Phil A. Neel
Phil A. Neel is a communist geographer based in the Pacific Northwest. He is the author of Hinterland: America's New Landscape of Class and Conflict (2018), a Field Notes book published by Reaktion (London), now out in paperback.
The hamburger is not simply a mundane symbol of food. It is instead a symbol of the system that has processed mere food into property that can be (in fact, must be) withheld from us until we submit to the social domination of the owners. And you and I are not owners.
This is a horror story about hamburgers. But, like all stories, it is not about the thing that it speaks of, and, like any good horror story, it is something that your body already knows.
When the monster is unveiled, there is not really a surprise: high wages, free-flowing stimulus checks, too much money spent on social programs—all different ways of saying too much money in the hands of those who were born to have less.
Time turns in on itself like a crashing wave. We often find ourselves adrift in the gyre, lost in the same places with the same events transpiring around us and altered only by the most gentle of inversions.
In spring the winter weight of snow trickles off the stone steps of the basilica in small, shimmering rivulets, a microcosm of the many streams glittering through the foothills of the unyielding Dolomites, or maybe more a mirror of the intricate alpine network of alte vie and vie ferrate, narrow, high walking and climbing paths hewn into the mountains during the first world war when other routes were made impassable by mines.
They’ve built a “Great Wheel” on the Seattle waterfront, directly between the part of the city that Paul Allen owns and the part of the city that is, literally, sinking into the Earth so that his property values might rise.
Born to a rural area in one of the poorest counties on the West Coast, this sort of decay had a bitter kind of comfort to it.
