Babbling and Sodomy

Translation is a weapon. Communication and understanding is not the sovereign right of your enemies. This is what makes them your enemies. What is the liberal dream? Can you tolerate borders any longer? Freedom is free, when everyone is free or no one is. The installation of artificial obstacles to control your body are just as terrible as those constraining your mind. Translation between social cliques produces a movement. Translation of foreign languages produces a cosmopolis, the world as a city. The peoples of earth are coming to an unavoidable conflict, and the cosmopolis is at the center of that conflict. The world will be a city, or it will be a ruin.

The construction of a cosmopolitan environment is a project of public spaces, of access, and the management and proximity of strangers.

Learning to live with the foreign is not something new. We are foreigners to this world. Attempts to scrub out any evidence to the contrary can only result in a dead habitat, a half hearted attempt to make real life mirror impossible abstractions. Sunlight scatters on a million sharpened edges, chromium locustwing technicolor cloud over a landscape of hunger and regret, a flattened place with nowhere to park. Adding endlessly more lanes to the highway, each utterly congested with agonizing traffic. Contrast this with the neighborhoods of immigrants, the shops in foreign languages and clothes of many colors. The anti-imperial core that has long done the labor of building empire, with none of the pretense of superiority. These are the most livable areas of a city, and these immigrants are the reason. Suburban living is a hospice for cultural relics. A strong society can't rely on people who hide away in their little forts and make up scary stories to justify their isolation. We have to build an evnironment where people are socialized. People have to normalize being around other people. It is not freaky. It is not scary. It is the best part of normal to overhear somebody complaining about personal problems, or talking to themselves, or to shift and make space on a bench without thinking about it too talk to their neighbors or walk around their neighborhood.much.

Anyone who has spent any time sick and starving in a proper forest can tell you, there is no going backwards to Eden. Solutions once found are held closely, and seek to become general. It takes a huge amount of force and cleverness to build the City, but it takes more to prevent the City. Expired tags and expired moral systems are forgivable until they crash into the real people and machinery around them. I do not think its bad that you are homophobic and racist and hate women. I think its hilarious. You belong in a museum. We will build you a little suburban dollhouse exhibit. I will come and tap on the glass, but you will be so sick of people tapping on the glass that you will not notice. You will not prevent the city. And we who must live with you, we have a desire to shrink from your disgusting person, to turn our faces away and pretend you are not happening. Yet we can not, and as horrible as it is, we will not prevent the city.