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The revolution was televised in the end, so the song was wrong about that. Songs are often wrong, if you think about it. Probably only so much wisdom you can shoe-horn into three or four verses and a chorus.

Anyway by the time it happened I don’t think anyone would have written songs like that. They’d have known nothing really existed anymore unless it was on some screen or another – TV, movie screens or just the computer. Daily life off screen was nothing, just the time you filled in before you could be back on screen again. The only thing that mattered was the stepping stones to the cult of narcissism.

The songs by then, when the revolution finally came were all about ‘me, me, me’ and were all so similar it made a mockery of the thought there was actually any individual ‘me’s’ at all But by then it was too late. And the revolution wasn’t for freedom or for peace. It was for annihilation, and it was orchestrated by that shadowy elite they all theorised about, but didn’t fear enough to ever stop watching their screens and do something about.

And that elite like to be entertained as much as the rest of us, so of course it was televised. Every last shrieking, painful, bloody bit of it. Flickering out to the few in a safe enough space to just watch – eating their popcorn and making directorial critiques to their armies.

A sideshow, that was the end. The only end we could possibly have had, given where we had come. A televised revolution we didn’t get to watch, only feel, and now its just our ghosts, watching flickering images on a screen, not even realising we are watching ourselves as we died.

That’s all there is now. That’s all there is. TV.

(c ) Helen M Valentina 2018