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 more like it.
Teddy: He’s tuned in pretty well, Carl, especially for a guy living under a bridge.
Hardcore: Does me good to hear you say so. Most people think I’m nuts.
Carl: I wouldn’t say nuts exactly. Different, maybe. Hey, I saw on Facebook this morning, uh, pictures of some kind of a Deep State powwow. No shit. Can’t see any faces, can’t make anybody out, but you can see figures in a tent. One guy claims he saw Obama. Another guy claims he saw Abraham Lincoln, ha ha.
Hardcore: I’ll be dipped in shit. Does he know about John Wilkes Booth?
Carl: I think the whole thread started with that guy who sells pillows on tv. Can’t think of his name.
Hardcore: I know who you mean. That man, now, he’s bona fide nuts. Carl tell him about the lady who posts all these gruesome pictures of dead babies.
Carl (laughs): I call her anti-abortion Annie. She’s a wing nut. They say she had three abortions herself before she was 21, but who knows. Yeah, she posts these pictures of live babies getting chopped up and such.
Teddy: Why do you use Facebook?
Carl: Lately, I’ve been asking myself that same question. I opened an account six years ago and kind of got hooked.
Hardcore: I don’t get on it much. To me these Facebook people shut off their brains. Who the hell would believe the pillow guy on tv saw Abraham Lincoln at a Deep State meeting?
[Sound of an automobile approaching, gravel crunching. A soft car horn.]Teddy (rises): That’s my ride.
[The three men shake hands, hug, engage in phatic communion.]Carl: Don’t be a stranger, now. Come see us deplorables again.
Hardcore: Maybe someday I’ll catch a train out West. Take care of yourself.
Teddy: I’ll do my best. You, too.
[Teddy exits.]Carl: I don’t imagine we’ll see him again.
Hardcore: Not in this life, ha ha.
[They turn to enter the trailer but hear the crunch of gravel signifying someone walking to them.]Carl: Who’s there? Who’s there?
[A tall, thin man wearing a stove pipe hat enters.]Apparition: I’ve lost my bearings, my good men, I dropped my compass just as I skirted Jupiter. Can you point me in the direction of the National Mall?
Hardcore: I’ll be double dipped in shit and hung out to dry. Wasn’t that Abraham Lincoln?
[Lights out.]Chorus
[Pacing, kibitzing, against the backdrop of the Washington Monument in the light of dawn.]Deep State Actor 3: I’ll call Harriet. She assured me we would get another chance to pick his brain.
Deep State Actor 1: Whose brain is it we’re picking?
Deep State Actor 6: For the love of God, Mitch, sometimes I’m embarrassed to share my first name with you. Spiritual you are not. The Almighty is opening a worm hole in the universe for our benefit. Your suspicions are a blemish on us.
Deep State Actor 1: I wouldn’t doubt it a bit if she hasn’t slipped her friend, Harriet, the playwright, if that’s not a pseudonym, a script of what she prefers this apparition to say. Or are we to believe Harriet is taking dictation from a dead President?
Deep State Actor 4: Don’t you worry your conservative head about authenticity. You have a former prosecutor on the job, and I still need to see hard evidence that this apparition is real. No knock offs in this gal’s closet.
Deep State Actor 2: Oh, please. How can one look for hard evidence of a paranormal event? Are you also open to UFOs? Perhaps willing to fund research to employ cuckoo birds and pay for their telescopes?
[Whirring of a helicopter landing on the mall. Commotion until the figure of an apparition wearing a black stove pipe hat enters.]Deep State Actor 3: We were getting a bit anxious, Mr. President. We were thinking we may have driven you away. Thank you for coming to be with us again.
Apparition: I could have been here sooner if I hadn’t arrived just now. I touched down by mistake in a small Midwest town. I’m grateful to be called, my wisdom for to share. Preserving the union is my heartfelt prayer.
Deep State Actor 1: My word, Madame Speaker, surely we’re not going to be required to speak in rhyme? I came here from Kentucky not to recite poetry, but to be a team player.
