RUNWAY

Violet jewels glitter in the asphalt, some recessed, others proudly erect in their wire cages, glaring, defiant, thrusting up like crocuses, unmoved by any human presence, evaporating fog to reveal the grim architecture of total control, contours fixed for eternity, nothing less will do. The mechanized juggernaut drags itself across the landscape, and its details overwhelm, tantalize, obscure the senses one by one, leaving only a nightmare of interiors, seductive inner spaces, carpeted boxes, sealed against weather and other acts of god. With centuries of patient observation, imitating organic life, absorbing both substance and form of the natural world, the beast is tamed, molded, pinched between Francis Bacon's rotting fingers, giggling as he paved the way for total war. It's a war of attrition, there's no hurry, time is on the machine's side; there's always room for improvement, tinkering, maximizing, infinitely approaching the zero of optimal conditions, saturation, perfect balance, both male and female, yin and yang, the receptacles, sensors, passive arrays, coils, and vacuums no less important than the ubiquitous industrial phallus, both extremes and every nuance essential for smooth functioning, hard steel worse than useless without soft skin of fetishistic rubber, a yielding calculus to flex the wheels under the terrible loads of this technological anti-triumph, this miracle of organization, hierarchy and relationship, this monstrous vision of human mind made real in riveted aluminum the size of an apartment building, fuming, roaring, jerking, bucking bronco-like with furious power as the turbines lift it off the violet-studded runway, gravity defeated by libraries of data, technical knowledge applied with ruthless zeal by armies of specialists, nothing but pure mathematics between my bottom and the receding landscape that already resembles a child's game, houses with dolls and miniature trees, great spirit keep these Rolls-Royce turbines spinning and deliver me safely to Fort Lauderdale.

Unlike plagues of the dark ages or contemporary diseases we do not understand, the modern plague of overpopulation is soluble by means we have discovered and with resources we possess. What is lacking is not sufficient knowledge of the solution but universal consciousness of the gravity of the problem and education of the billions who are its victim. —Martin Luther King Jr.

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