The Difference a Century Can Make

[RiverNotch]

The Difference a Century Can Make
 
 
If Charles Baudelaire, if D. H. Lawrence,
if Antonin Artaud or Vincent van Gogh,
especially if Antonin Artaud or Vincent van Gogh
were alive today, they might be fat
like Daniel Johnston and Roky Erickson; 
knocked up by the Men in White
while ignored by the Men in Black,
—denizens of a postbourgeois world Feh, Americans.
where everyone's an entrepreneur proletariat,
an educated or uneducated workingclass
businessman who made the grade. Feh, Americans. Or rather, white, middle-class Americans. I don't think even regular European folks don't see this, with the refugee crisis and, at least in Britain, the well-ingrained class system.
Have you made the grade? Although the sentiment isn't wholly unsatisfying, especially since the tone of the piece is wry enough to seem like it's skewering the thought. And yeah, at least for white, middle-class Americans, everyone's just that.
Also, the em dash can be removed, and the semicolon could be changed to a comma, but those incongruities do read intentional, so whatever. 

If John Dee and Victor Frankenstein were alive today,
they'd be the Steve Jobs and John McAfee of tomorrowland,
the land of the lost made brilliant again in all our lightweight Prefer "the" over "our".
contraptions we carry around, remembering—foreseeing—
impromptu game-changing. This stanza feels somewhat disjoint, for one because John Dee is way older than anyone in here, for another because this feels like a glimmer of (satirical) technological optimism. Whereas the progress of the Men in White/Black are denigrated up top, while the nature of this more-bourgeois world is mischaracterized, here "brilliant", "remembering--foreseeing-- / impromptu game-changing." is too-clearly positive, and the veiled jab that is "today's marvels being diluted" feels much more correct, even if almost equally limited (almost equally, since even in this *third world country* the poor can have smartphones -- thus the advantage). And with the topic somewhat returning in the next stanza, the disjointedness feels kinda awkward -- maybe the real opinion of the speaker peeking out, before being drowned in his anti-hipster-hipsterness? Or maybe I'm reading it wrong....
 
The hipsters are on gluten-free diets Hey now, responsible hipsters only go on gluten-free diets when they have coeliac disease! Most of the folks who go gluten-free for fads are either brain-sick or, hehe, prole-poseurs. Everyone but the desperate loves bread too much!
and the trolls are mostly fat, But with Jobs and McAfee, I read "trolls" as internet trolls -- I'm not sure about Artaud or Baudelaire, they seem deliberate enough (whereas judging by how the public treated Lawrence, sure, and van Gogh I don't think would even touch a computer), but are Johnston or Erickson online controversials, too? Or perhaps you meant something else, but here I'd think it was more your fault than mine, the internet reference is too close to the trolls.
mostly . . .
If Antonin Artaud or Vincent van Gogh
were alive today they might be fat
and no more hip than they ever were.
Kinda lovely, kinda weird. As much as I in my lucid states would consider myself a hipster (or at least a condescending aesthetic, as plenty of hipsters don't give a shit about thought), I've been immersed enough in a *third world* country's socialist rhetoric to find this agreeable, especially since this doesn't read too much like a character fully alien to the writer. But as language divorced from meaning, certainly lovely, with the rough style being very appropriate.