ACT TWO
JULIAN ASSANGE: [He is dressed in a grey suit. His shining hair is clean and feminine and light-bearing as a shampoo ad. Lucifer hair! He stands at a podium as at a press conference. He addresses the audience. The DEAD YOUTH pose, swoon, smirk, stand at attention, variously]
Hello my name is Julian Assange.
Thank you for your attention to those burka’d teens.
They are in a work-study program.
They are studying abroad.
They are in juvenile detention.
They are receiving extra-credit.
They are part of a good will exchange between our
two nations.
They are on a chain-gang.
They are all out on work-release.
Though DEAD, they are studying for their GED’s.
& degrees in dance therapy.
I would like to deliver my prepared remarks.
But I am distracted by these teens.
They are members of a dance team.
They are on their way to an abstinence convention.
They are drinking absinthe.
They are aspiring drone pilots.
They are on their way to an interfaith prayer breakfast.
They shot two convenience store clerks for one
hundred dollars.
Their van has crashed, and they are walking along
the highway.
If they do not find gas soon, they will have to eat
the weakest one.
They are going completely feral just a few miles
from the highway,
listening to death metal, practicing magick.
They are running pornographic services out of
their bedrooms.
They are at soccer practice.
They work in their uncle’s convenience store at night.
They do their algebra homework.
They study war.
They are boy soldiers, hustlers, ‘knock-off jihadi.’
They invented Facebook.
They are entrepreneurs and visionaries.
X-game competitors, budding baristas,
junior rapists, virgin martyrs and walking delinquencies.
They are beauties and atrocities.
I can’t stop looking at them.
They could not survive what was required of them.
I will now deliver my prepared remarks.
Prepared for me by the Author of the feast, which is
a cell line, or Fate.
The Smirk is full of noises. [returns to teens] The isle
is full of teens.
I’m bundling up packets of information
in strong ribands of junk for its own protection
and tossing it into the sea. Perhaps you’ve seen The Tempest.
Perhaps you know how this ends. Some things sink,
while other things float.
Others are enraptured in a tree.
We call this plot.
And tho I am a well known evangeline for privacy
I’m no angel. More like an ancient greek.
I like to lift the cloak off a diplomatic channel to watch
the current phreak!
I love privacee. I love transparancee.
DEAD YOUTH: Except!
ASSANGE: [continuing] I love secret identitees. I am mixed on the
subject of redaction.
I am a leftist.
I don’t hate the state
DEAD YOUTH: Except!
ASSANGE: [continuing] I believe emperors should be naked.
O complexitee!
Here’s a riddle for you to work out, O lightening bugs,
paparazzi: abominable
secrecy, delectable privacy, holee transparencee,
cursed detectibility, desired accountability…
Like: alive or dead in the box, what is the cat thinking.
That box is the Internet. One cat brain cell is the leaker.
Another brain cell is the leak-receiver.
The nearest synapse is the battle creek.
But the leak doesn’t cross there
it jumps all over the brain
lighting up every synapse
in a total war. A grand mal!
till noone knows where it is going or where it has been.
O device maudit! O seizure!
O brain on work release
from the regime of cause and effect.
Eventually it reaches its destination, me,
I publish it on Wikileaks
and that’s an end.
Game over, kitty-kat. Zap. zap.
O Wikileaks. Nymph-stage, perfect gesture at the perfect time in the minute lifecycle of a dayfly, which has to die at day’s end, lump it or leave it, leak or limp. I wanted to build on you but who can build on lymph. Our mistake was to publish the leaks ourselves, not just ship them to some other destination. We were left holding the bag with the cat out. Became the chopping block, target practice. We were happy to take the blows from those conquistador’s arquebusses and blunderbusses, really we were, but when the banksters and credit card companies blocked our pipeline of donations, that was really an end. Wikileaks! I swear to revive you once I reach my destination with the help of these fun-loving DEAD YOUTH.
