Thu, 19 May 2005

The Pres
To this day I’ve never heard of any country called Morgal, found no mention in any atlas, but The Pres. assures me this is due to the laughably inadequate mental capabilities of my culture. "No place to fit it into your people’s maps, you mean! God help there should be a country not designed by your Central Infamy Agency!" he spits, a zone of empty seats around him as businessmen and vacationers sift to a farther orbit. His suits may once have been regal, but the fraying at the edges tells of how long he’s been here, at least as long as anyone I’ve talked to can remember, washing his body in the lower showers and his clothes in the sink, keeping a slipping grip on the status of the world via papers stolen from the cafe. The President of the State of Morgal in exile has been a lunch partner of mine every Sunday, ever since I first heard his story during the week I worked out here at the airport (fired for betting on pinball during my lunch break).

“The destruction of nostalgia by a false architecture, based around symbolic form-cages, Dresden china eggs, Mondrian squares. Infinity as desired aesthetic effect, warp replacing flat plane. Architecture is the only art form from which we cannot e scape. Desire as sympathetic magic, the concept of separating the interiors of our living environments by symbolic mindstates instead of around our technology-the t.v. room, the washing room, the terminal room are now replaced by lust, post-consumer plast ibliss, oblivion. We now find ourselves in a world in which emotion can no longer be separated from the gestalt of anywhere.”

“The delicate thud of gunfire heard from the secure side of a plexiglass bubble rushed past me, crying at my desk, perfectly lit and framed for post-positional PR. Flakes of paint fall from the public side of the bubble, creating eye-sized peepholes in the wall of graffiti surrounding the House of Government. Video camera lenses attach themselves to the holes in the blind tourist hope of catching high dollar raw feed. I. tried to think my way through a phenobarbituate haze until the thought of martyrdom hits like a sniper bullet, cleanly penetrating his hindbrain. A look overcomes him, the same look anyone who has found a way of understanding a basically nonunderstandable situation eventually discovers.”

“We had graffiti artists paid by communiprop lackeys to translate the only remaining means of communication in the southern ghettoes into an Orwellian nursery. Along walls and ceilings my face, distorted as though the skull was perfectly round, perfectly endless, float like bodies lost to the tide through a field of constantly mutating text — THERE ARE THOUGHTS NO PATRIOT SHOULD HAVE NOTHING TO BE AFRAID OF CONSTANT SELF-MONITORING IS THE MEANS BY WHICH WE KEEP OUR NEIGHBORHOODS PURE. Said artists became threatened by both sides of the political spectrum, a disgrace to their once-friends and families and a potential threat to the forces they serve. Suicide rate amongst such artists was up to sixty percent, murder rate nearly fifteen during pre-election months. Such a challenge, inspiring the young people.”

The left-right polarization of American politics becomes a loop, positions scattered around the circumference of The Pres., who has established a kind of ersatz dictatorship through the decisive use of Masters-Johnson reports to exploit sublimated erotic impulses toward submission to a greater power throughout the previous campaign. Said devices only work once, after which they travel the routes of all technology, down through state and local elections, then throughout the third and, finally, the second world countries, where Americans watch in horror as direct feed CNN International shows how there poor people are exploited by psychological devices.

Marxian hive theory has taken on new meaning for The Pres. while watching a broadcast of George Bush (whom, The Pres. informs me, is one of three genetic surrogates designed for public speaking and other dangerous tasks, altered somewhat in face and skull structure, diminished rhetorical capabilities and, perhaps most importantly, each marked with a bar code in the small of the back in the unlikely event of a coup by imitation) wander through the hallways of City 619, a low-income housing project consisting of a massive complex of apartments, fast-food restaurants and Welfare stores — Welfare works, as all state projects do, on a failed credit system instituted by Citibank in 1998, scrapped and sold cheap to HUD, thus no longer allowing, in theory at least, for use of money given to Welfare recipients for non-necessary means. The truth of this is quite the opposite: credit dealers readily buy up Welfare credit accounts in exchange for black market merchandise, the accounts then being spent en masse buying wholesale amounts of technological equipment, sold to people in cities like 619 for a price slightly under exorbiant State prices. With the continuing cuts in Welfare payments, more and more people turn to this alternate system in order to keep somewhat fed. Bush organized a series of committees to investigate command structure in insect communities, which sums to playing earsplitting loops of insect clicks and drones around the clock throughout City 619. In the broadcast Bush walked along the hallways of one of the transient hubs, hands over his ears except for hand-shaking of the thousands of previously unemployed inhabitants now busy installing and maintaining the drone-speaker system. "Your Mister Bush has some of the Quixotic nature. You’ll be seeing him in the waiting room of a hospital or a hotel lobby soon.”

