A new study shows that 50% of the New York City subway system's more than 5,000 identified life forms are bacteria, constituting an underground labyrinthine eco-system of sorts.
Wow. It's almost as amazing as the fact that 50% of the earth's biomass is also bacteria. Or at least it would be almost that interesting if the latter weren't true and it wasn't a fact we have been aware of for a long time.
I guess people are shocked because the proportion of living organisms represented by bacteria found on the subway is only the median global percentage, which is surprisingly low for the place that drunk senile homeless people go to shit and masturbate all over the trash and refuse I discard there at 2 a.m. when I'm vomiting chunks of bile and semi-digested Maker's Mark into the crevices between the tracks rats on steroids with ripped triceps and six-packs for abs use for their nightly incline push-ups.
Please watch the gap between the train and the platform. Your next bodily pathogen might be hiding there. If you see something, say something, before it's too late and we're all exterminated at the hands of something that was always there which only feels new and weird to use because we're just finding out about its ubiquity now.
ISIS must have the night off or something. Maybe the real news is that 99% of the time you change your life to protect yourself from these alarmist spectres, you would have been better off just chilling the fuck out. 1% of the time you will die an excruciatingly slow and torturous death from the bubonic plague, but that can only happen to you once. The rest of the time you can enjoy with near certainty the absolute freedom of bathing in the steaming underground hotbed of fecal detritus on wheels you entrust each night to roll you home, with total impunity. It's no small miracle that you put this responsibility in an oxidized box of tin careening across tracks fixed into the earth looser than your grandmother's last rotting molar is set into her receding, blood-saturated gums.
That hauntingly beautiful, repulsive image of organic decay and pallid, ashen death is how America sees itself when its patriotic sentiments have been excited by the gentle stirrings of love for its country's irrepressible hypocrisy and fear for its rotting decline, concealed by only the thinnest film of slimy excrement, encrusted over the throbbing, pus-filled boils and drippy open wounds that spangle the inside of its mouth. If you want a place that is clean, you forgot where America came from and all the contagious diseases we brought over to it, like little microscopic Christian missionaries sent out to invade every orifice of every living thing not yet fashioned in the disfigured, pathetic and crucified Martyr of its ideological self-image.
We are the real contagion lurking in our own territory, and that's the fear we are always running from. Criminals, the urban poor, the homeless, ISIS, terrorism, communism, Jews, spics, muslims, the ebola virus, and anything else we might blame for the assault on our 'property rights', for all disturbances to normal market activity - all of it inspires terror in us because we know, viscerally, that we will one day be sterilized by the anti-septic disinfectant of true progress, when we can no longer pretend to be the cure for our feverish, chronic inflammatory sickness, and must come to terms with the mucousy buildup presence has left wherever we settle, until its oozy runoff flows into the sinkhole of history, where no one will remember us except to send us further and further downstream from the more enlightened civilization who shits us out and flushes us into our own asphyxiating inferno of raw sewage and toxic sludge, forcing us to breathe in what we have done until we die fucking choking on it, the thick, black flumes of soot and smoke billowing out of our asshole like a 19th century English coal refinery, which shoots the black and cloudy plumes right back up our calloused nostrils.
Meanwhile, the next stage in human history surpasses our accomplishments and does in actual fact what we have only the most hollow, three-dollar political slogans and the most insidious, stupid cliches for, celebrating its stifled values, as if by hoping for what our historical limitations denied us - consciousness of our own refusal to sacrifice our egoistic interests as the real, determinate barrier to our lofty philosophical ambitions - the necessity of our death sentence as the sole condition for making them real might be vacated at the last second, and we would be recognized for our heroism in dreaming up the better world of our sacred 'mental labor', realized only in the practical activity of the progressive development of this advanced society, building and asserting itself upon the earthly foundations of our unmarked mass grave, where the 'hitherto existing history of society' has been dumped once and for all. Its accumulated riches, its funds of accumulated surplus, concretised capital, objectified labor,etc., have been signed over to the collective management of the class it once privately owned and used up, threw away, and bought back cheaper and cheaper, taking more for itself and returning less and less to the true producers of value-substance.
