The Case of Capitalism v. Socialism: Imagery in Lopez's "Stress Management"

The speaker in Tony Lopez’s Stress Management uses juxtaposed imagery of hot and cold and fire and water to discuss the status of socialism. The speaker begins with capitalist imagery of a pressure hose, salt and pepper, live wires, and a rusty saw, all industrial products. Yet rust, the product of iron and water, when combined with Lopez’s capitalist water imagery, shows how capitalism symbolically destroys itself.

Socialism, by contrast, is portrayed as hot and fiery. The "whole country" is "on fire," and out of some ashes will rise "a town called Phoenix somewhere in the dry desert." This flame of socialism is extinguished by capitalist liquid nitrogen, an interesting modern reference to an extremely cold chemical. As noted, liquid nitrogen is not the first reference to cold chemicals contained in Stress Management. Indeed, capitalism seems to condense onto trees as children are young and innocent. Indoctrinated with capitalist ideology as they go "down the street," children grow to become adults and find themselves "held in fear" under the trees that now "drip" with the condensed capitalist ideology. As incompatible with capitalism as fire is with water, socialism provides warmth and light (i.e., the warmth of a fire) in the night.

Capitalism continues to be portrayed in watery terms in the final stanza with the symbols of a herring gull and cormorant, both water birds. I believe that the two birds represent different responses to socialism in different generations. The generation of Gandhi managed to place a "red spot" on capitalism’s bill, in other words, they made inroads on capitalism and tried to change the system. Conditions were also better then. The herring is a light bird, and it is not trapped. Yet the second generation ("Son of Gandhi"), seeing that capitalism is floundering in its own mistakes and greed, merely decides to burn the near-dead body. Lopez’s speaker argues that the new generation knows that capitalism is wrong, yet all they do is burn what’s left of it. People see the destruction of nature the two birds exemplify, and they can tell that capitalism is causing its own demise. Why, then, has socialism not presented itself as a satisfactory alternative? As the fire gets hotter, why do socialists allow capitalists to pour ever colder liquids on it? These are the questions that the speaker means by the question in the first three lines. Some change must occur between childhood and adulthood that prevents people from seeing the light, if you’ll pardon the cliché. Though most people think "all’s well," the speaker sees things as devilish ("diabolical"). Until socialism is able to present itself as a satisfactory alternative to capitalism, he argues, capitalism will continue to worsen living conditions: amphetamines, symbolic of attempts to revive oneself with stimulants, will become even more popular as people find their standards of living falling more and more. For some reason that is beyond the speaker, people still obsess with capitalist worries such as making ends meet ("the family budget") rather than ending the system that causes the need to worry in the first place.