Donald Freed, November 2006:

Literary Representation: Patricia Rae; e-mail PATTYRAEF1@aol.com

DONALD FREED

* Donald Freed has been awarded the 2006 PEN DRAMA PRIZE for his Devil’s Advocate.

Donald Freed’s plays, prizes, books, and films include: Inquest (directed by Alan Schneider); Secret Honor (directed by Robert Altman); Circe & Bravo (with Faye Dunaway, directed by Harold Pinter); The Quartered Man; Alfred and Victoria (A Life); Veterans Day (with Jack Lemmon and Michael Gambon); The White Crow; Eichmann in Jerusalem.

Three Rockefeller Awards; two Louis B. Mayer Awards; Unicorn Prize; Gold Medal Award; Berlin Critics Award; NEA award for "Distinguished Writing"; Hollywood Critics Award; Jonathan R. Reynolds Prize.

Agony in New Haven; Executive Action (novel and film with Dalton Trumbo and Mark Lane); The Glasshouse Tapes; The Spymaster (B.O.M.); In Search of Common Ground (with Erik Erikson, Kai Erikson, Huey P. Newton); The Existentialism of Alberto Moravia (with Joan Ross): Death in Washington: The Murder of Orlando Letelier.

New books, plays, and films include: Is He Still Dead? (with Julie Harris as Nora Joyce); Love and Shadows (from the novel by Isabel Allende); Sokrates Must Die (with Edward Asner); Devil’s Advocate, (to be produced on the London stage and for film by Barry Spikings); a novel, Every Third House.

Donald Freed is currently an Artist In Residence at the Workshop Theatre, University of Leeds

– Harold Pinter

– Studs Terkel

I

FOR: HAROLD PINTER and ADAM LEIPZIG, A.J. LANGGUTH, LEON KATZ

II

The American Empire, mad and blind with Power, threatens the peace and survival of the earth and its inhabitants. Any attempt by individuals to resist or reverse this apocalyptic situation through even greater violence only hastens the approaching doom. Thus, the old question is once again being raised: "How Shall We be Saved?"

The provisional answer—here dramatized—is "The Einstein Plan." This plan is presented by an American Exile at Lake Como in the Italian Alps. The thrust of the Einstein Plan is a strategy of non-violence using completely legal and democratic tactics that are designed to meet the challenges of the American threat.

The Exile makes his plea to the audience in a Lyceum setting, complete with an old fashioned Slide-Show screen and diagrams. Then, in the second part of the performance, members of the audience take the stage to test the thesis of non-violent struggle by small groups, at first, against the swollen Pride and Power of the American Nightmare.

The stage is bare except for the Exile’s lectern and slide-screen, and the twelve chairs the audience representatives will use in Part Two to conduct the dialogue and theatre games of survival and salvation.

At the end, the Exile returns to face the audience and find out whether, on any given night, his plea and his plan have been embraced or thrown out. Thus making this theater on this night a microcosm of our people and our society—with the decision of the audience the most fateful and existential sign of the time: fulfilling Antonin Artaud’s prophecy of the Theatre of Cruelty: WE ARE NOT FREE AND THE SKY CAN STILL FALL ON OUR HEADS, AND THE THEATRE HAS BEEN CREATED TO TEACH US THAT FIRST OF ALL.

III

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The stage is bare except for a LECTERN, and, at Right, an old fashioned SLIDE-SHOW SCREEN: an early twentieth century Lyceum setting.

When slides are used, the Exile activates the images from the Lectern.

On the Screen, pre-set, is a view of LAKE COMO. Upstage, in shadow, a dozen chairs, for use in ACT TWO.

House-lights down, Lectern-Special up; the EXILE enters.

THE EXILE

Good Evening, my fellow Americans, and other fugitives from the Camp of Victory…Tonight, I am going to ask you to picture an Exile from the United States sitting on a hotel balcony, in a tiny two thousand year old fishing village looking out at the Lecco leg of the Lago di Como. Across, you can see the foggy Prealpi range of low mountains; above, gulls wheel while on the shore ducks and their new born stay close to the rocky beach. Thus, this corner of the great lake from year to year unchanged, time out of mind. Or so it has always seemed to us.

Since the first century after Christ, wanderers have stared trancelike at the silver and black of the lake wanting to believe that against the immemorial water and mountains time must have a stop. "If only we could stop before it’s too late"—that is what the Exile repeats today—before the United States of America becomes the last and universal suicide bomber.

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The Exile knows that something is ticking, that the lake—one of the world’s deepest—is staring back, that the lake is in fact a sign not of frozen time but, rather, of time and change, itself, from the last Ice Age until this moment; ticking and telling us

that the shinning surface is not, in fact, an emblem of peace, permanence and beauty—a hypnotic denial of the gathering American storm.

What storm? The shitstorm of post-colonial war that the United States dares to call "Democracy," and the "New World Order"—that is being unleashed and tested in the Middle East, and, finally, that boomerang of violence slung four hundred years ago from the former colonies of the West that we call "Terror."

So the Lake is a kind of timeless moral mirage. And if you fail to remember that, despite appearances, this mesmerizing water was once the cutting edge of an overwhelming iceberg, then you are, in Nietzsche’s words—and he was at the Lake— "hanging in dreams on the back of a tiger." Tremendous change at last does sweep over us—change that millennia later we call the Age of Ice or, if any sapiens remain, the Age of Atoms.

Here, in the first century of the modern era, Pliny the Younger built one of his Villas, Villa Tragedia, from where he sat brooding on the loss of his Republic and staring out at the old Lake and the Little Alps. There, some nineteen hundred years later, the Rockefeller Foundation’s Villa Serbelloni would tower over the town and Robert S. McNamara would sit in conference on Pliny’s very point of Iron Age vantage to try in vain to take the long view of Vietnam, beyond the plain and simple horror of utter disgrace and defeat.