Rationally reappropriating all our old, tattered flags and mass produced pages of Scripture into toilet paper for it to wipe its asses with, floss for picking bits of our hoarded foodstuffs from its hungry mouth, and tissues for jizzing in, our former laborers now consume our product of its expenditure, and produce for itself as the necessaries of life what we consumed in luxury as that part of our tribute we didn't 'abstain' from squandering on ourselves, faithfully reproducing its reserves of human labor, the tools of labor, and labor's product, transferring the value of the first to the second, the second to the third until no trace of its obedient subjects is left in its products. What remains as a trace of our presence as their 'productive' owners, of their value and the value of their necessary instruments, is the innocuous bacterial thicket growing out of the cracks and interstices of the underground subway receptacle, the same one we used to fear contracting a plague from, before the exploited of the world classified our reign as the official diagnosis for its recurring, explosive, spiritual and moral infection, back when 'freedom wasn't free' and everyone and anyone but the privileged heirs of 'one nation' - united against its slaves it stood, 'under God' - was obligated to piously pay out pocket for the market value of its moral indemnification. Those privileged heirs,'under God's judging eye, led an orgy of bloodshed as Cain did against his own brother in the body of Abel, in the form of his labor - more thoughtful and deliberate than our own - expressed as the alienated commodities of his sacrifice in honor of its Divine laws of accumulation. The ratio between the revenue and the funds of its accumulated value expresses what part of itself it uses to enjoin more value to itself than before, and what it consumes for itself, either productively or for the gratification of luxurious consumption: some of the world's lot is destined for Heaven, others for Hell. God determines this ratio in accordance with that increase in the mass or rate of surplus product, by which God obeys his own shibboleth: be fruitful and multiply over the face of the Earth. As above, so below.
God, appalled by the violence of our ignoble sacrifice in His name, overthrew our existing property relations with his Invisible Hand, or what political economy calls 'the laws of supply and demand.' Confronted, on the market, with the humiliating lesson that His other son, our gentler, humbler younger brother, slain by our own envious hands, had a greater use-value for His pleasure. Loving him more than us, behind our ignorant backs, which we arrogantly kept turned toward toward the Promised Land, he cast us into exile , so that our younger, gentler Brother might live in peace, away from the sin of our decadent, violent despotism, the intemperate lust for the eroticism of violence to which we gave up each and every one of our bodily temptations. Each temptation to sell what we robbed as thieves from the lot of our stock of miserly laborers, was satisfied by, on the one hand, returning to our deceived beggars a part of its own wealth, and on the other hand, buying more of its product than what we first purchased from its sale. But the Word of God was clear: expropriate the expropriators. And so they did, and Cain was cast out of his earthly Kingdom, left with nothing, a miser among his former misers, but an outcast among them whose wealth he had lived off of.
Now like a bacterial colony without a host, the former magnates of despotic capital wander the desert in search of more of God's children. Blind, deaf and dumb, the former princes of His earthly kingdom have neither the ears to hear their own desperate lamentations, the silence with which the barren, forsaken land it walks across delivers its mocking answer, nor does it have eyes to see the endless, rambling stretch of sand and dark desolation it is forced to live out its days in, without the protection of a Father or the sympathy of a Brother, its existence fading from even its own dwindling memories, a senile will surrendering itself to a negated, forgotten existence, denied a monument or memorial by which to beget a progeny, or transfer its existence to its future, like the laborer who transfers its value to capital in the act of simple circulation. Removed from circulation and from the market of commodity production, Cain, as a producer of value, perished for want of more value to bind himself to, a part of lost revenue never to be recouped or enjoined to the future product of the Creator's labor, for which 6 days wages are paid for in 7. When God rested on the Sabbath, it was to give a day of rest to his creation, not to Himself; does the capitalist not stop production when the productive power of his capital sends the price of commodities spiraling downwards? Washed away in exile by the Desert Storm, divided the Empire falls, indivisible, invisible, with liberty and justice served, once and for all.
And God spoke to Cain, who was now an old, poor man. God wished to raise the Metrocard fare, and so it was raised. Then God said to Cain: 'Thanks for riding with the MTA.. This is the last stop; please exit the train at this station. Please be sure to take all your belongings before exiting the train.'
But Cain had no belongings, not even another fare. He had reached the end of the desert.
'Stand clear of the closing doors, please.'
The tocsin bell was sounded, heralding the workers' dictatorship in the form of a State manifest in the Heavens as the arch-angel Gabriel, the mediator of the material struggle of 'pure' Ideas to abolish their class existence, and by this humble sacrificial offering of Abel's to God, the political authority, universally, of class and state, and exploitation, are consumed by a great flood that would replenish the Earth from its past transgressions. Pleased with Abel, God resolves his Ideal existence into the material conditions of society, and the new conditions resolve themselves into the abolition of the division of labor between Heaven and Earth. As above, so below. The flood not only replenishes the Earth, then, but also God, who must recoup the universal social product, for that product to recoup God in its reappropriated wealth, so that each of these overcomes its self-estrangement from the other, dialectically transforming each into its opposite.
As below, so above. The accrued bacteria clung to the subway staircases and chairs. Piously acting in the service of God's will, it did as instructed: be fruitful and multiply over the face of the Earth.
As below, so underground. On the first day on the platform, God created the Uptown and the Downtown tracks. And so it was.
No comments:
Post a Comment