DYSTOPIAN AMERICAN METAPHOR

And so, what if clown shoes replace combat boots?
Our tears rain silver confetti onto the upturned mouth-smile faces of senators.
Why should the pain of our oppression have the dignity of a grim, dystopian backdrop? Instead, give it gaudy colours and grinning thumbs up. Our enforced goosestep, part parade/part rave, encourages competitive so-you-think-you-can-dance performances with ultra-white teeth gnashing scallops of laughter in just another scene from the dream machine.

I’m Marshall Warner and I’m a fiction generator. We’re born into captivity and utilized like livestock. They keep closer watch on me because I’m a creative intellectual, involved in writing projects from my early teens. I’m kept mostly isolated even when I’m shoulder to shoulder in a sea of people. I’m met with a frown or verbal reprimand if I ever forget my invisible cage and dare initiate conversation. I’ve been shoved unprovoked on rare occasions, keeping me head down and shuffling.

I’m alone but without solitude, as they monitor my thoughts, keep me working and experiment on me without checks or balances; the ultimate violation. Growing up, I believed fervently in my country. The original, pure, wildly quixotic version I was told existed long before, created by the most ambitious innovators and free thinkers. The System didn’t make its presence known to me until I was approaching the thirty-year threshold. I blush to think of all the awkward, dirty, sordid little things they witnessed before I realized I was being watched. It took me months just to finally relax and use the facilities. Took years to get used to too. They use my emotions to influence my will, like a well-placed whip on a thoroughbred. 

I’ve read that mind control technology exists. You know, hertz and frequencies are used to give and receive thoughts. From sleep state of .5 to the Hyper Gamma rays of 200 hertz, our brain can be intercepted and manipulated. Far worse than the simplistic patent that Tesla foresaw. They’re in my dreams, I know it. I suspect they program some dreams. And I despair as the stinging stars and strangling stripes have their way with me. I’m feeding the very society that consumes me. Allotted just enough pleasure in my accomplishment for my rapist to say that I liked it.

I suspect even my death will be wrought with a preconceived walk through a spectrum of memories to elicit an array of responses, all duly noted. Who’d have thought that dying alone would be a freedom and comfort that we end up having to fight for? Not that we can fight them. I don’t know of any revolutions that have access to a space program. That’s a bit rich for grassroots groups. Nope. Only nuclear war or a near apocalyptic event can shatter the satellites and underground neuro-networks. I doubt I’ll see it in my lifetime. Hopefully, when that happens, we won’t evolve into creatures who won’t be able to survive without technology. Why should I care? I just do. I’m on the side of Life. 

How do they control me? It’s different from person to person. For me, I’ve got stomach burning issues. If I don’t produce enough, my stomach burns every time I eat, yet the doctor finds nothing wrong from an upper GI and bloodwork panel. They can also make a muscle twitch at a crucial moment to initiate minor accidents. I’ve cut and burned myself cooking. I’ve dropped a precious object and watched it shatter to blue glass. They’ve even made a small muscle in my knee give out on the subway stair, and if not for a handrail I’d have fallen fifty feet down metal-edged, cement stairs. They let me know they have control while it happens too. Just a program. No guns or fancy nerve gas needed for assassinations. 

I’m trying to justify my worm squirm existence to people who still believe themselves to be free. I obey to make the pain and torture stop. I don’t love or worship the government. I hope they evolve into a peaceful society where all is shared as equally as possible in our current prosperity. Instead, the CIA sell drugs and traffic children to fund their unregulated projects, they act more as organized criminals than elders in an enlightened society. Instead of harmony and peace, they waste people’s lives keeping them separate or at odds with each other while the ruling class enjoy the fruits and accolades of the Earth like grunting, squealing pigs rutting and rubbing their foody faces.

I used to think I was brave. Until they made the abyss threaten to swallow me dark. When I find my mind and body invaded, I try to commit political suicide by peacefully starving myself to death. To protest my captive existence, to be that one disconcerting bit of data. They play hardball and make me feel like my stomach’s being chewed by rats, until I give up and eat. Even if I want to die, the cells of my body want to live, they don’t give a flying flip about what the executive order (me supposedly) has to say about it. My unenviable position lies between the will to live, and a life of servitude. This is my FUBAR unfolding. Fucked up beyond all recognition.

As I step out into the stream of humanity, tearlessly tinged with a Norman Irving horror, I wonder how many people know they’re being playfully puppeted at crucial moments – to both keep certain members of society firmly clenched in the buttocks of its preordained shit existence, and to entertain the cognitive monitors? They seem to do their best to sully the purity of victorious and tragic moments alike. At least for me. A fly for every soup and a dirty deed for every act of purity, that’s their calling card. The random act of kindness placed at a critical moment of despair. A glass of water in hell, as they say in lost mythology.

I write tale after tale receiving very little. Sometimes I won’t work if they hurt me. Sometimes I’d rather suffer, but eventually I fold. Will it ever be my turn to get credit for all the work I’ve done? I’m a slave, a lab rat, churning out occasionally brilliant ideas and creative projects others enjoy, but inside I’m wondering – between the shock and awe, the humiliation and the stolen scraps of life… where, oh where is my happy ending?    

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Deanna M. Lehman

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