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Old Pliny the Younger had to be cogitating about the Terrorists—the pirates who had burnt the great Roman port of Ostia and assassinated two prominent senators—all Rome was in a panic, so much so that she had destroyed, piece-meal, her Constitution, her democracy and her freedom. And Pliny could not find a way to deal with these "ruined men of all nations."

A progression of Great Men have all stood here in Pliny’s place—from Dante and Leonardo to Stendhal, Mark Twain, and Albert Einstein—and they had to have known that the illusion sparkling before them was in truth what Einstein would later designate as a New Stone Age clock. Can Americans, today, trapped in our Imperial limit situation, read Einstein’s clock, do we or our ruling War Class know what time it is?

These post-exilic parallax views—of the utopian idea of timeless memory against the ticking tragic reality of personal and national destiny—again blur our vision as we squint and strain to focus and find the fatal flaw that has transformed the American Dream into the American Nightmare; to understand how we lost our luck, lost our way, turned the people of the world, billions of them, against us: How the U.S.A. metastasized into the Democracy from Hell.

II

I am asking you, my fellow Americans, a frightening question: Did the America Dream or its New World precursors ever have substance other than as a function of a New Jerusalem for the fugitives of the late Age of Reason and the early Industrial Revolution? The 17^th Century Edenic myth had already been both co-opted

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and exposed by Shakespear’s Caliban, that "thing of darkness" that American History would embellish as Big Chief Rain in the Face, and House Slave Caesar Pompeii Rastus Brown—the Red man and the Black Man first slaughtered and enslaved to bring forth and feed the White Man’s New World Dream, then called back by popular demand for an encore, to be featured as the savage losers of the Wild West

extravaganza, and the music hall Minstrel Jamboree Coon Show (sings—"Minstrels Tonight No Longer White!").

The Dream, the Gift, The End of History were already problematic by 1870 to Henry Adams, to Walt Whitman, after him, and to Mark Twain—who had retreated to Lake Como—after him. Adams divined that not only had the South lost the Civil War

but so, too, had the North and that the emerging industrial Goliath’s first victim would be the hundred year old American Republic. Whitman, as was his way, would go further and predict that an imperial hyper-capitalist United States must represent "the

most tremendous failure of time." And, then, Twain roundly cursed out the whole gang of missionaries and political windbags, demanding that they all come home at once from their spiritual and financial depredations and highway robbery in China, by which he meant what we now call the Third World—"Come home to America", he cried, "and save these heathens!"

By the turn of the century, 1900, the number of naysayers had multiplied to the point that the American People had begun to make out before them a crossroads and a choice: The Gilded Age, or Chautauqua. Everyone knows, today, what the title of the victorious vision means—The Gilded Age of Imperial America with its 19^th century Filipino death camps—but only a few anymore recognize the lost native

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image of "Chautauqua." Chautauqua—what might have been. The upstate New York Judeo-Christian-Humanist revival based on adult education, hygiene, science, health care, Abolition and, then, Women’s Rights, temperance, racial reconciliation, anti-imperialist foreign policy—Progress with a human face (sings— "Leaning, Leaning…"). Chautauqua swept the nation. North Americans, in their millions, were beginning to awaken from their industrial stupor. Then came World War I—"came," that is, when the powerhouse of the colonial super states blew up and all the hopes and dreams of a Chautauqua-American Republic were lost and by the wind grieved.

And that is that: from the Somme and Verdun down to Auschwitz and Buchenwald, to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, down to our "American Century" of Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq—to the U.S. Victory in the Cold War and the "End of History",

down to this hour of "Shock and Awe" Imperial American Triumphalism. Who could dare to doubt that Western Civilization had found its apotheosis? William Faulkner.

…this land which man has deswamped and denuded and derivered… No wonder the ruined woods I used to know don’t cry for retribution! ...The people who have destroyed it will accomplish its revenge.

Thus a white man’s home-truth point of view in 1950. Before him, Henry Adams had written for the disappointed descendents of the Old Glory of the American Revolution; Whitman for the grassroots of the democratic demi-urge; until, Faulkner, half raving, himself, stood over the glamorous corpse preaching, beyond the South to the nation, that a living dog was better than a dead lion; that the Republic lay dying, poisoned by false power, doomed and damned unless and until we faced the terrifying

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truth of our hidden history. Anything short of this terrific truth being merely political sound and fury signifying nothing.

Can it be that the world’s oldest democracy is actually expiring from natural causes, with accompanying dementia? Sound and fury, Shock and Awe: Can entire nations go mad—Ancient Greece, Rome, Germany, Chile, Iraq, America?

Those giant firstlings of the twentieth century prophesied it all: Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, all had visions of World War and genocide.

No one who was anyone listened to these new gods of the twentieth century—believe it or not, Nietzsche actually predicted that in this new age of science not only would books be burned, but human beings, starting, he insisted, "with the Jews" (!). No, the powers-that-be were deaf, dumb, blind, and they had not the courage to see the shock and awe coming, that the mighty Wurlitzer of State propaganda would call "The Thousand Year Reich"; "The Dictatorship of the Proletariat"; and, finally, "The

American Century", with its correlations "The End of History" and the "Clash of Civilizations."

So, yes, in a way nations can go mad. Bush the Elder, after the Cold War, announced a "New World Order", and Bush the Younger, after 9/11, thought he saw an "Axis of Evil." In other words the Bushes saw a First World—America—over against another World of Evil and Terror. In clinical terms these delusions of reference are diagnosed as paranoia. The Greek root of this syndrome signifies "another mind", para-noia. That is where we live now—the place Gore Vidal calls the "United States of Amnesia"—in a new world, where we have forgotten who and where we are.

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III

Turn and turn about in our search for the Reason behind the reasons for the madness and blindness of American democracy and its attendant destruction and we

are driven like Oedipus to follow the red footprints down still deeper towards the genus loci, ancient Athens, of the American tragedy.

