Editor's note: originally published in A Century is Nothing.
War on terror experts discussed global strategies in a play with many acts. A play on (s)words. Some acts were hard to follow let alone comprehend. Reviews would be mixed when it ran off Broadway flagging down a Berber slave caravan inside an air-conditioned nightmare looking for a Caravanserai along Route 66.
“What’s the name of the first act?” asked a playwright.
“Patriot,” said General Consensus.
“How does The Patriot Act sound?” said the scribe, a former loan shark and energy consultant.
“I like it, I really like it,” said Asscroft a general Attorney. He was a neo-conservative hard-nosed right wing crazy religious fanatic from the State of Misery. “It has teeth with wide ranging constitutional subversive powers, perfectly timed for our agenda. Let’s push it down the legislator’s throats.”
“Does that mean the gag rule will be in effect?” cracked a comedian on welfare.
“Sure does. Anyone who so much as expresses concern about this constitutional urinary tract act will be blacklisted, hounded, ridiculed, ostracized, and labeled unpatriotic. They will never work again in this great beautiful free country. This is the home of the scared and enslaved. We will revoke their voting rights and cancel their citizenship. I’ve had it up to here with this liberal democratic crap. Our culture is to kill. Take no prisoners. Abuse the hell out of the detainees. Tell the peace makers and tree huggers to take a hike through old growth forests,” Attorney added with a smirk.
“Let there be no doubt about our honorable intentions. We are on a holy mission from God. Our destiny is to install democrazy in the Middle Eats,” said chef Boy R. Dumbed Down Dee, “whether they like it or not. They’ll eat what we give ‘em or starve. This is an ala’ carte, carte blanche military menu.”
“Should we continue bombing?” queried an intelligence asset in deep cover. Plame as day.
It was days, weeks, months and centuries since angels sang after dialing 911.
English hawks warbled about taking the campaign into winter. They needed hawk food. As predators they knew the terrain, the sweet sound of wings whistling through clouds with laser guided precision. Their talons were sharpened by their inherent power and Manifest Destiny. They were ready, willing, and able to establish and sustain new economic empires. They’d raped, pillaged and plundered plenty of old world civilizations and would not be deterred in their quest for more power and influence.
They had the perspective and experience of establishing colonies and global power under the crown, under the gun, establishing The Rule of Law. They were experts at economic terrorism, and exploiting natural resources using cheap labor.
“Yes, absolutely,” said another intelligence agent, an N.O.C. disguised as a cleaning woman with Gypsy blood.
Nonofficial cover was their nom de plume allowing them to work for foreign proprietary front companies while spying. Fronts were numerous: airlines, travel agencies, banks - world currencies and blood - military tribunals and civilian courts, oil and gas companies, construction firms, cafes, telecommunications, land, sea, and air shipping firms, brothels, juke joints, casinos, tailors, clip joints, beauty salons, crematoriums, and mortuaries.
The downside was being left out in the cold if their cover was revealed to compliant sheep citizens and transparent independent muckraking media. They’d be left blowing in the wind. A hard rain would fall. Everyone in the food and information chain was expendable.
A buttoned down butler brought them a mandate for an appetizer and they dug into their personal caves of hunger. They had all the Neolithic or "new science" tools at their disposal. Suddenly the garbage disposal clogged and someone called for maintenance.
“Maintenance!” demanded a shrill counter intuitive pro-active and very demanding defensive individual named Bumsfeld with lipstick on his collar from a one-night stand. “Get up here on the triple and bring your torch. Stuff happens. It’s the unknowable knowable.”
“Sorry sir,” said Maintenance, “stuff happens and my torch is down for maintenance, if you get my drift.”
“Drift, draft, fore and aft,” said a divorced right wing conservative senator up for erection. He washed his hands of the whole affair in dirty water. Finished, he threw the baby out with the bath water into the world’s endless suffering where 17,000 children died every day from starvation and economic terrorism.
Where 4,000 and then send some more American soldiers named Casualty in Iraq slept their dream of dreams in black body bags.
Agents returned to deep cover operations funneling arms, explosives and communication gear, maps and cyanide capsules to homeless, nameless volunteers.
