as he resumed his slow retreat down the ladder again. “Because, well, like it’s said, I’m made in His image, you know.”
“Wait a minute, what about everybody else? What about me, then?” Barnz wanted to know, leaning precariously out the side of the cab and now looking nearly vertically down the ladder at PLΔcebo as the latter resumed his descent to the ground.
“Hell, no! You must be goddamn nuts!” PLΔcebo responded as he hopped off the bottom rung of the bulldozer’s access ladder and onto the ground. Tiny clouds of dirt puffed up around, and settled onto, his mirror-gloss shoes as he landed. He looked up at Barnz with a scowling look.
“I mean, just look at yourself critically one time. No way. Geez, not you! Just ain’t logical, you know? I mean, I’m sorry that you’re making me have to say it so clearly, but listen: you’re black, dammit.”
“So what’s that got to do with it?” Barnz asked coyly.
PLΔcebo turned and made a beeline for the main gate, leaving the site without trading another word with either Fulcrum or Barnz.
Once he was outside the front entrance to the construction site, PLΔcebo was still seething inside as he began furiously tapping data into a MindφSet that he had pulled from his pocket.
“Barnz,” he mumbled to himself. His fingers flew across the keypad as he typed. “Thelonious. Damn, just look at that crap.scheiss–rhymes with felonious! Whoa …”
He paused a brief instant before continuing with his data entry.
“Naw. It’s gotta be Bulldozer. Bulldozer Barnz ...”
LIBERTYVILLE@ESPERANTIA
Charles’ very first recollection of Libertyville@Esperantia was glimpsing a part of its surrounding wall from the window of seat 21K aboard an aging Escudo.Amazonas Airways jet. From this airborne perspective, the initial impression for him resembled something that could just as well have been an infinitely long tapeworm. It was made of gray concrete and snaked erratically along the northern boundaries of the city, its tight embrace starkly highlighting the insular character of the place when viewed from above and afar.
To him, it looked just like West Berlin must have once appeared, tucked away from the rest of the worldmonde.Planet during the long decades of what was then referred to as a Cold War. What was different from the first glance onward was that Libertyville@Esperantia was geographically a peninsula of sorts. The wall was therefore most visible where the city bordered the mainland. Beyond it only water or a thin strand of shoreline were to be seen while, to the east, a wide river opened into the ocean.
The wall around West Berlin was different. It visibly circled the entire urban area of the city. But there was also another important difference: oppressive as it no doubt was to those within and also outside the wall surrounding the city at the time, a convincing rhetorical argument could be made that this sullen barrier looming between East and West nonetheless at least legitimately served a higher symbolic purpose through embodying the divide it literally cemented into place for so many long years. Seen through a semiotic worldview, it was absolutely unbeatable as a representative icon, a vivid reminder of the long enduring stalemate between the advocates of capitalism hunched down on the one side and those of communism on the other.
In fact, for someone with a simplistic perspective like that of Niklas, it actually supremely symbolized the days in which there were only a few ideologies worth making a stand for and that, for this reason, these were therefore much more inclined to be proudly contested and passionately defended.
“Good old days,” was a like a mantra which one could hear regularly from older folks when the subject of the past.time came up.
That was long ago. Swapping spooks at the Glienicke Bridge was a part of that era. And, even way before that, Chairman Mao.
L. Ron Hubbub and the Atomic Café and roads choked with fossil-fuel big-fin behemoths were the icons of that time, before which industrial-strength solutions for genocidal ambitions served to define the level of collective achievement for a handful of civilizations given to obediently following the leadership of various gangs of acknowledged miscreants.
That was even way before so-called new eras came fast and furious as their watershed moments were institutionalized or branded into the collective memory before they risked being bleached out by the ever faster turning of world events. The developed worldmonde.Planet was already gathering steam long before the advent of social engineers and cybersquatters, before facebooks and firewalls and spyware. The worldmonde.Planet was spinning at dizzying speed even before Chapman & Co. and a parade of Russian spymates became all the rage.
There were the ages of JFK, MLK and RFK, all being blown away in quick succession.
Or Nine-Eleven and the animosities, annoyances, angst and agencies it subsequently spawned. With the advent of smartphones, there came the art of sexting and, not long thereafter, the inevitable rise of reputation-restoration management agencies whose primary business model was to ensure that inappropriately bared body parts or unseemly bulges in undergarments disappeared from the ethernet before they could do any serious damage to reputations or careers.
All of these developments were soon accompanied by the radiant new TEPCO shine that much of the worldmonde.Planet and the agricultural industry eagerly took on post-Fukushima.
Naturally everyone liked Spikey Ike at one time, way back there in those dark days of pre-modernity, even if it took another few years before the presence of a wall like that in Berlin was finally a firm and physically established fact. In their minds, however, the more deviate architects of that particular age’s divisions, its reason and its politics were no doubt, somewhere in the back of their minds, already busily stirring cement and stacking bricks long before a gate went up at Checkpoint Charlie.
After all, in a logical context, walls serve no real purpose except as structures that serve to separate.
Those having the fortune or misfortune to one day find themselves on one side or the other.
In another time or under other circumstances, they might well be neighbors.
East and West. Or Arabs and Jews. Black or white.
First world, third world.
But who nowadays truly needed to pay attention to the often incomprehensible sensibilities of neighbors in a fully globalized age where physical location played little or no role anymore in the trade of goods or ideas?
There was absolutely nothing to be gained in being nostalgic anymore, if indeed there ever was. Such tidy states of affairs belonged to the irretrievable past.time now, to a period that dated back many long years before Charles’ time.
In fact, to a time that was even long before the days of Niklas Vladimir.
It is unlikely that anyone today could say with real certainty why a concrete wall had ever been erected around the perimeter of Libertyville@Esperantia several decades ago. The official explanation, and thus the one that was still often stated to be valid to this date, simply declared it to be in the overall “national interest”, declaring it necessary to protect and to serve its citizenry in light of the many constant and enduring threats being directed at it.
This was an explanation that was very often mobilized because of its terrific all-round effectiveness. Lots of otherwise questionable endeavors, from dubious make-work programs to granting tax exemptions on chick flicks or even making mobile to go to war, have all been publicly and convincingly justified as having been in the greater national interest at one time or another.
The same general principle has historically applied to awarding concessions for selling everything from opium to tea to guidance systems for nuclear missiles, for printing reams of postage stamps and paper money, for licensing taxi drivers and tax auditors or prescribing a recommended cholesterol level for pork meat.
It was kind of like Isotype. Every moron could understand the implied symbology so its messages didn’t need constant explaining.
National interest. No questions