A-Infos (en) Civilisation is a Jet Liner

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     A - I N F O S  N E W S  S E R V I C E
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We have only once sent an extract from one of our books to a-infos. 
It was well received but we now feel given the change in policy of 
a-infos that an occasional article like the following is in order. 
However, we are more interested in what you, the reader, thinks. 
Please let us know.

CIVILISATION IS A JET LINER
(extract from Questionning Technology published by FREEDOM PRESS)

Civilization is like a jetliner, noisy, burning up enormous amounts of
fuel. Every imaginable and unimaginable crime and pollution had to be
committed in order to make it go. Whole species were rendered extinct,
whole populations dispersed. Its shadow on the waters resembles an oil
slick. Birds are sucked into its jets and vaporized. Every part, as
Gus Grissom once nervously remarked about space capsules before he was
burned up in one, has been made by the lowest bidder. Civilization is
like a 747, the filtered air, the muzak oozing over the earphones, a
phony sense of security, the chemical food, the plastic trays, all the
passengers sitting passively in the orderly row of padded seats
staring at Death on the movie screen. Civilization is like a jetliner,
an idiot savant in the cockpit, manipulating computerized controls
built by sullen wage workers, and dependent for his directions on
sleepy technicians high on amphetamines with their minds wandering to
sports and sex. 

Civilization is like a 747, filled beyond capacity with coerced 
volunteers-some in love with the velocity, most wavering at the abyss
of terror and nausea, yet still seduced by advertising and propaganda.
It is like a DC-10, so incredibly enclosed that you want to break
through the tin can walls and escape, make your own way through the
clouds, and leave this rattling, screaming fiend approaching its
breaking point. The smallest error or technical failure leads to
catastrophe, scattering your sad entrails like belated omens all over
the runway, knocks you out of your shoes, breaks all your bones like
egg shells. 

(Of course civilization is like many other things besides jets- always
things-a chemical drainage ditch, a woodland knocked down to lengthen
an airstrip or to build a slick new shopping mall where people can buy
salad bowls made out of exotic tropical trees which will be extinct
next week, or perhaps a graveyard for cars, or a suspension bridge
which collapses because a single metal pin has shaken loose.
Civilization is a hydra. There is a multitude of styles, colors, and
sizes of Death to choose from.) 

Civilization is like a Boeing jumbo jet because it transports people
who have never experienced their humanity where they were. to places
where they shouldn't go. In fact it mainly transports businessmen in
suits with briefcases filled with charts, contracts, more
mischief-businessmen who are identical everywhere and hence have no
reason at all to be ferried about. And it goes faster and faster,
turning more and more places into airports, the (un)natural habitat of
businessmen. 

It is an utter mystery how it gets off the ground. It rolls down the
runway, the blinking lights along the ground like electronic scar
tissue on the flesh of the earth, picks up speed and somehow grunts
raping the air, working its way up along the shimmering waves of heat
and the trash blowing about like refugees fleeing the bombing of a
city. Yes, it is exciting, a mystery, when life has been evacuated and
the very stones have been murdered. 

But civilization, like the jetliner, this freak phoenix incapable of
rising from its ashes, also collapses across the earth like a million
bursting wasps, flames spreading across the runway in tentacles of
gasoline, samsonite, and charred flesh. And always the absurd rubbish,
Death's confetti, the fragments left to mock us lying along the weary
trajectory of the dying bird-the doll's head, the shoes eyeglasses, a
beltbuckle. 

Jetliners fall, civilizations fall, this civilization will fall. The
gauges will be read wrong on some snowy day (perhaps they will fail).
The wings, supposedly defrosted, will be too frozen to beat against
the wind and the bird will sink like a millstone, first gratuitously
skimming a bridge (because civilization is also like a bridge, from
Paradise to Nowhere), a bridge laden, say, with commuters on their way
to or from work, which is to say, to or from an airport, packed in
their cars (wingless jetliners) like additional votive offerings to a
ravenous Medusa. 

Then it will dive into the icy waters of a river, the Potoma perhaps,
or the River Jordon, or Lethé. And we will be inside, each one of us
at our specially assigned porthole, going down for the last time, like
dolls' heads encased in plexiglass. 


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