Posted on September 18, 2005 at 00:36:46.
pornacalypse 3
By M Satai
3. Let’s be frank: this Department 5 thing, it’s really just a scam, an excuse to pretty much do whatever the hell we want. How it basically works is this: you get a group of people together, print up some official looking documents, and you all agree it means something or other: power of search and seizure, power to use deadly force, power to uphold the “laws” you feel like upholding, protecting, or making up on the spot, etc. etc., whatever mayhem you feel like doing on any given day. Mainly, though, it’s all about finding a way to save your own ass.
Things have been this way for thousands and thousands of years. I’m always surprised when I find that anyone is still surprised by this.
Everyone likes to think there’s a conspiracy running, that somewhere there’s an inner cabal controlling and monitoring everything. It’s a human need, I guess, this need to believe in some kind of central monolith, a coercive order, even if it’s a dark one. But the fact is, far as I can tell, there isn’t any conspiracy.
No one is really in control of a goddamn thing.
That’s what makes it relatively easy for this or that group to take control of things. Once you realize that no one is in control, you figure you might as well be one of the ones that everyone already thinks is in control.
And so organizations like Department 5 get started.
After a while, they take on a life of their own. They start to seem real, authenticated, authorized. Sometimes even I forget that the whole thing is based on nothing more than a vinyl binder holding about 20 or 25 pages of typescript.
Nowadays, they even sell what I’m talking about on the internet. They call it a A Do-it-Yourself-Cop-Kit.
”Philosophy, theology, and aesthetics produce answers that merely reflect the moral bias of their questions—their interpretation of existence is consonant with the prejudices from which they depart.” –Peter Tracey Connor
That goes for law, too, of course, and the detection of a crime: who’s guilty all depends on what assumptions you make at the start.
So its very important to be on the “right” side of the law.
Who knows how many departments like ours they have running around out there? It’s anybody’s guess and what’s the point of guessing?
You get a knock on the door in the middle of the night: two detectives from Department 5 or 46 or 888 are there with papers and you’re informed that you’ve been placed under arrest.
What are you going to do? Make a run for it? Shoot your way out? Maybe you’ve got a wife and kids sleeping in the back room.
I repeat: What are you going to do?
If you’re a normal, law-abiding citizen you go along quietly, you put your trust in the legal system, you call a lawyer. Sometimes they let you go. Sometimes, for equally arbitrary reasons, you end up a donor in one of the organ transplant processing factories lining the turnpike stretching out to the zombie wastelands…
It sounds terrible, but it’s really not.
If you understand, finally, that this is the only world, then you come to understand that this is the best possible world.
Let me be frank: I’m not trying to solve anything. I’m a stormtrooper for the other side of the apocalypse.
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When I finally get home to the apartment that night, Suki is lying on the mattress, turned to the peeling wall, asleep in light bondage: there’s just enough slack in the rope for her to make it to the toilet, to the sink, and not much else.
Her real name isn’t Suki, of course.
What her real name is, that’s a mystery, and it’s not going to be answered, least of all by asking her, by believing whatever it is she swears under interrogation is her real name.
They ran a background check on her ID while she was being treated for abrasions, muscle tears, dehydration, etc. in the hospital after we rescued her from that japanese human-mobile display in the warehouse.
The information that came back on her was so self-contradictory that it washed itself out, as such information usually does, exactly one-half to be believed, and the other half not to be believed at all.
iden*ti*ty 1. a: sameness of essential or generic character in different instances b: sameness in all that constitutes the object reality of a thing: ONENESS 2 a: the distinguishing character or personality of logical identification 3: the connection of being the same with something described or asserted
Are you laughing yet? You should be. If you’re not, you’re taking yourself way too seriously.
Everyone’s running some kind of false identity nowadays. Not only is nobody who they say they are, nobody is even who they think they are.
Like everything else in the survival game, identity is a strategy.
She’s slender, Suki that is, shoulderblades delicate like one of those panels you take out of your computer, black hair, a long back with a long backbone like whip of vertabrae, very white skin, big dark luminous eyes like the big dark luminous eyes of an anime creation, small mouth that, when ungagged, very politely says things like, “prease, excluse me, velly solly.”
In short, she’s a fantasy girl: not like a real girl at all, but the perfect other for such as myself whose allergic to too much “otherness.” She’s as close to being a pure object of desire as a woman can be, while still breathing, or without being medically rendered comatose like the partner’s girl, like most people’s girls are nowadays.
Suki, as I said, is what I prefer to call her.
Let me assure you that she could have done far worse than ending up my sex-slave, if I can guess what you’re thinking.
