I learned sentimentality through romantic movies and had that learning deepened in literature classes. There I learned to associate growth with pain and focus with discomfort. In general, progress was neither a process nor a result that carried or ended with a smile. Smirks were permitted as evidence of inside knowledge that made looking down on the infidels, serfs and pawns part of the initiation to the good life.
Deep pain of exclusion from both the assumed wholesomeness and clarity of the “Street,” the lumpen proletariat and the iced creamed smoothness of the others we saw routinely having it all together on the TV. The “Street” too was learned fiction: Frankenstein meets Bigger Thomas as a real life naturalist character who will shoot yo’ ass for snacks, and laugh about it on the way to or from the store.
The “iced creamed smoothness” eschews the down and dirty action of the “Street” for the heightened pleasure of global destruction. Drones room the skies routinely shooting innocents by mistake—a small price to pay for our freedom. Polar bears sipping cokes on melting icebergs, bemused really, maybe a WTF look plastered across their mugs. And what just swam by? Salmons swimming downstream?
Life as a lived experience of isolation in the middle of Times Square, or bumping up against an imagined past in Atlanta’s Little Five Points. Sad shit unfolding from enema’s prompts…. And where’s the Batman?
Love for Black people so strong it hurts: how do you hug a mother in Somalia clutching the ashen ghost of a child whose life has been slowly eaten away by the absence of food…make you wanna wholla…way dey do our lives…
And what’s this I hear about seeds to developing nations, seeds that grow and don’t replicate—so they must be purchased every crop season; seeds that gangster the indigenous eco-system so that it becomes a whore to agricultural imperialism. No farmer’s market here baby, just the bitter looks of the indigene who were better off before our help.
Somewhere half a globe away serious men walk manicured lawns carrying a bag of sticks to hit little white balls into black holes. These are televised as real event horizons: “spacetime boundaries beyond which events cannot affect an outside observer.” Has humanity reached a point of no return?
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