They Never Do.

The scenes don’t seem quick to change.

And the people keep keeping the same lines propped up for “the ready” to grab and read. I feel for the ones on the inside. The outside. The ones that everyone forgets until they’re getting gone. The Machine’s leftover parts. The fuel for fires of relentless progress and the reason for books that preach blind justice. I feel for them the same way I feel for a fourteen year-old girl in Sudan. A distant, yet ever-present Janjaweed prospect. A part of a system of take-and-taken where they’ll never, never ever, by the design of the thing, ever see a fair dealing of cards. Off suit every time. I don’t see victims. I see a machine at work. A fantastic machine, with cold and smooth edges. Lots of blinking lights. Input-output-throughput-execution-results. I don’t see the bending over. I don’t see the “sudden abandonment”. I see no given targets. I don’t see any new hatred.

I see the same scenes that dance in history books, flowered-up with partial and ultra-partial language. The language of The Machine. The Machine's preferred language.

The Machine’s been working like this forever. Forever and ever. And The Machine sees no color, region, or time as an important context. Everyone has been on every side of The Machine because The Machine knows no loyalties. The machine cares not. The machine only knows what it has always known to do: maintain The Machine.

I feel. I feel for the burgeoning intellects of twentysomethings in rural Idaho that read the interweb and pray on it like gospel. As if CNN has anyone’s interest in mind but that of The Machine. As if anyone holding out on being moved has anything in mind but The Machine. As if stories of raped babies and sewage sammiches were trying to be hushed by The Machine. As if the Bush regime IS The Machine. As if The Machine would ever bother stooping to such pointless levels. It needs no evangelism. It needs no figurehead. It needs no purpose.

It is its own purpose.

The scenes don’t seem quick to change.

And the people keep pouring over the same frames… whether paper or screen, scroll or minstrel, tablet or blimp. They’ll consume the output given proper throughput, processing the results by the tick-tocking of the execution schedule. They take as it’s given. They empathize at The Taken, as if it were their experience when in fact the opposite is more true. The experience is what is taken from The Taken. That is The Machine doing the bidding of itself, for the benefit of the unknown majority. Double-dealing amongst everyone so that turns are taken, and The Taken from one time are the voyeurs of another.

The Machine needs no friends. Only the apathy of its voyeurs and the spite of its enemies.

From Pampers to lost dogs to bloated forms to reunited families to suicidal cops to feces-flooded toilets to horrendous heat to that saved baby to the blanketed wheelchair that obviously seats the dead to “gunmen” and mobsterish playground bully stories of hospitals under siege to Astrodome Bedouins given open-bar privileges to the family that took in that darker and less fortunate family to the reworking pump systems to the bus driver that drove that family from Minnesota straight out of the mouth of hell to the cholera, e coli, West Nile, and pages that list each threatening “itis” that currently cooks over cobbled streets. When The Machine speaks, listen close to not miss a beat. Not a dime.

But allow a brief pause for thanks. For but a second, that Bourbon Street is still dry. And that five years from now there will be the most powerful frozen brain demolisher ever made, offered from tattered and wretched street booths... and it will be named the Katrina Hurricane, served from pink vessels resembling the form of an empty soul, sucked through a straw forged from the nightmares that stream from the minds of fourteen year-old Janjaweed prospects. The Machine will name it as such. The Machine names all things of wanton nature. All things of traded value. All things of lost value. All things.

The scenes don’t seem quick to change.

They never do.