Good People on Both Sides: ACT II
—Donald John Trump, Speech to the People in America’s Heartland—“very fine people”—2017
Chorus: As Deep State actors we share the burden of protecting the People from their worst instincts while protecting ourselves from what makes them distinct—their votes. Dance we must to keep things spinning from left to right and back again, across the screens from Fox to CNN. As time goes by, our job gets harder to operate within the original charter. From Valley Forge to Gettysburg to Minnesota we’ve kept the spin within a circle with dead bodies from both sides stacked on the perimeter. But lately the dance has gone grotesque, our noblesse oblige showing far less finesse, our People splitting apart like particles in a centrifuge, our enemies friending them on Facebook with even less regard for the truth than we have. Where it shall end we haven’t a clue, but dance we must—what else can we do? Hark! The herald angels sing…
[In the soft glow of light from above where a bridge spans a river, Carl and Teddy, flash lighting a path, approach a homeless man’s camp tucked away in the shadows under cover of the bridge. A small flame flickers.]Carl (calling out): Hey, Hardcore, you around? You got a visitor from the west. (to Teddy) Give him a minute. I tried to call him but he wouldn’t pick up. He’s freshening up.
Teddy: How long has he been living like this?
Carl: I tried to prepare you for this sight, but you can’t. You have to see it to believe it. It’s all turned to shit. You have no idea what it’s been like the past twenty-two years.
Teddy (deep breath): Is he getting any help?
Carl: Not much. He can see his doctor. I guess he has insurance from the military. The guy that owns the Shell station on the corner lets him charge his phone and clean up. Cops don’t bother him.
Teddy: He gets a pension from the Army, right?
Carl: Little bit I think. He gets money somewhere. He don’t talk much, least not to me. When he does talk, it’s just about Vietnam.
[Hardcore, a thin grizzled old man dressed in a homeless outfit appears from a makeshift tent and stands near his small cook fire.]Hardcore: Who goes there? Friend or foe?
Carl: Just me, dude. And I brought Teddy with me. He made it. I told you he would.
Hardcore: I’ve been rehearsing that line. Comes from Shakespeare.
Teddy: It’s been a long time, Joe.
Hardcore: Another life it was. Nobody’s called me Joe for years, ha, ha, ha. I would invite you to come in, but I got no in to invite you to.
Carl: You got chairs, dude. See them logs? Let’s sit down. Did you already make supper? I see your fire.
Hardcore: I did. Don’t have a thing to offer you, not a thing.
Carl: I brought us some beers. Supper in a can.
Scene ii.
[A barge with a green light moves slowly along the river. Sound of lapping water, traffic noise in the distance]Hardcore: So what brings you back here, Teddy? We’re all tickled that you’re here, but I ain’t heard a good explanation. You just here to visit?
Carl: Told me it’s simple curiosity, suspense I guess.
Teddy: I see you have a Confederate flag.
Hardcore: I wrap up in it when it’s cold. It holds in the heat. Sleeping by the water gets cold from time to time.
Carl: How’d you come by that?
Hardcore: Bought it at a junk sale over on Broadway.
Carl: These people. Selling a flag as junk. You might not like it, but it’s a flag. It’s history. It’s not junk.
Hardcore: It’s history, that’s for sure. I don’t like it, but it’s warm. Don’t mean nothing to me.
Teddy: Interesting. I wish it were history. It’s like a stop sign, eh? Like a stop sign.
Carl: That reminds me—Hardcore, well, first, do you believe the Indians scalped the white people?
Hardcore: You asking an easy question or a hard question?
Carl: Any kind of question you want. The answer is obvious to me. Shit.
Teddy: It’s not really a question of belief, is it?
Hardcore: Not really, no. It’s more a plain old fact. Either they did or they didn’t. Somebody must know. When the white people came, they stole the land of the Indians. That much we know.
Carl: You believe that? It’s white people to blame? Surprises me, you being a vet.
Teddy: Unpack that for me.