Uhm, I’d like to introduce DEAD YOUTH, and thereby a portion of the plot:
OMNES DEAD YOUTH: [this rap accompanied by a rhythmic dance. The YOUTH may trade verses and sing some portions in unison]
Hello I’m Dead Youth
also known as a lion at the Baghdad Zoo
airvacked to Stockholm there I went symptomatic
comatic asthmatic astigmatic
but in my distress
I DID perfect the hologram kick
Like Zlatan Junior Imbrohimovich
But when soldiers filled the stadium
with their carbines, biceps and rank nasturtiums
I was laid out on the pitch
Dead, I fled to a dream Zurich
Where I died again of insight.
I padded on gold paws
lived on in the svelte vaults, read the golden
embossments
memorized the serial numbers
my brain better than a supercomputer
I maintained like a mainframe
but more better splendor
still you can’t live on love. Well, not 4-ever.
Hello so I’m dead again some bored john killed me,
some bulldozer. A falling wall. A body bomb
Answering its phone, a days work at the dump
Pulling the laptop apart for its metals.
Playing an extra in an international Ponzi scheme
cum-Gotterdammerung. I was a mule or camel.
The deal gone bad, I was hung
from the overpass headless with a name carved on my chest
Each time I came back from the dead
now I’m dead and my knowledge too
Unless Julian Assange can quickly speed me to a port
to reboot. Till then I’m just idling here on the deck
tho I was heading for Art’s shores.
JULIAN ASSANGE: [resuming fondly] O Art! That destination’s too
lofty. I have another one in mind…
In farthest Queensland, my colonie,
Magnetic Island, named for a mythical sleeping force
that made Captain Cook’s cock, uhm, compass leap
up like robin
directing him for the shore,
indetectible evermore. That black allure
could shock all the new Sony AM dreammachines,
crack safes, forge canvasses, eat the code off
any barnacled bit of credit card strip or VHS cassette…
I lived there in a lean-to, as my mother
lived in bikinis. Later we moved to the shelter
on the mainland
for battered moms and teens, she bought me
a Commodore 64
on credit, because she loved me, we lived like a
battery hens
on chips, I peck-pecked our 8-bits. Lean times.
Dear mother.
On our notorious hair
we brushed a deleterious dye
called Invisiblonde. Called Slender Prey’s
Intoxicating Hide.
ASSANGE and DEAD YOUTH: My mother JonBenet and me
My mother Margaret Thatcher.
My mother Henrietta Lacks.
My mother Antigone.
My mother strong correlation
Palingenesis, telomarese,
recapitulation
My mother twentieth cee
My mother enceinte
My mother epicene
My mother in surburbia
My mother sleeper cell
My mother human error
yellow cake or Zyklon B
My mother migrating heron
that, chopped up in the engine,
brings down the corporate jet
My mother trashed reputation
My mother Hitchcock blonde
My mother windswept highlands
My mother updo
My mother bog
My mother bared midriff, dirndl, sari,
sandal, buckskin, wristwatch, hijab,
Who survived my birth
but barely
Whose idea of groceries
was a bottle of bleach or pills
a donation to the church or the Panthers
lived in a vat of spaghetti
died in a petri dish
My mother in Arcadia ego
My mother botulinum in hypo
wiped toilets
in gloves and smock
played bridge in
evening dress
sabotaged the trainbridge
shot up the bank vault
worked the third shift
was throttled in halter top
was choked in a stalking
was brought up on charges
Became a rogue signatory
No longer agreed to the plot
Divested of media resources
became a relentless top
and crashed the last century’s banquet
a radioactive
grain in every dish
Her name was Estrogena,
Aspartame, Nicotiana,
Thalidomida, Saccharina,
Carcinoma, Sacerdota,
Carmen,
Carcinogen…
JULIAN ASSANGE: [patting the shoulder of DEAD YOUTH, calming them, distributing pills, talking a kind of soothing patter].
Hello, I am Julian Assange, I’ve been assassinated by
my mother.
My mother was divine. A divine assassination.
She edited and improved me.
She shot me full of gold.
Protected me, gilt me, guided me, hid me, and
bought me a Commodore 64
Now I endeavor to be a golden like my mother
to radiate hot pixels of information
to cell-divide forever
to stage a pussy riot, to offer teens of all nations
hot gobblets of information
pus-gold and liberating, the rays of my inflammation.
