TheHuxley Satellite Dish Huxley is a small town on the coast of British Columbia, Sixty miles from Vancouver. About two thousand people live in Huxley, most of them making their living by cutting down the forests, throwing the logs into the upper reaches of a river and then collecting them at the river's mouth. Other people from Huxley string the logs together and tow them a little farther up the coast to a pulp and paper mill where the logs are skinned, ground up, and made into grocery bags or items hook it into the local cable network so equally interesting and crucial to the everyone in town could use it at no safety and well-being of Western charge. Now, the people of Huxley, Civilization. B.C. live in Detroit. In Huxley they don’t care much That’s Detroit, Michigan we’re where things come from and where talking about. Hub of the American they go. The town itself was named auto industry. Home of the Detroit after Thomas Henry Huxley, the Tigers baseball club. Murder capital English biologist, a disciple and of the entire world. sometime bulldog of Charles Darwin, Calling Detroit the murder capibut no one in Huxley knows that. If tal may sound like an exaggeration. you were to tell them, they wouldn’t There are some cities in the southern be any more interested than if the hemisphere where more people get town had been named after Thomas murdered, but that’s different. Down Henry’s grandson Aldous, who wrote there people murder one another over a book entitled Brave New World. ideas, and all too frequently the govAldous Huxley took a lot of currently ernment gets into the act along with popular recreational drugs decades them because they don’t like political before anyone else did, and he made ideas. Nobody gets murdered in some remarkably silly claims about Detroit because they have ideas— their powers. No one in Huxley knows least of all political ones. People in who either man was. They’re both Detroit kill each other without giving a dead, aren’t they? Like all that history damn about politics. Just gimme that stuff. What’s so damned important hot dog, gimme that wallet, gimme about what’s dead and gone, they’ll that woman. The spades in Detroit say. may hate the honkys and vice-versa, Rough-and-tumble outdoor peobut when people get murdered it ’s ple, the Huxleyites. They drink beer, supposed to be personal and not polismoke cigarettes without filter-tips, t ic a l , r ig h t? T h a t ’s the North drive four-wheel drive vehicles and American way. laugh a lot. A few of them live in those nice houses you can find in any suburb in North America, but most live in shacks and mobile trailers. On W ou may be wondering how v alternate weekends they drive into ■ hooking a satellite dish into a the mountains to ski or fish or they ■ community cable system can drive down to the city, where they land a small town in British Columbia shop in the big malls. Later on maybe in the middle of Detroit, Michigan. they take their kids to the movies. Or You probably suspect that I’ve made at least they used to do those kinds of up the town of Huxley and its satellite things. dish to illustrate some silly idea I have Last year they changed. A few about how horrible the modern world enterprising locals bought a TV. satelis, and why you shouldn’t watch telelite receiving dish and found a way to vision. That being the case, you’re either battening the hatches against an attack on your television viewing habits, or settling in to enjoy some interesting bullshit. Sorry to disappoint you. This is as real as the eveBy Brian Fawcett Design by Kim Klein Art by John Kleber Clinton St. Quarterly—Fall, 1989 6
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