Athens, 399, before Christ: the Democratic War Party and its unending carnage had reduced what Perikles had called "the school of the Greeks" to a broken

enslaved city whose starving citizens ate rats in the streets and lived at Sparta’s mercy.

From the stone windows of Sokrates’ death cell, Plato, before being forced to run for his life, peered out at a line of crucifixes stretching to the horizon of the harbor. What the great Greek poets called "The Long Foot of Time" had caught up with and overtaken the demagogues of the Attic vision, and would close on Rome,

though only Sokrates and his companion Euripides could measure that lengthening shadow. Sokrates, before his Judges, saw the end of this phallic posturing—

…It’s only a matter of days now before I stumble, and the

Long Foot of Time overtakes me. We all run that race, my

Judges, and we all lose it in the end.

But no one could improve on Euripides’ parting words to "the city that hated him" and to the Democratic Tyrants who would silence the voice of his close friend Sokrates’ "examined life." The poet spoke directly to the War Party—"You destroyers of cities…of the graves of the sacred dead…yourselves so soon to die."

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"Here’s fine revolution," Hamlet murmured, "and we had the trick to see it"; but alas, poor Yorick, we did not. From Ur to Homer to Shakespeare to this hour, the poets, from the anonymous Gilgamesh singers to Beckett and Pinter, have provided the word and the silence.

Listen, America. There is a ticking in that silence. Listen to the fading echo off the Lake: "Hubris," chant the Greeks, "Vanity," warn the Hebrews, "Don’t tread on me," cry the first America rebels.

IV

Now, at the end of our seven thousand year day of Western Civilization (that began in old Chaldean Iraq), out of the silence of America hanging in imperial dreams

comes the horror and roar of the tiger, the final fury, booming and bouncing off the canyons of Manhattan smashing down our skyscraping towers. The suicide bombers

from another planet called The Third World have exploded on us, we think, from out of the blue.

Even a rocket scientist can add up the long odds against American democracy and its coalition. The numbers are against us, we have created our own nemesis. So, how shall we be saved? Should we retreat into metaphysics and the masochistic rapture of Jehovah’s judgment, or shall we nuke that other planet of everyone that is not us, kill them all and let God or History "sort it out," as we used to say in Vietnam? Hail Doctor Strangelove and go out singing "I’ll see you again"?

These are shocking ideas. There ought to be a law against them! Relax, breathe, there is a law already against such words, and many more coming. But not against such thoughts, and you know that Sigmund Freud had it right, my fellow

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exiles at home, when he whispered that "no one can control their thoughts." And what American has not stared at the slow motion catastrophe, speeding up now, of the wretched of the earth, our economic and colonial victims, as they die of disease,

hunger, war—in short, die from the collateral chaos of White Western Judeo-Christian Civilization. We stare at the television screen, change the station, in vain, and begin to give up the ghost as "They" pour across every border on every channel.

Think of it, fellow citizens: in the six decades since Hiroshima the United States of America has overthrown each democratically elected government in the Third World: Iran, Guatemala, Guyana, Jamaica, Chile; and subverted democratic and nationalist movements in Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, South Africa, Haiti, Indonesia—the list goes on—Nicaragua, El Salvador, Santo Domingo, Mozambique—never mind, for the moment, the CIA’s dirty tricks right across Europe— and then to come strutting out in cowboy boots talking about Freedom and Democracy in Iraq—where Sadam Hussein had been the Anglo-American agent used against Iran —and Iran targeted as part of the "Axis of Evil." Iran that could have, would have provided the democratic model to the Middle East had not the U.S. and the U.K. overthrown Iran’s elected government because it dared to claim the oil under its own soil for themselves. How is one to feel about these serial killers of democracy who preach every day to the rest of the world and without an instant of shame? Who has not inwardly vowed that the American gang having sown the wind must now reap the whirlwind?

The White House/Downing Street one word answer to these charges used to be "Communism," today it is "Terrorism." The fact is that there has been rebellion for

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as long as there has been colonialism. Rome provoked both Jesus and Spartacus; Great Britain the American Minute Men of Concord, and the Kenyan insurgents of the 1950s. If you won you were called the "Founding Fathers," if you lost, "Mau-Mau."

Turn on the television: see the black ghosts, the original sapiens stock of our own African genesis. These are our foremothers and fathers who, over some three

million or more years, managed the miracle of survival so that they could pass on to us their DNA and their gene pool. And how have we, Western Civilization, repaid them, our kin? Turn on CNN, watch your own flesh and blood die like flies on that "Dark Continent" of fabulous wealth.

So—if it is America and the sociopathic West that must be confronted then who should step forward, and with what weapons?

V

Measured by Einstein’s clock at Lake Como, American democracy is ripe, is rotten, toxic and sclerotic, the sick man of the twenty-first century at the end of its history and the beginning of China’s capitalist revolution. The "Chinese Century" is

another story but the point at issue is : the day is at hand when the history of America and the West will not be written in Cambridge or Washington , at Oxford or Harvard; our annals will be printed out for us in Peking and Jakarta, Teheran and Bombay by scholars of color who are not American Christians or Jews, and whose family trees, in modern times, are rooted in colonial bondage and humiliation. And the question that

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will animate the multi-volume internet studies of 2090 will be "Why did they hate us?" Meaning why did we hate them?

"Hate them?," you ask. What should we call the historical kill ratio, the famous "body count"? The Filipino’s killed no Americans to begin with, the North

Americans killed and tortured more than a million natives in those islands. The Mau-Mau, they rebelled, at last, and killed about 200 whites; the British? They

slaughtered 50,000. Vietnam? We invaded them and murdered them at a rate of 30 to 1. Iraq? War, sanctions, bombing, war again—100 to 1. And, of course, the U.K. after

they invented Iraq in the 1920s did not scruple to use torture, mass murder and poison gas as a part of their process of civilization.

