“Well, won’t you lend your lungs to me? Mine are collapsing.”-“Lungs” Townes Van Zandt
In the distance, I see the future, burning skies and flooded forests, states swept away, leaving only the levees that enabled their destruction, bodyguards who double-crossed their mark.
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“Gather up the gold you’ve found/you fool it’s only moonlight”
Around me is the now; a man on the bus takes heroin out of his pocket and examines it. He starts to nod off, opening the bus window before doing so, letting the cold air in. There are scabs across his body, capitalism’s stigmata in the form of smack side effects. The spring melt is arriving. The snow is fleeing, cold clear water surging down Mont Royal. But there is no dirt to hold it. The result is run-off, dirty water clear enough to pass as something else. A generation raised on YouTube is coming of age: the first whose learning, entertainment, and lives were lived according to capital-hungry algorithms, codes that do not prioritize profit but are only for that. Even the most greedy human is still human. As such, they can never operate as capital might like them to. Algorithms are different.
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“You better leave this dream alone/try to find another”
Buildings grow more grotesque by the day. High rises are being built downtown; each time I walk by, I dream of Molotovs. Industrialization has put us in the guillotines. Capitalist rats chew at the ropes, unaware the blade will kill us all.
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“Wisdom burned upon a shelf/who’ll kill the raging cancer”
Fascism is capitalism’s immune system—it becomes popular when the system is sick. Yet it offers no alternative. This is by design, for it is meant only to buy ruling class time. Unwilling to give up their position, however, the elite do nothing. We look at the 1930’s and assume fascism will pass. But then we had Germany as a potential enemy. This allowed us to position fascism as anti-American. Fascism is reliant on nationalism, and stripped of it becomes politically inert. Now we have no fascist enemies—our forever war is against the poor and Muslim, not the rich and Aryan. And so, barring a fundamental system overhaul, we will careen into the abyss wearing MAGA hats and coal rolling.
Miles Taylor 