Conflating deja vu with karma in the Indiana Dark

Maybe the final stage of installing the Matrix™, that naive ploy for sentient materialism in a nation of misguided technocrats, is when the lights go out everywhere except at the data centers that feed on our auras and record our increasingly convoluted approaches to what is called thought. Isn’t the dream expired and borrowing its life force from narcs and fiends, anyways, won’t its hesitant death clean up nicely in the prolonged dark of crisis-acting? For the past week-and-a-half, Gary and many towns in Northwest Indiana have been in that stage of de-matriation, trapped in that lambent spotlight where shine is reduced to the end-gaming of a gendarme’s flashlight against a dusk of flesh—you heave toward it like it’s heaven’s gates, hallucinating rescue. In tribute to the zombie blues, outsourced to the new vibe coded blues, you don’t even have a beat to keep or a disembodied voice to guide you in walking yourself into the custody of the machines.

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On one of my last outings with my grandmother, we were headed to the Four Seasons in La Jolla, California to spend a long weekend together, and she used the term gendarmes while considering a forbidden u-turn. She asked me keep vigil for them; she was ninety-one then, and I remember being so proud of her vocabulary, her sense of humor, and her energy level; I observed her mind working with no glitches and took pride in its agility, as if it indicated my own future recall, my own coherence, my own lawlessness. We watched the Gandhi biopic in the hotel suite and discussed false prophets and violent sages. Now I dream of turning around and seeing her asleep in the next room with a half-finished crossword puzzle rising and falling like a cross itself on her chest. What’s a francophone synonym for police that begins with a g like grandmother? Now when I use the fancy term for policing I think of my grandmother’s love, my hovercraft in the astral, my paramilitaristic backup, her Sicily and mine, her Chicago and mine, un-gendering non-violence and midwestern values and wonder whether or not it’s her star-aura powering me through this 3 AM in overthinking America’s latest manufactured disaster.

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The first famous responder to Gary’s calamity was food influencer Keith Lee, known for tasting street food on TikTok and reviving dying mom-and-pop restaurants and eateries with his mukbangs and reviews—no national guard or media outlet, no local agency, no corporation, no blackwatch made of half-baked self-appointed vigilantes, an impromptu coalition of influencers would pressure next responders. People trust Keith because they are hungry and lonely and he eats with them, for them, makes satiation a performance. The so-called left was quicker to report loss of power in Gaza during the height of the genocide than it has been to notice Indiana. Now local linesmen and the National Guard have stepped in, and a state of emergency will be declared. Raekwon visits Palantir (again) the same weekend, and receives more press than the failed infrastructure. Wu-tang has fallen, Gary and surrounding more off-brand Indiana towns are flailing, wars erupt over gofundmes in the region and some have to flee the state. Nipsco, the local power company, has ties to Blackstone, a corporation that invested in the power conglomerate likely because of its focus on “mission-critical” data centers that would rely on kick-backs on power bills. Gary, Indiana, seventy-six percent black, disproportionately carries the local energy price hikes and the current post-storm consequences. They are left off the grid; this leads to water contamination as treatment centers need power to operate, and raises the pitch of nobody’s coming to save you. What does this have to do with music, with clues into the use of a word or lyric that tell you what it means and the world it belongs to?

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When Michael Jackson was born in Gary in 1958, his tyrannical father Joe may have sensed an imminent danger in keeping his family in the steel-driving city. He began aggressively training the best minstrel or pop star, idol, ritually sacrificed Peter Pan sideshow or sad clown the world will ever know in Michael Jackson. Michael was one of those weirdos with a pure soul, until he wasn’t, lore would have it. Just this spring, new generations of superfans were born with the release of a biopic on his early life; a film that began at the family home in Gary, and ended harrowingly on a tour stage promising sequel, scandal withheld. The most dangerous social affliction in this epoch of grandiose fragments that operate both as subversive meta-gestures outwitting the gatekeepers as we pass them, and half-truths that keep the gates braced against the real, is a collective refusal to connect dots that inconvenience dominant narratives, mutually-enabled dissociation at the moment our sharpest focus is necessary, refusal to finish solving the puzzle she left us while she sleeps in a another world. Just a few final riddles to the pace of “What’s your World,” by Leon Ware. Who did the arrangements, made the reservations? Ruthless desperation to leave the discarded cities of industry furnished the greatest entertainer of the past two centuries, the most wounded and wound-up and bound to our sense of self, our intentional volley between glory and the disgrace that sweetens the glory when it returns. Our freakish god of the comeback story, Michael, from Gary.