You know it all: the wretched of the earth over five hundred years of slavery, exploitation, disease, the madness of alienation, and the so-called "natural disasters" that are, in reality, the direct result of the First World policy of enforced dependency and structural underdevelopment—we know what we would have done if it were we who had been driven out of our minds. If it were we who had been robbed of our labor, our time, our space, our wealth, our name, and our gods: there would have been hell to pay.

Hate us?! Let those great leaders of the Free World, the Group of 8, let them get down on their knees and cry out in Tolstoy’s voice, "Poor people, forgive us—for God’s sake, for Christ’s sake forgive us!"

And Tolstoy said that "God sees the truth—but waits." That was a hundred years ago, in the Age of Revolution. Today we live in the Age of the Boomerang and the waiting game is at an end.

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The analysts of tomorrow will not be capable of elucidating the old question of why empires like the American turn paranoid and create enemies in order to maintain their false power identity, but they, the Chinese scholars, will at least be asking the right question. The question we should have asked ourselves long since while there was still time: why, over a span of half a millennia, did white Western

Civilization in the name of Christian Salvation and Economic Progress destroy and enslave vast populations of "heathen" and degrade the eco-system to its present crisis: How have we become, like Athens, a Terror Democracy?

Forgive me, but to simply continue to e-mail or scream out strangled questions and answers to the effect that there is an atomic apocalypse coming out of the death

throes of the American Empire is obviously hopelessly inadequate, even if—(Wait! Can it be? Yes —CNN is interrupting its coverage of the Group of 8 decision making conference in Scotland—concerning the salvation of the darker races, as usual—to announce that—No! the senses reel—that the Leader of the Free World, Mr. Bush, has just had another accident while riding his bicycle and has crashed—you couldn’t make this up, it would be condemned on the stage as a fiction—he has crashed his bike into a Scottish police officer and inflicted minor injuries on both himself, that is

the Commander-in-Chief, and the unlucky constable, but that—hold for it!—the president is unscathed and will be announcing later in the day to the G-8 that the American People are "the most generous people in the world.")…"Oh God, God—how weary, stale, flat and unprofitable, seem to me, all the uses of this world…"

Where were we? Torture? That’s correct: Guantanamo, Belmarsh, Basra, Abu Ghraib, "Third country rendition." Since the Second World War the U.S. School of the Americas has taught and exported torture, filled up the world with a new regime

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of physical/medical/psychological/chemical/torment (the Syrians and the Egyptians aren’t in it). The naked mound of tortured living bodies at Abu Ghraib was only the first course, the "softening up" process assigned to the MPs of the West Virginia

National Guard. There are as yet no films of what transpired in the sanguine and secret rooms reserved for the strategies of the long headed senior officers of Military

Intelligence, CIA, and the "Independent Contractors." This snapshot of torture is the elementary reason that the United States refuses to accept the Geneva Protocols or the existence of the World Court or an independent United Nations, much less the Nuclear Proliferation treaties or inspections—all refused by the U.S. before September 11, 2001.

Today we are in the grip of a one-party anti-terrorism state, a hollow rich/poor psuedodemocracy of denial, of fabulous wealth and soul breaking dread and poverty (Faulkner had tried to pinpoint this stark split when he described his Mississippi microcosm as a hell where poor "white men rent farms and live like niggers and niggers crop on shares and live like animals…"). Yet still the G-8 demands to know why they hate us, these Third World zombies, these "dead enders," these (cheapest of

all words) terrorists, these—(CNN is breaking in again. What next? Another Bush bicycle—No… A terror attack on London! Prime Minster Blair stands before the cameras at the luxury resort, Bush and the Group of 8 ranged around him. Blair is whey-faced, his voice failing; Bush bruised and frozen. These men are panic stricken; terror surges out of the television box. So all the bombers are not pinned down in Baghdad after all… )

In 2001, the man who falls off bicycles smirked that "they" envy and hate us for our Freedom, our Civilization, our Progress. Yes, he was half right, the G-8 has

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half the reason. But it is the other half, the major term of the dialectic, the truth beneath the half truth that condemns us to the most drastic accounting: Our Freedom, our Progress, our Civilization is based on the vast criminal colonial conspiracy that we, variously, celebrate as the Age of Faith, the Age of Reason, the Industrial Revolution—All the rhetorical moving parts of that infernal machine that we have

Spewing that word salad, while Western Civilization and its comprador classes raped and robbed the ancient world and the new until not a diamond or an ounce of gold or oil or a buffalo was left uncounted in Madrid or London or, latterly,

New York. We North Americans know that the original sin of our empire was the Spanish, French, English genocide of the Native Population of the New World from

Hispaniola to Tierra del Fuego, in the tens of millions, by murder, disease, induced suicide and madness: Gold and God. Then came Uncle Sam and, now it can be told, the theft outright of the way West. How it was that white posses first scalped the so-called Indian savages. Scalped them, and called them niggers. "These whites have come up shooting," the great Chief Black Elk wrote. Shooting and slaving and stealing until the price of retribution to Red and Black is beyond even the American national debt. No money and no shame—and no answers to the real question, "Why did we hate them so?"

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Talk about "innocence." Talk about "paradigm shift" and "everything changing after 9/11"—what white settlers did to red and black people in the name of Civilization, that was a paradigm shift, for them; that was a change, all right, if you call the Holocaust a "change." September 11, 2001 was not a paradigm shift: 9/11 was a bloody by-blow of American and Colonial crimes against humanity, a boomerang, the chickens coming home to roost, the reaping of the whirlwind.

