{"id":6191,"date":"2020-07-16T12:21:31","date_gmt":"2020-07-16T12:21:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/?p=6191"},"modified":"2023-07-08T10:19:40","modified_gmt":"2023-07-08T10:19:40","slug":"the-alarmist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/posts\/the-alarmist\/","title":{"rendered":"The Alarmist"},"content":{"rendered":"<style>\npre::first-letter { float: none !important; font-size: 100% !important; padding: none !important; font-family: \"Palatino Linotype\", \"Book Antiqua\", Palatino, serif; }\n<\/style>\n<pre>\r\n\r\n<a name=\"Top\"><\/a>\r\n\r\n<em>A play about the words and deeds of Revolutionary Hero Thomas Paine.<\/em>\r\n\r\nGREGG GLORY\r\n\r\n<a href=\"Alarmist.txt\">Text File<\/a>\r\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.gregglory.com\/alarmist\/\">Web Site<\/a>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\"...our honored flag... asks no monarch\r\n           to support her stars....\"\r\n\r\n    --- Philip Freneau, 'On Mr. Paine's Rights of Man'\r\n\r\n\r\n****\r\n\r\n\r\n<a href=\"#Top\">Top^<\/a>\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>THOMAS PAINE<\/h2>\n<pre>\r\n\r\nIn protestation of his time\r\nHe found the human mind divine,\r\nFound the talk that made it up,\r\nSpoke aloud, and would not jump.\r\n\"Clear words beget clear heads.\"\r\nClarity in life, clarity in death\r\nIs the best man has to hope or dread.\r\nIn protestation of his time\r\nMan completes the balance of his rhyme.\r\n\r\nTo rip at the savage face\r\nTo tear out the tyrant's heart\r\nWas his only mellow wish, when once\r\nHe tottered at his infant start.\r\n\"Poetry's the soul in the hole\r\nOf all our deluded union.\"\r\nNever again to read in dread\r\nWhat any briary tongue\r\nOr lashed heart had said.\r\n\r\nA pauper's son, a poor man's daughter\r\nLive their fused lives upon the waters,\r\nBless the vision that lifts them in a trance\r\nBeyond their haunted circumstance.\r\nA steady voice, a glance like Fate's,\r\n\"All the million reductive deaths\r\nOf a single soul in resistence\r\nFind their measure, and their truth in Time\r\nIn the balance of a rhyme\r\n\r\nNot otherwise.\"\r\n\r\n<a href=\"#Top\">Top^<\/a>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<a name=\"_SCENE_1\" id=\"_SCENE_1\"><\/a>\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>SCENE ONE<\/h2>\n<pre>\r\n[PAINE spins a globe outside of FRANKLIN's London office.\r\nBooks are scattered all over the floor.]\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nSpin, spin!\r\nIron ring I am whirled within!\r\nArbitrary midget measure of my unconfining infinite!\r\nA span of bands all flicked from flat\r\nto this uniform globedness to ring my aching head\r\nwhose every thought is centered\r\non the latitudes you winningly bend.\r\nDear iron thing pinged from iron ground, rent\r\nfrom flatness to the shape of Earth one man's brain intends,\r\nyou laurel my lauded humanity when\r\nto my invented center and gravity you tend.\r\nSpin, spin!\r\nThose laws of nature that great minds reveal\r\nmay in yet greater imaginations strip repealed.\r\nOnly my blue eye (and my diamond eye within)\r\ngive credence to the luminous architecture you pretend,\r\nflowing shined lines\r\nthrough space and time\r\nto end where they begin.\r\nChaplet-circlet of all the circumnavigated seas,\r\nit is in my wide eye you thrive\r\nand give me the image\r\nmy imagination divines,\r\nplushly hover to deliver there, in picked increments\r\nthe measure that I had made back to me again.\r\nAh ha!\r\nIf cold-hearted Columbus knew you\r\nthrough and through\r\nI doubt that I'd be splayed here to beg\r\n(an impertinent impatient menace to my own peace)\r\nold Benny Franklin for his lettered word\r\nto push and passport myself through one half of you\r\nfrom the old drab world toiling here\r\nto the Edenic new whom\r\nthat Italian's ballet-tighted stride\r\nhad mistakenly discovered. Meritorious maritime error!