United We Stand Milk tm
You know what they say about when ‘it’ gets to the dairy products. Or maybe I just pretend. Or maybe I’m real and you are all just pretenders. Or maybe, just maybe we’re a polite panoply of misgivings, midirection and misunderstandings. I think we are all just human. I must believe that we are all just human, or the very idea of belief, of hope, of ‘the common’ just flies right down the shitter.
Tonight, before I was rudely reminded of the nationalist bent of the world by my dairy products, I was having a rather equally depressing go at history – specifically the idea of memory, space and what the hell has happened to both. It is, of course, a conceit of age [call me an old soul, I’m only 33]. I wandered through my old life, my old bars, my old scene finding most probably what existed when I lived it, but nothing of what I lived. The only being retaining that memory was the space itself, which is of course a ridiculous subjective projection on space. It was that comfortable space; that space of which one knew every nook and cranny; that soft velvet of remembrance… but without the people. It is always a sad, absent memory without the people. As much as we might believe in the power of ‘space’, ‘remembrance’, ‘history’, it is nothing without the people.
But that is precisely what we are asked to live today. We are asked to remember things, times & lives, without the people. We are are promised a paradise without the people. We are promised alienation. Our idealized lives are scripted as insular, without space, without time, without humanity. Our lives are expected to be pre-fabricated, like our homes. And we are suppose to be happy with that. Like my memory of the East Village circa 1995, our people are supposed to be erased.
Why?
The greatest fear of capitalism is connection – the people, communication, commiseration, recognition of the mutual shaft, the collective will to a better world.
When history is devoid of people, this view is possible. When there is no insitutional memory, this is possible. When there is no memory, We All Stand United For Our Milk tm.
And we could give a shit about anyone else.