A Mechanical Term

Lyrics

We have better words for it now.
Streamlined.
Efficient.
Market-based logic for structural decay.

We talk about the tide that lifts the favored boats.
(and the ones that fill with water).
A clean, frictionless model.
The founder’s name has been moved to an awkward footnote.
His books gather dust in the members' clubs.
It’s not good form to quote them anymore.

But I can still smell the study in Bayswater.
Wet wool overcoat drying by the coal fire.
The cotton wool earplugs to mute the street.
You sought to express it in mechanical terms.
A law as clean as gravity.
As impersonal as the rain.

Survival of the fittest.
Not a judgment, just a fact.
A neat equation for the unsaid thought.
Mr. Darwin’s finches, but for us.
We found it elegant. We found it true.
We built our glass towers on the bones of it.

You gave us permission not to grieve.
To see the engine, not the ash.
To call the outcome of a rigged game nature.
The necessary Untergang of the weak.
It was a comfort, that coldness.
A gentleman’s science for a hard world.
A reason to simply... let things be.

Then came the newsreels in 1945.
The grainy film, the open gates.
The same mechanical term, just scaled.
The logic followed to its final station.
A sudden, collective need to disremember.
To efface the blackboard in the lecture hall.
To find a new, more palatable name.

But the ghost still haunts the policy papers.
It wears a better suit, uses softer verbs.
It no longer says its own name out loud.
That would be... unfit.
And it is, above all things, a survivor.