These pets you see gathered around me are little runts
I’ve collected from the NICU ward in Memorial
Hospital in South Bend
Indiana. Poor things were born
addicted to oxycodone, oxycontin, valium and other
narcotics.
Born like princesses with lotus feet. Only things fit
them are Nikes and IV’s. Poor things are asleep.
I had to save them from the cuddler army of 54
retiree church organists, an invasive species.
I carry in this box a little code to feed them on.
sorry a little comb, they’re bees.
Please help yourself before helping others, little
species little protégées. It’s on demand!
It’s all you can eat on repeat forever.
in the event of two similar die-offs, the greater
of two die-offs is still similar. Infinity resembles
infinity to the dead.
That’s why they need a mom like me
and how I can be one: resemblance
is a magick power. I copy my mother
& live here in drag like a mortal.
I just don’t have a normal mortal motor.
I’m an abnormal mater!
Abnormal matter!
But unlike cancer, I have a motive.
It’s to keep these teens alive on the Internet.
I feed them like roses, I feed them privacee.
My motive is indetectible to you
because you don’t want to see it.
But my moralitee is a rare and strong growth.
It configures a colonee.
It grows in night vision.
It thrives on unnatural light.
ABDI WALI ABDULQADIR MUSE: Assange, I have arrived.
ASSANGE AND OMNES DEAD YOUTH: [with extreme courtliness and pleasure] HOW NOW DEAD YOUTH!
MUSE: Although I am a teen I am not dead. I have come to occupy this ship. I need it.
ASSANGE: To occupy this ship? Faddish lad. Despite my suit, do we resemble a corporation? Is it Bring- Your-DEAD-YOUTH-to-Work Day?
MUSE: ASSANGE, I am a desperate man. In just a few hours, they are shipping me to Terre Haute.
ASSANGE: Handsome Youth, albeit not dead: you are welcome to join us on our ad-hoc journey, our ragtag army of questionable devices. But if you wish to steer this vessel anywhere but Magnetic Island, I suggest you find another means of transportation. Allow me to quote from Mayakovsky’s dead letter: this boat has smashed upon the rocks of ‘byt’. I.E., the Smirk is listing badly. We stole it from from a shippy sick bay where they were going to ravage it for parts. I mean salvage it. But now it is our salvation, albeit limited. It is following a mystery current, lately detected, a smooth seam. It only goes one way. And that way, if I may be so blunt, is my way.
MUSE: Assange, allow me to reassure you. My capture of the site will last but an interval. I have urgent business to attend to. I know it is my fate to be entirely landlocked and sealed away from the Internet till my fiftieth birthday.
OMNES: GASP!
MUSE: I was sentenced this morning in a New York court. OH, is any fate worse than Terre Haute, Indiana? And I speak as one brought up in ‘war-torn Somalia’! Tomorrow I will be flown out in chains under armed escort. There I will take up residency with bungler jihadist and the backup director of the Gambino crime family. It is rather glamorous company for one such as me, who only left his mother’s side two weeks ago.
OMNES DEAD YOUTH: Two weeks?!
DEAD YOUTH 5: I also died two weeks ago.
I haven’t yet adjusted. Mama Julian says
I’m adjusting poorly. I may have an adjustment disorder.
I may cause a small but crucial aberration in the field
with my level of maladjustment.
I could sink the ship
before we reach Magnetic Island
or even start an island of my own, helas,
a cancer cluster.
He’s wrapped me in a lead apron
And kept me away from important instruments.
My story goes:
A drone hit me.
Nosed me out with its nosecone.
Zeroed me out of the Anthropocene.
Although I was, like the drone, an American.
It pushed a wall on me. It made a date with me!
O dinner date! O pederastic drone!.
These DEAD YOUTH call me ‘Barack’ but I don’t like it.
I am a teen who died eating dinner with my cousin
and that’s all. It was not a happy fate. [fights tears]
MUSE: [placing hand on DEAD YOUTH 5’s shoulder] My sympathies are with you, Abdulrahman. But you’ve got to buck up. This is the new situation!
DEAD YOUTH 5: O God, God! [burying his face in Muse’s shoulder]
DEAD YOUTH 1: [exasperated] O, weep weep!
DEAD YOUTH 2: O gag. It’s alien corn hour.
