Absolute Grotesque

This article is archived, and is no longer part of Vekllei canon.

Six bodies hung from the Rodney Creek Railroad Bridge, without names. The leftmost corpse, which was a boy, had a sign slung around his neck with tomorrow’s 8am train on it. Besides the swaying boy was his father, and next to him was his mother, and so it went down the railroad bridge, counting off his little sisters and grandmama and so on. The baby had been thrown in the creek. Who they were didn’t matter much, since the types of people hanging from bridges and trees and lampposts were cut from the same cloth.

Later that night, a man from the Kennecott Copper Company payed a sum of four and a half million dollars in cheque towards three bastards, two pigs and a thug. For that sort of money, you could buy a home to the North and the East, far out of Utah and far out of the violence. Not that any of them would leave — the pigs had good jobs with the Sheriff’s office, the bastards had been born here and would die here, and, well, the thug just liked killing too much.

You could trace today’s nightmare back to the collapse of the Ford Motor Company, but there were problems in the southwest long before even that. The truth of it is that there’s been a lot of anger in Utah for a long time, it’s just taken a lot longer than anyone thought it would.

It’s quite impossible to imagine the tragedy of the U.S. in 2094, where suffering can be predicted by the latitude at which it occurs and midcentury domesticity collides with violence and power. As the U.S. Dollar inflates wildly and the Atomic Age has priced out the working man, is it any wonder that Southerners waste away beneath horizons of the quiet, rusting manufacturing plants of the southwest, where the wind whistles between conveyors once carrying bits of Pontiacs and Fords?

What we saw, as the Dallas Accords failed and the talks of a total secession ascended from fantasy, was the rise of militias, company cities, industrial action, bloodshed, lynchings, racial animosity, the death of suburbs, mass killings, child labour, sexual violence, decaying infrastructure, and so on. The air was electric with opportunity to live out your wildest, most depraved fantasies. Bizarre images of single-story cul-de-sacs and a half-dozen State police excavating portions of desert existed simultaneously. The free flow of immigrants between Mexico and Arizona was quickly seized upon and exploited by companies like Anaconda Mineral and Kennecott Copper, who filled their mines with Latin Americans to shut out striking workers.

An immigrant labourer was dead at the signing of his contract. He was killed by vigilantes, or in a mine accident, or was simply consumed, since these people did not have names and the companies had no expectations of their longevity. That attitude soon came to shadow almost every interaction between otherwise decent people of impoverished communities — that there was no future, that they were the last generation, that the hedonistic cycle of production and consumption had become life itself.

The hedonism of brutality and modern pornography manifested in the violence of the company militias and local sheriffs alike, and so both cannibalism and necrophilia were widespread in oft-secret killings. Desecration of corpses, mutilation of the living, and widespread lawlessness came to characterise the hell that was life in the southern U.S. in 2094. How terrifying it was that beautiful things could decay so quickly.

So it was that men became creatures — lust became necrophilic, suffering became ecstasy. This mad spiral towards our worst instincts came out in full force. The biopolitics of life and consumption became the necropolitics of grotesqueing and subsumption. A girl’s sandal; poisoned bread; leaded cosmetics; copper in the mountains; apricot phosphorous on the horizon; a nuclear family in the current; six Mexicans gutted; six good boys killing for cash; whole towns cashing in and shipping out.

That is life in Utah today. Absolute erotic; absolute grotesque

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