REQUIEM FOR A MILLENNIUM

We have replaced all the social undesirables
with Fourier transforms, orthogonal vectors,
Lagrange multipliers, and statistical outliers,
while reducing the homeless to the fractal dimension
of 2.8 (thanks to Mr. Mandelbrot)--
the same dimension as this crumpled
piece of paper, which used to represent a plane
or your doctoral diploma--
we've proven once again that it's more efficient to
keep the bastards institutionalized
than to try to rehabilitate them
at the cost to the taxpayers,
and we've done everything to minimize the cost--
the cost of production and the cost of murder--
we've solved the problem of the heat flow
in the gas chambers,
while splitting the atom in Hiroshima,
and eliminated the unpleasant smell
of charred human flesh with a lethal injection,
we've made smarter bombs,
which can now destroy densely populated areas
with surgical precision and minimal collateral damages,
and have put the best number theorists
in charge of our national security,
impenetrable to almost any hacker--
yes, we've all turned into human sheep clones
showing once again that science,
mathematics and technology
have nothing to do with moral choices
or social responsibility--
those dinosaur concepts
that had died with Kant long time ago,
we have proven (if you really care to read it)
that there are no positive
integer solutions to Fermat's old equation
for n greater than 2--
still we don't know much about anything,
still we don't comprehend what God
has to do with mathematics
or why we are really here for a brief instant
on the cosmic clock.
And we keep on trying, trying to reduce this universe
to some predictable model,
trying to sell an abstraction to the poor and the dying,
trying to sell a perfect body type to the anorexic young girls,
trying to sell teen porn to the internet pedophiles,
trying to replace injustice with trickle-down economics,
contour integrals, commutative diagrams, and
equivalence classes,
strangling our arts, our voices and our humanity
with mindless, endless equations, symbols,
inequalities, numbers, and statistics,
which recognize no love, no individuality, no passion--
just the blind efficiency, control, production
and competition--

No, we are not better off now
(knowing how to destroy ourselves hundred times over)
than we were a thousand years ago.
 

                                                  March 31, 2001
                                            --Alexander Shaumyan