ASSANGE: Intriguing Somalian youth, I know your country well from the Internet. I think of it fondly for it figured in several of our earliest leak-tests. Then our ‘Cablegate’ revealed the US government dipping its big toe in the riptide of your perpetual war.
MUSE: I hope not perpetual.
ASSANGE: Well one can hope. Malignancy has a way of sticking around in the system. It mounts the lymph nodes like an Internet and rides. It opens a franchise. You may have concluded this during the handful of years you have endured in the Anthropocene.
MUSE: ASSANGE and YOUTH, I have no time to waste.
Please allow me to begin again.
I’m Abdi Wali Abdulqadir Muse.
Though I have many names and synonyms
Approxi-nyms and acronyms
Provided for me by journalists and the Internet.
The Internet, my second mother. [All nod, approvingly]
I come from Galka’yo, Somalia, what’s known
as a divided city
due to a continuously collapsing state
a conflict which expands according to no known
galactic models
continually making more of itself according to local tastes
and outside interference, as you referenced in your
‘Cablegate’
I am 16, 17, 19, and 26, also over 18
according to American authorities, paving the way for
prosecution.
I am between 16 and 17 according to my mother
continuously phoning from Galka’yo.
According to she, I was
“coaxed into piracy by gangsters with money.”
and have been gone just two weeks.
That is my prologue, and what’s left of it
is immediately going past
and folding up into a vanishing point
according to hegemony’s impossible CGI,
its skill with dispossession—
But what is this? I hear someone approaching!
I hear someone muttering, clattering
the loud clang of a too-long saber knocking against a
polished boot!
A visor knocking the bridge of a sweating nose
as if some inept knight were climbing up a ladder!
O who is approaching? O is it Authoritee?
Can it be I am detected? O, ASSANGE, am I slain?
[he scrambles to hide].
ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPÉRY: [a pilot. enters with bluster and saber rattles. He steps up the podium previously occupied by ASSANGE and delivers this address, haughtily]
Hello I’m Antoine de Saint-Exupéry author of Le Petit Prince. I am the beloved aviateur-auteur-and-homme-du-lettres-francais. I died in 1944, mort por la France. Being dead, I can board this ship without disturbance. Monsieur Assange has arranged the security that way, doomed liberal. It’s hardly sea-worthy. It’s hardly air-tight. Ah, but all errors are human errors when it comes to privacee. To begin: I am the dream interloper, I am the white hunter and these assorted perverts are the prey. I am played by a woman. Like many women associated with aviation, I have disappeared: myself, Howard Hughes, Lindbergh’s baby. Since your premonition, have you ship-rats run a search? Have you thought about draining the loch? Have you thought about dredging the apartment complex? Have you thought about going door-to-door? Erica Pratt, seven-years-old of Philadelphia, freed herself from a kidnapper by chewing through duct tape and escaping through a broken basement window. In an article on the Internet, the police chief glowingly notes, “she’s suffered NO HARM WHATSOEVER!” Yet this vessel, the Merchant Vessel MAERSK Alabama, AKA the SS Smirk, on the other hand, which I am here to inspect, and, let’s face it, confiscate, cannot effect an escape. It’s listing, it’s riding a sludgy margin. Something stinks. For one thing, is that Julian Assange, or just another pirate, or both? I insist as a Frenchman stroking my kepi, this ship’s forms aren’t in order. Her manifest ain’t blest. This blonde might be a stowaway, some homeless mom leaving the night shift at Dunkin Donuts with a packet of reject munchkins for her litter kids. I might look like Claude Reins from Casablanca, flaky as a pastry, my coiffeur a vol-au-vont cushion for my kepi, a cravat spoiling for an honorary cross, but as a woman, I’m the endgame, I’m the belle dame san merci, bon homies, I’m a swallow, a tough cookie that lays its radioactive grains in the throat, and I say, she’s leaky, this blonde, and this tub, The SS SMIRK. Her story don’t hold water. It don’t hold up. Listen up, paparazzi, papyrus, inamorati, dead and sleazee guests. These papers are thin as leaves, they show a ghost cargo, ghost crew. [beat] Unfortunately I can only read these ghost papers because I, too, am dead. I keep radioing ship-to-shore on my magic instrument but I can’t get through on pre-war knowledge. It’s just birdscratch, birdsong: Who dunit who dunit To who. To who. I’m dead to them like last century’s flu. I’m going to have to bring this vessel under my own command with no help from outside intermediaries. AND there’s no telling what’s in that box he’s fingering. Could be a dirty bomb!
