ACT II
scene one
Lights come up on The Author sitting in a chair that is very low to the ground. The Author stares up at a computer screen while dictating into a headset.
Dear William,
This is act II, scene one. As the lights come up the audience sees a character representing me. "I" am sitting at a computer speaking into a headset. The audience may or may not understand that I am dictating a letter to you, but the re is nothing in the play so far to suggest who you are.
Last Saturday Andy, Matt, Rick and myself drove up to LA for a Stop the Bombing protest. Everything changed there. Somewhere in that mass of people was something I had been looking for.
When I say that everything changed I mean the way I thought about the war changed. For the first three weeks of the assault on Yugoslavia, I researched. I read everything I could get my hands on. I staye d away from the TV and found news sources online. Much of this information was found on websites, like www.zmag.org or www.commondreams.org, that were posted on your listserve. Slowly my health went downhill. I caught the flu for a couple of days, then an odd strain of bronchitis. Without noticing it, I had slipped into a serious bombing-induced depression. I would read all the online news and then rant to Andy. You were out of town or I am sure I would have called you. At the protest this changed . . . the depression cleared. I, for the first time, saw myself in a community of people who knew that NATO actions were wrong, and they weren't afraid to say so. After the protest I was very energized. On Monday morning I started talking to my students and colleagues about the bombing. This is where I got the inspiration for the play. I thought that by putting these conversations into a play I could get other people to have these conversations. I keep looking up at a sign on my wall, "We want to give you more to talk about." I am afraid that t he public has been sold on the misconception that there is nothing to be done. It is hard to summarize this conflict without drawing comparisons to movies. Wag the Dog gets talked about because it "predicted" this war. I keep recalling Dr Strangelove: or how I learned to stop worrying and start loving the bomb. I can't help but think of the general's raving about being past the point of no return when I hear congressmen say, "Now that we are in this we have to win it." ; They talk as if bombs are the only answer and the only "problem" we have to deal with is the refugees.
At the protest I had a camera with me and I started taking pictures. An orthodox priest had up a copy of the Christian Activist and said "Here. Take picture." I walked up and down the block snapping pictures of signs.
Images of protestors with signs are projected onto a screen upstage.
Do you know what the government did last night in your name?
Clinton Lies People Die
Negotiations don't kill refugees.
A man at a table held out buttons that looked like targets. I put one on. I gave one to someone else. The white flowers arrived in the afternoon. Students poured quickly into the street as the light turned red. They gave a flower an d a flyer to every car that would roll down their window. One student tossed a flower into the backseat of a convertible after the driver said, "we don't need to stop the bombing we need to stop the ethnic cleansing." Because the light turned green and the man pressed on the gas no one got to ask him if the bombing was stopping the ethnic cleansing.
A reporter asked me, "Why do these people have targets on? Everybody seems to be wearing targets." And I told her that these people were wearing targets for the same reason that people in Belgrade wear targets. She didn't seem to know what I was talking about so I continued. The pentagon talks about this war in terms of targets, "NATO bombs degrade key military targets." These people are wearing targets to show the American public what the pentagon means when they say targets. Targ ets are people. She really didn't seem to understand that the targets were an attempt to undo the injustice of the language used to sell this conflict to the American people. I gave her some anti-bombing poetry and my email address. She reluctantly gav e me her card while scribbling down notes for the report she then phoned in.
This is the sort of work I am trying to do with this play. I want to put some of this "why you ought to love the bombs" language in a setting where I can use it to examine itself. At the same time I do want to give the reader, or the audience, real information about the situation in Yugoslavia. As I write this we are only five weeks into the campaign. I am afraid it will go on for much longer. So many people I talk to about this say, "I don't think the bombing is a good idea but I can't protest against it because I don't want to look like I am in favor of ethnic cleansing." I think this is something the media has done. The coverage of the crisis in Kosovo has focused so much on the plight of the refugees, and I am not sugges ting that the refugee problem isn't real. Unfortunately the media is too busy pumping the audience for sympathy to mention that the bombs are not even beginning to stop the forced migration out of Kosovo. Since early on in the bombing it had appeared th at Milosevic had been retaliating against the Kosovars for the NATO attacks. The more we bomb the worse it gets. NATO's solution is to step up the bombing. So we drop 500 bombs in a 24 hour period and 8000 reinforcement Serbian troops pour into Kosovo and NATO reports evidence of mass graves, so NATO announces that they are going to intensify and broaden their bombing campaign. NATO announces that it is running out of smart bombs and that more gravity guided bombs and cluster bombs will be used. Grav ity guided bombs are just like gravity guided rocks.
fade to black