This book features 5 essays about my first three months in Chicago. Here is a section of the book's fourth essay, "The Evils of Modern Society: Vol 3; The Metropolis (or) The Quixotic Utopia."
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“It is no more spooky than the selective yogic trance of the average city [Metropolis] dweller, which allows himself to walk in mindless indifference through incredible noise, filth, pandemonium, misery, neurosis, violence, psychosis, rape, burglary, injustice and exploitation, screening it all out and concentrating only on robot-repetition of his assigned role in the hive-economy.”
Robert Anton Wilson
Cosmic Trigger I: The Final Secret of the Illuminati[i]
(1977)
In the arid deserts of the American Southwest mountains pierce from the earth, pointing to the skies above us. Standing awestruck under the cool shade of such grand magnitude we can yell, "Wow, look at what God has made!" In the Metropolis, where tree and soil has been replaced by iron and concrete, the shadow of the modern skyscraper blots out the sun. Standing between these concrete palisades we look up to find where the sun has gone, instead of clouds we see the razor's edge, where concocted alloys shave at the heaven's outer edge. We can't help but freeze and think, "Oh my God! Look at what man has made."
What once man strived for, and soldiers died for, and explorers left all for, has been paved over, replaced by coffee shops, corner liquor stores, and banks where everyone can find “wealth” in adjustable rate loans. The time of going out, has been replaced with a culture obsessed with moving up. Where are the wild men in the metropolis? The man who left home looking to live off the land, taking nothing more then a rifle, a coonskin cap, and a dream to survive only on meat - Elk, Deer, and Bear? The metropolis has replaced this man with a gaunt metro man, voice two octaves too high from years of wearing pairs of ball-scrunching skinny-girl-jeans. Where is the Cattleman? The entrepreneur who knew the difference between a steer and a stud, this farmer and businessman was moral, treating the farm, the farmhands, and livestock all with dignity and respect. The metropolis has done away with this man and created instead a short-haired GQ man. Having, business suits pressed at only the most expensive Chinese owned dry cleaners, suits tailored at only the most trustworthy Jewish tailors, and shoes shined by only the most prestigious of black homeless street-corner shoe-shiners, these GQ men are described as our modern man. They work in real-estate, investing, insurance, or banking, and instead of making food, they create interest to feed their own personal fattened (golden) calf. Where did all the women go? The mother who could hem and sew, butcher and cook, the caregiver, the lover, the fire builder, the stew stirrer - the Mother. The Metropolis has perverted these little women turning them to something most heinous. These less-then-girls walk always with Latte in hand. When moving from one boyfriend’s house to another, they need more then one U-haul to carry all their make-up, hair products, facial soaps and cleaners, diet pills, Cosmopolitan magazines, birth control pills and coffee makers. Never able to stand still, either from too much coffee, or soreness from the previous nights illicit sexcapade, they can be found in a club grinding crotches on some other woman or man, texting at a coffee shop, or shopping for any number of extra expensive, extra provocative haute couture. There was a time when even presidents wrote of the wondrous American wilderness, the rifle, and the smell of freshly cooked game. Now presidents, the north on our moral compass, don’t come from the land, they come from the Metropolis.
The American Dream of the Wild West, great outdoors, and the white picket fence is gone and in its place is America’s reality, the Metropolis...
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