dynamic stress loads & the fatigue limit
by uzwi
In this science fiction story, the terror we’re hearing in the media is not our own. It’s the panic of a family of gangsters who know that the near future is going to get rid of them. The barely repressed anxiety—displaced as rage & tantrum—that fills the news is not fear of UK collapse, or the fear of having to live a reduced life in the coming failed state in a heated world. It’s not ourselves we’re hearing. It’s the unspoken—literally unspeakable—panic of a collapsing corporate that bought into its own propaganda centuries ago, echoing through the structure it’s built to shield and express itself. “Great” Britain was never a place. It was psycho-economic architecture for the Firm. What we hear from it now is the sound of vibration fatigue in the structure. When the Tories bet on covid, Brexit & the bonanza of disaster capitalism, they may also have brought about the collapse of one of the most stable little earners in the world after the Catholic Church.
“…the old sets are brittle, falling off the page, waves dash against sea walls, old photos curl and shred. The Veiled Prophet Parade [in St. Louis] floats in the hot summer night…yellow glow of lights, giant leaves, eating pink cake, the cardboard around the edges blowing away in the rising wind, piers crumbling into the sea’s waves, wrecked house, rain, gray sky.”
WSB, “The Western Lands”
Ah, been following the Meghan & Harry stories, I see. 🙂
Hi Andrei: more interested in the reactions of the UK media as the “sound” of the structural collapse of The Firm, echoing through the population which is the major part of the machine. Also, the sense that, often, this kind of failure is built in at the design & materials-engineering phase of any machine. It’s inevitable. Not built-in obsolescence so much as weariness in the components themselves.
But as far as two mooing ex-royals & a bunch of entitled morons trying to hold their 1000-year-old pension pot together while trapped in the ultimate Huis Clos–not following that, no.
Interesting critique. But a writer in The Times has a different story – the royals are zoo animals, trained to docility and imprisoned in a luxurious cage for us to gawp at!
Hi jumbotrotter.
One thing’s for certain: if nothing else, they’ve been reduced to being a component of metaphors…
Whatever strikes you as relevant; but I’ve been hearing that gilded cage thing since the Festival of Britain, & any image that strips them of power & seems to show them as victims probably suits their self-presentation in the modern era.
I like the mechanical engineering metaphor because fatigue limit is inherent & linked directly to how the machine works.