Wednesday, 23 April 2014

a ninety-ninth story...'po-tweet'

Five times a week I take the monorail into the city: the monorail train rises from its concrete lair and crawls like a rattling corrugated iron centipede above the uniform rooftops of the suburban tenement blocks, mostly inhabited by manual labourers who make this city run.  I am a writer, as poor as dirt, and I live among them, commute with them.

The advertising agency I work for is in the heart of the city.  And gradually the landscape changes from drab, brutalist concrete to steel and glass – crystal spires, skyscrapers of all shapes that pierce and/or prop up the horizon; beacons to wealth based on incorporeal systems that largely reside inside the heads and hearts of the rich, a system that has become impenetrable to everyone else.

As we near the celestial metropolis, the wide-shouldered money men in their pin sharp suits embark, and we are obliged to relinquish our seats.  There was a story in the prole-art newspaper last year about a money man bludgeoning a pregnant lady from the tenements to death with his umbrella when she refused to give up her seat: it didn’t make the national news of course, because its par – rather, this sort of behaviour on the part of money men is considered natural: Darwin’s computer generated visage you can see super-imposed onto the facade of many a city institution.

The authorities, what you might once have called the ‘government’, have become dominated by money men, their wealth made variously in nuclear energy, arms manufacture, space travel and private security.  They have all made a lasting metal-fisted impression on what you might once have called ‘society’.  After all persistent interpersonal relationships have been replaced by apersonal antipathy among the various peoples of the city, forcibly imposed from the top down with the rigour of an industrial steel pounder.

My boss is Franklin.  He has the imagination of a gnat and the interpersonal skills of a wasp - not that it matters: as long as Franklin is able to micro-manage, which Franklin does to the nth degree, as well as run copy deadlines to the minute.  If I am so much as 1 min 02 sec late submitting a piece, say, on the company’s latest hypodermic truth serum (the company I work for is in the aforementioned business of private security), he’ll give me a penalty point, which can result in more work, or docked wages.  I have to pop caffeine tablets on far too regular a basis to keep up with my present workload.  And I can barely afford to resole my shoes.

Every quarter we’ll be visited by the Big Boss.  His name is Joel T. Stronginthearm; I am not sure if Stronginthearm is his real surname, or simply an invented tough-guy moniker.  Joel T. Stronginthearm stands on a podium at the far end of our half acre office and speaks to us via a microphone.  It is supposed to be inspirational, it is supposed to show that the mighty rich Joel T. Stronginthearm is taking an interest in poor little copy writers like me, it is, in fact, depressing.  Effective anti-depressants, however, have long been annexed under an authoritarian initiative to ensure the latest and best innovations in medicine are issued (almost) exclusively, at least preferentially, to those over a particular (and near unobtainable) income/productivity threshold.

The canteen where we take our allotted fifteen minute break for lunch – just enough time to stuff a decomposing sandwich made from reconstituted cardboard, or close to it, down your gullet; just enough time to escape the scrutiny of Franklin, but not the perennial feeling of worthlessness – remains, like the monorail trains, unsegregated: the money men, law men, politicals (call them what you will), are not stupid.  These people realise they have to be seen by the proletariat as a part of the wider community even if they are apart in their heads and hearts, which is where reality for so many these days is constructed and compelled.  Moreover, these people find the whole idea of a big society, originally fostered by David Camereton (who for us proles is a latter-day Chaplin-cum-Hitler), positively risible.

And yet, yesterday afternoon, as my day continued inexorably, I at least found a little head space to day-dream.  I met a girl, a woman, the other day in a down at heel cafĂ©, surprisingly well-dressed, and she smiled at me.  Acknowledgement: it is all I require – I am not special, but in a sense, I am unique – and hope, for whatever it is worth these days (I haven’t checked the share price, for people like me cannot afford shares in Hope Incorporated), hope fluttered for a moment; the bird of hope, an undernourished, coal-blackened canary that cries ‘Po-tweet!’ 

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