P: Vol. 3. Final Condemnation

or
Political Buffoonery

The sky during the day was most often green with streaks of orange. Water fountains bubbled a sanguinary red whey - a tactic the Department of Catastrophic Prevention and Provocation believed would satisfy the bloodlust inspired by the oppressive Futurcon Amendments - resulting in many stained silk shirts. Policemen wore penguin suits and hurled eggs at innocent bystanders, then fined them for “sedentary sedition.” Extinguishing blazes was halted by the fire chief until the incendiary brilliance had ceased to impress the gathered spectators. Street performers - the bowling pin jugglers, the paintedpanickycy mimes, the mustachioed organ grinders - were indistinguishable from the members of the Upper Court, and the Lower Court Members wore the zebra-striped canvas jumpers of those they sent to the labor camps for the crime of being adilettantete or exhibiting uninspired comport."



Borders had been crossed. Arbitrarily. As arbitrarily as the establishment of inalienable rights. As arbitrarily as a raging mother spanks an ordinary child. Arbitrariness defined most of the customs of...

Pulchritude. The name as dichotomous as the town, the town as misleading as the word. The inner ear grasps onto the phonemes and theiarrangementnt and gags the brain, all four lobes seize with epileptic repugnance at the very sound of it. Pulchritude. How this word came to signify stunning vestige baffled even the profoundest of philosophers (who were allowed to wear only wool, even on sweltering days, as it had been decided that intelligence should secrete from the body and emit an odor recognizable from a distance).



The word and its meaning, thsignifierer and signified, the sound and the idea so vastly differed that the very word seemed to not be in earnest. Confabulating in its own ironic phonetic. Turning in on its nature as a word. Living a life of smoke and mirrors.



Pulchritude. Every time it was uttered the speaker became a pathologicamiscommunicatoror, a violator of words, a straddler of truth and lying in the extramoral sense. Pulchritude. The syllables of skulls and bones, meant only for the odiferous scraps of offal organs and humus, for rotting meat on carrion bones. For sewage pumping out of a gaping, regurgitating orifice of riveted steel. For the earthy, mushroompungencece of second-story hotel sheets in dissolute rooms, well above the grime of the streets but still below them.



Pulchritude. The word meant beauty, the town meant Hell.