No Planet B - Part Ten
or, The History of the World Backwards
July 2006
Feudalism Wins Election!
The Feudalists get in by focusing on local issues. Barons give stump speeches in the market square.
BARON: Feudal aristocracies are organisations of families set up to procure our own privileges at the expense of the rest of the community. Now, to do this I tell you plainly we’re going to be using fear, violence and big horseback soldiers in black with studded black gauntlets going “Har-har! A pretty gold necklace hag, it shall look well on my falcon!” But we are planning to lift weekday parking-restrictions.
Columbus
The looter and killer Columbus is chased off the continent. For Columbis the final indignity is that he is pursued by sarcasm from the Arawak people. As Columbus’s ship sets sail, the Arawaks follow him into the water hlding out jewels and gold and shouting, ‘Oh you forgot these! Mr Colombus! You forgot the gold! Don’t go without this!’
The Atlantic Ocean
Mariners in the fifteenth century face a hazardous Atlantic Ocean. As a consequence of twenty-first century de-regulated factory-fishing, petro-chemical tanker spills, and the toxic run-off from industrial agriculture, only three fish survive in the Atlantic Ocean. Not three types of fish, but three individual fish. Three giant, mutant fish, they are the terror of mariners and the subject of the sea-shanty sung by anxious wives when their menfolk go to sea.
MUSIC: [C - C/B - Am7 - F ]
SONG: SEA-SHANTY
May you sail home in your ship,
Safe from giant mutant fish
That grew so big they ate the whale
And show up on a world-map drawn to scale.
When you sail upon the ocean deep,
May you escape the mutant fish and cross the sea,
Each one so much bigger than a whale
They show up on a world-map drawn to scale.
BACK-PROJECTION: ‘HERE BE DRAGONS’ ANTIQUE MAP TAKING UP WHOLE OF CYCE - CLICK HERE FOR BIGGER VERSION OF MAP.
Arthurian Albion
The Arthurian Knights model themselves on the Rotarians, an association of charitable businessmen sometimes called the Round Table Society. The Knights organize Shetland pony rides for peasant children.
The Knights also wage war against all other charitable organisations until they alone are the dominant NGO. In a particularly brutal massacre they slay every last member of the Variety Club of Great Britain and are subsequently investigated by the Charities Commission.
Year Zero Clocks Going Forwards Confusion
Despite blanket advertising many citzens are confused as we make the transition from years going down in number (DC - due Christ) to years now going up progressively (AC - After Christ)as we go into ACDC time.
Jesus
A man called Jesus appears on the dusty roads leading to Jerusalem. Jesus is a Mexican migrant worker in the olive groves, who begins his career telling stories to his fellow seasonal workers. He of all people has forgotten that the clocks have gone forward and is an hour late to the Mount of Olives where he is giving a talk. As he and his disciples pound down the road at speed, waving to the Rasta on Mt Zion, Thomas asks ‘What is your mission, Jesus?’
JESUS: [Strong Latino accent] My mission? To replace Paul’s philosophy with mine. That, my friend, is why we are going now gonna speak at the Mount of Olives.
Yes, says Thomas, Paul predicted that you would speak at the Mount of Olives.’
Oh yeah? says Jesus. Well, did Paul predict I’d do this? [body-pops]
At the Mount of Olives Jesus delivers his parable to a small crowd of migrant workers.
JESUS: Okay, I tell you a little story now. This is a story which comes from ancient times from way back in the the Petroleum Bubble. Long ago in the time of asthma, there was a little town called called Gernika in autonomous Catalonia on a peaceful afternoon many miles behind the lines untouched by the Spanish Civil War.
MUSIC UNDER: FINGERPICKED ACOUSTIC GUITAR
A cat’s cradle of banners criss-crosses the little square, flush with window-boxes of gardenia and bougainvillea. At a white stone fountain an old man waters white horses, while on benches, by a cafe, in upper windows townsfolk listen to the busker in the square.
His name is John and he comes from London. (I went on a walking holiday to England myself one time. I found the pastures pleasant, the mountains green but the dark mills were a bit Satanic).
As they listen to his song, no-one knows that John is sick with fever. He has not eaten for days. Beneath the rough blanket he wears as a poncho he is shaking. Sweat runs under the tight band of the broad-brimmed hat, stinging his eyes. The thick wool of the poncho prickles and suffocates. Oh! For a breeze! But like nightingales in the Niger Delta of antiquity confused by Shell’s 24-7 gas flares, he must keep singing until he drops, for his life has filed down to this sharp point and there is no mercy.
