Motor City

Detroit, MI - Peter - Wednesday, April 10th, 2002 : goo

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They program their drum machines and beat-boxes; They sequence their obsolete analog machines; They pave textures on which the discussions of their bleak urban futures drive like the cracked motorways aproning through the Motor City. General Motors installs automation, robot arms to boost production, dispatching countless laborers from the assembly lines; crumpled souls collecting like abandoned cars in the crackled car-parks scattered through the urban sprawl like sterile, neuter seeds, cast to the changing winds, fallen wherever the fates lose interest, doomed to rot in a land without nourishment.

Dirt, whos oil-stained topsoil birthed unprecedented revolutions, engine revolutions, mass-produced vehicles to bear us on burning fossil fuels, to contrived destinations we never knew we had to reach.

And we’re still not convinced, yet we’re endlessly strung along on these manufactured dreams, hopes ephemeral, made flesh by Detroit’s envy, working hands, calloused souls, sheet-metal minds crafting American Chariots in the form of streamlined magazine ads.

Still chained to the assembly line, our shared subconscious retooled by preprogrammed robots, efficient and calibrated to the eons that defy our sharpest human conceptions, propelled by the riches amassed from a market of ever replaced, perpetually re-abandoned autos, Detroit’s greatest left to rot with bald tires, left to die with imported hands, greasy fingers long since laid off, men succumbed to hydraulic arms, automated welders, mechanical sprinting, senseless efficiency, time measured in time-clock decadence, not in human breath.

Not even in human tears, so real, which leak out of eyes that still remember the soreness of the welding arc, the burn of the topcoat primer fumes, the shimmer of meta-flake custom finishes, eyes averted to avoid the grit of titanium rouge, polished from carburated engine portals.

This is our fate, blueprints drawn with the spilled blood of the united brotherhood of auto workers, perpetuated and circulated in a tangle of veins only as complex as our highways and weaving interstates crosshatched life-flow, etching our country’s dilapidation, taxiways for grounded Detroit dreams, mincemeat for Michigan lake-gazing souls.

Too few of us remain reluctant to abandon this technology we, as children, were intricately conditioned to embrace. Our world, it seems, is changing dialects, digressing, beckoning the new souls of its young citizens with freshly contrived horizons that are as blank as they are empty, as hopeless as they are bleak, and unprecidentedly soul-less. The staunch fingers of tomorrow gesture, their seductive “come hither” enticements indicate futures paved with circuits, silicon dreams so minute and featureless that they swelter to obsolete staleness before our jaded hands can even hope to grasp them.

Detroit has been abandoned for outcroppings of digital commerce, the crystalline fiber-optic linked splinters of silicon bi-ways. And our sociopathic digital pipe-dream churns out soul-less replicants, commerce-engineered, stock-option-fueled automatons, the assembly-line hip, who now populate a new era of decay and fleeting decadence, a digital sprawl so hopelessly fated, epicenters engulfing our land like lava flows, dissolving global borders into homogenous territories, all lacking the individual features carried only by unique human individuals, funded by the sweat of labor, the unflagging chase of tangible mechanical innovation, dreams made real on the assembly line. Now machine etched circuit boards are packed, straight from robot hands, hard-wired with the substance of breathlessly tepid, post millennial aspirations; shiny commercial after-lives that even the most naive now see to be bitterly vanished.

History’s pilot-light still glows brightly enough, yet, to illuminate the trends of reality, stroking us with hopelessly soothing breaths, whispering reminders that speak in gears grinding, “we can’t go back”. Revolutions and sparks, timed to spark-plugs and engine ignitions grunt out in diesel breaths, “that which was once precious has been abandoned”.

And the abandoned souls of our Motor Cities worldwide collectively sigh in perpetual frustration. And yesteryear’s newest models, shiny highway cruisers of Detroit Ingenuity and American work-ethic, are left abandoned, in fields and on free-ways, each last drop of oil spent out in failed redemption, each last measure of horsepower consumed, parsing pavement and driving roads that lead nowhere.

So we sustain our futile human hopes as best we can contrive, the willing among us sitting attentive as Detroit souls program that forgotten hope in sonic metaphors, weaving our collective dream’s rememberance with the tarnished fibers of the assemby-line, the residue of Detroit’s mechanized soul, the automotive majesties that carried a generation of enraptured citizens towards goals that still remain reachless, and a syncopated utopia that perpetually disappears over the horizons of our endless network of highways.

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