Deep State Actor 3: Apparently, the apparition didn’t get the memo. There is no requirement. But anyone who feels better speaking in rhyme is certainly free to do so.
Deep State Actor 2 (chuckles): Nicely done. Memo? Do so?
Apparition: I rhyme sometimes on purpose. So what is on your agenda for this meeting, rhymed or unrhymed?
Deep State Actor 4: Mr. President, before we get to our purpose, namely, to learn from you what we might do to keep our Constitution intact, I have a question for you, a serious question to me and to my ancestors. How could any man, white or black, in good conscience, believe that colonization of former black slaves, transporting them on ships once again to an unfamiliar land, ripping them from their homes once again, would be a fair, just, and democratic solution to the so-called ‘Southern problem’? Have you no empathy?
Apparition: That, my friend and colleague, is a very good question. The short answer? I can’t defend it. I never felt good about it. I will say this: Three of my predecessors in office belonged to the American Colonization Society. Oh, Frederick Douglass was hopping mad when he came to see me about it—it wasn’t as if I thought it was a good idea; I thought it was the best of the available options. I was the proverbial man driving the trolley car. I won’t tell you what Frederick said about me, about my character. He changed his mind anyway, after January 1, 1863.
A baritone voice from the sky with some echo: The Emancipation Proclamation made up for a fair amount of moral squishiness. Sorry, Abe, but I can’t hold my tongue. I wanted everyone to know, and never forget, that your Proclamation would never be canceled: “Abraham may be slow, [he] may desire peace even at the price of leaving our terrible national sore untouched, to fester on for generations, but [he] is not the man to reconsider, retract, and contradict words and purposes solemnly proclaimed over his official signature.” I understand your outrage—colonization would have been cruel and unusual punishment—but this spirit of Abraham before you now is not cruel.
Deep State Actor 4: We’ll, that answers my question. I’m in.
A second baritone voice from above: Yes, Abraham’s “momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves, who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of captivity. But now, as I said almost six decades ago near the end of my short life, we must face the tragic fact that the Negro is still not free. One hundred and sixty-one years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination.”
Deep State Actor 5: Amazing! Was that Martin Luther King?
Deep State Actor 2: Those were his words.
Deep State Actor 6: Well, yes, the Proclamation turned out to be a good thing, but I’ve long had a question. On what authority could any President simply declare that a Constitutional guarantee is not the law? How is the Emancipation Proclamation not unconstitutional? It may have been the right thing to do, but was it Constitutional? What if Donald Trump had signed the document?
Deep State Actor 2: You raise a good point. We can always count on you to put us in a conceptual straitjacket.
Apparition (laughs): I created a thing called Presidential War Powers.’ As commander-in-chief I decided I had to take any measure which may best subdue the enemy. I did more than emancipate. I suspended the writ of habeas corpus by presidential decree, I declared martial law, and I authorized the trial of civilians by military courts—all on the grounds that in an emergency I could do things during war which cannot be done constitutionally during peace.
Deep State Actor 4: Yes, you did, Mr. President. I was grateful that Donald Trump had read no American history whatsoever and had no understanding of how far you expanded Presidential authority.
Deep State Actor 1: In the South, sir, we also understand the repercussions from your reach toward tyranny over the states and have spent our time since then fighting against a federal government that sought to change our way of life. That sentiment, in a nutshell, has been the wind beneath Donald Trump’s wings. We’re in a pickle in the South. All these years we’ve spent keeping the federal government out of our lives paid off. Our people believe government is evil. We got what we wanted. But now, people are crazy. We must find a new direction if we don’t want to go the way of the Roman Empire.
Deep State Actor 5: I’ve tried to revere you for Emancipation—I mean, I do revere you—but how could you do this for African-American people, but do nothing for Native Americans nor for women?
