illustration by IAN MOORE
On
the 150th anniversary of
the COMMUNIST MANIFESTO
Thesis, antithesis, synthesis: none of the shells contains the pea. And
these end-of-millennium pyramid schemes to plunder whole nations of their meager margin
are mere revisitings of Aguirre’s journey. In this post-modern Eldorado, though,
Indians, jaguars and macaws have been scattered, their bromeliad forests shattered and
burned to grow freeze-dried hamburgers for our astronauts – and by the trillions,
mind you, there’s progress yet. Now that the difference between tragedy and farce has
long withered away, you can locate the prophets and disciples on line at some obscure
British Museum in cyberspace, just keystrokes from the global porno village and the daily
listings of profit and price.
Stadiums and spectacles! Half the proles in prison, the rest gone shopping, destiny
dispensed from slot machines. Looters great and humble now gnaw their booty in the cellar
of the self, while dynasties conjured and deleted in a day tornado overhead, the serpent
endlessly swallowing its tail. Faulty wiring in the cooling towers,
more tumors in your scan, the last songbirds ignited on an electrified fence to keep the
barbarians out. Your birthplace bulldozed, finally, to save it, or to build the cineplex
where you can gaze as peripheries melt down, metropoles give way, and slaves squabble
murderously for an extra stripe.
Carlos, Federico, listen: different specters haunt us now – laboratory
plagues and wild weather, myriad revenge of the manufactured ecstasies,of wonders
too wonderful, too technologically sweet, that once slumbered in the lap of
social labor. And this coming mutual ruination of the classes, contending or
not contending, general contamination of both paradise and hell. Prehistory,
history, post-history: another conundrum, new gigawatt empires resemble the
old. The hunger the same, and the rage, the despair, the everlasting uncertainty
and agitation, the human sacrifice and idiocies of urban life. Pharaoh clones
skate across the cracking, disintegrating ice of what was once thought solid,
while someone’s young kids still slave in the mills and mines, barefoot,
ravenous, under the whip, nothing to lose but their chains – and a ruin
to win.
David Watson
Detroit
