Poison The Well
Seth Price
2002
Adapted from audio track on Constructive Engagement, 2002, LP and CD (free103point9 AD02).



It is a probable future, the future under consideration... What’s happened is a general decline of the United States of America. Expanding to fill the political space is the looming spectre of a New Europe, the European Union, one nation under an odd blend of info-capitalism and creaking socialism, a shadow stretching across the globe…. And behind this cloak of might lurks the endless ocean of China, which, with the help of the Europeans, has leapt from its twentieth-century grind of industrialising poverty straight into the 21st century’s digital economy, of course at the expense of millions, just as she had done with her Great Wall, centuries before. China: a rough but sturdy lad, a bit dumb, but ravenous and determined, joins hands with an aging but vicious grand dame, she who has seen the bloom of her beauty turn into a decrepit travesty… It is a dangerous alliance.

But this is not the only fateful pairing. The United States sees the military/industrial complex grow to encompass and absorb the entertainment industry. To the accompaniment of crushing heavy metal and orgiastic holographic display, fans will see what they can comfortably assume are staged deaths, but which they know on some level might be the real torture and beheading of political prisoners. For America, in those dark days, was a malignantly tolerant nation---the secular humanist state pushed to the nth degree—a Godless country where every belief was encouraged except the narrow notion that there is a God, one God, and his son, Jesus Christ. Christian prayer was not allowed, while the children of Druids, Afrocentrists, Queer Nation, and others were allowed to practice their bizarre rituals in the name of "diversity". All copyright will be outlawed then, because information is clearly a free entity---as endorsed by the cities of virtual people, descendants of our modern-day hackers, who have coded their minds into strips of magnetic binary data and passed on, in a mockery of the Rapture---their first computer transcendant was called Enoch, thereafter…. A realm of bodiless, beliefless people, a true socialist society, invisible and omnipresent...

There will be no single Antichrist---many people mistakenly believe that a single charismatic man will rise to power. But John clearly tells us that there are many Antichrists, that they have been with us all along. From a ten-headed undersea lair called Mosaic, the grand inquisitor of NASA monitored civilians. His pockets and briefcases were stuffed with money—and we speak now of real, tangible dollars, a precious commodity afforded only by the rich, who traded them on the swollen corpse of the stock market, a corpse bloated with all of the things one could buy and sell: for instance, futures in air and water, but also good thoughts and bad thoughts. In any event, the wealthy had the privilege of paying with colored scraps of paper—the bulk of the populace had no recourse but to use electronic finance systems, through which the state was able to track their every move and habit. Many of the citizens were under other kinds of surveillance as well. Because of the lack of room in the existing prisons, the number of which exceeded that of all libraries, schools, and hospitals combined, and the absurdity of building yet more prisons, all criminals walked the streets, a subdermal chip tracking their movements and shocking them when they attempted to exceed their narrowly defined privileges. It was a control state. In reaction, many people followed a cult of cutting, through which they attempted to exert control over their lives by slicing their bodies with blades.

The truth is that the origin of much pagan diety belief was in the creatures which flourished on Mars a thousand years ago, whose only extant evidence is their monolithic structures visible even now from earth orbiting telescopes. For example, the temple complex of Cydonia, so-called, with its massive head, its pyramids and tunnels. It may be that some people, when the tribulation comes, will be caught up by the waves of power emanating from these Martian sites, and find themselves living out the rest of their days in a curious limbo-like existence among the crumbling ruins.

-© 1990, Set Price