Seattle, the summer of love and beyond
The Summer of Love and Beyond
A One Act by Dex Quire
Time: The Present
Place: A recent Seattle City Council meeting
(Note: there is no correspondence between the “real” Seattle and this Seattle of fantasy)
Scene One
Mayor Marci: The takeover of the downtown neighborhood of Capital Hill City, our very own Summer of Love, by the Righteous Youth, was a great success and –
Citizen Ben Marble: Mayor, sorry for interrupting, but how can you say such a thing? The Righteous Youth torched buildings, closed access to the area and drove the police from the East Precinct Station.
MM: And? Your point, Citizen? The Righteous Youth showed an independence of spirit not seen since the days of our racist founding fathers; but they did so without the racism.
CBM: Mayor, I protest. Four black young men died at the hands of the Righteous Youth during this takevover. The police were demoralized; they filed out of the building with their genitals in small boxes exactly like the Chinese priests in the movie, The Last Emperor; it was a humiliating spectacle.
MM: We disagree, Citizen Marble. Thanks to that encounter with the Righteous Youth, the police and city government now think and believe as one. They have seen the light, you might say. They no longer murder, at will, our oppressed communities; they no longer issue traffic tickets thereby allowing young people to learn to drive a 100 miles an hour through narrow streets, a vital skill that will stay with them for the rest of their lives.
CBM: (mumbling) Short lives at that.
MM: Citizen Marble, please speak clearly into the microphone.
CBM: Yes, of course, Your Honor. What about the four black youth murdered in the takeover zone of the Righteous Youth?
Council Member 3: I think Citizen Marble is getting a bit too far into “What Aboutism”. Can we ask the citizen to please check his privilege and keep focused on whatever he is trying to say?
MM: Yes. Citizen Marble, about the four youth who passed during the Summer of Love – we have put up a plaque commemorating their youth and sacrifice in reminding the city of the former systemic racism at the hands of the former police department. Thanks to them, everything is different now.
Council Member 2: I, for one, am tired of Citizen Marble’s othering of the Righteous Youth. He has done nothing but remind us of the horrors of Lookism. Can we take a vote on putting out his eyes?
MM: I think that would be very much in order. All in favor?
Council Members 1-9: Aye.
MM: Nays? None? Be it so ordered. Officer Feather.
The doors to the council chamber slam shut automatically. Citizen Ben Marble is tazed and strapped to a chair. Officer Feather presses her thumbs into his eyes.
CBM:
Screams in agony then slumps his head
MM: Thank you Officer Feather. I must say your forearms and thumbs have gained in strength and dexterity over the past months. Council Secretary, would you enter into the minutes that the mayor and councilmembers acknowledge Officer Feather’s positivity and cooperation with us along with a special notice of her advanced peacekeeping skills?
Council Members 1-9: Aye
Thank you. The next order of business. Council Member 5 has prepared a special presentation
nods to council member 5
Council Member 5: Thank you Mayor. These slides are from a recent festival in a small town in northern Japan. Yes, you are seeing what you think you see: About twenty loinclothed young men carrying a large model penis, about ten yards in length and four feet in diameter. This celebration of the penis goes back thousands of years in Japan and the festivities continue to this day, as you can see. It is surmisable that this people does not fear the penis; in fact they celebrate it in the most public way.
MM: This is all quite interesting Councilmember 5 but do please hurry as we have a rather full docket tonight.
CM 5: Of course, Mayor Marci. I’ll skip over slides belonging to the present and take us back two thousand years to the Roman Empire. For too long the Right Wing has claimed to stand for Western Civilization. They boast that they represent the historic continuity of Greek, Jewish and Roman culture as their birthright, our birthright, in fact. It is time for progressive forces to take back our civilization. Time for us to stop feeling chagrined when the Right Wing tries to make us feel as though we are betraying Western Culture. The fact is: the Roman world was awash in the penis. The penis was everywhere, in bas-relief on nearly all buildings, in statues, paintings and mosaics, in spaces, public and private. The erect penis was a sign of good luck, of rich harvest; it was a talisman to ward off the evil eye. Christianity effectively erased the penis from the public – and private – sphere. For two thousand years, no penis. Again, it is time for us to take back our civilization and once again enshrine the penis, everywhere.
Council Member 1: Very well-spoken Council Member 5. We might also note that Sunday afternoon fights to the death in the Coliseum and other venues across the Empire were also an outstanding feature of our early Western Civ. My hope, and I believe we are all of one accord on this, is that we can revive violent recreational public death as an entertaining feature of life for our modern times.
Council Member 5: Thank you for that important point, Council Member 1.
Unfolds a large architectural sheet
I have here a design to repurpose the Space Needle as a giant penis. In this way we can announce to the world that Seattle is on the forefront of change, change for the better. I would like the council to vote on this proposal.
MM: Most impressive Council Member 5. Council? Shall we vote on –
Interruption from the floor
Citizen Tonya Traven: Mayor, council members, my name is Tonya Traven. I would like to suggest a slight postponement of this proposal or resolution. True enough, Christianity did cause the penis to vanish from its traditional place of veneration in the ancient world and even to the present day. However, there might be other ways of looking at this. I believe banishment of the penis gave women breathing space in the ancient Roman Empire. Perhaps it lowered the cultural temperature, that is, took down unfettered male power a notch or two, relieved Western Culture from a kind of totalizing macho impulse. The vanished penis gave the culture an aperture, so to speak, whereby women could claim some recognition or status within Western Cultural Life.
Angry crosstalk among the council members:
Who does she think she is?
I never –
What the fuck?