Apparition: You young people. I love your energy. Women were invisible in the original Constitution, and I did not do enough for them. Native Americans? To be honest, I was a believer in manifest destiny. Six months before the Emancipation Proclamation, I used the power of my pen to begin the transcontinental railroad. The next day, I signed the Morrill Act making land grants for public universities available in the West. I did not become President to right all the wrongs of this country. I did not become President to write the Proclamation. I became President because I thought I could be a force for preventing a war and making our destiny manifest. Alas, such was not to be. Paramount for me was saving the Union. The War of the Rebellion came.
Deep State Actor 1: We don’t like to call it that in my state. We prefer the War Between the States. Southern historians sometimes point out your cruelty to native people as evidence that you are no saint, sir. Didn’t you preside over the largest public hanging of Indians in our entire history?
Apparition: Ah, the Dakota Uprising in Minnesota. Yes, we were so busy attending to the War of the Rebellion that our military was spread pretty thin. Well, the Sioux in Minnesota agreed to cede their land and live on reservations, but we had corruption among our Indian agents. They withheld food, and settlers stole horses, the Indians were starving, so they attacked and killed over 800 people. The Governor held trials and convicted 338 Indians, sentencing 303 to public hanging. Anxious to not act with so much clemency as to encourage another outbreak on the one hand, nor with so much severity as to be cruel on the other, I ordered a careful examination of the records of each individual trial. Ultimately, the military executed 38 Indian prisoners by public hanging on the day after Christmas. Each of them had been convicted or murder or rape.
Deep State Actor 4: You did the right thing. I can empathize, Mr. President. When I was a state’s attorney general, I was duty bound to prosecute cases that I didn’t like bringing forward. The law is the law.
Deep State Actor 3: It’s clear to me, Abraham, that you do have some special insights to help us find a way through this sticky period in our country’s life. We, too, are determined to preserve the Constitution in the face of white supremacists and men who politically support an evil, loathsome man who’s selfishness and criminal inclination is a threat to democracy. What is your best advice?
Apparition: You credit me with too much, Ma’am. But… If I could make one point, I would say this: There are good people—on both sides. The reverse is also true: There are bad people—on both sides. It’s not very helpful to look at a person’s political party in this country and decide that one party is bad, the other is good—therefore, one person is good, the other, bad. Just as I could not assume that all of those captured Sioux warriors were bad and deserved a noose, I could not assume that all of the Confederacy was bad and deserved to die. I’ve been following events since Donald Trump rode down his golden escalator and announced his candidacy. He has surrounded himself with bad people, people willing to sacrifice principles for power, people willing to break the law to keep him in office. He himself is a bad man. You’re doing a good job of seeing the good people on the other side—and the bad people—but you need to do a better job, you need to look more carefully at individual cases, and you need to fully prosecute civil, political, and violent crimes. Act with clemency when it is deserved, but throw the book at those who equally deserve it—on both sides.
Deep State Actor 5: I can’t understand how you became a Republican, sir.
Deep State Actor 1: I’m not so sure he could be elected as a Republican today.
Apparition: I had several bad options. One party argued for the continuation of slavery, extending it into the Western territories. Another party argued against slavery, stopping it in its tracks by any means necessary, including violence. Another party argued that slave states ought to be free to keep their ‘peculiar institution’ without interference, buts its spread to the West should be stopped. The Republican Party did not want war but did not want slavery. I did not want war, I did not want slavery, but I wanted the Constitution to hold. Ask yourselves—do you seek another secession and rebellion? You’ve had your January 6. How long can you permit white supremacy to infect the population? The problem you face involves the Executive Branch. You’ve had a rogue President who does not respect the Constitution. It’s a unique problem made worse by his own belief in white supremacy. This man is not a Republican nor a Democrat. The Electoral College was created to safeguard the interests of small, rural states, but it is holding the majority of the population hostage. My advice is to restructure the Electoral College. Charlatans and demagogues gain traction when they have to fool a small number of people all the time. You can’t fool all the people all the time. The genius of America rests in majority rule.
[Helicopter whirrs]Apparition: My chariot awaits, good people. I have eternal faith in you and in the American people. We were so much older when I walked as a man. We’re younger than that now. Farewell. Farewell.
Drop curtain
