《文明的未来》 作者：李东 (2000)

For entertainment only

It doesn’t take a village of cultivated social critics to realize the aftermath of our being completely yanked by the self-destructive and self-illusive "civilization progress", the more futuristic a civilization becomes, the closer it gets to the doomsday.

Lately, I have been haunted by vivid visions and apocalyptic delusions of a murky future going down in the flames instead of the history. Maybe a mythical aura of an epiphany is being spelled slowly and subconsciously at the inner sanctum of my heart, and it blows off some compelling and appalling fantasies heralding an unusual upcoming epoch. Let me harp on the negatives of a highly geared futuristic civilization—a convergence of all societies in the future—with surgical precision and anatomically gory details.

That futuristic civilization highly prides itself on highfalutin high-tech while furiously stoked by sky-rocketing yet on-the-rocks stocks and thoroughly soaked in a investment revved-up economy and eerily powered by headily wazoo-wired-up wireless industry and shored up by an impetuously vertiginous cyber infrastructure as well as heavily saddled with a heap of debts. That quirky society is heavily infested with a gaggle of sassy corporate go-getters and a slew of canny pin-stripers as well as a bevy of tech-savvy high-fliers cloistered to clustered and cluttered cubicles. Men there just ain't elude their armored mental Gulag that ratchets up nothing but their non-stop scrambling for power and everlasting desperation in pursuing a niche in the Pantheon of a futile fame, and a man's shear audacity and chutzpah detonates his astounding rise in societal ranks.

That futuristic civilization tones up values of equality and justice while justice itself is cloaked in the mind-bending lofty language of law from a few of big time legal pundits. Law itself sneaks among fuzzy lines and equivocal words, eventually reduces itself to lyrically-slick yet logically flawed articulations buttressed by a gobbledygook of a dandy yet cracked judicial system. An indicted can get away with murder and goes on the lam while the victims' families constantly live in angst and anger as well as fear. Ultimately, that society's unfettered freedom becomes a growing menace to those ultimate-freedom seekers there, and random violence has caused men to live in the throes of life crises and on the verge of metro-terror syndrome.

The jugular-shaking and amphetamine-paced life style in that futuristic civilization drives men to a twisted superposition of violence-escalation and drug-addiction as well as alcohol-binge in deafening heavy metal clashes. Drug lords can't ward off the temptation of pugilistic violence and groundbreaking actions. A spate of avant-garde feisty hip-hop pop-cult superstars pop out from a media razzle-dazzle, taking no heed of decency and giving themselves over to their libido. Chains of newly unleashed lucrative music franchises rake in tons of bucks in raspy raps and lackluster clatter of an ego-ballooning Zeitgeist. The tacky labels of tomorrow's culture lend themselves to blur men's eyes, so men don't see what's right and what's wrong, and neither do men know if they're already dead or still alive until they're all turned into demoralized fragments. Confused by their crumbling identities and flabbergasted at their lack of outer-assurance and inner-balance, men of that future civilization won't let themselves be lumped into any common protocol. Financially privileged yet emotionally starved, men there always hanker for more jaw-jacking freedom and more jaw-dropping pleasure as well as jaw-jutting individuality, yet no amount of undiluted freedom can sate their insatiable appetite.

The frenzy of paparazzi and harsh media glare defame and deflect all social celebs into seedy trajectories of public tabloid preys. The hype and hoopla, as well as uncensored pernicious Net-smut over the privacy-threatening and spam-infested as well as porn-saturated Internet are hatching latent crimes. In the higgledy-piggledy virtual Valhalla, netiquette-deprived netizens live grandly and hurl 4-letter epithets shamelessly, and gun-ho laptop-toting cyber-punks pull off bank-jobs presumptuously. See, a slipshod cyber-culture and a contaminated earth climate tend to be shilling for the warping decline of that futuristic civilization.

The ubiquitous chaos finally pronounces a once-flourishing empire is deeply bogged in its ghastly hefty shadow from stem to stern. That futuristic civilization is finally shackled with its own heavy-tech gewgaws and dwelt by a cacophony of clones of shameless VIPs who busily lobby on issues from rampant Viagra’s abuse to sloppy construction of an expensive extraterrestrial defense system thwarting potential invasions from a phalanx of outer-space animals.

Our futuristic civilization is ultimately staked on pretentious high-profile low-life scum with politically stellar performances yet without the desire to match their rhetoric with their actions. A pile of joint capital-ventures tapping into Galaxies that have become crass profiteers' ultimate commercial frontier, while nukes proliferation is on the muscle, escalating from an intimidating stand-off into a scary near-miss. Evil and His Ilk finally unveil their pug-ugly faces and take the helm of this plummeting empire stuck in the mire and fire. A Hannibal Lecter out of the ADX "Supermax" Hellhole of a rockies-pokey takes the shell of a charismatic worldwide leader with a haughty visage and trendy attire as well as nasty behavior.

In the final confrontation with the Armageddon of our futuristic civilization, men's humanity strikes a spark, yet the flame sputters and quickly snuffs out in the wake of the undertow of future-age barbarity and insanity as well as ferocity. Men's enticed hearts have long been frayed by the flames of their own all-out desires, and their vulnerability finally prints their own burial missteps and carves their own tombstones.