We shall be monsters

The Inevitable Monster That America Made

“It is true, we shall be monsters, cut off from all the world; but on that account we shall be more attached to one another.”

-Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

Like inebriated hosts, we insincerely welcomed his arrival to our lavish, Dionysian-style party.

At first, we were surprised…or at most, entertained.

We found his presence irrelevant.

We found his obnoxiousness inconsequential.

He disappeared into the crowd, only to reemerge as a blindingly bright, final pageant of one.

That’s when the music dissolved into uncomfortable shuffles as people tried the doors, only to find them swollen shut from the heat of sweaty bodies, dancing for decades.

He’s ruining everything, we mumbled.

Someone stop him, we cried.

He’s gone mad, we shouted.

But we have all gone mad….

for only a mad world would demand such decadence.

We were distracted and perversely greedy.

We turned away from the spiritual world and just leaned sideways into the television.

We neglected to mourn the deaths of other species for hundreds of years. Instead, we justified their ruin as “progress.”

We moved into fragmented subdivisions

and even more fragmented attention spans.

We left massive carbon footprints that hardened in the increasingly hot sun.

We told ourselves it was the other side’s problem — and then drifted back into our blue-light dreams.

And now we draw a breath.

Our selfishness,

that insidious vapor,

has long been wafting between people, in and out of lungs, permeating crowds, blanketing surfaces, drifting from shelves, and beckoning from screens.

Along the way, we went insane.

And he is our mania, manifested as a monster.

A monster that America made.

Its body was cobbled together

from decrepit, dead limbs of capitalism

from the injected lips of vanity

from the bulging, webby veins of racism

from the clumsy thumbs of instant gratification

from the limp penis of pliable morals.

We used the heat from the climate like a blowtorch,

melting together its sutures and

cauterizing the orange skin so it would not bleed out.

We welcomed rage, slathering it over bruises and callouses

like a sticky balm.

We set aside our care for consequences,

interested only in the sheer magnitude

of our frenetic experiment of “more.”

We were dancing and intoxicated, ecstatically orgasming from novelty itself.

Then we gave it guns and White entitlement to defend itself.

We fed it with our time and attention

because we were gripped by the clutches of its celebrity.

We touched and massaged its fat,

blistering pustules of Ego

because we were addicted to the taste

and desensitized to the effects.

We did not, and cannot, and will not look away.

America, the Consumers and the Creators of Donald Trump.

The ones who exhaled the most virulent strain of Debord’s spectacle.

The vengeful scientists

chasing after the monster

as it threatens to destroy everything it touches.

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The original version of this was written in March of 2020 during the start of the Covid pandemic.