The Automata

Dexter Nyamainashe was having trouble starting his automata. For years he had been collecting scrap metal from the wasteland deserts and the ruined streets, which he welded together into little worlds of people, animals, buildings. When he stepped behind the contraption and turned the crank, these tiny, mechanical beings would spring to life: eating, loving, killing (for verisimilitude); a whole microcosmic reproduction of the world he saw around him. He called them the Global Villages of Peace. And yet, despite the infinite and infinitesimal care with which he crafted and operated his machines, Dexter’s Zimbabwean countrymen wanted nothing to do with them. The government called them charlatanry; the poor called them witchcraft, and fled with dark backwards glances as soon as he touched the crank. Those who might have understood, who could afford an education, could also unfortunately afford televisions, and preferred to spend their time watching reproductions of such a distant, sensational life that Dexter’s Global Villages seemed little more than the scraps they were made out of.

Eventually one of his friends, who owned a junk shop in town, suggested that Dexter set up his automata in the store window, where he could crank to his heart’s content without fear of persecution or misunderstanding, even if the purpose of his art had been reduced to selling the occasional shoddy good. When his arm got tired he would stop cranking and turn bitterly to the television that also blared behind the storefront’s glass, tuned often to the peculiar cartoons of the Fox Network. Stupid box that needed no human turning to bring it to life, that was witchcraft, he thought, an automaton of the finest and yet pernicious make. For who turned the crank? He couldn’t figure it out.

One day however, when he was taking such a break, Dexter was startled by an interruption of the moving, speaking drawings in the box. There for once was a real man, named Rupert Murdoch, the head fox himself, the Zimbabwean thought. After several minutes of hemming and hawing, Rupert sighed, and then admitted that he had been slyly using the content of his shows to brainwash the North American people (and, by extension of the technology, the rest of the world): his cartoons would cleverly contradict the immediacy of global warming, or spout the political rhetoric with which the last North American President had been trying to take over the world. Ah, Dexter smiled sadly when the old fox had finished, so they were just automata, but what a shame that they were used to such evil ends, especially as anyone and everyone can see them. Witchcraft indeed. With that, he turned off the television, and began cranking his Global Village of Peace to life, even though no one was on the street to watch.