We been headed in the wrong way all through time,
Always living in the wrong place,
Running for our lives.
Walking to Gernika
All the livelong day.
Walking to Jerusalem
Where my luck will change!
[Strumming under] Suddenly a breeze. A flutter of gardenia petals. A swirl of dust at his feet. And there standing before him, draped head-to-toe in the bunting she has careened through in her swoop from the first floor, is Teresa. Young and old cheer to see John fall into her arms, for they do not know he has fainted.
After brandy and bread, John and Teresa walk down to a meadow with young Pepe.
Pepe is my son, she says, we’ve got a new life here.
Too much has changed, I fear, and John says to her
I see a way out of this,
Put your arms around me and give your old man a kiss.
It’s not so simple, says Teresa. His father is still alive and I love him.
They start back for town. Pepe does not know what’s been said, but seeing the look of John’s face, the little boy says ‘Here, you broke yours when you fainted’ and John looks down and finds a ukulele in his hand. He looks up under a sudden thunder of planes. Bombs roll Gernika into a cloud of black smoke. John tastes brick-dust on his tongue as he runs towards the town, fighter planes swooping low to strafe those fleeing into the fields.
Back in the rubble of the ruined square, Teresa’s lover, the father of Pepe lies bleeding. John watches the family of three huddle together and turns back onto the lonesome road out of town, passing an old man shooting a maimed white horse.
One day two years later in London John receives a telegram of a phone number with the words Teresa SOS.
He runs to a pay-phone but the line goes dead when he dials an international code. Technology collapse has hit international phone-calls. Only government offices and the executive suites of the very poshest hotels can still do make them. John runs down to the Blackfriars Telephone Exchange, only to be met by an army cordon. He breaks in through a back-window and hears his own footsteps echo in an enormous building empty apart from the solitary figure of Albert Einstein up to his elbows in wires and cables, sprockets and cogs.
You’re too late, says Einstein.
I just need ten minutes!
It’s no good, says Einstein, all these wires are either too thick to fit the aperture, or else so weak they snap when the capacitor heats up. If only I had a fine, nylon twine tensile-stretched under hot conditions.
What about the A-string of a ukulele made for a six-year-old boy in Spain?
It’s a crazy idea, says Einstein, but it just might work.
What’s the matter Luke, why you stop writing? You think that last bit of dialogue is beneath you? Well, okay. Maybe you want to tell a story instead. Come on, Luke. Maybe you can tell us a story called ‘How Mummy and Daddy Paid For Luke to Go To University And Learn About Sophisticated Literary Taste’. No? Well, then maybe you could tell us all a story called ‘What I Did In My Gap Year’. You don’t wanna? Okay, I got a suggestion. I tell the story. You write down what I say. Vale, entonces companeras, companeros...
Minutes later the dial-tone purrs and over the crackly line of the world’s last ever public-access long-distance phone-call, John hears bullets rattling the walls and windows of the Barcelona Telephone Exchange. Teresa tells John she has been shot defending the exchange and has not long to live. She tells him she wnts to arrange for Pepe who will now be an orphan to be put on a ferry to England, but before she does so, she needs to hear from John’s own lips the answer to a question. ‘Do you John agree to be a father to little Pepito. John says ‘I do’, the A-string snaps and the line goes dead on the world’s last ever public-access international telephone call.
... Although, my friends, there is a theory that if you look very closely at a painting by Constable, you can see Alan Turing and Albert Einstein loading DVD players onto the Haywain.
And so it came to pass that one week later, at Poole harbour, John meets from the ferry the nine-year old boy who, when an old man, will be called, by neighbours finding Giuseppe a mouthful, The Maltster.
MUSIC UNDER ENDS
THOMAS: What does the story mean, Jesus?
JESUS: What does it mean? It’s what all my stories mean. No rubber johnnies, no gay sex, oh, and bishops, lots of bishops, deacons, arch-bishops, a huge hierarchy. Ain’t it obvious, companero! ...Here’s what it means.
SONG: GERNIKA REPRISE 2
JESUS:
I been living inna Mai Lai
Just a-looking for the quiet life,
Paid a mortgage in Fallujah
So I had to stay.
I been working out of Bhopal,
Farming in Chernobyl,
I been picking cockles on Morecombe Bay.
ROB: When the olive-picking season is over, Jesus gets a job hiring out deck chairs on by the Sea of Galileo. It is a pleasure-beach donkey he leaves town on in closed season, both he and the donkey wearing matching straw-boaters. It is autumn and fallen palm leaves blot the street so no-one hears them clip-clop out of town at dawn.