Jim's GPS passes the Turing Test, female robotic voice (almost) never wrong, merge left, merge left, getting more insistent, merge left now, and you're hurtling along at 80, between brown high hills that lead to tunnels blasted through mountains in California, they'd heard stories of what was on the other side, cars attacked by flesh-eating zombies, the caveat, never get out of your car, you're a Manhattanite for Christ's sake, on a break from forty hours of effort, not having a staff of IT minions, that either it is impossible to transition contacts and calendar from a Palm to a Blackberry or that I, not having a degree in engineering, cannot do it, grist for the essentialist mill, that the sunlight can be made to lie too, an anthropology of the contemporary, and point-to-point delivery, arcing in reaction to the flood of images of your husband dead any minute, dreaming I'm a shooter hiding in the back of a trunk, taking aim and pulling the trigger, watching the body of a stranger drop, thinking they deserved it, abstracted out of my mind, is that any worse than the CIA's freelance contractors, rock coming through their ear buds as they hammer or beat a bound naked body suspended on pulleys, which Elaine Scarry and Amnesty International and Coetzee have been screaming no, wrong for thirty years, your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others, torture has nothing to do with truth, information extracted from torture is notoriously unreliable, protecting privilege while denying what it's doing, yet another problem with it, encouraging hypocrisy and self-inflation of Magistrates and Colonels that gets in the way of the subjects of the law they circumvent or spit on, spirit away, and on another scales, there's the public flogging of a young woman in Kabul, as opposed to what, the private flogging of an old man in a Brooklyn basement, we're so advanced we'd label that psycho, servicemen and women, though I wonder was it in her burkah or half-naked, I who never had to endure anything worse than the terror of pre-teen spanking, my mother, like Kurtz's Intended, thought she'd got the Big One, It's queer how out of touch with truth women are, unrecorded by bottom-feeder FBI software, now abstracted because decades distant but then the apogee of injustice and humiliation at the hands of conformist authoritarians inadvertently sculpting an all-out agonist, perhaps explaining her visceral horror at torture, not very clear...and yet it seemed to throw a kind of light...all that can be asked of knowledge, baiting me oppositional & defiant at every turn, but I do digress, my lady, fuck class but save the civil and the civic and every form of community or intimacy that isn't its own tyranny for as long as it can last in full bloom, harvested by countless language farmers, why should high theory save us from more top-down hauteur, inviting denigration of Dickensian seriality, preferring the fiery furnace myself...

 

 

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