The
following monologue would never happen. This is a news producer
talking. He isn't smart enough to see the big picture. But I'm giving
him that ability to know the real op. Of course he's a pitch man, and
he's thinking about his reputation, and how to play the audience, which
is his job. His job is the con. How to achieve it.
Major television network, quiet conference room. Producer meets with his director.
Producer:
"Look, Fred, I've got a laundry list of details for the two-hour
special on the riots tonight. First of all, I know you're a burning
building guy. You love those blazes. But you're getting sloppy. Last
night, in the middle of the Minneapolis report, I could see two palm
fronds and part of the big Hollywood sign on the left of the shot. I
mean, come on. If you have to substitute Philly for Minneapolis, okay,
but don't go nuts, all right? What are you, some kind of pyromaniac?
Next, about our anchor on the scene, Paul. He's black and he's wearing a
black medical mask. First of all, I can't hear what he's saying. And
people out on the street think he's Antifa. I know Paul loves that, but
his father's a neurosurgeon in Boston, and Paul went to prep school and
Harvard, so tell him to lose the attitude and the mask. Now,
Jenine---we told her we'd warn her if rioters showed up anywhere near
her, but she keeps looking over her shoulder when she's on air. It's
developing into a twitch. She pretends she's tossing her hair out of
her face, but she's stealing little glances behind her. Tell her to
knock it off. On our remotes from the West Coast, we have to use Herb
Chen. It tells our audience we're not buying into Trump's China virus
thing. But Herb is basically a weather guy. He thinks he's doing
hurricane stand-ups in the middle of a flood with branches flying and
fifty-mile-an-hour winds. He shouts, so he can be heard above the storm
noise. It's incongruous. Fix him. We want a nice steady tone. And
look, no mention of COVID on the show. Once or twice is okay, but we
don't want mixed messages. Some of our talent think they're aiming for
Pulitzers. If it were up to them, they'd be going live from ORs, over
the shoulders of surgeons cutting into the chests of gunshot victims.
Keep the reports from cities short and fast-moving. This has to look
like a total national tragedy. We have to justify fewer commercial
breaks. We can't stop every six minutes and run those crazy-ass Geico
spots and diarrhea medicine ads. It has to be dignified. Get it?"
"And
look, Fred, give us a good lead-in, okay? Solid and short. With
numbers. 'Protests and riots are exploding in 140 US cities. 21 states
have called in the National Guard. Curfews have been imposed in 40
metropolitan areas. Military units are on standby for deployment. What
is happening in America?' That kind of thing."
"Go back and
forth between expressing support for the protestors, support for the
police, support for social justice, support for America, support for our
own ratings. That last is a little joke, Fred. At least show teeth.
Stop thinking about how you're going to highlight as many burning
edifices as possible."
"Look, just between you and me, the
violence is a planned operation. It comes when the damn lockdowns are
loosening up and the economy is reopening. It's another attack on the
economy. It's throwing cold water on the protests against the
lockdowns. One set of protests kills the other set."
"Law-enforcement
is using contact tracing to ID riot-leaders coming into cities from out
of state. Can you believe it? We've already got a Surveillance
State. Now we need what? Protestors with special apps on their cells
so the authorities can track them?"
"And Fred, again just between you and me, this whole op isn't just Antifa. It isn't just the radical left."
"COVIS-19---what I call another season of flu---is the bridge to 'the new normal'."
"Top-down
technocracy, Fred. 5G, Internet of Things, smart cities, surveillance
of every fucking square inch of the planet in real time, with thousands
of satellites, social credit score, currency reset, borderless planet
organized at the top like a mega-corporation, energy quotas ladled out
for every citizen. Rockefeller Globalists, technocracy."
"Order from chaos. So, during the last few days, produce the chaos in the streets; and then bring in the order."
"Regular
citizens caught in the squeeze play. Regardless of what they say, when
the chaos comes to their door, they want order. They want the
controllers to restore the peace by any goddamn means necessary. Which
of course is the IDEA."
"'We'll save you. Don't worry. Just salute and follow our orders from now on'."
"I'll
tell you something I learned while I was still at the CIA, before I
came to the network, Fred. Simple 101 type-thing. Every op has a cover
story. In this case, it's racism. A cover has to have some reality.
In America, not hard to find racist reality."
"Another cover
story. Political left vs. political right. That's real, too, but it
only scratches the surface. Orwell's 'boot stamping on a face' isn't
Republican or Democrat."
"Speaking of which, those heavy riots
and the cops at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago?