She could have found herself hanging in the Central Park crucifixion fields or she might have simply disappeared into the bowels of the hospital where she was treated to end up as the centerpiece on some necrophiliac’s party slab. She might have been bought and sold and slipped through the corridors on a hijacked gurney into the outlaw Burroughsian underground where she’d have had ocelot legs grafted in place of her own beautiful limbs, or a kangaroo head transplanted onto her shoulders, or whatever.
Don’t think these things don’t happen every day. Believe me, they do. I see the failed end results all the time: weird hybrids floating among the shipless pilings in the greasy water of the East River, the sad, impossible bodies of aborted peacock-boys and dolphin-girls bobbing along with all the glitter of yesterdays’ civilization: empty Pepsi One cans, fast food wrappers, tampon applicators, etc.
So you could justifiably say that I saved her life, such as it is, and inasmuch as one still holds onto those old 20th century humanistic view that life is the most precious of all gifts etc. etc.…hey, I’m practically a hero, a true humanitarian.
Serving Size 219g
Calories 600
Calories from Fat 300
Total Fat (g) 33
% Daily Value 51
Carbohydrates (g) 50
% Daily Value 17
Sodium (mg) 1050
% Daily Value 44
Dietary Fiber (g) 4
% Daily Value 18
That’s the nutritional value of the Big Mac I bring home with me for dinner and eat right out of its little paper box alone at the kitchen card table.
On tv, well, actually on the tv’s, the panel of nine monitors I’ve lined up three on three against the crumbling kitchen wall, each monitor subdivided by six, I watch a collage of homemade media.
There are no privately held networks anymore—all broadcasts are pirated. Whoever can bribe, rent, steal, or shoot their way into a hijacked studio can temporarily put out a broadcast.
But violence isn’t even necessary anymore to grab a share of the media. Anyone with the right equipment and a cable can find a crack through the tsunami of airwaves. Witout getting up from your couch, you can have your program seen on some screen, some where.
There are so many goddamn channels, in fact, that most of the time, on most of the screens, there is nothing at all running: a long stare into electrical nihilism.
If it’s not nothing that you’re looking at, then its worse than nothing: video of people lazily masturbating, getting drunk, talking on the phone, paying their water bill, combing their hair. You’ve got video feed recording empty rooms as people pass in and out of them going about their perfectly ordinary lives. Even the sex videos, unscripted and featuring “real” people, are so boring as to be practically unwatchable.
Right now, on BaudrillardTV, one of the last semi-traditional networks still in existence, I see a middle-aged woman reading the label of a shampoo bottle.
How many times can you watch something like that?
The original idea, I guess, was to get the camera closer and closer to “real-life,” to really get “behind the scenes,” to make things relevant to the way real people really lived. But it seems that the closer you looked, the less there was to see.
St. Warhol was right: when the future came everyone got to be famous for fifteen minutes. But, unfortunately, by that time there was no guarantee that anyone was watching.
Somewhere along the way, the border broke down between the audience and the performer, the 4th wall, I think the tv people once called it, and once that wall dissolved, people’s natural egocentrism took over. Everyone rushed the stage. Everyone wanted in on the act.
Everyone wanted the starring role, the best lines, the close-ups, the longest air-time.
After a while, no one was satisfied to vicariously watch others live out their dreams. What got forgotten is the hierarchical principle of performance: you need “actors” and a passive audience.
Entertainent is fascistic.
Someone has to agree not to live, to sit subordinated in front of the screen, the stage, the monitor, whatever. Without both, actor and audience, there’s nothing to see and no one to watch it. Now everyone’s an actor and their own audience of one and that means no one is really either. Now its as if ten billion cameras were following ten billion people in ten billion movies that not one of all these billions and billions of people are watching.
Or, you could just say, that everyone is acting and watching themselves star in their own private movie taking place in their own head.
And yet, even though Im not watching, I leave the tv’s on, the four computer monitors, the five or six radios…and each screen, each broadcast is filled with break-ins, special reports, running headers, pop-ups, etc.
It’s a constant chatter of fractured information that means absolutely nothing to me, that I can’t remember from one second to the next.
But I need it…I need all of it precisely because it’s all so thin, superficial, pointless, and unsatisfactory.
Wiping my greasy mouth with the back of my greasy hand, my belly filled with all the crap in that Big Mac, I get up from the card table and swim through all the incoherent electric babble that fills the apartment.
I stand at the kitchen sink and chug-a-lug some pink anti-nausea stuff from a crusty old bottle. I slip the button on my pants. I massage my meat. I’m on my way to the mattress to rape my darling Suki. But first I need to rev my gonads up a little by reading an entry or two in The Big Book of Apocalyptic Sex Crimes
--MS