Are
U, R?
By Kent Daniel Bentkowski
(a/k/a Kentroversy)
Introduction:
The following free-form poem was influenced by my having read
the 1920 Carel Kapek play R.U.R., which was an acronym for ‘Rossum’s
Universal Robots.’ This Czechoslovakian playwright foresaw
the time when robots would assume mass production, performing
manufacturing work that would displace a rather large segment
of the prior human workforce --- all the while saving the globalist
corporations untold millions of dollars in their by-passing all
the labor and workforce issues. Having just become involved in
investment banking as a (temporary) career, my attitude about
the world around me was irrevocably changing --- forever altering
my life in the process.
The dystopic R.U.R. was disturbing to me on a number of levels,
as it clearly wasn’t exploring the positive future reality
of robots as Issac Asimov would do thirty years later in his
own short story collection ‘I, Robot.’ It is helpful
for the reader to understand the etymology of the word robot.
The word robot itself has Czechoslovakian roots, dating to this
earliest use of the root-word ‘robota,’ which itself
means “compulsory labor.” Therefore, the message
that Kapek was trying to put across was the eventual and inevitable
replacement of ‘middle-class manufacturing workers’ by
robots --- a process that went on to have a profound effect on
the automobile industry, as just one example.
With regard to the literary devices and the format of this poem,
I was also doing a little bit of experimenting here, particularly
with the manner in which certain words or ideas were handled.
The way in which I set up the format of this piece was by my
own use of the classic interpretation of the three-stage Hegelian
Dialectic; which is to say:
thesis + antithesis = synthesis
The only thing I will leave up in the air is the last of these
three phases --- does the narrator give in and give up, or does
he stand up to fight? Is the narrator a displaced worker, who
had lost his job because of robotics, or is the narrator himself
a robot?
Hmmmm . . .
R.U.R.?
Are U, R?
Are YOU, R?
Kent Daniel Bentkowski
November 2004
Are U, R?
The diode probes my tortured soul . . .
Automaton automation
Captures mass production’s role
Pay-offs, lay-offs, day-offs
The computations
further
my frustrations . . .
I’m just a statistic on some government list
TKO’d by technologies fist
Occupying . . . unsatisfying
Places, faces . . . dreams and schemes
Outta work . . . soda jerk
The diode tortures my probing soul . . .
Don’t you know how to grow?
Go to school . . . play the fool
It’s all meaningless . . . such a mess
Societies subtleties
Hit me like a brick
Surviving in this mixed up world
Is the hardest trick
The torture . . . souls my diode probe . . .
© 1984 / 2004 Kent Daniel Bentkowski
All rights reserved. Used with permission.
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