What idiot decided to stage the anti-Vietnam war protests against the
Democrats? Some invisible ops case officer guided THAT choice. It
swung the balance against the Democrats, and Richard Nixon strolled into
the Oval. If there was a shred of hope of ending the war by putting a
Democrat in the White House, it went down the drain in Chicago, when the
country watched the city explode in violence, on television. That's
us, Fred. Television. That's the kind of shit we pull off."
"But
for the ops planners, it was a victory. They produced chaos, and they
brought in Nixon, a law and order man; and when the time came, the
planners blew him out of office---more chaos---and brought in the
bland-egg duo of so-called peacemakers, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter.
Carter was a complete nobody, plucked from a peanut farm by David
Rockefeller. Carter became an agent for Rockefeller's gang, the
Trilateral Commission."
"Democrat? Republican? To the ops controllers, these are "lower organisms" to manipulate. That's all."
"Now
Fred, the word has come down that we need to play up the social justice
angle during the special tonight. Weave it in as history.
Anti-Vietnam war protests as a comparison, the long tradition of
resistance to oppression, all that stuff. But not heavy-handed. We're
not FOR these current riots. Not overtly. We UNDERSTAND them. Get
clips of old union strikes against Henry Ford, MLK marches in the
South. Quick hitters. Voiceover tying it all together. But then---'no
one is for violence.' Play that other side. Most cops are honest.
Good people. Serving the public. Risking their lives. I want a
stand-up on the street with an articulate cop. Sympathetic. Give me a
peaceful protestor, too. You know, a common-sense person. Thoughtful.
Back and forth, back and forth. Ultimately, shave the whole thing on
the side of order. But hit the right note: 'we need to restore some
semblance of normalcy before we can have truly meaningful dialogue.' Be
careful there. No sheriff-coming-to-town-with-six-guns stuff. We want
four main reporters on location. Two white, two people of color. For
music, we'll need a bit of...mournful. Sense of tragedy."
"We're
conducting an orchestra, Fred. We're modulating and riffing on the
racial cover story. We keep that cover front and center. That's why
we're here."
"But I'll tell you a secret, Fred. Like Martin
Luther King, I have a dream, too. I know could end these riots, this
violence. If I had the power to do what I wanted to. Yeah, everybody
thinks that. But I know how. Communication. That's what we do,
right? Every night, in prime time, I'd put the same black man and the
same white man across a table from each other. Bare room. No set. A
transparent plexi shield between them, so they can't kill each other.
One, a real smart cracker from the South who has guns at home, and two, a
real smart Black Panther type, who also has guns at home. Turn on the
black man's mic for five minutes. He says anything he wants to, to the
cracker. Then turn his mic off. The white man's mic goes on for five
minutes and he says anything he wants to, to the black man. And they go
back and forth for two hours that way. No fucking ads. The ratings
would go through the roof. And the next night, they come back and do it
all over again. They come back every night, and they go at it. Every
damn night for two hours in prime time. For a week, two weeks, a month,
two months, six months. I don't care how long it takes. And little by
little, things would happen. Don't ask me what. I don't know. But it
would happen. This is what I've learned, Fred, in the stupid racket
we're in. I've learned it by negative example, because what do we do?
What do we really do? We shut stories down before they ever play out.
That's our miserable fucking job. So in this case, these two men face
off and there's no time limit. And the world watches. Watches
something real on television for the first time in their lives. No
presidents, no pols, no talking heads, no corporate front men, no
experts, no paid bullshitters. Just these two smart guys. Little by
little. And when you think it's over, because they're showing something
new, it's just getting started. The audience, the world audience would
travel through their own nervous systems, by osmosis. Victory, defeat,
exhaustion, depression, hate, disgust, the sacred and the profane, my
friend. The whole gamut. Night after night. Can't stay away. No
exit. No short cuts. Can't fake an ending. Cannot fake a fucking
ending with some cooked-up resolution; no smiles and handshakes and
phony happiness. No host with his plastic hair and plastic teeth
grinning like a loon. No liberal asshole or conservative corporate
asshole to intervene with stupid signals to their mindless supporters.
No panels, no votes, no winners and losers. The drama's real, for once,
and the audience gets a whole lot more than they bargained for. Can
you see it? Can you see it, Fred?"
Fred finally talks: "It would
never work. First of all, their hate for each other is bottomless.
And two, they would run out of things to say."
Producer: "Wrong
on both counts, Fred. The hate looks bottomless, only because time is
always restricted. We don't restrict anything. These two men can play
out that bottomless-hate all the way, a hundred times if necessary. It
doesn't matter. When they're bored with it, something else will
emerge. Like I say, I don't know what. But there's always more.
