Date: Wed, 25 Jun 1997 08:06:23 -0500 From: Phanny Subject: SUB: CONTEST: Non: Prose: Did You See Them? (This and the others I'm sending arrived before the deadline, but I dont' stay up till midnight. -- Phanny) Did You See Them? Modern Maenads, home for the day, they sit now, packed in the A.C., not racing across the mountainsides. They sit and they sweat and they stink, awallow in sofas and loungers, with a wave of electronic thyrsoi commanding appearances in the circus rings before them of their angers, of their hatreds, of their revenges, and of their fears. Death, murder and more...doled out in nonstop daytime talk shows, neverending waves of soap opera machinations, and spiced to death with news and "real life" shows that hardly ever mention anything or anyone merely good or normal. Cable TV scrolls channels and hours of drivel, of idiocy, of madness unsurpassed in the history of inhumanity for their bemusement and amusement. These are the days of their lives. They waddle in breadlines everywhere...in supermarkets and grocery stores, breaking into twenty-four hour dispensers of fats and fluff, driving past fast food dealers in lookalike uniforms with electronic headsets tapped into the greed...enquiring minds want to no...with McNews and McViews, for those who pay their McDues in the public McZoos. Decline and fall? No, just slumping and slouching on a sofa. Blood. Horror. Shock value. The channels churn the surf, to spill excitement, canned laughter, musical prompts in case someone isn't sure what they should feel, jazzing emotional excitation pouring out of the glowing tube that holds heaven but mostly hell on the other side of the glass... More each day, more and more, faster and faster...stimulation until there is no feeling anymore, nothing left, just modern maenads dancing to the bells and whistles of advertising the small lies of our times. The bloody feast goes on and on strangers torn to shreds hidden secrets dragged out for a public augury of what we never wanted to be, and neighbors and friends alike shafted on the spit of the gossip whenever there's a commercial or nothing on that we like and then let's watch again to learn the roast, the lie, the way that real people like J.R. do things... Did you see them? Sitting in their darkened caves, hunched over the bright flickering of their wide-screen sets with all those channels and nothing to watch, nothing to see, nothing really interesting on tonight. Those thoroughly modern maenads.