The terror of 2001 is born out of our crime in delineating the victims of our colonial bloodbath as half-men, heathens, savages, wogs, gooks, apes, animals; calling them women, witches, devils and terrorists so that our homegrown heroes on horseback and bicycles could boast of themselves as not only Men but Great Men. These great cowards and psychopaths, these sordid buccaneers who have pushed the hands of the clock, on the cover of The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, and all the other scientific man-made chronometers on earth, to 11:59 P.M.—and we have the audacity to ask, "Why do they hate us?!" Hate and fear us? All the jihad bombs in the world, a million times over, are still only a fraction of our mass bombing and our arsenal. Enough: we are hated and feared because we are hateful and fearful. Period. Full stop.

Steady, friends, courage, we are coming, now, to the Point. And the Point is: that we know and have always known. And, thus, understand what we must do. We know what we cannot do: cannot turn ourselves into human bombs; or kill every banal bureaucratic bully in the world (from Adolph Eichmann to Dick Cheney) in effigy or in absentia merely by wishing it so, or waiting for a god to do it—that is for the Bible and the movies. No, if we are, as it appears, simply a small number of higher primates situated in a part of North America who have, too soon, styled ourselves as Human Beings and the Guardians of God, Freedom and Democracy everywhere, then how

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can we, in Abraham Lincoln’s word, "disenthrall" ourselves before it is too late? How can we—Homo Amerikanus, late in the Age of Atoms—ordinary citizens interpose ourselves between the killing machine of the Washington War Party and the rest of the world? Is there an idea, more powerful than the hopeless and pathetic terror of high explosive suicide, that we can grasp and use now, today? An idea beyond the vocabulary of gibberish—"Neo-Con, Neo-Liberal, World Bank, Global Trade, Group

pf 8": this nomenclature of Neo-Colonialism that is nothing less than a litany of death. Is there no other equation for the human race?

The old Russians used to say that "one day was enough" to save the soul—it had better be, at one minute to midnight.

VI

WHAT IS TO BE DONE?

The time has come for the Exile to put up or shut up. To, first, try to answer the age old-question, in its contemporary context: "What is to be Done?" or in the archaic passive form, "How Shall We be Saved?"

If that, then, is the question, the deep existential interrogation of our lives, I am now going to ask you—in person—here, tonight—to join the issue. Immediately after the intermission, eight or ten volunteers will take over the stage with a facilitating Stage Manager—and without me—to start a dialogue. I will return at the conclusion of this "Part Two"—starring you—for a final word.

The answer to the question of our survival or salvation that I here ask permission to put before you is, perhaps, at first going to disappoint or even anger

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some of you. The answer, the issue before this "house", for the balance of this evening—and I would suggest for the balance of our lives—that issue is: NON-VIOLENT ACTION.

An immediate non-violent rebellion against all the sides of this phantasmagoric War on Terror. Do you sigh and roll your eyes? What Gandhi called

"the weapons of the brave," and Martin Luther King identified as "unearned suffering"—do you groan at the echo of what you consider worn out slogans of the long-ago twentieth century?

What! After the assassinations of the ‘60s; the outright smash and grab hijacking of the 2000 election in Florida and the suppression of the Ohio vote in 2004

in the African-American wards and on the college campuses—you cling to the day dream that "The System Works" and the world need only wait for 2008 and new hair styles at the White House, or Downing Street for that matter.

The simple fact is that the American System of Capitalist Democracy has never worked without the constant conscience of our sometimes hidden history of anarcho-revolutionary non-violent rebellion: From the pre-revolutionary tax and tea uprising in the eighteenth Century, until now, at this hour, when millions of Latin American immigrants and refugees are in the streets of El Norte, and the heroic Albert Gore rather than mourn his stolen presidency has taken his hi-tech Chautauqua Survival of the Planet Show on the road, and we salute him!

So we do not need to re-invent the wheel of non-violent resistance, and it all begins to come back to you now because some of you have been involved players in this world-historical drama, and all of us owe what life we live to the individuals and the masses who have resisted the evil of war and exploitation and ecocide. Resisted

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under the banner of Christ, or the black flag of Anarchy; the white dove of peace; the Red Crescent and/or the Green Banner of saving the earth—this is our inheritance and the gift outright of the past to us; our forebears in non-violence did what they did for

us; we remember them and we owe them an accounting, an account and a plan for our day. And here is mine for your consideration, tonight: "The Einstein Plan":

THE EINSTEIN PLAN

The Einstein Plan is a kind of objective correlative to Albert Einstein’s lifelong search—with Sigmund Freud and others— for peace and justice. The concept

was, like the mind of this genius, elegant and universal. He observed and deduced that if 2% of a protesting population in a nation with any pretense to a democratic system refused to cooperate with the State in, for example, paying a war tax, or not blocking the entrance to a recruiting station or a weapons factory, and the War State prosecuted this 2%, and the 2% demanded their legal rights, their day in court, then, he asserted, that the infrastructure of the Nation—the courts, the civil service, the legislatures—would be paralyzed!

The Nation would be overwhelmed. Defeated not by a huge one-day General Strike or a magnificent March on Washington or by millions demonstrating against Nuclear War—but by a slow motion, at first almost invisible, strategy of completely legal, constitutional, individual non-violence.

Can it be possible that without a Thoreau, a Tolstoy, a Gandhi; a Mandela, a Caesar Chavez, and a Lech Walesda, or a Martin King, and their mass following, that there could be such a mundane 2% solution to the Shock and Awe of the Modern

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Paranoid War State? Let us dare to examine the question, in the Sokratic Method, let us dare to "check" Einstein’s figures.

2% of the population of the United States is roughly 6 million people. Parenthetically, nowhere near that number were ever in action at the height of the Vietnam War Protests. Remember, we are not dealing here with election percentages requiring a 50% majority, or periodic mass demonstrations, however inspiring. Before spelling out how the Einstein Plan actually splits the anomie and alienation of a population in denial, it should be made clear that this greatest scientist was a fervent supporter of every kind and style of mass and individual rebellion and protest against

war, poverty, racism, injustice—he supported them all: religious, secular, democratic, socialist, anarchist—the lot. It is just that the 2% scenario he suggests represents a

shift in the dialectic as between gigantic charismatic figures—from Sokrates and Jesus down to Gandhi, Mandela, and King—between these, and ordinary citizens using their hard-won constitutional powers to interdict what has become a corrupt and fatally malignant system. So, here follows a summary of the Einstein Plan.