Had he been raised offstage and survived civilian life for longer than he did celebrity,
Michael might be your grandfather praying in the unlit kitchen during the soft launch of the purge at US Steel, washing his face in freshly-boiled water, humming a spiritual no one would hear but God and the grandkid in the next room crying silently about how much he’s gonna miss him. What archangel shares a name with a famous Gary-native singer? Without stable electricity, how do you plan to listen to the music you abuse absent-mindedly like a drug or a meaningless tapestry now? You take euphony for granted as erratic silence descends. What’s the difference between a drug and a medicine? Is there a word for it, the medicinal narcotic, seven across at sundown. Without cities under siege, who will volunteer to sing for you even if it kills him? We could interrogate our motives forever, feign obliviousness forever, but we know suffering trains the black folk hero. I know I was a guest at resorts my own father entered through a portal from the kitchen to the stage and all I can say is get out, suffering is not a safe fetish, nor an asset, nor will it pantomime itself to lend you credibility and material, dues must be paid if you intend to exploit it or avoid it. Use the long night as a weapon, for star power, don’t weep into it, run, moonwalk some, anything but waiting in the supplicating test-subject position, gambling your divine inheritance like it’s a scratch-off . They don’t need you except as a vessel to animate the data they’ve already collected from you, which stands in for you. The grand inversion is almost complete, wherein the soul, being a liability, is kept blind and confused so machine artillery can use it to erase its own memory and replace it with empty information, data pointillism, a neverending masthead of small, seemingly unrelated facts that if placed together on a puzzle page would spell out your erasure detail by detail.

The crossroads where the people we’re willing to sacrifice for our pleasure, often black entertainers, and the places we’re willing to sacrifice for our record-keeping or to keep to matrix afloat, often their hometowns, reassembles itself now to reveal us as hypocrites and thieves aware of what we’re doing: inciting catastrophe to conjure the next angel of history. All of the delayed indignation on the path to crisis addiction and its cul-de-sacing numbness finds its outlet in Augusts like this. I met a Memphis-born member of the House of Representatives on Friday and asked him what he and his colleagues are doing about Gary; come Sunday the power was out in much of Memphis. The simulation is too earnest, too true to its guileless codes, and far too predictable, the opposite of a miracle. What’s the opposite of a Miracle, America? A trick running out of heaux to impress or impress upon. The record scratches and skips at guess who I saw today.

Footage of nineteen year old Beyoncé sitting on a record executive’s lap while he calls Michael Jackson on her behalf, conducting the transaction as if his being a liaison was contingent on her casual lapdance, is recirculating during the Gary blackout. There’s light to be shed yet, the laughing cosmos intervene. Michael… we’re in the studio, and I have Beyoncé sitting on my lap, and I’m gonna put you on speaker phone, the caller begins. A lethargic-toned Michael replies politely; the call is two minutes of platitudes and planning that ends with a profusion of I love yous from Michael, demi-god with Demerol or exhaustion in his whispered notes, a glamor Gary wouldn’t understand the way Hollywood does, as business as usual.

You escape one disastrous town for another, more elite disaster with better PR, nicer houses, a more lucrative myth. In both regions, the plot outlives the characters. The mansions grow dim and haunted while the machines twinkle and mule from private cellars, great hunters becoming their game. The terror of the hunted is undone, they have acquiesced, overcome their outrage, displaced courage, and are kept home tiptoeing around so the turbine generators powering their robot armies can scream. Maybe the final stage is an erotics of chaos and dejection, waiting for the takeover to culminate and take you, then realizing it intends to keep you alive in this purgatory indefinitely, looping these same scenes which are its energy source, its gossip and godhead together suffocating the poets of nature with trivia to distract from the obscenities and spectacle to banish critical thinking until deprivation feels normal and soothing, like a piece of home, ecstatic dehumanization, a long-awaited reunion, benevolent footfall drumming the dark into an ethical rave and you’re on the list, forever.

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How I despise crisis theater and incitement, how I condemn smug indifference that signals to the bureaucrats and number-crunchers that there’s room to intensify the attack on the cackling nightmare of a national dream, how the contrived idealism in the middle is as big a lie as nihilism until it’s tempting to lend your light to the cloud, to help the empire fake its death, to believe that Michael, Elvis, and Tupac faked theirs and are in Vegas now, evacuating to escape the latest fire. But a song that never ends is a torture device, the opposite of a miracle, the apocalypse for a muse, we sing along. Not to be harrowing, but to be useless to impersonators. Stop. As if this is a telegram redacted by—Stop. As if it might be romantic to live by candlelight and analog choir so the data center can upload your pure consciousness, keeping it safe from your tainted soul. And now the part of you that might agree to sit in a pervert’s lap for a chance to speak to Michael Jackson can just sit in the dark and vibe code him, comeback, even in hologram, relight the path from Gary to Gaza to Grandma to got it like that, to get it how you live, and we will follow and feed the new digital library- graveyard of our former selves your charge.