JULIAN ASSANGE: It’s an organ.
It’s for shipboard services.
And I’m a missionary / mercenary.
All above board.
DEAD YOUTH: [prankishly] buzz buzz
ASSANGE: OK It’s it’s a crate of oranges.
They’re alive with fruit flies, all indentured workers with their vaccines and their papers from Monsanto.
All above board.
DEAD YOUTH: buzz buzz
ASSANGE: OK It’s a miniature server farm.
DEAD YOUTH: Buzz!
ASSANGE: Its video game controllers
a junked prototype of the Wii
DEAD YOUTH: Weeeee!!
ASSANGE: I’m taking them to Vaguest Africa
for starving children to use
in the camp for refugees.
To keep fit and practice drone warfare
in case they are adopted by Americans in the future.
Mine’s a mission of relief!!
DEAD YOUTH: [like a saxophone] BUZZ!
ASSANGE: Ok it’s bees.
ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPÉRY: Sir you won’t use that tone with me. I represent the internecine interests of France, Lower Saxony, and American shipping lines. I am the universal solvent and when I move my bowels it’s like a gold mine. Ok? I’m throwing my weight around, skinny. Now, I want to talk to a grown up.
ALL: That’s me!
MUSE: [emerging from his hiding place] Ahem, that’s me. Monsieur, may I be at your service?
ANTOINE DE SAINT EXUPÉRY: Who’re you?
MUSE: My name is Abdi Wali Abdulqadir Muse. I am a valet of that man there. As you can see I’m black.
ANTOINE DE SAINT EXUPÉRY: And why isn’t he talking to me directly?
ABDI WALI ABDULQADIR MUSE: Sir we are all white men here. That is, in that, we believe in the rule of law, trickle down economics, the chain of command, cheap clothing and container ships. A chain that on the one hand moves the goods, and on the other holds me here in my place, you in yours.
ANTOINE DE SAINT EXUPÉRY: Fiend, you can reason.
ABDI WALI ABDULQADIR MUSE: Good sir, I am no fiend but a valet, in a job-training program, what your brother Briton would call a ‘training scheme’. I hope to return to my own land and open up a school for valets. We will teach subservience without the malfeasance, the smile without the guile. How to wipe the white crumbs from the table with a knife. A blunt instrument. It may sound out of date to you but some things never go out of style. Par example, did you hear the new Obama Administration ‘e-verify’ immigration labor bill includes a footnote exempting “footmen” from requiring documentation checks?
ANTOINE DE SAINT EXUPÉRY: That sounds to me like so much tropic hyperbole. For ‘tropic’ read ‘sophist’, NB.
ABDI WALI ABDULQADIR MUSE: Not at all, sir. Settle into this wingchair. Let me and these rank lads, my pupils, perform the very law for thee.
ANTOINE DE SAINT EXUPÉRY: Your pupils? I got the distinct impression these kids were with the blonde!
[ABDI WALI ABDULQADIR MUSE tut tuts ANTOINE’s objections and sweeps him into a fatherly wingchair ASSANGE, MUSE, and DEAD YOUTH perform COLLATERAL MURDER TWO. Here the burkas return and the DEAD YOUTH with MUSE perform another excerpt of the famous video according to the strictures above]
ASSANGE: O lovely, lovely. DEAD YOUTH you are so talented, so flexible and double jointed, so committed in your willingness to become any kind of media. It was just like watching a revolutionary mural or frieze, both analogue and digital. How it counted itself off. How it moved in frames, and how those frames moved. O I’m willing to run interference for you children from here to Infinitee— or, preferably, Magnetic Island. That’s just the kind of mom I am. A blonde one. Hum! And you must understand, villainous Exupéry, that this performance is both a literal depiction and a kind of allegory for all kinds of less visible violences which are an intrinsic part of our cultural fabric but hidden inside diplomatic cables or mental black sites. You see it here, but it’s happening there. DEAD YOUTH will bring it to light!
