are young Americans on every corner, underemployed and overmedicated, slow-dancing with the apocalypse on TikTok livestreams. The groove’s synthetic now. No vinyl hiss. No funk. Just algorithmic patriotism with the soul siphoned out.
The volunteers aren’t who they used to be. Not the Peace Corps - this is freelance security, camoed up and jacked on internet mythos, guarding statues like they’re altars to forgotten gods. Someone slipped a capsule into the collective communion wine and suddenly Independence Day means shoot first, tweet later.
Up in Temporarily Humboldt County, some ancestor’s bones are being paved over for another patriotic golf course. Take an Indian to lunch, says the ad campaign, just don’t ask about the unceded land. Manifest Destiny 2.0. Now with drone surveillance and eco-certification.
I remember the old recordings. Pastures of plenty gone radioactive, cows glowing like saints in fallout fields. Dust Bowl refugee upgraded to climate migrant, moving inland as the coastal dreams sink beneath the finance storms. Woody sang “This Land Is Your Land,” but they redacted the last verses in the textbooks, right after replacing the word “solidarity” with “entrepreneurship.”
The myth of America the Beautiful is now a sponsored hallucination. Sponsored by megacorps. Curated by Pentagon psy-ops. Filtered through 4K screens and fed back like bile on a spoon. Ain’t livin’ in America, baby - we’re surviving the simulation, pretending the Stars and Stripes Forever hasn’t already been trademarked and auctioned off to the highest bidder on a yacht named “Liberty.”
They gave us Muhammad Ali and called it progress, but they still jail the protestors. Still gas the crowds. Still sell the bombs. Sweet land of lip service and legislative rot. This land is your land, all right. As long as your land comes with a mortgage, a tax lien, and a silent agreement to never mention the bodies under the floorboards.
God bless America. It’s bleeding out in augmented reality. Wave a flag, get a coupon. Salute the hologram. Obey the script. And never, ever look behind the curtain. There’s nothing back there but mirrors and a tape machine skipping on an old national anthem loop.
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