Big Deal: Lost in the Art of the Fog

It sounded good. Jobs for people that could not find work in a decimated former industrial stronghold.

Jobs for people that otherwise string two or three jobs in fast food drive-thrus or succumb to the hustle on the street.

Not everyone can go to college or afford to finish either. So it was thought it might help those less fortunate to join the Middle Class with a classic factory job just like the old days. Isn’t that what they all voted for? Make America behind the times again?  Join the consumer class. Buy homes, refrigerators, riding lawn mowers and so on.

How about polishing glass?

It made international news.

American jobs, American factory jobs coming back to America?

Really?

Foxconn and its record breaking corporate welfare gift. Wisconsin’s number one for something again besides drunkenness and obesity. Taking the rest of America along for the final descent. Green light to displace residents of Racine County Wisconsin and con the residents of Wisconsin. Really the residents of the United States.

It wasn’t going to be all that bad. The majority wins.

As this was something even our beloved president beamed about. Jobs needed for the most racially divided, most segregated state in the US? Really? So that Foxconn can have a vast swath of land to build the biggest and baddest factory on Planet Earth under the guise of making flat screen LCD displays, former farm land, streams and, of course, wetlands. Change the rules so they can drain the swamps, re-route streams, get that Lake Michigan water, ease those pesky DNR and ERA restrictions and change the landscape into a desolate Chinese industrial wasteland.

Safeguarding air and water gets in the way of progress. We can just wear gas masks like the rest of the successful manufacturers and who needs water? In Wisconsin we have an abundance of alcohol. And cold damp air. Lakes, streams and swamps. Soon enough we’ll have pot in gas stations right next to the CBD oil, the little flasks of booze and chew.

That allows the populace to remain sufficiently medicated and wander around in the fog. Not noticing or caring the world around them is dying, or taken for fools.

At first, just last week, it broke that Foxconn changed their mind. No LCD screens and instead R&D. White color jobs.

Who wants that?

You’d have to be educated.

What changed? Governor Tony Evers, a Dem here was voted in, here in Wisconsin, over the incumbent Scott Walker, a Republican – Walker brokered the deal and the president was only too happy to share the headlines.

Yet the Republicans with Walker on his way out castrated Evers’ gubernatorial power so that he couldn’t wield the power of his predecessor. They wanted that deal for Foxconn (among others like killing the ACA) to stand.

Then, anyways, it looked like Foxconn would walk.

So what are they going to do?

The president got on the phone with Foxconn CEO Terry Gou and now we see the plan to manufacture — is still being planned. We don’t know what was said — promised an afternoon of golf at His private club, dancing girls, and maybe some really fabulous chocolate cake?

The deal appears misted in secrecy and shrouded in fog.

No screens?

R&D?

How about pixels of light cast in an electromagnetically contained fog, projected from a port in your smartphone or a peripheral sitting in your living room?

Remember R2’s message? Obi wan and Princess Leia, they kind of made this popular on the big screen, and Lucas even had this in his first: THX 1138. I saw it done not as a projection but as water droplets sculpted into 3D at Navy Pier in Chicago, and in Dayton at their water front.

It’s been around in sci-fi, so why not Wisconsin? Maybe not with a fog of Great Lakes water.

In the movie and as an artform, it was either just fictional or as at Navy Pier or Dayton, when it let loose, there was a deluge of water falling.

Three dimensionally projected in water droplets, not just thin air, and they could even be scented.

Serve to mist the room. Keep the plants healthy and your furniture from falling apart. Even deal with dry skin.

With clean, fresh, Lake Michigan water.

R&D, first contemplation and then into counterfactuals.

One concept could be a wall, like a fountain you see in an office structure where the water cascades down continuously, so that it then could be captured at the bottom and recycled. Projected with Netflix, Hulu and BBC Earth.

Fast and it’s going to move faster.

Smart cities that collect their own garbage, the lines on the streets illuminated and able to change as needed. Androids that are courteous instead of those rude humans at the Fast Foods that bark out your number and go back to staring at their smart phones.

We like the idea of Foxconn spawning the imagination. Giving rise to new worlds, new industries and a new future. No one likes them displacing homeowners and killing the environment. At least those that accept the science that there is an environment.

Of course, we could always have a visual representation of something pleasant to see: masking the rubble, that was once the countryside, when it’s all said and done. It could even be on a subscription a la carte basis so you could pretend everything is okay.

I think I’ll choose “Idyllic Halcyon Spring 2.0” — close my eyes, while my car takes me to my cubicle autonomically, lost in rumination, regret with a dash of guilt, still breathing to complete the recipe for the post-modern industrial age.