A Survival Manifesto!!!
The world has gone mad and we must put a stop to its self-extinction. You are all dying and may not know it. The love of accumulation is killing us and turning us into shadows. What comes after Postcapitalism? The dreaded something that they are keeping behind the barbed wire electrical curtain. As Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Something is wrong with capitalism.” And we know what.
Stop bad love. Bomb this bad love and get right with your hearts. Bomb the power. Bomb the plate glass, bomb the store dummies, bomb the consumers, bomb the bankers, the businessmen, the hucksters, bomb the oligarchs, the thieves. The Mall is a disease. Do not be silent. Silence kills. Speak up. Remember the words:
I once was lost but now I’m found
Was blind, but now I see.
Let us open our hearts. Let us brush the snow from our lips. Let us breathe in suffering and exhale charity. Let us be humble and leave this evil place and put good where there has been only its absence. Love one another. Consumption consumes us. Do not let them use God against us again. Love God, love Mohammed, love the Buddha. Befriend the poor. Do not wait. Love them right now. Love all the colors of humanity. Come to our meetings. Let us know how you live. Peace
—The Sun Collective of Minnesota
www.suncollectiverevolution.com
4201 Roosevelt Avenue NE
“Oh, those people?” Alma said. “I love those people. Harry, I’ve told you about them, don’t you remember?” He stared at her. “You never pay attention to me. I even went over there once. They sit around and talk and make plans. They’re extremely chaotic, but they do things. It’s very sweet.”
The manifesto had cheered her up, Brettigan could see, the Earth-improvement project, all the desperate remedies.
- 4 -
He had once committed a murder.
The trouble was, he couldn’t remember whom he had murdered or how exactly he had gone about doing it. One morning he had awakened bathed in sweat, his heart thumping like an engine about to seize up. Alma slept peacefully next to him, breathing through her mouth with delicate snores. The chalk outline of his victim, pointedly clear in his dream, had now faded away. How could you be a murderer if you couldn’t remember the specifics of your crime?
And how had the murder occurred? The dream-memory had involved not a gun but a knife, infinitely sharp, sharper than a surgeon’s scalpel. Despite the gaps in the narrative, Brettigan did remember how blood seemed to be spurting everywhere, and the inner exposed body parts of his victim, and the screaming. He remembered the terrible baritone roar, the rattling, gurgling outburst of a man in his last moments dying under protest, the light going out in his eyes.
But who was the victim? And where did the rage come from? He couldn’t remember. You don’t expect a man like Brettigan to be a murderer. It wouldn’t fit his profile stored up in all the algorithms that were forming slowly, like sea slugs, on everybody, inside the godlike computers that no one could unplug. Here he was, a virtuous man, a retired structural engineer, a bridge designer who’d volunteered in soup kitchens, tutored disadvantaged children, raised a beautiful daughter and a handsome son, driven them to softball games, soccer games, attended their piano recitals, helped them with homework, walked his daughter down the aisle at her wedding, paid everyone’s tuition—a model citizen! Hardly a blemish visible anywhere! If anyone was qualified for the role of devoted father and faithful husband, he’d be at the front of the line.
And yet his dreams: his dreams would send him to the electric chair. Or the gas chamber. Which they didn’t have anymore. But they did have potassium chloride and would enthusiastically inject it into him.
“You, Harold, a murderer? That’s a laugh. You’re harmless. Always have been,” Alma had said when Brettigan told her his dreams. She yawned, lying next to him, and treated him to a patronizing chuckle. “You’re the most harmless person I ever met.” And she kissed him on the cheek before getting up to take her shower.
“Not that harmless,” he muttered. “I’m capable.”
* * *
—
Weeks later in a bookstore, idly paging through a collection of European and African aphorisms and fables, he had come upon this passage, planted squarely in the middle of the page.
In mid-life a man wakes up believing that he has committed a murder. He cannot, however, remember who his victim was or what method he has employed to do the killing. Despite his forgetfulness, for years the man is weighed down by the memory of his crime; his guilt becomes ineradicable and leads to his physical decline. On his deathbed he is visited by the angel of God, who tells him that his only victim was himself and that he has murdered his true self for the sake of the life he has actually led.
It sounded like one of Kafka’s parables or a story by Henry James. (Brettigan had in his early twenties been a reader of fiction but in middle age grew to despise it; fiction was like quicksand, dragging you down.) He didn’t care who had written this quaint parable with its lethal, accurate truth. Stealthily, he closed the book and replaced it on the bookstore display table. No one would ever know that this book had found him out. No one had seen him reading it. The other customers—that lady, over there, in the threadbare flower-pattern print dress, who was trying to memorize a recipe in an unpurchased cookbook, or that man reading a guide to explosives—they were all oblivious to him. The book, with its fables and aphorisms, had his number and was selling for $24.95. He had checked the price. Somebody had stolen his dreams and had put them into this book. The unconscious never takes a vacation. And capitalism sniffs out your secrets. It knows all of them by now and has lists with your name on them matched to a facial recognition file.
Wherever you go online, the Big Computer knows what you want before you want it. It’s ready for you and waits patiently, humming. It knows where you will be tomorrow and what you will be doing, and it carefully calibrates the shame you carry with you in hopes that you will buy something to restore your peace of mind.
* * *
—
He had had, he felt, a lucky life of good fortune and privilege, and if the sun was setting on people like him, middle-class white guys, well, okay. His only real cause for disquiet had been Timothy, their gifted boy. As the younger of their two children, he’d been born with an uncanny talent for mimicry, beginning at age six with imitations of his sister, Virginia, whose whine he could duplicate so accurately that if you were in the next room over or down the hall, you’d think she was speaking in her usual wheedling way. She dropped little pauses in her sentences and rushed her verbs and nouns together, and Timothy had somehow trained himself to parrot those habits too, so much so that the imitations gradually became distracting and weird, as Brettigan and his wife waited for Timothy to sound like himself. As he grew, the voices proliferated: he could sound like film stars or rock musicians or politicians or panhandlers or his parents. He could be anybody, but when he was himself, when the disguises disappeared and the masks fell, he seemed not to be present and accounted for. And he had a magician’s gift for vanishing, almost on the spot. He was there; you saw him; you looked away, and when you turned back, he was gone.