EXUPÉRY: Oh that was a marvelous play. It had a certain native simplicity, a native joy, an interest in aping and imitation, but at the same time Very European, very martial, very involved in divisions and counting and perfect rule of law with plenty of exemptions and exemptions and indications and—
Hey! What is the meaning of this! I am strapped to my chair and cannot move and liberate myself?! Is this a kidnapping? O! Removed from history by some rank plot! I am full of rue! O Mama said this would happen if I didn’t keep my feet on the ground! Just like Patty Hearst and Amelia Earhart! She was not such a mama as you [he nods at Assange].
MUSE: I thank you not to abuse Monsieur Julian. He’s been a bit of a prick but is now rehabilitating himself as a mother and teaching these homeless dead children to rehab junk ships and hack into computer systems. It’s basically Schindler’s wrist. Now, what did you think of the play?
EXUPÉRY: What did I think of it? I admit, I enjoyed it, at first blush, with the carefree jouissance as a schoolboy which is universally prized and protected, even on this questionable vessel, which I am beginning to regret I every mounted, this Puke Parnassus.
ABDI WALI ABDULQADIR MUSE: Behave like a gentleman, sir. That’s enough of your lingua franca. Ah, mother tongue can be such a dick in a throat, such a svarte garrote! Of course, as one whore said to the other, “There is no mother tongue. Only a power takeover by a dominant language.”
EXUPÉRY: For a ship full of ‘mothers’, I find your deportment lacks tenderness.
ABDI WALI ABDULQADIR MUSE: Lacks tendernesse! Sir, since you are a master of these things, let me ask you: what is the most tender thing of all?
EXUPÉRY: A new mother.
ABDI WALI ABDULQADIR MUSE: Well we’ve got that, if you’ll excuse the expressions, in spades. We’ve got Monsieur Assange. However, this discussion is becoming circular, like a chapeau, a case of crabs in a seminary or a firing squad. Let me tell you a little story. I saw this on Al Jazeera. There is a disease called Chagas disease common among the rural poor of Latin America. In Argentina, for example, the poor share their small homes with a tiny irritating insect called the vinchuca. It bites these poor peasants as they sleep. It sips their blood, it shits or vomits a little bit of this blood back into their bloodstream. As it does, it also releases a microscopic parasite, the flagellate protozoan Trypanosoma cruzi. In photomicrographs, this protozoan looks as slender and harmless as a little girl’s hair riband or a streamer from a bike. But in the body of a peasant, toxin runs all through the body, causes celldeath, including in the heart. Now the peasant man can no longer swing his axe. And why must he swing his axe? Because that is his livelihood: he makes axe handles. The tessellating pattern of subsistence labor snags and staggers. The axe is swung but poorly. The mother now swings the axe, now the children, and now noone. My parable is concluded.
EXUPÉRY: That’s a parable? I don’t follow.
ABDI WALI ABDULQADIR MUSE: Allow me to quote another great author, Mr. Herman Melville: FOLLOW YOUR LEADER. [smacks him] Sir, you are slower than these dead youth. Perhaps your kepi is too tight. I am here to read my rights into the record. I’m here for my MIRANDA rights! That is, I’m here because I love the Brave New World despite the people in it. I like Assange and his mooncalfs, the DEAD YOUTH. So let me begin again. As a human inmate on earth in the year 2013, I have been bitten by many things. That is, I have been subjected to many things, mostly against my will. To the point that will itself seems to be a poison and not the same for every man. The whole body of Somalia, par example, if we agree that it exists, has been swathed in a garment of toxic and nuclear waste for some decades now thanks to the depravity of wealthier nations and global shipping companies. We’ve been too embroiled in a convenient civil war to defend her. The Indian Ocean tsunami revealed the whole plot, brought huge barrels of oozing to nuclear and hospital waste to our shores and wiped it as salves into the RNA of my brethren. Now, some among us have styled ourselves shepherds of the sea, gone out to garner a sort of immediate reparation for these systemic damages from passing ships in the form of ransoms. Others among us, admittedly, have been motivated by baser things, such as the desire to eat. Which one right now, ask yourself, would you rather I be, a man motivated by justice, or a man who wants something to eat?