“And then I was informed by the cabinet that profanity is the way to reach the average street person — an auto wreck of street thug ‘organization’ slang, gutter humor and feral grunts, but the stupid pig-people don’t want that from their godhead. I went all wild with the new vernacular during the next State of the Union address to a stunned populace. One week later I’m on the air (once again cancelling top-rated program “Fuck Junkies form Planet Yoni”, never a shrewd move for a political figure hanging so tenuously to his approval rating) “with my homies M.C. Information Paradigm and D.J. Skullfuck at my motherfuckin’ back, you slimy nothin’-ass sellout commie traitors!”. For the first time in fifteen years the polls had me at 49%. The reincarnated Zombie-Duvalier refused to have lunch with me anymore. It was all, how you say, downhill.”

“The Pres. begins to have dreams about his life after politics. He awakens from a dream consisting of an endless string of orphanage girls crawling through broken glass and used syringes in order to give him gifts of their mouths to find himself in an airport. He has no ticket, has no luggage, and has no destination. He walks to the bathroom and relieves himself, happy that no one notices him yet terrified that his Secret Service agents are nowhere to be seen. The thought that their utter professionalism allows them to blend so completely into the scenery reassures him-the critical aspect for employment in the Shining Fist is anonymity-and releases into the bowl the usual stream of blood, semen and urine. He walks to a lunch counter and eats. He wanders around, never seeing the same terminals twice. The sense of endlessness gives him a sense of inner peace. He sits and reads three-month old magazines, blankly running his fingers autistically across the scar at the base of his skull, twitching and uncomprehending whenever he reads his own name in print. He falls asleep in the chair, awaking exactly eight hours later to do the same. Repetition is the highest form of meditation for The Pres. He awakens every morning to find two hundred dollars in his left coat pocket, but the thought of catching a flight or a cab never crosses his mind. Soon his memories dry up and blow away until he cannot even remember himself as being The Pres. The increasing effects of a time-lapse Alzheimer’s DNA prion, perhaps , weaves his life into perfection until he wanders naked through the terminal singing “Hail to the Chief”, his only remaining verbal cluster, and drops dead.”

He awakens to find himself covered in blood, semen and urine. The Pres. obtains a dramatic fear of dreaming and begins a barrage of CNS depressants just before sleep in order to avoid conscious dreaming. After six hours he is injected with dextroamphetamine resin complex. This cycle of medication affords him a sense of order but wreaks havoc on his nervous system. The results in his mental stability become obvious.

The Pres. was once asked in a press conference given from his hospital bed what his definition of morality entails. The Pres. told me he had a curious sensation of intangibility, which correlates to thinking about walking — once each step becomes a conscious thought, the entire system breaks down. The closer he came to putting this network into words the less substantial it becomes. The Pres. remembers that dissection is not possible without the death of the subject. A severe tremor rips through the entire room and The Pres. instigates a complete House of Government media blackout for three days while he and the cabinet go into special session. The Pres. developed an irrational fear od the word “morality”, the very mention of which sends him into a fugue state. Needless to say, the PR damage of the past few months increased exponentially.

The Pres. holds the press legions hostage within The Presidential Compound, each member finding little solace in the shallow corners and angles of the room. The Pres. stands above them on a semicircular table, arms stretched back schitzophrenically behindhis head, one leg inches from the faux oak surface. The cameras find him through the wall, his infrared image so well known by this point as to identify him by the populance on first sight. The remaining members of the cabinet — those who have not either resigned to live off gov. stipends in the Carribean or those who have been liquidated by either SF guards or privately hired police forces — young white trash thugs given badges and guns and paychecks on the first and fifteenth in order to search and destroy any subversives who are not with the game plan (from advertisement, New World Securities, as seen in The New York Times), are on bended knees, praying outside the door. One can only speculate just what they are praying for. The Pres. tells them half-remembered childhood stories, hide-and-seek, throwing rocks at foriegners, his first kiss. The words slow and stop.It is completed, he sighs, knowing he has not nor will ever be forsaken. The room fills with white light.

“Now I am here. Everything is so much simpler now.”
(12:10.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #