It is spring.
that is to say
another season tries to begin
under bombardment.
On the feed
a girl from Kherson
explains, without a tremor,
that the drone
killed
both her dogs
and the cat.
She lists them
like groceries.
She is tidy
about grief.
The Iraq War vet down the pub says:
"that’s how my father talked"
life on the Eastern Front,
after four years
plus six more,
unlucky
volksdeutsch
toddler,
as his unholy
kindergarten.
So we look again
at the child
on the screen
and the silence
isn’t just for her
it is for him
for 1943
for winter marches
for men who learned
that the heart
can be planed down
to a flat board
if history keeps
running it through.
We used to think
it took trenches
and rifles
and orders barked
in bad weather
to get that flat.
We used to think
it took mud
and a man beside you
turning into red air.
But now
the instrument is lighter.
Now it is
a room
with blackout curtains
a headset
a broadband line
a boy
and the lesson is:
a harmful act
followed by
no suffering
followed by
reward / rank / XP / banter
again
again
again
again.
No flies.
No bleach.
No mother shouting
from the stair.
Only ping.
Only “nice shot.”
Only “gg.”
This is not
“teach him to ****
But
This is
delete the price tag.
This is
will without residue.
This is
power is clean.
Do that
for twelve years
and then ask
why he posts
like no one bleeds.
Ask the teacher,
my just-passed
sister so dear.
She had forty years
of faces
in her.
She said:
the millennials
at least had a playground
that was not
wired.
They fought
over swings
where someone cried
for real.
But these Gen Z kids
are pure Lord of the Flies
she lamented but
with Wi-Fi.
Feral
but indoors.
Each year, worse,
she said.
Each year
more boys
arrive already armoured
in irony
and grievance
and the voice
of some hideous
British podcaster
saying women
took everything.
She said
they don’t believe
in consequence
because
they have never seen
an action
finish.
Every action for them
is cut
by an ad
a tab
a parental call
a respawn.
We implored her but
McLuhan promised
a global village.
She said
we got one.
It’s just
the village
from 1932.
In the trenches
a century ago
men learned
that you can impose
your will
with enough steel.
When they came home
many of them liked it
and built parties
to keep it.
In Österreich,
in the Weimar glare of Deutschland,
in Italia, the mothership of all,
in tightened-belt Magyarország,
in shrine-bright România,
in waiting-room Hrvatska and Slovensko,
in royal-latched Kraljevina Jugoslavija,
even down into Bălgariya and Elláda;
those places that didn't call it fascism
but just look at the boots...
I know how to make
the world listen:
force.
Now
in basements
with controllers
and similar hunger
and 15% youth unemployment
(over ten-thousand applications at
one New York City Mickey Dee's)
and a feed that keeps saying
"you were robbed
by women
by migrants
by progressives
by queers"
(but almost never
by the automation you’re actually mad at)
boys are being taught
And don't tell me it
ain't true cause I'm
a gamer, too ...
the same pose
without the mud.
What once was learned
in trenches
and rifles
is now learned
in basement
with controllers.
The fascism
is interface-shaped now.
They do not need
book clubs.
They have lobbies.
They do not need
brown-shirted
Sturmabteilung.
They have clans.
They do not need
München beer halls.
They have Discord.
And in those rooms
older, angrier men
— some of them
real-war broken —
fish for them,
praising
the clean headshot,
adding
a little Tate,
a little Farage,
a little Trump,
a little Le Pen,
like seasoning,
till the boy
who only wanted
to be good at the map
is suddenly discussing
“the great replacement”
between rounds.
"America adores violence,"
Williams said.
"We have violence
for service.
Battleships
for peace.
Enterprise
to bring bananas
to breakfast."
He said that
before television
became nightly war,
before the net
took out the last
restraint of distance.
He did not yet see
killstreak bonuses.
He did not yet see
stream-sniping.
But he saw us.
By the road
to the contagious hospital
spring struggled
under dead grass.
By the cable
to the contagious household
a new spring
struggles
under lifeless feeds.
There is the same
thinness of color,
the same
half-life
(or Half-Life)
of feeling.
The children
should be green.
They are
buffering.
And still
we say
let it pass.
Because we like
the convenience.
We like
the dopamine.
We like
our kids quiet.
We like
our outrage
coming pre-edited.
This
is how
a species
arrives
at adulthood
having practiced
two hundred thousand
painless harms
before the first
real death
in the family.
This
is how
a girl
on the southern front
can name her
dearly beloved
two dogs
and one cat
like items
struck from a
grocer's list.
This
is how
a veteran
in another country
can look at her
and think, haunted:
"she has my father’s eyes..."
This
is how
we build
our next
authoritarians.
Not from
Mein Kampf
but from
menus.
Not from
Nürnberg
but from
lobbies.
Not from
triumph of the will
but from
triumph of the ping.
And so
we remember
that Williams also said
"Poetry is a rival government."
Because tyrants
always shut down
the comics,
the puppets,
the satirists.
Because Guthrie
wrote on his guitar
"This machine kills fascists"
and he meant
the song
trips the circuit
of obedience.
So let this
do the same.
Let this
be the line break
they can’t algorithm away.
Let this
name the wound
the games refused us.
Let this
cost.
And because you wanted it —
the old voice,
the one that knew
how innocence
and forgetting
can both be terrors —
let the last echo be:
“How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each pray’r accepted, and each wish resign’d;”
— and hear how it fits
too well
for kids
who can press
Start
and make a new self
whenever the old one
gets stained.
And let us all create
a true New Republic
a global New Republic
where in our republic
decrees are issued
only after tea
and no child
or dog or cat
is ever collateral.
*