Vroom, Vroom

I have another play, in the conceptual stages, titled CLOSED LOOP. Usual deal, like my others: simple staging, and a chorus of southern white boys. Supposed to be evocative of James Dean in REBEL, stylistically. Maybe Mitchum in THUNDER ROAD.

Here I use NASCAR as representative of the Republican mindset. Especially Southern Republicans. See, you burn up a ton of resources in order to drive around in a circle. Can't even reverse direction. Never escape the track. Enclosed. Controlled. And it's a privately owned sport.

So-called sport. Completely cut off from reality. Huge barriers to entry. Plantation size. It's expensive as hell. So it's not very fair, very welcoming, very created-equal, to those lacking capital. How very Republican. And Southern. Exclusive. Non-competitive. Like elections, ideally. Like everything, ideally.

The chorus are the pit crew. They dance, too. There are girls scattered around in skimpy dress. Everyone biding time, I suppose, until Jesus waves the checkered flag, a huge one, signaling an end to the great race of life. Then they all go to heaven, even the girls in the skimpies. If they been saved. So the ennui, it makes sense, watching a bunch of cars going nowhere, if life is just something you wait around to escape from.

Maybe the four horsemen will descend from the sky and take a few victory laps for Jesus, when that day arrives. Get raptured, the spectators. Right there at the event, from the stands. Don't repeat that. The NASCAR crowd will take it seriously. Start bringing crap to the track. Salvation aids. Maybe signs. "Hi, Jesus".

Who knows what. Help them get raptured. Make sure none of the righteous get missed. Hang on, there are strange clouds on the horizon. Not like any I've seen before. I think I see images in those clouds. Didn't mean to be a doubter there, Lord.

Then, whoa, a new breed appears, at the track. New kind of drivers, and cars. Here the mood goes to MAD MAX. They don't play by the rules. Crash the gates. Start driving around the wrong way, in the middle of a race. The cars have all kinds of sharp shit sticking out.

And hood ornaments: Ryan, Cruz, Rand, Michele, their belle. In chrome, burnished, all sleaked back, deco style. Big ones, kind of phallic.

These guys, they want to get back to purity. They're puritans. Back to the roots of stock car. In crime. Bootleggers, avoiding the law. The race deteriorates or is elevated, maybe, into a demolition derby. Enormous mess. Think war zone. Iraq.

Burned out hulks of cars. Others still afire. Drivers scattered about with limbs missing, guts spilling out. Pit crew going ape-shit, jumping around. The girls, in the skimpies, looking a little smoky and singed.

They win, of course, the new guys. If you can call this winning. They do. Here the mood goes to BEN HUR. They carry their muse, Sarah, around the track in an enormous sedan chair, all done up like Cleopatra. Celebrating, triumphant, they knock down the hooch.

The crowd doesn't know whether to cheer or what. These guys are well-funded, clearly, and they respect that instinctively. Privilege. They love privilege. Keeps the riff-raff at bay.

They kind of cheered for Iraq, all that chaos, after all. The NASCAR crowd. And their kin actually fought there, unlike the guys who started it. Reconstructive surgery of a sort, on the heathen, those Iraqis.

Uncivilized lot. Don't know Jesus. Made things better there. More Christian. Didn't we? Hate to think Billy Bob got his balls blown off for nothing.

But then, oh fuck, this was just practice. The primaries. Sarah is dropped, unceremoniously marooned, in the infield, looking about for an innocent moose to murder. Her blood's up. She was only a prop. Even they know that.

They hop back in their cars, decorated now with severed heads and other body parts on pikes, on the pointy protuberances, on the hood ornaments, and head back out through the crashed gates. Onto I-40. Wrong way, of course, making mayhem. They're taking the show on the road.

All of America must be purified of the taint, of the sin, of secularity. Got to get back to God. Back to the roots. Religify the country. The government. Bring them back to God, if you have to kill them to do it. That's one way, actually, the way of the Inquisition.

Meet your maker in church or at the pearlies, the great gates, with Saint Peter presiding, bouncer at the great bar at the end of the universe. God's night club, if you will. If Peter is hungover Jake will be there. Jake Neal. He used to be bouncer at HELL. That's a bar. Used to be.

