The American Mechanic

During a vent of an IM session, a fellow broad-thinker completed our political and social rant with the following:

He: and the average american on the street thinks their country is just so great, but has no clue about how their country works
He: so thats what annoys me
Me: you know what's really weird..when i just read that last thing you wrote..
Me: i thought you wrote "the average machine"
He: haha
Me: but really, i guess it's not that different
He: perhaps its not

So came to be a budding metaphor in my mind. And after seeing the awesome and inspiring film “V for Vendetta”, the illustration has come to form:

The American Mechanic

High tech conglomerations with glimmering parts
Innumerable pixels yet standing in blurry view of others
We are the American Machines
Born from the passion, creativity, and laborious efforts of
The American Mechanic

With shiny exteriors and the most desired fuels
Basic yet luxurious service and support no matter what the issue
Whether we sow the land for the masses
Or churn through the daily rat races
We love our name-brand display and user-friendly façade
And we blindly admire our maker who gave us such a visage

We rarely question this maker beyond a few petty doubts
Because we are smugly satisfied in our everyday bouts
Minor tune-ups and four-yearly checks, we don’t mind
At those moments we’ll openly show faults and attempt to fix the finds
But when those windows pass, when the next set of Mechanics comes to show
We revert back to our smug satisfaction of passively accepting each Mechanic,
and those before him, who
Gave us our home
Our jobs, our security, our seemingly bulletproof shield from the world
Our hedonistic pleasures, our culture, our educations, our hopes
To question the Mechanic would be to question ourselves
For the Mechanic is nothing without his creations, his constituents,
the extensions of himself
And to question ourselves on irregular checkup
Would be to recognize that the design is flawed, the parts not optimal,
the outlook possibly…grim
That great change may rest on the horizon for the next generation of machines

Since we fear what we don’t know, and embrace what we’ve been taught
We resist important updates and upgrades to our manners and thought
The first Mechanics were very crafty when establishing our freedoms
But I wonder if they foresaw this ultimate release of allegiance
The desire to shed responsibility, to blame without shame
To think that we are just singular compartments in a steadfast moving train
That no one machine can initiate change
Or even if, it would be on risky ground and a recall would be at stake.
In the end preferring to live our lives to their rusty ends
With only necessary body work and reminders of our impermanence
Instead of rewiring ourselves to make our marks on the world

And so with our glimmering parts and shiny exteriors,
We are the American Machines
But there are lucky ones among us whose defects now run deep
Because they’ve educated themselves beyond what the makers set for them to believe
With due respect they’ll question the Mechanics,
perhaps resist due force in their desires
And instead with due process bring new parts, new energies,
new dreams to the uncloaked masses.