While it might surprise you, the contrast in body mass index is rife and well in the city of joy, where it's not uncommon to find podgy women with groceries and a USB fan astride a hand-pulled rickshaw. The BMI does average out between her and the puller, a gaunt, almost skeletal apparition, but any suggestions of a wealth gap cannot be ascertained when such trips usually end with the rider refusing to pay or in high-pitched haggling for a few rupees. The lady then galumphs into her palace and continues to berate another mongrel of similar hardscrabble denomination, the house servant, for not being able to read her mind.
The coils of human feces and the rudimentary sun are placeholders for the joy in the city. The artifacts of globalization and overeating are indigestion, that and a lack of public toilets, bad city planning, prarie dogging, and you get the picture, how to show, not tell, movement. The city is remarkably overjoyed with these and other types of protests that want to show you something isn't quite right, while the police and the enforcement are trying to tell, and allay all concern as mere childish annoyance. More coils. Smelly ones.
The sun does what it does best: be sunny. But you can't tell; there's a brown haze of particulate human follies hanging over the city that, from a landing aircraft, signals I'm home. Feces floating towards god, or dust, or pollution. And since most of the energy of the state goes into accruing wealth for fourteen generations of beneficiaries, you can't blame them for negligence. At the national level, the leaders do it for their tycoon friends; at the state level, the beneficiaries are state level in their nefariousness, at least a promoter, a serial criminal of some sort, a psychopath of political repute, but certainly not the ordinary citizens. Those fools are use and throw, for votes. And you get them indoctrinated in a political party, and they fight like they're getting a cut of the loot, and the leaders laugh.
They don't. They get promises. Zillions of promises Promises to last a lifetime, at least the term, and then rephrase and repackage them, presto, the fools don't even notice. You dole out the same cheap, trite candies and more of those worn-out promises, but in shiny new covers, say, under a different party name, and they are back again with their tongues lolling out, like obedient dogs. You kill and maim a couple of thousand, and as long as there's no camera, it's as if it never happened, dissents or criticisms don't survive police plus goons. You buy the rest; most have shit their spines in their poop anyway. And that's how things work in a democracy. Easy-peasy.
And with AI, a surveillance state mixed with state-of-the-art skullduggery will make it impossible for an incumbent to ever need to vacate the chair, no matter what. All kinds of Machiavellian schemes can be hatched to get people to rethink before they think; democracy won't survive; just as a namesake, but as an oxymoron.