Looking back, this one may be better suited to film. Get a director. Someone good at special effects. More possibilities that way. Bring out all the apocalyptic undertones. Not so under, really, on the tones. Pretty up-front. The tea gang think they're in league with the Lord, hanging around yearning for the second coming.

Impatient for it. It's an insult to God, somehow, to try to make the world better. It's supposed to be shit. They're reassured when it's shit. So, hey, they get proactive. Why wait around when you can go out and bust stuff up. In the name of Jesus, no less. Doing God's work.

So you would have hoped they'd be content to live in their own hell-hole, but no. They want that for everybody. In the best interests of our salvation. They're looking out for us, ruining our lives. Wish they wouldn't tread on me.

They kind of are the apocalypse, themselves, in slow motion. Bet they like the sound of that. Apocalypse, now! Uh-oh, reports coming in on the I-40 situation. Maybe not so slo-mo, on the destruction. They're getting the job done there. Big tactical advantage, when you don't give a shit about anything.

While we're at it there's another play in the works, in the think tank of my brain. A STREETCAR NAMED DESPAIR, all about Paul Ryan. He's the main character, the protagonist. This one has a chorus of dockworkers, burly as hell, all in wife-beaters, as is Ryan.

There's a catchy tune, WE'RE RANDY FOR AYN, during the singing of which there are assorted spats in the chorus, and a little blood. There are scratch-and-sniff cards with the smell of those guys in the chorus, after a long work day. Earthy to say the least, with a hint of bear-breath. I mean beer-breath.

Ryan plays himself. Who better. His wife, Stella, is jealous as hell, and weirded out by Paul's devotion to Ayn. Ryan has a little shrine at home, in the spare bedroom, stage right, in their dingy apartment. It's an altar to Ayn, with candles and such.

There's a weekly poker game, and the guy who fares worst gets shit beat out of him by the others at the end of the night. This keeps a nice edge on everything. Very randy. I mean Randian.

All the guys in the chorus lose their jobs, as does Ryan, when their company gets bought out by Bain. The pension plan is declared overfunded, on the basis of very optimistic earnings forecasts, by home-schooled economists right out of Patrick Henry. It's pillaged to the bone.

They're distraught, understandably, and ready to kill Ryan, who had persuaded them to de-unionize. Then, ex-machina, Mitt himself is lowered down in a big, boardroom-style chair. Black suit, white shirt, tie. Stage center. Hair neatly greased, right out of the eugenics lab, by all appearances. Scratch and sniff. Cologne, after-shave, pomade, hint of cognac.

He tries to calm the chorus, reassure them. All will be well. Ryan hops aboard, pretty much in Mitt's lap, as he slowly ascends. Turns out Ryan's been special economic advisor all along, to Bain. On their payroll. Helping Mitt make money. Guys are now visible either side of Mitt, suspended on cables, in SWAT gear.

This is an extraction, an op. The helicopter hovers. The boys are still trying to get their hands on Ryan. But he's going, going, gone, off to the lair, their hide-out, at the bastian of the Boehnerites, in some crevice in the mountains. An inverted Shangri-La where there's ten coolies for every white boy.

The news comes in on the radio. The economy is in free fall. It's 2008. Ryan, on the side, has been advising the government to deregulate everything, for years, destabilizing capital markets. So Mitt and the plunderers can make more money.

The pension is toast. Nonexistent. Whole world has gone Enron. Stella enters from the kitchen, stage left, with grilled cheese sandwiches for the guys. And water. Not enough money for beer. They attack the shrine, enraged to insanity, as Stella flees back to the kitchen.

They find all kinds of incriminating stuff in the debris, at the shrine, and realize the extent of the plot. Whole government is compromised. All the regulating agencies, bought off. Staffed with shills. There's no one to turn to. Images emerge in their minds of an assault, the storming of the Bastille, Fort Boehner.

They're aware, at the same time, of the futility, their helplessness, their powerlessness. They can't do anything. Scratch and sniff. Despair, overpowering everything. With a hint of rot-gut. These hard-working Americans, they're headed for the streets.

Maybe the gutters. They know it. Hope? Nope. So say the Boehner boys. And Rove's platoon of pussies, the chicken-hawks. Rich boys jealously guarding their piles of loot.