\r\n\r\n[Inside FRANKLIN's office.]\r\n\r\nMEMBER OF PARLIAMENT\r\nThere's too much talk of America for my comfort.\r\n\r\nFRANKLIN\r\nAnd not enough action for my satisfaction.\r\n\r\nMEMBER OF PARLIAMENT\r\nYou know full well, Dr. Franklin, that your American\r\ninterests are represented in Parliament by your worrying\r\nEnglish brothers.\r\n\r\nFRANKLIN\r\nYes. They worry our poor stag of freedom\r\nto the poorhouse by their taxes.\r\n\r\nMEMBER OF PARLIAMENT\r\nWell, there's not exactly an exactness\r\nin the extraction of your tithes, it is true,\r\nbut there is an approximate proxy of your solemn wants\r\nfigured in Parliament as near as our charter may permit.\r\nRealistically, Benjamin, I don't see that changing any time soon.\r\nThis policy of ours of virtual representation serves\r\nall our colonies around the mounted globe. Soon\r\nthe British flag-pole shall be her axis;\r\nwhat you ask for is uneven, unfair,\r\nand would knock our other more peaceful provinces\r\nto rash action by its example.\r\n\r\nFRANKLIN\r\nBut we are Englishmen like yourselves, and not\r\na conquered land. Surely that difference penetrates.\r\nOur skins are as white as the flag's X-ing stripes.\r\nWe're blood and blood through and through.\r\n\r\nMEMBER OF PARLIAMENT\r\nOur wisest heads here at home have endorsed\r\nthe virtual representaion policy. And besides,\r\nyou are free enough in America.\r\nWhat's the point of making trouble?\r\n\r\nFRANKLIN\r\nWhat's the point of being free?\r\nWe are virtually represented, you say.\r\nAnd you say well. Would the King be as pleased\r\nwith us for nearly paying our taxes\r\nand almost obeying his laws?\r\n\r\nMEMBER OF PARLIAMENT\r\nI have small doubt that it would be considered\r\na most treasonous rebellion.\r\n\r\nFRANKLIN\r\nA king is under an obligation to those\r\nhe proposes to rule, no less than those ruled\r\nare obliged to him and to observe the laws\r\nthey make in common. You see my point.\r\n\r\nMEMBER OF PARLIAMENT\r\nAnd I shall take my leave. Proposes to rule?\r\nHe is our donned soveraign. These words of yours\r\ndeliver a treasonous treatise. And I, for one,\r\nwould not have my trunk separated from this crown I wear.\r\n\r\nFRANKLIN\r\nI spoke only, friend Terrence, as is my scientific habit:\r\nin hyperbolic hypothesis alone. A junture of conjectures\r\nconducted within the safe parenthesis apparatus\r\nof our dear friendship, Terrence. I hope you do not\r\ntake me too amiss, sir, or ferry it too far astray\r\nand deliver my words' import into the hellish harbor\r\nof another's ears, who may be less disposed\r\nto levy my enthusiam with his love.\r\n\r\nMEMBER OF PARLIAMENT\r\nTrust my silence, and my self-interest.\r\nGoodnight, friend.\r\n\r\nFRANKLIN\r\nAs benevolent friends let us always part\r\nuntil these tight-stretched times tear us apart.\r\n\r\n[MEMBER OF PARLIAMENT exits by far door.]\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nAh, Chris, expecting old India and getting America,\r\nwere you pissed at the switch\r\nthe whirling world had slipped you?\r\nAh, Chris, Chris, you knew, you knew, didn't you\r\nthat the whole world is in the mind\r\nand no place other;\r\nand of the world, and of that mind\r\nI am the lonely citizen.\r\n\r\nFRANKLIN  [Entering.]\r\nA jake jenny will spin as pretty, son,\r\nand you might even do\r\nsome more useful woolgathering then.\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nTurn a profit or turn the world:\r\nwhich majestic enterprise\r\ndo you choose to pursue?\r\n\r\nFRANKLIN\r\nFew revolutions ever rotate to a profit.\r\nThose that do most often mis-aim their circles\r\nand round on nothing worthy, or had too low\r\nand ungolden a stock to start with, sir.