Carl: What the fuck? Unpack that? Ok. Here’s the thing. If the white people had not stole the land of the Indians, he wouldn’t have been drafted and sent to Vietnam. We wouldn’t have had no country for him to fight for. Hell, you wouldn’t get your pension. We wouldn’t even be here. We’d be like the Roman Empire. And now all of a sudden it’s my fault because I’m a white man? Well, excuse fucking me.
Hardcore: Hit a nerve sounds like. I don’t know why you have to be so pissed off at the world when you got a roof over your head and family around you. Teddy, do you know anything about what happened to my house?
Teddy: No, I haven’t heard much of anything from anyone for a long time.
Hardcore: Freakiest thing. I was asleep downstairs in the back room where it was always cool at night. Middle of the night I heard this big boom and saw the wall buckle. Lightning struck a tree in the yard. Took out almost the whole house. Then came the fire.
Chorus: We have no Oracle, no reason to believe we deserve a miracle, yet we still believe in the ballot box and the People. We changed the charter, added three amendments, tried Reconstruction, but we haven’t found a way to break the curse and its ineluctable destruction. As Deep State actors we are aware we’ve brutalized throughout our history here and there, thither and yon; we’ve tried restitution and reparation in tiny ways, but we can’t agree on what to do with the legacy of white supremacy and slavery. It is quite unsavory…
A wound left to fester can rot from the inside.
Health care workers need to treat the ill even those self inflicted.
They do not have to like the patient.
The wound festering… Are you thinking about Lincoln’s decision not to disempower or imprison the white slave aristocracy in the South after Grant gave Lee and his soldiers a free pass? Not much changed in white power after the pause in military action. If so, I think you’re right. We would be a different country today. Hindsight is 20/20. I’d love to read an analysis of your assertion about healthcare workers having an obligation to serve all ill people, even the self-inflicted ill, from a utilitarian perspective. However, I don’t think anyone would quibble with your corollary about liking or not liking the patient. That should not be a factor.
One issue that always comes up for me when I read history is the context for actions. It sounds like an excuse for bad behavior, but when I think of how women have been treated for millennia, and children too, these were and still are the slaves in every culture.
We expand the care-giver assumptions to traditional female jobs (nursing, teaching, waitressing, seamstressing, launding), all low paid, and low prestige, even cooking until we invented chefs..
Sometimes the roles were reversed when conditions changed, for example women built the Anasazi buildings (lots of small flat stones stacked into intriguing structures, many still standing) while the men did the important work of intense gardening in the drought inflicted fields of New Mexico.
Male slaves were also captured during wars by most cultures in the middle ages and earlier, and the women slaves generally had lower status than the male slaves. In general, men felt good (just better maybe) as long as there was someone of lower status around to provide even a small amount of status, and often that person was a woman.
Women were the slaves of the slaves too. It seems like human status depended both on how dark your skin was and the size of your genitals, maybe not in that order.
The status of women has improved a lot in the west, but is remarkably fragile. Remember, married women couldn’t have a credit card in their own name until the middle 1970s, in the US!
All men carry a heavy load for gender slavery, and white Western guys for race-based slavery too.
There is a lot of guilt to go around. Education seems to be the key to change, and that is very fragile these days too.
I thought a lot about whether I could justify Carl, Teddy, and Hardcore—three aging white guys—as core characters in a play titled Good People on Both Sides.
Violence, symbolic and otherwise, has a wide berth when it comes to privilege. What distinguishes the American context of white privilege from other instantiations of prejudice cross-culturally and historically is its conscious collective decision to embrace slavery of blacks as a condition of white emancipation in its Constitution.
I’m writing from experience as a white male in the context of family and friends who set aside reason and facts and vote for Trump. I’m not interested in changing their minds. I’m more interested in changing their vote.
Problem is they won’t read much. This paltry skit will not hunt. Can education change their vote? It’s becoming a matter of knowing the good and the bad, but especially knowing about the bad. Rhetoric and manipulation, skeletons, feathers, dead birds.
How could I open the stage to a female character in Act III?