The Manifesto of Futurism, as defined below by F. T. Marinetti in 1909 was perhaps one of the least known yet most influential tracts of the last 100+ years. It predicts the fall of Russian Empire, the rise of fascism (and gleefully at that) and the All American ‘Need for Speed’. Originally written as a yelp for Italian legitimacy in a rapidly industrialized world, it’s thinking has been extended and referred to ever since, even if not overtly.
MANIFESTO OF FUTURISM
1. We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness.
2. The essential elements of our poetry will be courage, audacity and revolt.
3. Literature has up to now magnified pensive immobility, ecstasy and slumber. We want to exalt movements of aggression, feverish sleeplessness, the double march, the perilous leap, the slap and the blow with the fist.
4. We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath … a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.
5. We want to sing the man at the wheel, the ideal axis of which crosses the earth, itself hurled along its orbit.
6. The poet must spend himself with warmth, glamour and prodigality to increase the enthusiastic fervor of the primordial elements.
7. Beauty exists only in struggle. There is no masterpiece that has not an aggressive character. Poetry must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man.
8. We are on the extreme promontory of the centuries! What is the use of looking behind at the moment when we must open the mysterious shutters of the impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We are already living in the absolute, since we have already created eternal, omnipresent speed.
9. We want to glorify war – the only cure for the world – militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman.
10. We want to demolish museums and libraries, fight morality, feminism and all opportunist and utilitarian cowardice.
11. We will sing of the great crowds agitated by work, pleasure and revolt; the multi-colored and polyphonic surf of revolutions in modern capitals: the nocturnal vibration of the arsenals and the workshops beneath their violent electric moons: the gluttonous railway stations devouring smoking serpents; factories suspended from the clouds by the thread of their smoke; bridges with the leap of gymnasts flung across the diabolic cutlery of sunny rivers: adventurous steamers sniffing the horizon; great-breasted locomotives, puffing on the rails like enormous steel horses with long tubes for bridle, and the gliding flight of aeroplanes whose propeller sounds like the flapping of a flag and the applause of enthusiastic crowds.
Sound familiar? Although this was an intellectual/artistic movement in its conception, the world view it births was neatly used as justification for the rise of fascism and the rise of corporatism, which was Mussolini’s word for fascism anyhow. In the face of Environmental Catastrophe, the Futurist response is to rev the engines of destruction even higher!
George “Mickey Mouselini” Bush’s Speed Machine makes war, fast war (“Blitzk–” I mean “Shock and Awe”) – consequences be damned simply because it IS WAR FOR WAR’S SAKE, as war is the ultimate state of human society. It just the type of thinking that gets you into wars of choice without exit and violent eternal occupations.
Is it perhaps not that Bush and his Administration are anti-intellectual, but that we just can’t relate to the constructs of his thinking despite the fact that it is based on an old and storied foundation. Or are simply unaware.
