Max at the Cotton Exchange

Copyright © 2010 Ernest Bloom.

Cracking crab legs, soon he was
thinking how latter-day inhumanity is armored in the
starched shirt uniforms of lobotomized administrators,
goose-stepping legions armed and credentialed behind their
MBAs and professional certifications,
reassuring proof of their honorable intentions when they
lay awake at night alone with their
infantile doubts and dreams of falling, and in the
swollen and pasty, judgmental faces like
green, fluorescent, bilious moons rising from the
hallowed, billowing robes of courthouse orthodoxy,
and in the thunderous counsel of compliance
and acceptance of the status quo advocated from every
monotonous and unimaginative pulpit throughout the
fading land. Inhumanity painted into every sinister,
frozen smile greeting you, scrutinizing you for any
sign of weakness, and locked into the mystic mantra beat of
We've always done it this way.

We require a new kind of liberalism, he thought, not
like the unthematic monstrosity we've had for the
last thirty years, not assembled Frankenstein-wise from
disjointed, unrelated parts. A new liberalism that's genuinely
concerned with global economic disparity,
emotionally connected, empathic. We must all feel
and know without question, as axiomatic, that every hungry
human belly must and will be fed. That's the only
tonic that can cure the spiritual blight. There are to be
no more commercials -- our shame! -- about
starving children, ever. And every
human mind in every corner of the world must be fed.
This is the human duty. This too must be recognized as
fundamental. Unquestionable. But we must
no longer be satisfied with fighting the symptoms of the diseases
of poverty, hunger, and dyseducation, but we must identify
their root causes, and labor tirelessly to eradicate those causes.
We need a new kind of universal compassion that trumps
every vestige of nationalism, that recognizes
shared humanity across the borders that delineate
outmoded states, whose time in this shrunken world is
fading away.