ARREST

(The Exile activates the slide carousel and the first of

what we may call "anti-power" point slides appears

on the screen. The style is diagrammatic, abstract, utilitarian as

an airplane passenger safety illustration.

Slide #1 pictures a room full of people sitting and talking.)

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A group of friends and interested people meet to plan a non-violent campaign. The meeting is public. That is to say that a lawyer will be present and there will be a

notification to the Chief of Police, the Mayor, and, perhaps, other public officials. The meeting might be taking place in a space such as ours, here, tonight. It goes without saying that media have been invited.

Next: Slide 1A reveals the legal compulsion for our up-coming non-violent action: the binding laws from Nuremburg, the International Court, the Geneva Accord, the United Nations Human Rights protocols: these and other legal

documentation will be part of the plan, the arrest, the trial and the public relations websites from the first meeting.

Now follows the legal, First Amendment plan. This plan is based on the decision of several members of the group committing to violate a misdemeanor law or regulation by, for instance, blocking an entrance or sitting-in an official office in a corporate, or state, or federal building.

Do not imagine our volunteers in front of the military recruitment center being dragged kicking and screaming into a police wagon. No, please picture very well dressed men and women cooperating courteously with the authorities who are, in any case, only following orders.—Next:

(Slide #2 pictures a non-violent workshop rehearsal. A photographer

is represented in the diagram.)—Next:

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Non-Violent workshops like those of the Reverend James Lawson for Martin Luther King will precede the arrest action.

(Slide #3 represents the arrests. The volunteers have adopted non-violent

sitting postures, thus making it easy for the arresting officers to carry the

positioned, non-threatening arrestees into custody.)

This is how you sit—in a package position. The authorities lift you. "Thank

you, Officers, for your courtesy in carrying out your orders—I will be glad to walk from here to the van."

(The Exile sits in the arrest position. The Stage Manager and an assistant

lift and carry the Exile a few feet.)

Thank you. There is no noise, no disruption, except for the presence of the volunteers and their well researched and written demands. And so they are removed without incident from the office or the entrance way and cited for a minor violation.

No drama and, in their initial act, probably no media (until the campaign has spread to two or three cities).

Now follows the first surprise: the well groomed protestors do not pay their nominal citation fines—instead, they are represented by counsel, who, to the baffled annoyance of the Court, request a preliminary hearing and the exercise of their right to a trial before a jury of their peers.—Next:

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THE TRIAL

(Slide #4 portrays the trial—complete with friends, families, media,

and, possibly, hostile auditors: a crowd unlike any other blocking-

the-sidewalk misdemeanor hearing in recent memory.

The Jury Watches.)

The preparation and the trial can take as much as a year’s time. For now, there are larger meetings to gather support and raise legal funds; the lawyers speak to groups in homes, on campus, before the bar associations, at rallies for the, shall we say, "Cincinnati 7."

There are soon the first of many websites; there are Press and P.R. volunteers; there is a Court Outreach to pack the court chambers for every hearing, until, finally, there is the trial itself.

(Slide #5 reveals experts testifying to an empty Jury Box, but there is a

packed courtroom and full media complement.)

The documentation of torture and terror, of war crimes, of illegal war, of the secret "Homeland Security" infernal machine of black propaganda and its gangs of agents-provocateurs, all the festering of the War State is laid before the court. The court responds that this is a mere misdemeanor case and nothing from Nuremberg is relevant. The defendants appeal to a higher court and wholesale their national and international documentation around the country and across the World. Again, the courts reject the appeal.

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So, now the experts, the former military, the scientists, the doctors may be allowed to testify before the judge, in order to rule on the relevance of torture, etc, but

they will not be heard by the jury; however, the notables will speak to the media, the public, the University, the internet: the Educated Class, world –wide.

Within one year, millions will know about these four or five or seven citizen/witnesses who blocked a federal office and now await their first verdict.

THE VERDICT

Assume a judge-instructed misdemeanor guilty verdict, and a ten day jail sentence (though later, in the second year, there will be dramatic acquittals and jury nullification-rebellions—we know this from our history of the 1960s and ‘70s)—Slides 6-10 explain themselves. The Long Foot of Time is moving:

Slide #6 Pictures the Defendants being sentenced in front of an overflowing courtroom.

Slide#7- The Street in front of the courthouse:

Slide#8- The media waits.

Slide #9- A campus crowd waits.

Slide #10- The Police stand by.

Nevertheless, assume five to ten days in the local jail or out at the Honor Ranch. And you may also assume:

Slide #11- Montage of local and national public and media reactions.

Slide #12- Repeats a larger vision of the first arrests [Slide #3].

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The rally, the conference, the campus march, the street demonstrations; and, above all, the new precisely planned blocking of the same or similar official office,

and the new team of attorneys once more on their legs in the court room invoking Constitutional and International Law…

THE FUTURE

And, thus, as the Hebrew Talmud confides to us—you make a choice and take an action, other people see it, and "what happens happens." And if not now, when?

Do you doubt that when there are as few as two hundred such cases—and their attendant legal/political repercussions—two hundred, never mind 2%, that massive non-violent action of the older twentieth century form will erupt? The last slide of all, representing the human gene pool, itself.

(Slide #13- The White Screen is black with a multitude

of non-violent witnesses.)

And there will be millions of arrests and thousands—think of it—thousands of new court cases and Einstein’s predictions will once again have a universal validation. Do not suppose that the rest of the world will not be caught up in this drama (film and rock stars and all) with the Green Parties, alone, turning legislatures around the globe into Town Hall Meetings and Teach-Ins. And the message is and will be that we are living and working for Law. Because War is not Law, Torture is not Law, Economic

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Slavery is not Law: They are instruments only of Power and the State and they are a violation of the Laws of Life—and that is why we are in court!

