Saturday, June 17, 2006

See the sites 1

On the southern outskirts of town there is a factory that manufactures things that nobody wants. Part of it is a printery responsible for the bales of junk mail that appear in your letter boxes, as well as government forms. Other assembly lines produce spurious samples, traffic cameras, those spikes they use to stop pigeons roosting under bridges, and Volvos.

From the outside the factory is nondescript, concrete blocks floodlit tacky orange at night, beyond a sagging perimeter cyclone mesh fence. Featureless trucks deliver the factory's products to the rest of the city at all hours of the clock.

Inside it is another matter. The workers on the assembly lines, amid the machines, are children and youths, abducted from the city's central bus interchanges at night, and blinded especially for the factory's purposes. They are chained to their workstations and fed once a day on MacDonalds hamburgers. Their swift pallid fingers work for fourteen hours at a time. They do not dream.

When they grow too old and big for their workstations they are taken shambling away to a shed at the back of the property, still crabbed over from their years of toil, and humanely killed. Their bodies are recycled, dried and kibbled for use as cattle feed. Their overalls are washed and then given to their successors. Nothing is wasted.

The factory's purpose is not production but consumption.

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