Most times I sleep. And sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night to such horrors I have to flip open my laptop and read about the world just to believe it. We are the age of “increased learning” and “advanced knowledge.” We habituate in the climes of international terror and under the constant threat of nuclear holocaust. America is the impassioned center of ideological warfare; the face of the world’s hope for freedom; and the symbol of power’s curse.
As we bask in the illumination of our PCs a child cries out in Darfur under a tranquil black sky, back lit by weeping stars—the transitory silence torn away by the reverberation of AK-47′s ripping through canvas tents; the screams of mothers watching their children taken from them before their eyes. While a celubutante femme-fatale flips her bleached locks under a cloud of hairspray the ozone rips wide open—and a faulty satellite hurtles toward earth unabated by the technology which created it.
We are all Frankensteins, shuffling around in lock-step…struck dumb by mass media, blinded by silver screens, eyes gauged with sexual imagery at the checkout aisle, ears pierced with synthetic beats laid down by technocrats rather than artists—we swallow Xanex, Ambien, and Oxycontin by the handful, with shunts in our heart, stints in our brain, anthropomorphic limbs clinched around plastic cash cards; robots probing our bodies under the spell of anesthesia; we plug in our brains via USB port to absorb the latest trends in the stock market and jet off to our work stations in automobiles finely tuned and controlled by microchip processors.
To wear the mark of the beast under the guise of an Identity Chip in one’s wrist does not sound as far fetched as it once did. Nor does the Orwellian nightmare of a worldwide net of security cameras. The Telescreens. I am Harrison Bergeron, weaving through sidewalk crowds with the mechanized growl of downtown traffic crushing my every thought into a million shards of unresolved thought; with earbuds jammed into my head blocking out the still small voice reaching out to me; an endless stream of titillating impulses and sensory distractions sweeping me away into some hazy dystopic phantasm.