THE QUESTION

It is time for you, now, to cut this issue. During the interval please speak to the Stage Manager (he is the gentleman standing up in the front row) and indicate to him your area of special interest.

Please bring up the house lights.

Now, would you please raise your hands if you wish to participate on stage in ACT TWO. Thank you. Mr. Sainsbury will talk to you in the theatre when we take a break in about five minutes. You will, also, be able to speak from your seats, and to write statements for questions to be read. Please write and turn them in during the interval.

Before we adjourn, I would like to anticipate your dialogue of ACT TWO in two ways, only:

First, I ask you to consider that Dialogue, in its classical Sokratic method or in the modern existential sense, is not merely a conversation, certainly not only a

debate, and absolutely not a T.V. Cross-Fire shouting match. No, our aim is that confrontation in Good Faith that Albert Camus said distinguished dialogue from all other forms of rhetorical argument, because the participants were prepared to change their minds. Or, in Dostoyevsky’s words, "not be afraid to change our thoughts."

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My second hope for your consideration is that you not shy or shirk from what Tolstoy called "The Fantastic Brigand Question." That is to say, if a Fantastic Brigand appears at your door threatening to destroy your family, then what is the use of your non-violence or passive resistance to evil? Or, in modern terms—non-violence is all

very well in a democratic republic like America or Great Britain but certainly not against the Fantastic Brigands of Stalinism or Fascism or Al Quaida Terrorism.

I beg you to face this most insidious of all non-seqiturs that, like the "Ticking Bomb in Times Square" argument for torture, can only be answered with your entire being—though you may want to counter by asking whether Nelson Mandela was naïve when he sought to non-violently slay the Fantastic Brigand that was South Africa—and did it! Or whether Lech Walesa and the Solidarity! Movement were fools when they stunned the world and stopped the Fantastic Brigand of the Soviet Union in his tracks. Nor did you, ladies and gentleman, ever believe that William Faulkner’s prophecy would come true: the State authorities of the Deep South—forty and fifty years on—prosecuting the Klan killers of Medgar Ever, the Birmingham school girls, Emmet Till, and those heroic civil rights volunteers Schwerner, Cheney, and Goodman.

Admit that you were astonished, just as you are now that General Officers of the United States Armed Forces are denouncing American Middle East war policy; and that Palestinian and Israeli mothers have found a common cause for peace. What other explanation can there be for these phenomenal events except the breaking through of that libido and life force that we are calling Non-Violent Action?

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And may I remind non-American friends that Mohandas Gandhi began his soul-force movement in South Africa to confront racism, but, later, in India perfected his vision with those strategic strokes of genius that drove the British Empire out of

India forever! Non-Violence is fungible, it is adaptable for all times and all seasons.

So who, then, is mad—Tolstoy and Gandhi and King and Mandela, or the Real-Politic crackpots with their weapons of mass destruction? You must decide for yourselves, once and for all, whether or not George Orwell answered this question when he wrote that, "There was truth and there was un-truth. But if you clung to the truth, even against the whole world, you were not mad."

Not mad. Not even make-believe, because we are in a different kind of theatre, here tonight. Different not because our stage resembles an old fashioned Lyceum lecture, complete with pictures of the Holy Land, nor because you are about to take over the podium and talk to your heart’s content and, perhaps, even act out a non-violent workshop theater game scenario, as Dr. King’s volunteers did—dividing up your number into police and non-violent witnesses, or into witnesses and fascist thugs or provocateurs, or a jail cell encounter with inmates or guards.

All of that is still, partly, entertainment. But if the action, talks and decisions you take here tonight represent at least a rehearsal of a future choice—then, my fellow actors, you have created a "Theatre of Cruelty." So named because you have of your own free will placed yourself in a position of extreme moral and existential "choice", and it is this choice that is cruel. Cruel despite the fact that the choice of non-violence or violence is the essence of reason and sanity—nevertheless, this choice of life

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against death will certainly release the most far flung repercussions in your soul and, then, in the world.

Because we here, tonight, are not a sampling error or a television Reality Show. No—we are a microcosm of our race, our nation, our world. We are those very

Actors that Shakespeare so lovingly called "the abstract and brief chronicles of the time."

And we are here in a Theater of Cruelty that is disguised as a Lecture Hall. We are here. We have come this far. Will we go further? The suspense is almost unbearable; it is even as Antonin Artaud, the father of the Theatre of Cruelty, wrote: "We are not free and the sky can still fall on our heads, and the theatre has been created to teach us that first of all."

Now. I thank you in advance for your courage and lucidity, and I will be watching closely from the wings and, then, return to respond to your response, and a word about the future of the Einstein Plan.

-END OF ACT ONE-

* Playing time of ACT ONE approximately 59 minutes.

 

 

 

 

 

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During the interval, the Stage Manager gathers the people who have expressed interest in participating onstage in Act Two. He tells the group that four of them will be assigned jobs:

THE QUESTION READER will select questions to read – either from other members of the audience, or from the prompt questions provided. S/he will state the question clearly to start each phase of the discussion.

THE DISCUSSION COORDINATOR will choose who speaks. S/he may call on people in any order, and may also choose to call on people who indicate by body language that they have something to say. S/he will also make sure no one monopolizes the discussion, and that time is fairly shared.

THE EMOTION SENSOR will speak up if s/he feels that emotions are harming the discussion. S/he will also state dynamics of the discussion that are going on, but that the group isn’t acknowledging.

THE RESTATER will summarize what’s been said by the group every 10 minutes.

The Stage Manager also states what his role will be: He will facilitate the discussion by monitoring the time, by calling on the Question Reader to state a new question; supporting the Discussion Coordinator in his/her selections; calling on the Emotion

Sensor if necessary; and making sure every 10 minutes that the Restater summarizes what’s been discussed.