[beat, beat]
What about a man who wants to eat justice?
And what would such a man shit out into
Justice’s bloodstream?
And this, then, cher aviateur, my dirty chevre,
my cabriolet, is the meaning of my parable.
So many things I have been made to eat. So
many little things have eaten me.
I will learn from that. Let me be unto this
world the bacterium
pinkly slender as a girl’s riband
that eats and changes hearts
until the muscle of the great man falters
no axe can swing
and no blow can fall
EXUPÉRY: O pirate! I am slain.
ABDI WALI ABDULQADIR MUSE: When I hear grown men use this term ‘pirate,’ I reach for my gun. It seems it only applies to me and a pack of shut-in dead and down-market teens.
OMNES DEAD YOUTH: [happily] We’re going to need a bigger boat!’
MUSE: We’re going to need a bigger gun. Somehow we’re the scourge, the pirates, and not the credit default swappers, stock traders, nation crashers, corporate raiders, pharmaceutical hockers, civil war fomenters, forest burners, contractors, mercenaries, military recruiters, plant closers or anyone else who bleeds ‘the system’ for all its milky staph while leaving behind a crumpled stalk that is good for nothing but releasing toxic compounds as it breaks down. It seems that only I, who have nothing, not even a functioning country, I who rationally recognize what’s right in front of my face, that the exchange value of a single white man’s life is without limit, that the cargo of a single boat of cheap junk, crude, or even waste headed to port is far greater than all the souls in my war-wracked region, should be condemned for my savagery, my wild-eyed ‘rapacity’? Sorry, if I’m ‘bloodthirsty’ I come by it legitimately. It’s the only career path open to me. Plus you should thank me! Being kidnapped makes every white man a movie star. No more paper pusher for you! You’ll be a celebrity. You’ll be played in by the Toms Hanks or Cruise, or should you die, a lesser star, unless you die heroically, and then its one of the Toms again. Are there other dreams than these?
EXUPÉRY: O a pirate! He’s going to blow us all to kingdom come.
MUSE: That’s right. Madness is my policy. It’s mutually assured destruction. I learned it from your centuree.
EXUPÉRY: Assange! Tunnel digger, money changer, your cult of privacy gives aid and support to these evil doers. Muse, do you have any idea what your piracy is doing to insurance premiums?
[All others collapse in laughter]
MUSE: Sounds like highway robbery!
EXUPÉRY: [Sulks]
MUSE: Now you’re sulking like a teen. If you keep this up, we’ll use your pipe to dig out your eyes and we won’t let you watch the second act. It will be highly educational, like the first. And at the end there’ll be a test. I’ll give you the questions in advance. Are you an ‘environmentalist’ or just a ‘mentalist‘? Do you want these youth to chop you up and feed you to fishies in their fishnets or will you bend like a spoon?
OMNES DEAD YOUTH: Oh, we are bloodthirsty youth!
ASSANGE: If you don’t mind, I don’t care for all this violence.
It’s very analogue
It’s very twentieth cee.
It’s not what I signed up for
when I signed up to go to sea.
Also, I must add that these youth are looking peaked
and less sexy by the day. Sweet siphons,
we must make our way for Magnetic Island soon.
We can picnic on Picnic Bay.
OMNES DEAD YOUTH: For I am tired mother and would fain lie doon!
ABDI WALI ABDULQADIR MUSE: for someone sour on the 20th c you’re a bit of a nostalgique.
ASSANGE: Too true.
I’m like Odysseus in that way
And every way. The very cleverest of boots.
That one skilled in the ways of contending.
Splendida mendax. But less bearded…
Anyway I’m just tired. Like the brochures say,
I need to reboot.
I need to relax, if lax I ever was.
I need a long layover at LAX
to spend time in an oxygen bar
And lay down in my oxygen tent
And think about my brood
Why don’t you captain for awhile, ABDI WALI
ABDULQADIR MUSE.
[He lies down to sleep, as do DEAD YOUTH.]
MUSE: Very well then, intermission.