Now I fathom not who this Evelyn Kriete is or why it is she posters our rhyolite halls with fanciful concepts such as “kittens” (let alone what purpose a man of steam might have need of a punk?), but otherwise, her observation is sound, belonging to a similar sentiment to the one which sets my own heart rambling down a corridor joined in beauty—and not a not spilt decision between sooty path “A” and sooty path “B.”
What if one of Mr. Fowler’s clacking contraptions fell in the woods? Would anyone notice the blessed silence or would it remain unrecognized, as said device neither sported goggles nor stovepipe with gear adornment in hatband? These corridors that used to ring with joyous hammers of opportunity now clang with clamor of discontent. The unifying spirit of creation that Steamtopians used to share has divided into slag of derision. Why must Steamtopians take themselves so seriously? Are we nothing more than mobs of fragmented separatists?
Repudiators of industrialists who praise function over form allied against the demagoguery of entrepreneurials, concerned naught for purpose, so long as an artifice exhibits an idiom they call “Steamtopian.” Imagine these parties, if you will, one a bespectacled ass stylizing a skewed derby and watch fob, the other an elephantine automaton transport wielding death-ray tusks.
Neither cares the preposterousness of their own nickers on display, only that they may enumerate, on two hands, the flaws of the other. Draft be damned! But herein, as the great Bard would tell us, lies the rub. Are not both a menagerie, founded on elements which both made our community wondrous? Are there really aesthetics without a purpose? And is not purpose without beauty naught but the extension of Industrialism?
Although I share not Ms. Kriete’s love of kittens, why would I feed such beasts to dragons of magma? Am I not a man of charity? The act of making myself superior by remaining uneaten makes me less creator than creature. Look to the bellows of your inner forge-fire and you will see that I am correct.
Within each contraption lining our neighboring caverns, whether they be repudiators or demogoggers, is a beauty which can only be found in Steamtopia. Within each one of us lies a dream. A dream to create a free home where our family flourishes and grows, where ideals illuminate our caverns for ages to come.
We must stop this search for the flaws of our neighbors lest we fall into the same said trap as the ELOI. Not one of us is pure evil—with the exception of robber barons who skulk the Overground. Let us not live like them, behind gates of iron and towers of ivory, hoarding kittens for dragon consumption. Let us seek out our neighbor and embrace their humanity and their difference and make Steamtopia great.
-Zachary Ashe: 1865 Opinion column Steamtopian Sentinel
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