\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nHuman happiness is ever the right and highest aim;\r\nand doesn't that slap of happiness\r\ndemand an infinity of wish lived the minute\r\nwe experience the weird, willed, insistant rush of it\r\nwired alive from the prison of skin?\r\n\r\nFRANKLIN  [Laughs.]\r\nThe blank page in the annihilating brain?\r\nMaybe. Sir, I don't believe we've had a proper introduction.\r\nI'm....\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nPropriety be damned! Perdition it!\r\nHave all hell environ its vetted\r\nshalls and shall-nots in walls of fire.\r\nPropriety, manners, graces sociale, the plume\r\nof grooming, and the pander of please-easements:\r\njunk all to a rump-superstition\r\ntrying to tell me by poxed signs how to relate\r\nin the uncreated minute\r\nI share with my glorying fellow-man.\r\n\r\nFRANKLIN\r\nBut what ever should I call you, sir? Mr. Blank?\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nIf I really gave a damn about that...\r\n\r\nFRANKLIN\r\nEven my pussycat purrs to his syllable. Right Rog?\r\nUnnamed is nihilism, for we must name to know.\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nWell, sir, Sir won't do for a start.\r\nNeither Lord, nor Your Majesty, nor You Jackass,\r\nwhich my ex was so pricker-burr fond of.\r\nAll too stratospheric for my loving muddiness;\r\nand yet, to say honestly, not high enough\r\nfor my fired-high Babylon-in-the-sky desire, either, sir.\r\nSire... has a ring to it....\r\n\r\nFRANKLIN\r\nBut... I sense a hesitation in this gestation.\r\nBeasts and kings both sire offspring; it seems\r\na wide enough label by all accounts.\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nWide indeed. But inaccurate when applied to my amours;\r\nall have ended without such tissuey issue, you see.\r\n\r\nFRANKLIN\r\nPerhaps I'll call you rootabaga. And perhaps,\r\nlike a ruminative root,\r\nyou could cull your tongue a minute\r\nand raise a squalling brood\r\nby its intermediate burial.\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nPoint taken. I'll laugh aghast at myself\r\nand flap about gashed to uselessness\r\nif you keep me in your wit's crossfire longer.\r\n\r\nFRANKLIN\r\nPoint taken. I guess I must wait contented\r\nin the bathing aftermath of your compliment\r\nfor you to spit out your alias.\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nHonest Tom Paine, you may name me,\r\nif you wish to follow my mother's custom\r\nwho had it, as she puts it, from my dire father.\r\n\r\nFRANKLIN\r\nDire...?\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nA grim man; internment improved him\r\n(his only writerly quality, now that I think of it).\r\nPrisons and genius are linked by locks\r\nstronger and stranger than any heaven's Destiny.\r\nAnd, well, he did save me from the Navy;\r\nthat blasted ship went all hands down and had to crawl\r\non their water-buried fingers to hell.\r\n\r\nFRANKLIN\r\nPray tell.\r\nAnd are you yourself a writer, sir, uhm, Tom?\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nGiven to scribbling. Blood and ink\r\ncharactering forth the teeming memes\r\nof this spade's-worth of pink brain, and all that.\r\n\r\nFRANKLIN\r\nWell. This has been most amusing, but I'm afraid....\r\n\r\n\r\nPAINE  [Looking around impaitiently.]\r\nNow where in bloody beavered double hell\r\nis that fat bastard Franklin? He's kept me\r\nwaiting here in his rump room hours now,\r\nall afternoon the sun has blazed through those wavy panes,\r\nand there's not a tract in his pick\r\nI haven't raped over my spry eyes\r\na million times before, an annoying hoard\r\nof dead words clapped between these reamed boards.\r\nI myself am near as dusty, and near as dead.\r\n\r\nFRANKLIN\r\nWell then, Tom, let me be an Adam to your ignorance\r\nhere in my habitable Eden, and name myself:\r\nDr. Benjamin Franklin, at your service.