badlands (revised)
Posted: January 3rd, 2010, 9:58 pm
He knows some badlands out on Route 23, weathered down, beaten, stained, streaked in minerals and time—indistinct mounds and flats as you crest a rise, though they leach color in late afternoon solar haze. He knows a place where he can watch them dissolve, darken into sooty old structures, and flats become fallow pavement. He’s never seen a guard dog around. Nothing to guard. Stain and ruin. He’ll sit there for hours, watch heat waves simmer on fissured concrete and sticker vines. Sure the Rust Belt collapsed and we hemorrhaged red ink for decades, but we held our own. He calls it a house of cards, the global banking ruse, bottomless deficit. Downer. He laments an ascendant culture of greed, the mass-consumption motor of everything, transnational corporate pillage, the pyramid’s dissolving base. Downer, man. He laments our dishonest, privatized wars. But you can’t touch our wars.
He stews about numberless blocks of dry digits, satellite, cable, whole buildings jammed with servers, and lost promise of it all. He googled a 2002 article at a library—Enron shoved millions at Bin Laden and the Taliban for a pipeline until things soured, and Cheney told his players about an invasion well before 9/11/01. The same Enron that wiped out people’s life savings. It’s right there. Public. Associated Press. The “Gestapo” never stole your high speed connection. But our wars are untouchable. I’ll be seeing you in all the old familiar places, old wounds, devil deals. Means and ends. We could finally set it all right. It’s not like you’d invite these savages to dinner—our detestable, one-time “allies” up on the Big Screen of Doom. He hates the big screen too, his Orwell shtick, nattering nabob. He hates the big lies, the bigger the better, he’ll never learn. “We have Google now; let’s use it.”
He should stick to badlands, teetering mouse-click economies on rusted girders, jimson weed graffiti on crumbling suburbs, training films, mopping up bombed out slums. Roll a six-lane hangover to lands of old hangars and shot-up factories. Down the vines from Hangar Nine the boys used to wire their war birds, wire bolts to mammoth Pratt and Whitneys, wipe oil from their brows, feed the screaming raptors. We won the war, built some highways, gas pumps, roadhouses, neon swoop, runways and factories, a lot of factories. The Strip is everywhere. Roll those six lanes, oil-slicked over a hundred rotted rail spurs, a desert rising rusted on peeled cigarette billboards, broken barstools, past gothic mills, cracked formica, taped vinyl booths, bacon grease and black Joe, tangible, pre-digital grime. Physics fell to hordes of microchips, forced underground, binary. It all changed. Music was shinier, vibration more petrified, pain less real to touch. He can’t put a finger on it.
Stick to badlands. Write of hell fire steel mills in the best of times, snow blanketed toxic debris, soft bumps, gabled production houses starved on a steel sky, soft mortar and grunge, checkerboards of shot-out panes. Write of teenage raves and wild dogs roaming filthy literary tombs, Detroit, Youngstown, Sometown mass- producing rust. We built the damn things, built them in factories moving around like drunken walls at the Zircon Lounge went south, pistons and carburetors, switches, toggles and cables, gears and gaskets, hoses hissing snake oil men, castle and crenellation, Genesis, Revelation. We hauled rocks up the hill, rocks from the ground, built pyramids, cathedrals and pound for pound the legends and bombs, we got used to the sound. Everything fought itself; rain fought its only sun. The roads went south, deep south, river bed ghosts, soldiers clutching a song. Someone had to haul those rocks and it was damn hot.
He stews about numberless blocks of dry digits, satellite, cable, whole buildings jammed with servers, and lost promise of it all. He googled a 2002 article at a library—Enron shoved millions at Bin Laden and the Taliban for a pipeline until things soured, and Cheney told his players about an invasion well before 9/11/01. The same Enron that wiped out people’s life savings. It’s right there. Public. Associated Press. The “Gestapo” never stole your high speed connection. But our wars are untouchable. I’ll be seeing you in all the old familiar places, old wounds, devil deals. Means and ends. We could finally set it all right. It’s not like you’d invite these savages to dinner—our detestable, one-time “allies” up on the Big Screen of Doom. He hates the big screen too, his Orwell shtick, nattering nabob. He hates the big lies, the bigger the better, he’ll never learn. “We have Google now; let’s use it.”
He should stick to badlands, teetering mouse-click economies on rusted girders, jimson weed graffiti on crumbling suburbs, training films, mopping up bombed out slums. Roll a six-lane hangover to lands of old hangars and shot-up factories. Down the vines from Hangar Nine the boys used to wire their war birds, wire bolts to mammoth Pratt and Whitneys, wipe oil from their brows, feed the screaming raptors. We won the war, built some highways, gas pumps, roadhouses, neon swoop, runways and factories, a lot of factories. The Strip is everywhere. Roll those six lanes, oil-slicked over a hundred rotted rail spurs, a desert rising rusted on peeled cigarette billboards, broken barstools, past gothic mills, cracked formica, taped vinyl booths, bacon grease and black Joe, tangible, pre-digital grime. Physics fell to hordes of microchips, forced underground, binary. It all changed. Music was shinier, vibration more petrified, pain less real to touch. He can’t put a finger on it.
Stick to badlands. Write of hell fire steel mills in the best of times, snow blanketed toxic debris, soft bumps, gabled production houses starved on a steel sky, soft mortar and grunge, checkerboards of shot-out panes. Write of teenage raves and wild dogs roaming filthy literary tombs, Detroit, Youngstown, Sometown mass- producing rust. We built the damn things, built them in factories moving around like drunken walls at the Zircon Lounge went south, pistons and carburetors, switches, toggles and cables, gears and gaskets, hoses hissing snake oil men, castle and crenellation, Genesis, Revelation. We hauled rocks up the hill, rocks from the ground, built pyramids, cathedrals and pound for pound the legends and bombs, we got used to the sound. Everything fought itself; rain fought its only sun. The roads went south, deep south, river bed ghosts, soldiers clutching a song. Someone had to haul those rocks and it was damn hot.
