Somewhere down there was the White City promised in the Columbian Exposition brochures, somewhere among the tall smokestacks unceasingly vomiting black grease-smoke, the effluvia of butchery unremitting, into which the buildings of the leagues of city lying downwind retreated, like children into sleep which bringeth not reprieve from the day.
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How much time and money and labor and planning and passion and dedication went into building a possible version of a beautiful world while ignoring the actual world in which this faux Utopia managed to disappear? Shallow declarations and uplifting images of the way we profess we want the world to be is America's greatest commodity. "Look at this beautiful thing we've created! Look at the way the world will be when we utilize technology and capital to invest in people! The world can be a wonder and a marvel!" think the people walking about the Chicago World's Fair. And at the end of the day, bellies full of treats from around the world and minds stuffed to bursting with possibilities, they leave the confines of the White City and head back into the reek of slaughter lying over every life and the knife-filled alleys patrolled by corrupt police and their one room tenement with one oil lantern and no heat where they have not had a decent dream of the future for as far back as they can remember.
Aha. I see it now. The White City is the daylit fiction that the Chums of Chance have come to support. The dark conjugate of that is Chicago and the rest of the real world. The World's Fair is a mind fuck, a moment of mass hypnosis to convince the poor and the working class that the world isn't the giant cow-murder-smelling shithole they've been living their entire lives in. And here come the Chums of Chance in their cheerleading outfits for America, their ship wrapped in patriotic bunting, to declare, "America is the greatest nation on Earth!" Say it enough and even a couple who just lost their child to malnutrition might just believe it.
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Postscript: Oh, hey! Look at that! I figured it out already. Ignore the last postscript!
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