pete edler
america@play
remember the Eloi
in H G Wells’ The Time Machine
where during Dark Nights
the Morlocks venture forth
from their chthonian halls
to harvest Eloi
who spend the days in endless
babble, feasting, games
in return for which
the Morlocks toiling below
to sustain them
collect Eloi bodies
a story of the century just past
and oh so true in this, the twenty-first
but who are they today
these Eloi
they must have morphed
from Wells’ abysmal Britain’s upper class
lounging on the backs of proles
to USA the Privileged
forcing the world to sustain
its endless babble, feasting, games
androids is what they are of course
and their great weakness is
that they don’t know it
like beautiful Rachael
the biomimic android in ‘Bladerunner’
yes like the magnificently ambivalent
the achingly alluring Sean Young
likewise in Bushamerica today
Eloi endlessly at play
while Morlocks harvest bodies
out in the world
by the tens of thousands
you may recall in ‘Bladerunner’ of yore
the designers of androids
already were at work
on a new model to replace Rachael
one that would be more human than humans
so that whenever human inspectors
tested for android qualities
in humans suspected of being androids
they’d look for excessive empathy
too much love, a surplus of compassion
thus to identify perfected android qualities
profoundly dangerous to humans
even if by such criteria
the Dalai Lama himself might be
the most subversive android on earth
Americans however falling far short
of android designation
all clearly human
blissfully unaware
all babbling, feasting, playing
and killing to their human hearts content
the puppet-masters who design
and program the USA
of course are more sophisticated
than were the makers of Rachael
they understood quite long ago
that building machines
that feel, think, act like humans
is much too complicated
expensive and time-consuming
compared with programming
already existing humans
no, all they had to do
was make folks forget
or simply ignore
the qualities that make them human
this they accomplish through the media
through TV saturation
a seamless pictorial debauch
a never-ending spree
of babble, feasting, playing
US lifestyle commercials that kill
people in far-off places
while also serving as curtain
to hide the killing from view
(©Peter Edler 2006)
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