\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nBlimy. I never met\r\nan ingenious fellow as fat as you;\r\nusually, they're skinny as cadavers\r\nand rude to boot.\r\n\r\nFRANKLIN\r\nYou seem to fit like a snug glow into your own\r\nindandescent description, like a wick\r\nnipped into its tallow, Tom. As for me,\r\nI've decided my girth should mirror, not mask\r\nthe chubby depths of my inner resources.\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nA plummet-line down the bellybutton to the soul...\r\n\r\nFRANKLIN\r\nAnd there you've got my spiritual and intellectual measure.\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nA veritable globe unto yourself, eh?\r\n\r\nFRANKLIN\r\nThe ladies like a fellow of some substance.\r\n\r\nPAINE  [Laughs.]\r\nWell now you've turned the coinage upon its maker\r\nand whacked the spitting image home with a vengeance;\r\nmy trim economy is disastered by your brutal wit.\r\nStill, I've never met an opponent I haven't bested yet.\r\n\r\nFRANKLIN  [Pouring.]\r\nScotch and soda?\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nAy.\r\n\r\nFRANKLIN\r\nHealth, Peace, and Fraternity.\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nTo the survival of the ideal in the real.\r\n\r\nFRANKLIN\r\nAn interesting toast.\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nI always toast that. Nothing else exists\r\nworth getting drunk about.\r\n\r\nFRANKLIN\r\nA champagne extreme, it seems to me.\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nLife's lace and ashes, Doctor, roses and dung.\r\nI like what I toast better than that flat\r\nQuaker oat bread I was raised up on.\r\n\r\nFRANKLIN\r\nWe're both Quakers, then.\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nCivility, insistent peace (but not a any price),\r\na solemn or wondering longing for God, yes,\r\nby those totem tenets shall I keep,\r\nand expurgate the speakers from my picked text;\r\nwinos, mostly, more interested in ass-sniffing\r\ncivil authority than in living up\r\nto the bold moral obligation to treat\r\neach reaching individual as your soulful equal.\r\nSuch cowed cows!\r\n\r\nFRANKLIN\r\nAn upright stance before both man and God;\r\nand no superstition warps the stature of your bones.\r\nHighly commendable in a man sent\r\nto myself for commendation's stamp.\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nI cannot take a compliment while I seek a favor.\r\nI'll take this as a taste of your liquorish taint.\r\n\r\nFRANKLIN\r\nSquarely said. Do you have an ample sample\r\nof your writing? A quillful will do withal.\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nA sample pamphlet's on the table. Written on behalf\r\nof the King's excise men, of which I was one\r\nharanguing his Highness for a raise.\r\n\r\nPAINE  [As  FRANKLIN reads.]\r\nMaybe here in England we're a little bit clearer\r\nwho have less spavined freedom from the powdered Parliament\r\nthan our water-separated neighbors, and so I'll not relent\r\nfrom tugging you a bit nearer health by my stitches,\r\nwhich these bitching words you pull at\r\nby your nickering lip in fastidious judgement, are.\r\nAmerica's a right yummy ripe prize\r\nthe mincing king in his house-robe has sworn to squeeze---\r\nscouting the palace for yesterday's newspaper,\r\n   his shoes a hurry\r\nof velvet on velvet while his ministers mangle\r\nthe masterful quadrangle of his royal foreign policy;\r\nBut when he with his fey ringed hand, almost a glove\r\nof golden mail it is so richly ringed, enrings to wring you\r\nwith every sort of constricting blockade and strangling tax\r\ndon't say that I didn't warn of choking, even until\r\nI myself did croak! And then your theoretical, heretical,\r\nunEuropean Britishness shan't stay his envious, pretty mitts\r\nbut more merely spike the dregs with a tough clump pulp,\r\nsoon enough swallowed as a single undissolved sweet\r\nin his gargantuan majesty's gargantuan gullet.