Detritus, flotsam and jetsam, rather more elegant terms to describe what we’ve seemingly become; rubbish, although apparently useful rubbish or we’d have already been destroyed.

“Useful to whom” would be the reasonable rejoinder and of course the answer is, “to those who own us”, although we either don’t realize that to be the case or we won’t admit it.

Subtle slavery seems to work just fine for the masters, a refinement over its crude antecedent model where slaves, being forced to acknowledge what they were, tended to revolt rather than to serve quiescently, as most of us do now.

Quiescent slavery, all the rage, the beauty of the hive.  As the Borg may once on a future Spring “mourning” declaim with deep satisfaction “resistance was futile”.  So we just sat back and sort of enjoyed it.

Plato’s autocratic dream realized, a place for all and everyone in his or her place, with a bit of illusory drama in the form of verisimilar democracy thrown in to keep us entertained.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2019; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia although he has primarily lived in the United States of America (of which he is a citizen).  Until recently he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales.  He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies).  He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at http://www.guillermocalvo.com.