The Stage Manager asks for volunteers for each job, and makes his selections.

When the Interval is nearly over, the Stage Manager collects any questions that have been written by the audience, and hands them – along with additional prompt questions – to the Question Reader.

Once the audience is seated, the Stage Manager introduces himself and the four volunteer participants who have jobs. He clearly explains what job each person will be responsible for, and says that this part of Act Two will last 45 minutes. He then asks the Question Reader to start with the opening question.

On nights where the audience doesn’t come up with questions of their own, here are some to have on hand:

In the first act, Donald proposed the Einstein Plan, which says that if 2% of a population took social action, that would be enough to change the system. But perhaps critical mass is only 2% of 2%. In the United States, that would be 120,000 people. What do you think?

Donald said that we should take social action in support of the Law – that the Law is on our side. But now our leadership is changing the law; witness the US’s legal position on torture and incarceration of "terrorists." If our social

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actions aren’t backed by the letter of the law, how do we have the authority to proceed?

Let’s ask the Fantastic Brigand question. If a violent person comes to your house and threatens to murder your family, is non-violence really an option? Don’t you have a greater responsibility to protect yourself and your family than to be non-violent?

The Ticking Time Bomb in Times Square question goes like this: You’re the chief of NYPD, and you’ve discovered a powerful bomb about to go off in Times Square and the man who set it. The bomb cannot be diffused, it will go off in 15 minutes, and there isn’t enough time to evacuate people; if the bomb goes off, 10,000 people will die. The only hope is to get the bomber to reveal the code to stop the bomb from detonating. He has refused: he admits he’s the bomber, he knows the code, and he wants to kill 10,000 people. Do you use torture to get the information? Is this scenario honest, or a provocation?

What is wrong with this verbal picture of the Time Square Bomber? If torture is the answer to violence then why not petition to begin at once the torture of American and British war criminals, et al?

 

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The Action resumes with the volunteers and Stage Manager leading the audience in a searching dialogue, and possibly, non-violent theatre game workshop game improvisations.

At the end of about an hour, the Exile returns to thank the audience—on stage, and those in their seats—and to urge them to stay and talk further, to plan; to breathe together (to "conspire"). The volunteers return to their seats.

The Exile remains to complete his message from Lake Como:

THE LONG FOOT OF TIME

THE EXILE

Some of us are exiles abroad, some exiles at home, but all of us, in one way or another, are fugitives from the Camp of Victory, even as President Eisenhower, himself, was when, in his farewell address, he amazed the Western elites by warning that the new American "Military Industrial" war complex was "crucifying" the human race on a "cross of iron"; and John F. Kennedy, before his execution in Dallas, responded to an airforce plan for a nuclear sneak attack on the Soviet Union with the biting rejoinder, "And we call ourselves human beings!"

Einstein believed that we were the creatures who had called ourselves "Human Beings" too soon. It’s true. Einstein believed that, and Nietzsche when he called for us to become "arrows of longing for another shore," and Camus when he said that

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each tells the other that he or she is not God: all this is the predicate for the commitment to non-violence: the realization that not only are we not Gods but that we

are not yet even human beings—unless we draw the line here and now: take the ball out of the hands of the terrible players, and with non-violent means work toward the non-violent ends of life in Nature.

I say "We" because it is our turn. The masses that followed Jesus, Gandhi, Tolstoy, Chavez, Walesa, and King were overwhelmingly from the peasant and working classes. There were many educated, and highly educated, clergy and intellectual supporters and leaders, of course, but in their millions the throngs were poor people and students. Today it is our turn. We are the Educated Class, the Internet Class. And it is our turn.

Sigmund Freud said that "People who belong together need not be glued together." That, also, is true. So, now, we go on together—while the Exile returns for a last look at the Lake.—Next.

(Slide #14: Lake Como, again, on the screen.)

I

This is where we began…on the far shore where Shelley stood in a vision of revolution… It is the end of another day on the Lake. Not the end of History. Something deep in the United States of America and its Camp of Victory went dead after the boys and the heroes came home from the Second World War, even as in Athens after the triumph of Marathon. The final victor, then, was Sparta, and after

Auschwitz and Hiroshima, Gandhi mourned that "National Socialism has won," and that democracy would need to be reborn. Just as old Pliny the Younger pondering in

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both his Villa Tragedia and Villa Commedia foresaw the end of the Roman Republican Ideal and prayed for a sign.

Time for the Exile to go home. New Orleans and Baghdad are now sister cities. Yet it still sparkles, this Lake, and the sky looks flawless. Nature’s clock seems to be in perfect working order. And it is: out of sight and sound behind the high Alps the last of the glacier lakes are breaking up—even as the polar ice caps. An authentic paradigm change in the real world, vast and terrific, is silently, for the moment, moving towards us. And we are slowly waking up because that soft ticking sound is the heartbeat of our species and it is infinitely louder than all the suicide bombs in all the worlds—First, Second, and Third.

The Exile looks up, and there on the rocks, just north, is the message: the giant stone death mask of Mussolini, clear as day. Or is it Napoleon? And we had the trick to see it—Alexander and Julius Caesar dead and turned to clay; Napoleon and Mussolini to stone; Bush and Blair? They will be overcome by non-violence, by what Shakespeare called the "Good years", that "will devour them, flesh and fell." Let them pass away, they are already dead men.

The clock that tells us of their demise is the Lake. The Stone Age sign, the huge, deep still wet print of the Long Foot of Time that has, so soon, caught up with the United States of America—exiles and all.

(The EXILE exits. The image of Lake Como remains up on the Screen).

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(After the curtain call, the Exile announces that he intends to invite an arrest on a date certain. He encourages members of the audience to join him in forming a team and taking part in the event as a participant or as one of the support group.)