\r\nYou'll rebel, we see that plain and clear.\r\nNow, you folks won't say as darn much, that's clear too.\r\nBut when the itching squeeze arrives,\r\nmost intelligent types on this pitted isle surmise\r\n(and not without some sour pips of bitterness)\r\nthat the reaching King will stretch and find\r\nan aching fist of hawthorn thorns adorning\r\nhis shilling-supple grip, and not a lazy goose\r\nor pioneer-reared American turkey on the table\r\nhankering to honk:\r\n\"Where'd ye like yer golden eggies, Majesty?\"\r\nnor any docile dove cooing full eagerly\r\nand baring a plucked pink breast to put\r\na bit of neat meat on his heavily buttered table.\r\n\r\nFRANKLIN\r\nAn awful willful quillful.\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nFor a mind to hear its thoughts,\r\n               they must be said:\r\nand no one's howled it loud enough before:\r\nmy human loves move and near compel me\r\nto root and roar in ramping brashness for your cause,\r\nwhich, even if you don't see what that is as yet,\r\nyet still it must be shouted about, and louder shouted:\r\nfor America, for Progress, for Humanity and me:\r\nlisten, my bespectacled aquaintence: INDEPENDENCY!\r\n\r\nFRANKLIN  [Shaking paper.]\r\nQuite a paean to procure a pittance, Paine.\r\nA love-libretto to Liberty that might inspire a riot.\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nThe drug of love never slavvered me to much of a lather---\r\nbut Liberty!--- Well, I'm her most adoring whore.\r\n\r\nFRANKLIN\r\nI'll write out a note. Take ship with this\r\nand find a printer's apprenticeship\r\nat harbor for you in my beloved, brotherly\r\nbig-time backwater, Philosophical Philadephia.\r\nHere's my impress. Whomever you deliver it to\r\nwill know its trueness in that colonial city.\r\nCome. Take it.\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nThanks!\r\n\r\n[PAINE exits. Outside office door.]\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nNo reason for me to keep middle-aging in England;\r\nto woodlands wild I hie,\r\nand to pastures new retire my ire!\r\n\r\n[PAINE begins to whistle, then sings.]\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\n    Cap'n William Death was of bitter worth\r\n    And he sailed aboard the Terrible;\r\n    A crow their flapping emblem was\r\n    And flamed down to the bitter seas.\r\n    For defeat came blowing in French Vengee's sail\r\n    Under clouds confused as a bruise:\r\n    O the dead men's storm-breath was terrible\r\n    Under clouds confused as a bruise.\r\n\r\n    O Cap'n Death was of bitter worth\r\n    For when the weather and cannons were wroth\r\n    He sent his unpaid men ten fathoms down\r\n    To collect their coral crowns.\r\n    Beside their chattering skeletons goes,\r\n    Serene as if in the sky,\r\n    The burning bodkin of Ol' John Crow\r\n    Who fluttered high but now's below.\r\n\r\n    Black brother Crow's flap warns us all:\r\n    For as ye rise, so must ye fall.\r\n    Dead men's storm-breath blows foul and used\r\n    Under clouds confused as a bruise.\r\n\r\nNow to America I wing,\r\nOf America I must sing.\r\n\r\n\r\n<a href=\"#Top\">Top^<\/a>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<a name=\"_SCENE_2\" id=\"_SCENE_2\"><\/a>\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>SCENE TWO<\/h2>\n<pre>\r\n[PAINE enters with a fresh copy of the Pennsylvania Gazette.]\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nAll language takes some stain of ill or good\r\nfrom the character of the man that yaps it.\r\nIn my own zone of rights I write and knight reality,\r\nand kneel to no mental soveriegn but the muse imagination\r\nI rum-reelingly pursue. Come, blood-potent rum,\r\nand serve the prophetic office of a tired Tiresian tit,\r\nreveal to me in this minute's less some more consuming All.