Council Member 5: (Angry) Citizen Traven, may I ask: are you not the celebrated eco-terrorist, Tonya Traven, otherwise known as the Green Queen?
Council Member 8: (Angry) Citizen Traven, did you not chain yourself to a tree in a logging region …
Tonya Traven tries to speak
… and have your foot cut off at the ankle by a logger?
Tonya Traven: Yes, I am the same.
Council Member 6: (Flustered) I for one am taken aback by a fellow ally speaking as though she knows what a woman is. I don’t feel very safe, all of a sudden.
More crosstalk by council members all in agreement, upset and showing expressions of stress …
MM: (Intervening, banging gavel) OK, let’s have a bit of order here. Council Secretary can you please pass around the calming heroin pills to the council members? Thank you. Citizen Traven, you have blown a cannon sized hole in your argument by claiming to know what a woman is. Do you wish to rescind these, any of your overly defining comments?
Tonya Traven: I was just trying to propose another way of looking at Council Member 5’s assembled and quite impressive data. We’re just talking here. Hey, I donated a foot to our progressive enterprise … I just –
Interrupting
Council Member 5: For Christ’s sake, I’m sorry. I can’t take much more of this … I’m shaking just now –
Council Member 3: Me too.
Council Member 4: Yeah, me too.
Council Member 9: God, same here.
Council Member 5: All this talk of women, as if we know what women
Makes twin air finger quotes
means, has got me –
Council Member 5 cries out and clutches chest, head falls onto the council half-circle table. Council Members 4 and 6 sitting next to Council Member 5 gently shake and try to prod Council Member 5. No movement, nothing.
Council Members 4 and 6: O my God! We think Council Member 5 is dead!
MM: OK, we’ve got an emergency situation here. Officer Feather please taze Citizen Traven and take Citizen Traven into custody. Also please call in the coroner to confirm Council Member 5’s death. This council meeting is adjourned.
Scene Two
Seattle City Council Meeting, Two Months Later
Mayor Marci: Thank you everyone. Let me bring you up to date with some prior developments before moving on to tonight’s agenda. You will recall that during our last meeting Citizen Tonya Traven spoke with lies and unsubstantiated detail about
making finger air quotes
“women”. Council Member 5
nods to the cadaver of Council Member 5, seated, unmoved since his death
suffered massive heart failure during the back and forth. Never was there a clearer example that words kill. A capital crime. Subsequently, Citizen Traven was condemned to be thrown from a helicopter at two thousand feet onto 5th Avenue and Pike, downtown. Unfortunately, as you probably know, Citizen Traven escaped county jail and is now on the run.
Council Member 3: That does seem to be her usual MO; always getting into scrapes and then going on the run.
MM: For now, anyway. We have requisitioned hunting camera’s set up all over the Cascade Mountains when hunting was legal. Citizen Traven belongs to us; it’s only a matter of time. With that, let’s move on to our agenda. Please adjust your gas masks. Masking is now mandatory at city council meetings, in public buildings and at all work places. We have let Council Member 5 stay in his chair as a representative of the city’s dead. All council members agree that the dead have been othered for too long, and, definitely without sufficient local or national representation. We must remember —
Interrupting
Citizen Cory Brawn: Your honor. This is frankly insane. Council Member 5 is dead. He cannot vote; you have thereby reduced council representation to eight down from nine. His body is decomposing, putrefying the air in the council chambers; it is nauseating. You have propped him up, but his eyes are falling out and his bodily fluids stew the floor beneath him.
Council Member 7: (Adjusting a Hello Kitty gas mask) Hold on everyone. Is Citizen Brawn – I think he is taking his name a bit seriously –
Council members, laughter all around
is Citizen Brawn telling us he doesn’t realize every city council in America now displays a dead member, that schools and businesses also have dead members — living cadavers as it were — on staff in addition to boards of directors, symphonies, universities, in law offices, prisons, airlines, sports leagues, and in the journalistic and entertainment industries, and in Wall Street for God’s Sake?
CCB: Of course I am aware that you have all started a completely insane fad of propping up dead bodies in every corner of American life with mandatory gas masks for the living, but —
Interrupting
Council Member 3: So now, what? Are you a Clean Airist? You don’t like gas masks? You don’t see the educational value in school kids learning about the human physiognomy in an incredibly vivid way? School children can actually see every layer of the inner human body as it falls away and reduces to skeleton. This is real learning, much more graphic than watching in real time on an iPhone. I halfway suspect Citizen Brawn of being Anti-Educationalist.
CCB: I thought we were supposed to like and strive for clean air, you know reduce climate change and all that.
MM: Clean air is fine as far as that goes, but we must do our part for the oppressed as well. Of all our multitudinous oppressed communities, what community is more oppressed than the dead? Huh? Tell me …
Council Member 9: Citizen Brawn, you’re on thin ice. If you can’t see that tiny baby gas masks are the cutest things on Earth, well, I don’t know if there is much hope for you. The other day I saw a citizen with a gas mask pulling his little baby in a wagon. The baby was so cute with his little gas mask …
Crosstalk of approval and agreement
Council Member 2: We finally shut down the mortuary industry with its huge bag of tricks to fleece the living and oppress the dead by burying them all — out of sight! Unbelievable, you come along with your antique views —
CCM: What about the growing rat population? It’s out of control!
Council Member 6: Now you’re a Ratist … Mayor …?
Looks at Mayor Marci pleadingly
MM: (Hitting gavel) Citizen Brawn you’ve got a lot of brass showing up to a council meeting with all your Ableist, Lookist, Clean Airist, Ratist posturing and prejudice intact. I’m going to sentence you to six months of intensive Death Appreciation Studies, with a corpse tied to your back for good measure. Officer Feather …