Finale: Act V
Scene: [Hardcore and Teddy are sitting in lawn chairs in front of Carl’s trailer. Teddy’s luggage sits near him.] Hardcore: Been good to see you, Teddy. I didn’t expect it. I don’t expect I’ll see you again, at least not in this life, ha ha. Teddy: Not unless you come West. Hardcore: I don’t dare drive very far no more. Teddy: There are other means of transportation. You know, people live under bridges there, too. Your chosen lifestyle is available to you. Hardcore (laughs): Oh, I know. I seen pictures on Facebook, people on the streets of San Francisco, sewage in the gutters, little kids running around, naked. [Carl enters from the trailer.] Carl (laughs): Don’t you bad mouth Facebook, Hardcore. Hardcore: I ain’t. Just saying what I saw. Carl: We all know whose side you’re on. Hardcore: I’m not on nobody’s side. I’m sideless, ha ha. Carl: Clueless is…
Act IV
[A makeshift Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF) in candlelight. Members of the Deep State are situated in the tent forming an audience for the Man in the Stove Pipe hat, who sits in a chair, rising occasionally to pace.] CHORUS: We prayed for divine intervention on this dark night, we offered Harriet incense and peppermints, meaningless nouns from songs of yore, to bring us a leader, but we prayed the night before, and the night before the night before. The God in Whom we Trust paid no attention. What brings you among us tonight in the form of Abraham Lincoln? Are you his spirit or a fake apparition? Apparition: There is but a whisker’s difference ‘tween the two, good people. I am me, and you are you, me on my side, you on yours. The Secretary of War from my administration awakened me from a slumber in answer to your…
Act III Good People on Both Sides
Chorus: Being a Deep State actor tortures the soul with ungodly moral dilemmas, but decisions must be made in times of turmoil and trouble. Someone must rule. Regardless of our political party, our hypocrisy sustains our democracy, double double, boil and bubble. Someone must be cruel. Pragmatism trumps ideology. All of the truths we tell are tempered by human psychology. We tell them what they want to hear to break the fever of their fear. We measure human misery and poverty and hate, we stage FBI investigations and we debate, we want all citizens to be happy and free, but we have to face the core problem of taxation. We are the adults in the ether. We know for the past two score and two years private profits have flowed one way, from the masses to the oligarchs and the well to do. The people have gone begging. A deep…
Act II
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…
The Late American Republic: 2121
My country, ‘tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Will we still sing of thee in 2121? Will our song of freedom ring? My country, ‘tis no guarantee, fertile land of possibility, for thee I fear. Will we still sing free in 2121? Will our song of hope persevere? My country, ‘tis for thee, precious land of empathy, for thee I pray. Will we still stand proud in 2121? Will our song of justice decay? My country, ‘tis for thee, treasured land in history, for thee I tremble. Will we feel your beating heart in 2121? Will our song of democracy crumble, dissemble? My country, ‘tis in thee, bountiful land of mystery, in thee I trust. Will we have a vote in 2121? Will our ballots like our bodies return to dust? My country, ‘tis of thee, of thee I sing.
Hysterical Blindness
Conversion disorder. When you can’t walk or balance very well and can’t make your way through the real world, but there’s no neurological or physiological explanation. When you can’t hear real sounds, but your ears aren’t broken. When you can’t see real images, but your eyes and retinal theater are fine. Doctors cannot find a cause. Conversion disorder has existed forever under different names. ‘Hysterical blindness’ is an archaic expression of it with echoes of insanity. Times have changed because nowadays medical science recognizes that this condition is not a mental illness but a neutral syndrome without a chemical or physical cause. Something is happening but you don’t know what it is. Conversion disorder. It also appears to have metastasized from an individual affliction to a collective one in 21st century America. But what do I know? A neighbor asked me about getting a Covid vaccine. Before I could respond,…
Stages of Human Development: A Short Account
From my days as a blonde boy in the wild of mid-twentieth century Illinois to my nights as a grey beard in California, I—as have you with reference to your psychic progenitor—have changed. Musically, I still feel my roots in the soils of rhythm stout and durable in my body, beyond the reach of time, the thief; roots sprouting from magic beans dropped fatefully on the ground by sparrows crossing the sky. Instruments as creative tools—similar to typewriters and dictionaries as communicative tools—how to approach these tools as a learner, how to use these tools in performance, these aspects have been remodeled and refined through cultural participation as blonde turned to grey. The sole late comer is my recent addiction, since detoxified, to the blues harp. I have several covers of Little Walter on my SoundCloud account. Lacking a tether to the blonde boy, ‘tis a pitiful harp I play.…
I Have Eaten the Plums: Forgive Me
So much depends upon a red wheel barrow. So sayeth the Bard. The blonde boy learned very young that he depended on drum sticks, guitars, typewriters, books, dictionaries, tape recorders, transistor radios, tv, vinyl records, microfiche—red wheel barrows he needed to clear a path into history where valuable artifacts had been left on the banks of the river—music, poetry, narratives, reports of experience, captured thoughts from a collective consciousness far greater than his paltry share. Though he faced stiff cultural headwinds in his habitus, where behaviors mimicking those who think their shit don’t stink were surveilled and disciplined, he also found reflective adults, primarily women, in the community who gave generously of their time, attention, and resources, especially at school and in the library, tireless spirits committed to children he could not imagine life without. They made the rhythm and harmony for his melody. He came to cherish rhythms first,…
Meeting Up with Frederick Lewis Douglass in the Library
The smell of the town library, light flowing in through stately windows, dust motes dancing in the beams, silvery twirls, the stacks, the ladders, the card catalogue, the stately librarian, the search afoot for books, guided by Dewey’s decimal system, the sitting down, the sinking in, the quiet…the total library phenomenon soothed the blonde boy. He fell in love with the public library in fourth grade, a brick and stone building standing stoically amid a scattering of lesser structures—a gas station, a grocery store, a bank—its entrance guarded by two classically stone lions, a monument to White privilege. As he grew he graduated from books, encyclopedias, and periodicals to listening stations with vinyl records and microfiche readers in cubicles, as an adolescent for sheer pleasure, eventually for serious historical research and focused knowledge building. Later in life, the blonde boy would study literature and linguistics, research methods, composition theory, and…
(Dis)Covering “Things Have Changed”
I’ve been adding a lot of Dylan songs to my sets, almost a whole Dylan set, motivating me to get a set of my very own compositions on my iPad for live performance. When I started building backtracks for this time-machine hired-musician project I call Euphemism’s Prism, a remnant of the lockdown; when I had to learn to divvy up the music with my other artificial selves, musical descendants of the blonde boy, child is father, I turned immediately to Mr. Tambourine Man with my desire to cast a dancing spell, then to Just Like a Woman where Queen Mary is a friend. I recall vividly sitting on my drummer’s throne just after the incredible Bose got here, ready to render Mr. Tambourine Man live for the first time. My harmony tracks were balanced and reasonably in tune, the guitars were aligned, as were the stars I guess, because I…