ENTROPY
Entropic nuances in the spaces between words. In conversation, hesitant mumblings, whispers of an unseen future. Shapes half glimpsed through the charades of corporate television programming. The neo-socialist rhetoric of the government is soothing our petty first-world concerns. New Goldsteins not yet known but commonly agreed upon. Exchanging glances furtively out of the corner of our eyes around the dinner table and the take-out shop. Who will be the next to take the fall? Which revolutionary leader will we chase into a hole so he can be dragged out and shot like a dog? Which civilian population will rise up in anger and riot when the Police have shot dead one of their young men? Last month a man stabbed another man on the streets of London and stayed to chat with the Press, knife in hand.
We are bathed in the glow of high-definition live-feed transmissions as waves of edited sound-bite entropy wash over us. The nuclear family has long vanished. Mother, Father, and young Jack and Digger the Dog, their brains fried and eyeballs popped long ago as televised stimulus totally overloaded their synapses. Catatonic to begin with, they couldn’t even scream as they marched into the long night of children’s television programming twilight of the idols. First the people were separated from the land, then the communities were systematically devastated, then the family was broken. Now we are each alone.
What new environmental disaster will shock us from the comfort of our first-world economy capitalist democratic lounge suites? Is it real, we ask ourselves, does global warming exist? Yesterday the worst floods in a decade tore through Germany and Hungary. Grand distractions from the grand design, the new world order. There are millions starving in sub-Saharan Africa, and glaciers melting in the Himalayas threatening water security for China.
We should care they say, donate now. Take a stroll through any of
our public housing estates and it’s like a walk through a ruined civilization. Burnt out cars, this is a reality check. A warzone depopulated. What happened here? The silence, the burnt out homes, the glazed windows that reflect the ghosts of dreams lost and buried. Was that a face at the window, before it turns away? A woman staring blankly at a backyard of dirt as she sucks on a cigarette drawn from a khaki green pack emblazoned with images of decay. She yells at some young children out of sight. She doesn’t look up as I pass, if she sees me, she says nothing.
our public housing estates and it’s like a walk through a ruined civilization. Burnt out cars, this is a reality check. A warzone depopulated. What happened here? The silence, the burnt out homes, the glazed windows that reflect the ghosts of dreams lost and buried. Was that a face at the window, before it turns away? A woman staring blankly at a backyard of dirt as she sucks on a cigarette drawn from a khaki green pack emblazoned with images of decay. She yells at some young children out of sight. She doesn’t look up as I pass, if she sees me, she says nothing.
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