There's no pattern. They're not following a script. Even if it seems
they are, because of their conditioning, it wears out. I don't like
admitting this...but I have faith. Faith in people if you give them
enough time. You know how I got to that point, Fred? By becoming more
and more cynical. Eventually, a glint came through. When I was nothing
more than a perfect son of a bitch who knew the world would never ever
make it, I caught a glint. I was you, Fred, only worse. I was sure I
would despise people forever."
Fred: "Then why are you producing this show tonight?"
"Because
I'm still a sad case. Because I'm still afraid to walk away. So
tonight, we'll serve our usual turds on a silver platter to the
audience. You'll get your fires, and I'll get my ratings, such as they
are. But I just wanted somebody to know that I know. I could produce
something very different. Once in a while, making it happen feels
almost within reach. I can almost touch it. Before I think about the
business we're in."
Fred: "A black man and a white man talking to each other, on television, in prime time."
Producer:
"It's never happened. Not the way I'm putting it there. These two men
talking. If necessary, FOREVER. That's a long time. That's my
dream. And see, most of the audience is thinking, like you, it'll never
work, it's ridiculous. But they're watching. Every night. And for
the first month, they keep thinking, this'll never work, these two
men'll never make it happen. Other people in the audience are hoping
for a phony pop psychology ending, a Doctor Phil resolution. They want
cute. They want a few tears and a confession and a bullshit hug. To
resolve all of America's problems. But of course that's not happening,
either. These two men are the image of each other's nightmare. There
they are, face to face, across the table. The audience gets a whiff
that this is no melodrama. It's not staged. It's not cooked. That's
when the fear sets in. 'You mean...this is REAL?' Jesus Christ, we
can't have THAT. Where are the censors? Where are the cops? We have
to stop this. We have to stop it now. The censor in everybody comes
out. 'I want fake, I want phony, I want bullshit. That's why I pay my
cable bill. That's why I eat my dinner in front of the TV every
night.' But it's too late, pal. You're hooked. You're hooked on the
genuine thing. Every cell in your body screams NO. But it ain't
stopping. The train to hell and heaven and all towns in between has
left the station. We're going the distance, whatever it takes. Buy the
fucking ticket, take the ride. In prime time, on television. This
isn't flag waving and America First, and it isn't looting and burning.
It's two men talking with no interrupters. No drug ads about how your
balls might fall off if you take this medicine, no car ads, no insurance
commercials, no hustlers with sheets and pillows. It's two men who
keep going. Snow, sleet, hail, tornados, earthquakes, they keep going.
They chew each other up and spit each other out a thousand times. Will
they go crazy? OF COURSE they'll go crazy. After who knows how long,
the white man'll think he's black and the black man'll think he's
white. Every cliché and slogan and accusation that's ever been thought
up will wear out. There'll be times when they're laughing so hard
they'll be shitting and going blind at the same moment. And when the
tears run, they'll be terrifying and repulsive and somewhat beautiful.
Talk-show 'honest' will have disappeared long ago in the wind. The
whole of television will turn inside out and explode. Every atom of
fake television will return to the cosmos. This is how we'll destroy
television which is the show business hernia of the soul that keeps
people bending over as they shuffle along with stupid grins on their
faces under the eyes of God..."
Fred: "You're drunk, right?"
Producer: "Sober as a judge, my friend. Sober as a judge."
And
somewhere in an office in a city---"Doctor, as you know I've always
tried my best to be a normal person. That's my North Star. Being
normal, no matter what. I feel VERY uncomfortable when I'm not normal,
even for a minute. But you see, I have this one dream, over and over.
There are two people in the dream. They're vile. I don't like them at
all. They're extreme in opposite ways. I wish they would go away. I
wish the government would make them go away. They're in the afterlife.
They've been sentenced to sit down and talk to each other FOREVER. I'm
there, running the camera. Somehow, it's a test of my faith."
Doctor: "What do you think it means?"
"I
don't know. I imagine watching these two people go at each other like
lions in a cage fighting over a piece of meat. I hate it. I want to
turn away. But I have this strange feeling. Sometimes there's another
part of the dream. I'm sitting in the sky at night. And then it seems
as if I'm sitting in a theater. I'm watching a play. It's like nothing
I've ever seen before. I don't understand it. I don't WANT to
understand it. But little by little, messages are coming through...one
man up on the stage says to the other one, 'a fire just burned out.'
And the other man says, 'two more just shut down, they're watching us on
television'..." |
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