A Prophesy From Utopia, Seattle, 1999
Dear American Public,
Disclaimer: This op-ed is also an inaugural poem
(anti-intellectual America rolls its eyes. Here we go…)
But wait a minute! To be an op-ed it can’t just be any poem. No, in the least it should be a time traveling poem; a poem that Boldly goes back to the time of Great Again. Historical and stuff. A Golden-Aged Laminate Poem.
I mean it’s a Really, Really Great Poem!
Please keep your hand inside the vehicle as we travel to where the notion hits home: As a university instructor in an American Studies department that was consolidated into Transnational Studies, re-envisioned, innovated, expanded–simultaneously downsized– the positioning of borders, barriers to pluralism in higher education,
blurred lines
between social imaginaries and unequal political realities have come to mean a great deal to me. This is also an adventure in hybridity!
One that I’ll warn you is dangerous too. The kind that mines past perspectives
through artists and teachers of troublesome voice and that messy insistence on making a living, bodies with curves that resist textual advances of dead poets on top of History, those Ministry equivalents of fake news variety
that everybody used to just call
propaganda.
But I’m not saying you should leave all the interpretation up to me
(I am a Big Woman, but certainly not alone).
Ursula K. LeGuin* once wrote ‘… the nature of the utopia I am trying to describe is such that if it is to come, it must exist already. […] I don’t think we’re ever going to get to utopia again by going forward, but only roundabout or sideways…’ or, as she explains,
going backwards.
So cue the replay, adjust your screen. We’re about to go from LeGuin to
the threat of the Leaky University!
(This is where we punch in the Destination: Utopia, Seattle, 1999)
BEEP-BOOP-BEEP
Enter scene: I think this is when they might have figured it all out, that when it reigns it pours; that educated minds under cuts think critically; that democratic scholarship, when ideology comes down, catches it like a sieve, filters it,
floods the streets.
Can you imagine them now, Space Needle in the foggy distance, 50,000 – 100,000 little holes in their free market plans, angry, eating up economically
loaded words
like affordable textbooks in the rain?**
What if I told you that you didn’t have to imagine them anymore, folks? What a wormhole that is!
An education still somewhat untethered from a dutifully repaying STEM career,
and it’s only 19-99!
Who knew that the back-stepping, forward-marching, American-Dream-plated neoliberalism of Trumpism would bring us to where Seattle
trickled off?
Or at least, back to its Prophesy.
This is how it generally works:
you recite it long enough and it becomes Reality.
This is where I started, at least, inside a giant, dysfunctional tv,
traveling through an obsolete building at my public university
that also routinely leaks.
“Back round once more. Usà puyew usu wapiw!”
– Ursula K. LeGuin*
The priestess clicks her tablet
and Sees:
“ And the calendar year will crack.
And the institutional facades will leak, will crumble like
40-year-old public spending campus constructions in
the rain.
And they’ll send out the workers scrambling,
circling above in furious rituals to patch it, illusions
collecting in public spaces far and wide like
tears
caught into conspicuously placed Emergency buckets.
And those buckets will look an awful lot like unused
Construction buckets.
And the Men will be At Work Again.
And the women can ask them
for The Pocket Monies.
And the people coasting by on
debt with their breakfasts
in their hands will
look up, awe-struck, incred-
ulous, and inauger
that this Work is not about
the work anymore, this endless holding up
the roof, On Fire,
in suspension, in suspense, in desperate invest-
ments, and grumbling comparisons of
facades,
but inside deeply held breaths has become something
fallen
irrevocably into ruin.
something beyond
the cheap fixes, the $6000 shower curtain, the golden
laminate dream in-between,
all these idolatries impossible to lean on anymore,
unspeakably shiny, really,
liquid,
pooling in a just sad corner to reflect to us
that we are all just squatters here.
And the silver view will slide far away,
to something out there now, immovable,
concrete,
not so pretty,
but together, seeking out elsewhere
under efficient, Brutalist architecture,
exhausted, sure,
–I mean, aren’t we all, who can even get ahead these days? –but
still reaching, gathering up
the last, long, bright
green, ecofriendly years
from the bonfire with their hands,
awoken and scorched,
maybe a little bit hungover,
but with paid leave now, just glowing
with a holy trinity of Arts, Universal Benefits, and the Spirit of
Collective Leisure,
casting out the evil demons
of ass-backwards mechanization and their
greedy little cronies,
enlightening the Kids not to be Alright again,
but furious
with bad-ass anti-bigotry,
Glorious.”
-amend transmission-
**http://www.globalissues.org/article/46/wto-protests-in-seattle-1999
Jennifer Seaman Cook’s cultural political scholarship in the arts, media, and visual and public cultures is augmented by her intermedial practices in poetry, essay, and documentary. Her most recent essays can be found in Salon, PopMatters, and Heide Hatry’s photography book Not a Rose. Jennifer’s poetry has been published in Cedilla Literary Journal (archived at University of Montana), Lunch Ticket and more. Jennifer teaches American Studies at the State University of New York at Buffalo. She stands firmly behind the democratic promise of publicly funded institutions.