\r\nCome! attendant angel or ministering harlequin\r\nto the splay water-palace of my mighty-tided heart!\r\nOverwhelming Fate's one gospel of 'Obey,' spill to my glum gullet\r\nand trash the fabulous furies' fang-gaped destruction, come\r\nand in my pleasant dreaming take up a torching seat,\r\nfor you in molding fire all shall choir 'I am free!'\r\nand I shall spatter out the language to make that freedom ring.\r\n....Ah! Argh-oh how I am spun to dumbness\r\nin this walling world that prisions me!\r\nHere evil ministers jangle unreachable keys of speech,\r\ndeny me paper and shout down my rising voice;\r\nthrough the dawn-dashed bars they hack at my words\r\nand unstitch my life-lexicon to mere mumbles.\r\nWitness well their degredation of-- of themselves!\r\nThey steal my speech and claim my saying as their own,\r\nhollowing out its virture by their rotten lives.\r\nHow shall my hard-held honor this dishonor sustain?\r\nHow renounce this attack on the very sound\r\nof myself, the very soul of my talking enterprise?\r\nPrised apart and pitted empty, my words are spit-spattered\r\naway from their durance-resistant usefulness\r\nand let to loll unacknowledge in the gutter\r\nof common discourse. My words! A told tool\r\nI would not trade away for the nothings\r\nso plangently proffered me by nothings.\r\nI walk and talk these Philadelphia Gazette steps,\r\nround-robining all day all the old news-of-the-day\r\nwith these current estimables, a smashing\r\ncash crop of the red-nosed best of America,\r\nmerchants and others with enough free time\r\nto pay their way to freethinking like me!\r\nHere's the meritocracy, paying enough\r\nto buy the public opinion away from those\r\nwho tax it royally to their blue-blooded side.\r\nPennies well spent! Their wary copper\r\nbuys golden souls that would offer themselves for lead---\r\nand some day shall--- some day soon, too soon,\r\nmark my history-honest words. I'll tell a tale  [Shakes paper.]\r\nwill kill some men.... Damn, the things I say!\r\nHalf the time I don't know why I say 'em;\r\nhalf the time they're nothing but all that I've got.\r\nWhat will my penny-a-day words pay me?\r\nLet my ripping talk unstitch this trans-oceanic union;\r\nit is a challenge to roll a world on one's tongue, non?\r\nMy loves have disappointed, and my eyes all are maimed\r\nto see that kniving inhumanity until they are too much cut\r\nto look a moment longer dry, and must perforce\r\nweep out a ruin of pure blood on the blood they see.\r\nI feel all a bear, and would tear a thing apart.\r\nHere's the coffehouse where all the future stife and rule\r\nof our not-yet-nation is avidly debated, and yet\r\nthrough some causeless niceness is left to languish unpursued.\r\nThe noble word finds not it noble counterpart\r\nin honorable action, and all lies undone;\r\nwe speak and spat of self-governance, who have none.\r\n\r\n[Enter FRANKLIN.]\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nCome, old tongue, let's talk a new union\r\ninto its existence by the brashness of our wish.\r\n\r\nFRANKLIN\r\nPaine! Paine!\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nIn the ass. In the ass. I know, I know.\r\n\r\nFRANKLIN\r\nOh, really now Thomas, I was just wondering\r\nhow you were getting along here in the city\r\nof brotherly love. Not quite the debate pit\r\nyou're used to.\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nMuch more so actually. Many fine talks indeed.\r\nBut if you mean, by how I am, how goes the cause\r\nof insect-winged locust Liberty (how many years\r\nsince Athens first heard the wings!) well then, I must say\r\nthe locust is bursting through the ground in Concord\r\nand Lexington; just yesterday as a matter of fact.\r\n\r\n\r\nFRANKLIN\r\nWhat in heaven's name do you mean, man?\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nRead it in the Gazette, and you'll see soon enough.