Books: Telegrams from X County

Enceiderich: Jetzt oder Nicht? | Decide: Now or Not?

By Deniz Ataman
QuailBellMagazine.com

Robin Wyatt Dunn’s chapbook, Telegrams from X County, is an abbreviated social commentary set in X County in X World. But this X County in this X World sounds vaguely familiar. Kinda like the X County in the X World in which we live. A “think piece” (cue Lester Bangs puffing away on a cigarette condemning the death of rock ‘n roll in a superficial, authoritative, corporate-driven-world) foraying the robotic buzzing of a society that is spoon-fed exact doses of carefully sculpted reality by a handful of drones who “know better.”

X County is a Pleasantville of sorts; where dark thoughts pervade each individual, but are suppressed and masked with a plastered smile in order to maintain order. Yet, the narrator is aware of this hollow existence that is eat, sleep, work, repeat.

I live in X County where I love you but you’re dead inside.

The narrator undergoes these spurts of sanity realizing this society is consumed by superficial artifacts: reality television, screwed and chopped media coverage, masked intentions by those in power, mass produced foods designed to satiate with no nutritional value... A world that values surface, not depth, resulting in a slow, metallic, death. Or in the narrator’s case, a zombie-state.

The zombie logic is a real learner. Stoke its fire. Make its sound. Know its name.

But this snippet of sanity is suppressed immediately by the Bear-men. The Big Whigs in power. Why a bear? It’s their growl, their brute power, and the pounding thump of their paws to mark their status on top of the wild food chain. Motto: invoke fear and the rest will turn into lambs.

The arc of their motions through the sky describe Masonic or Kabalistic hoodoo credos, nonsense of course, but still enacted in government houses of worship, still processed faithfully by the bean counters and the electorate.

The prose de résistance is marked by the narrator’s question to decide: now or not? (Enceiderich: Jetzt oder Nicht?). Perhaps by invoking the dictatorial state of the Nazi Regime, the narrator sends a powerful shout-out for humans to snap out of the daze and harbor the innate power of choice to step off the assembly line. That mass-produced-mindset where we only wish to profit off one another, to stomp on one another to reach the top, only to find there is no top. It's a trick. For one truth is certain, it is an endless ladder when we are working against each other.

I live in X County next to you.

So what do you do? Do you push back these revelations of what’s real? Or remain in the buzzing machine? The decision of which gears to grind is personal: 

I live in X County because it’s a decision. Because I knew I deserved it. Because I had to know. I had to know what the enemy felt like, inside of me. Not next door, not on the radio, but in my heart. 

And the power to choose is what makes us humans, wide-eyed, and aware. 

#Real #Prose #Review #SocialCommentary #Power #Freedom #Choice #Humanism #Rights
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