A Spanish woman in black with an ear for dialogue mopped her stairs and pavement along the narrow Rue Castanets. Finished, she dumped the water into the gutter watching it flow to the ocean, evaporate into clouds and rain flowers.
“This is no time to be surrounding ourselves with incompetents. Find someone who knows the lay of the land,” said a junior fellow named Full Bright on a scholarship. He unrolled a parchment for all the knights to see.
“Now see here,” countered Deli, “what it’ll be gents?”
“Make mine ham on rye,” said El Salvadore from the divan where he fondled his Dali. She was in no mood for this intentional violation of her writes.
“You know I don’t eat meat,” she said.
“Yes my dearest,” said Salvadore, “I’m well aware of your passion for fruit. You are my passion fruit, my darling. We’ll see what they have in the queen’s pantry. Perhaps a nice juicy banana?”
“Yes,” sighed Dali dearest, “peel it down for me. I am a bed rabbit. Elementary my sweet.”
“Yes, darling, he who wants to enjoy a fine fruit must sacrifice its peel. Let’s turn the lights down low and make whoopee.”
Salvador turned to his friend. “What do you make of this Pablo?”
“Hmm,” Pablo said, “it’s fairly abstract standing alone. It needs definition, stronger emphasis, a wider range of implicit specific graphic detail.”
“I agree,” said Salvadore, “perhaps broken orange melting time machines. Dashing surrealistic nature enveloping warriors disappearing into exile, fighting real and imaginary foes is called for.”
“Yes, a nice touch, that,” said Pablo. “Many are called few are chosen. We may consider this, my dear colleague, an experiment, an expanded vision. An extension of a red or blue period.”
“Well put dear comrade speaking of the blues. Less is more.”
“Agreed,” said Pablo, “let’s not put in anything extra or take anything extra out.”
“Such a novel concept,” said Don Q., an eavesdropping unemployed literary agent sitting on a nag and wearing a battered bedpan for a helmet.
“Excellent,” said Salvadore. “My friend Cervantes said the exact words to his companion Pancho. One rode an ass into history. Shall we have a go then?”
“Yes,” said Pablo. “Be my guest. Let’s take a line for a walk with Klee.”
“It’s glee Pablo. Joy. Such a silver tongue you have. Have you thought of a name for your new work my wise friend?” asked Dali.
"Guernica comes to mind,” Pablo said.
“How appropriate,” Dali replied, stroking his exquisite mustache. “It will become a classic. It will connect the wild subconscious and rationality. It’ll make you famous, old boy.”
Picasso’s Guernica commemorated the small Basque village of 10,000 in northern Spain. It was market day on Monday, April 27, 1937. In the afternoon waves of planes from the Condor Legion, Heinkel 51s and Junker 52s piloted by Germans blasted Guernica. Survivors found 1,660 corpses and 890 wounded people in the rubble.
“Be that as it may,” Pablo replied. “Art historians and critics will have their say hey kid. It will shock supporters of social realism and propaganda art in France and Spain.”
“How did you do it?” Dali queried.
“From May 1st to June 4th in 1937 I made forty-five drawings on blue or black paper. I incorporated the bull, the horse, classic bullfighting figures, and the lantern from my 1935 Minotauromachy. I used the weeping Dora Maar because she has always been a woman who weeps. Guernica is a bereavement letter saying everything we love is going to die. And that is why everything we love is embodied in something unforgettably beautiful, like the emotion of a final farewell.”
“I still think your vision aspires to greater heights,” said Dali. “Your work contains fantasies meeting the objective violence of history.”
“You are too kind my dear Dali. People have started talking about your work. Your intentional dreams, so strangely manifested, in the way you have masterfully allowed your subconscious free rein on the canvas. Most amazing, your Persistence of Memory.”
“You are too generous Pablo. I merely reflect the ongoing crisis in society, the surreal absurd nightmare, with, shall we say, a twisted rather sordid but truthful elusive creative beast we must acknowledge to allow our perverse authenticity freedom wherever it leads us.”
“So true my friend, for we are only the conduit of the magic,” said Pablo. “We paint what we see with our innermost senses, born by authentic inner visions.”
“We are the mysteries speaking through the mysteries,” said Salvadore.
“We are ceaselessly redrafting the short story we call our life,” said a scribe.
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