\r\n\r\nFRANKLIN\r\nHave some shocks in store for us?\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nJust honesty, Franklin. A common enough trait.\r\n\r\nFRANKLIN\r\nIf you say so. I'm on my way to our coffeehouse.\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nAh, yes, where all you continentals discuss everything.\r\nI think I'll join you.\r\n\r\nFRANKLIN\r\nHere we are.\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nIn, in! What're you waiting for?\r\n\r\nFRANKLIN\r\nAnxious as a slaver with his unsold load of darkies!\r\nAfter you.\r\n\r\n\r\n<a href=\"#Top\">Top^<\/a>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<a name=\"_SCENE_3\" id=\"_SCENE_3\"><\/a>\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>SCENE THREE<\/h2>\n<pre>\r\n[PAINE and FRANKLIN enter the coffeehouse.]\r\n\r\nALL  [Variously.]\r\nBenjamin! Franklin!\r\n\r\nFRANKLIN\r\nPopular as ever, aren't you Thomas.\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nGentlemen! The continent has shouted out loud\r\nfor Liberty, and strikes at the chains that bear away\r\nour taxes and our freedoms. And the first heart-blow\r\nhas landed in Massachussetts!\r\n\r\nALL\r\n[There is a general outcry at this news.]\r\n\r\nDICKENSON\r\nThe man's a tear-sheet specialist.\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nThere's a lady or two who might attest to it.\r\n\r\nDICKENSON\r\nHis news is no news.\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nWhich then must be good news too.\r\n\r\nDICKENSON\r\nWould you trade wits with me?\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nI'd not have your wits with a pound of gold.\r\n\r\nDICKENSON\r\nAnd if you had 10,000 pounds you could not buy one of them.\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nNo, for there's not one of them to be found.\r\n\r\n\r\nJEFFERSON\r\nOf all the noise and bother, man, spit it out!\r\nWhat've you got under your tri-corner?\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nHold your horrors, and your tipsy cups contain\r\nin steady hands while I my steady tale relate.\r\nListen to me, breathe all silent, and follow\r\non subtle steeds of imagination while I ride\r\nto a distant dark that's yet too near our hearts.\r\nNo tall tale do I trip in here to you to tell,\r\nall grenadier and gnash, no not so tall as they are,\r\nnor as viper sharp as a Redcoat snaps, all brass\r\nand splash and flash, but merely a minor story simply told\r\nin amiable note, of small acts and large hearts\r\nwhere a simple standing steady has effected\r\nwhat all the bravado of words never could.\r\nMen of the hour? No, not so grand as that,\r\nbut of the minute? Yes, they'll\r\n          stretch to that extent\r\nand be remembered as they have named themselves:\r\nMinute Men.\r\n\r\nRANDOLPH\r\nIsn't that the Massachusetts militia?\r\nThose old groaning fellas that put\r\ntheir earlier steel to riotous trial\r\nagainst raping Indian raids and those\r\nFrench incursions of years ago?\r\n\r\nADAMS\r\nYes. And they've kept up their drumbeat,\r\nthe ancients,-- and the youngbloods beside 'em,--\r\nputting away powder and blasting balls against the day.\r\nThey weekly drill their assembly on the town green\r\n\"at a minute's notice,\" as they so baldly claim.\r\n\r\nJEFFERSON\r\nAnd the Sons of Liberty all call from there,\r\ntheir terrorist pranks and wild high times\r\nmaking the ruinous incursion of the Brits\r\na laughing matter as much as anything else.\r\n\r\nADAMS\r\nI swallowed all my light laughter the last time\r\nthey rifled through my havoced house in Boston,\r\nand now grind all my guffaws to grist.