Testimonial in Vintage Chrome
We are many. We have seen what has become of this world, and who is responsible. We demand punishment. We demand repayment. We do not forget.
As steel welds to steel, forged by calloused hands, up went the world. Into the heights, Mankind, plotting while restive, smoking jacket, a cocktail in one hand, gazing down on the realm. In your youth you ran and played, scraped fingers along dusty streets of horse manure yearning for coins. Fist fights down cluttered alleys. Boys versus girls, poor ruffians against bullies and angry shopkeepers.
We saw you in your heyday and thousands more. Quick, ambitious. Selfishness repackaged as business acumen.
'Poverty is bad, I deserve better,' you thought. Believed. Greed from early on became the Romanesque cathedral in which you prayed. Martyr to money. First, a small business, cutting every angle until consumers were swindled, yet you held the dingy halo of profit in your arms. Banking. Lobbyists. Rigged contracts and reneged agreements. Men with their eyes focused on resources as if those fervent orbs were born wearing the lens of the diamond cutter.
These things we noticed, yet had little power to thwart. Protests brought the jackboots. Revealed truths slurred as conspiracy theory. You ascended. Into the splendor of bustling cities, metal fingers climbing up higher every years to tickle the silver lining of clouds. Cocktail parties. Tuxedos. Art deco statues of women grasping lightning on the ninetieth floor of a skyscraper dedicated in your honor. You congregated with minds like your own. The Unsatisfied. Your world altered, from dirty windows in a rundown tenement, to checkered floor tiles and hard labor performed by silent maids from foreign lands.
And for all of your acquired prettiness, the wives in pearls and jewels hanging on the arms of the Unsatisfied, you, all of you, practiced a conceit. Build beautifully. Dine in splendor. Pay smarter men than you to pen your speeches. Laugh. Smoke. Travel. Drink fine liquor. Dance. Impress.
Keep the war going.
Which war? It didn't matter. Maybe it never did. But make sure we have one.
Here. Here is where you and your brethren stockpiled madness more than generals did armies. Like the monarchs of old you idolized from your youth, blood would be shed so that you might have the precious vitae of your obsession. More. More goods. More capital. More diamonds. More land. More authority.
And who took these things for you, in the tug-of-war over ages? Who used the expensive arms, read the maps, crept into Baden Baden, Nairobi, Hong Kong to burn, rape, shoot, execute?
The Poor. Same clay from which you were molded. "But they are not me!" you said. "I rose through hard work. Them? Lazy and stupid. I was, from the womb, better."
But the poor were good enough to bleed. Kill one poor mass to ensure freedom for another. Struggle. Die in a million inhumane ways against other poor men from faraway lands led by rich men like yourself, some of them your allies behind closed doors. Shift money to various banks. Secret handshakes. Meanwhile, those in the trenches, the heat ray battleships and drop troop airships exsanguinated, screamed and melted under the force of your wars.
Who transferred vast sums to their accounts?
Who drenched their wives in gems and fur coats while they were off in the mists of Hell?
Millions into billions. Trillions dreamt of at night!
For the returning soldier, fatigued, soiled in petrol and grime...what did he gain aside from a bill offering him a house, and an avenue temporarily buried in a blizzard of confetti and hurrahs?
Post war stress. Entire generations seething from a plethora of fatigues. Hospitals stockpiled with the Lost. Prices rising at home. World in flux. But you? You enter the war in encased in gold and exit in platinum. How coincidental. Inflation. Factory relocations. Outsourcing. Pollution. Your debts are insurmountable.
Despite the lack of resplendent progress, the calls for reforms and facing domestic squabbles...we have more war.
What nation did we last conquer? Which flag last soiled in blood? Who were its people? Have we fought one long war for a century on blood soaked silver ornaments against a mass of enemies, or one thousand battles of attrition against every country in existence?
Some so small, how were they ever a menace? Others so grand, so prominent, why did we ever engender to raise a hand to them?
Nonetheless, we are here.
Look behind you, captains of the well to do! View the charnel smokehouse once called New York City! Hear metal screech as dying humans while the fires rage. Inhale the acrid odor of your expensive missiles, burning fossil fuels. Will you drive over its pilfered bridges? Have any of you dared enter the melting streets to drag out what treasures remain? A fragment from the Empire State Building? Winged icon from Saint Patrick's? Who secured the hallowed top of the Chrysler Building? You? The enemy? No. Oblivion holds it and all of our monuments in a captive abyss. The Hudson flows as black as your values.
So we stand here before you, the Survivors, last of the Gilded Age inheritors. Smell you ashen world. Taste in the air the result of unlimited profit pursuit. Do you enjoy its aftertaste while you grovel on broken asphalt?
In your drive to divide yourself from us, the Mass, how could you miss the obvious? That unfettered greed begets dissension amongst us, who outnumber you? How could you never foresee the apparent regime change on the horizon, as you placed better and more destructive weapons in the hands of those who grew to despise your schemes?
Here we are. The End. Civilization, again in collapse, and we are no different than the fiends who preceded us.
And like all endings, the brute is on top.
Newark, New Jersey has been gated in. A fortress city. When we built it three years ago, we lied. You believed. "Last of the cities! It must be protected!"
Layers of walls. Art Deco wonders hidden inside a hundred antechambers. Soldiers and children of war, hard bitten working class lords of Struggle. We knew. We saw. We planned.
And now the Final City is ours. Lock. Stock. Barrel. We will move ahead. We will safeguard the art and make more beauty.
You twelve, fallen idols. Money lovers. Eat your profit. Outside. In Newark we killed money and greed, profit and inequality. Our one law says NO PERSON LEFT BEHIND OR BELOW.
You never understood this elegant premise. The world smolders because of your hideous Want.
So keep it. The world and its fallout are yours. Enjoy it as the skyscrapers tumble. Dance for joy while farm fields burn. Laugh until the packs of feral dogs find your starving, deluded bodies.
The final tens of thousands are within. We leave you to your accomplishments.
The Working Class entered the city. The great gate of Newark squealed shut and a dozen grand locks slid into place.
Twelve persons in once fine suits and dresses remained. Out.
The wind shifted.
From the rooftops, children heard the baying of the faroff hounds, and placed bets.
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