Billions of people believed that Homo sapiens had achieved a permanent higher station since the retreat of the last great ice age.In the end, we smote ourselves with our hubris, believing that we were replacing God’s wisdom with our own.
We believed that we had created a Brave New World, where candy-cane lies and Santa Claus promises could trump hard reality at the election booth every two years. But if all good things must come to an end, how much sooner must the corrupt and the unreal collapse into rubble and tears? Imbalances so great, in a machine running at such a high speed, could only result in calamity when the connecting struts gave way and the beast flew apart.
The new Babylon was where mankind gorged its morbidly obese body and deconstructed spirit on endless food and limitless pleasure, grew like a maggot fattening upon the bloating corpse of Western Civilization, and then burst and devoured itself in a final death-feast.
The primary lesson I have learned over the past three years is that it is much harder to build and sustain a stable and functioning civilization (even an admittedly imperfect one) than it is to destroy a pretty damn good civilization in the name of establishing utopian perfection by government decree.
In my humble opinion, Matt, you are indeed a great writer, developing. At my age, it has been a great pleasure to watch your writing become all the more expressive and spot on with our epoch. Would that our fellow Americans could absorb the nuggets you offer to us so freely.
I’m trying to set my literary bar high enough with pieces like this that even liberals and LIV’s will find it compelling. The plot in the first 2/3 is just a windup, to get the reader up in the tower with the historian, looking back. My target audience is not our choir, but the other side. As soon as I see that Salon or Daily Beast etc is mentioning “Alas,” I’ll put the .99 cent anthology in the Kindle free run for five days to encourage maximum downloading by the folks who need to read it the most.