\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nWhile we all dreamed headlong on our pillows\r\nin pleasant Philadelphia yestereve, and of shooting\r\nheard only the hooting of the rustled town owl\r\nor the low growling of a dropped locked-box\r\nknocking the cobbles, men awake in Lexington\r\nwere laying about their harrassed ears with fast hands\r\nto stopper-up the deadly bombast of British lead.\r\nBut wait! I do not want to jump the story,\r\nconfusing conclusion and lead, spiking titles\r\nwith the weedy inference of an afterword,\r\nbut shall lay instead this narration in one row only\r\nthat corn shall grow by corn in serried succession\r\nand we all reap its meaning at once.\r\nWell you know that Concord is the provisioning-house\r\nof precious gunpowder and hard-caught musketballs\r\nfor our fierce Northern friends in liberty\r\nwho look to disengage the English Gage\r\nfrom our Boston's harbor where he's sunk at anchor,\r\nbottoming out our hopes of independency.\r\nWell, that Gage last night had aweighed anchor\r\nand shoved his dumb humpers into longman rowboats\r\nto swish the blue inch on our maps\r\nfrom Boston proper to the peaceful Back Bay swamps\r\n(see page two of your Pennsylvania Gazettes, gent'men),...\r\n\r\n[The assembled company all snap thier papers open to page two.]\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\n...his gross ranks breathing heavy in their bishops' hats\r\nand tack pants, faces moony-garish and powdered,\r\nsqueezed cheeks carmined to set a raucauous red\r\nto the parade red of their dandy red coats,\r\nmoved in uneasy union against the giving mush of marsh,\r\nsucking away the calm silence of the night\r\nwith each bootblack boot's approaching gasp.\r\nWho among them, in their defensive tenseness,\r\nhunched into the long round hour before dawn,\r\nregretted their intention to leave defenseless\r\ntheir outback colonial charges by destruction\r\nof Concord's hidden charges? Who among them knew\r\nthat in quiet Lexington lay a fuse to ignite the night\r\nand out-firework all the stars that shined on them?\r\n\r\nADAMS  [To FRANKLIN.]\r\nThe garrison's active; this is a solemn business now.\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nThey approached the town with the unwiped mud\r\nstill clinging guilty on their soles. And then,\r\non the minute, and at the trial telling of a bell\r\na racing Paul Revere, pacing Prescott and daring Dawes\r\nset clanging at the redcoats' coming on,\r\nsome few men assembled on the town green\r\nexchanging nervous grins and greetings\r\ncheated of their normal charm and pleasure.\r\nAnd as those few stood shouldering difficult guns\r\na reasserted quiet fell from an empty sky\r\nfrom which, it seemed, God's face had turned aside.\r\nAnd then those brave few heard a heartless haloo\r\nranting anarchic through the rumoring wood\r\nand the soul of each man-at-ease went bell-wild,\r\nringing each steady steeple to splinters, or nearly,\r\nand yet each man still stood his minute stilly\r\nto look on coming ruin with the same eyes they used for love.\r\nUseless monks spend their closeted lives in sackcloth\r\nrighting their minds for the divine, but those 80-odd\r\nknew more of all of God, and what God might\r\nhelpfully trumpet down to our skunking circumstance\r\nthan a million such widowers of miracle,\r\nprayering self-abasers crooning to high heaven\r\nfor just one more fix of some diviner substance.\r\nWhite heaven was in their mustered hearts, which red-eyed\r\nRedcoats marched from the scarlet sea to bleed\r\ninto a single lake of blood.\r\nThese Minute Men, assembled mixed upon the green\r\nwhereby a red flood of near-enemy troops\r\nmust pass and parade, mustered softly in quiet pre-dawn,\r\nwaiting for the landscape to rouge aroused\r\n           with their future. All alert,\r\nand steady-still as ever their starting hearts\r\nmight make them, they heard the trooping song:\r\n     Sam Adams and damn'd Hancock\r\n     We'll take the bunch and clap the lock!\r\n     And watch our leaderless colonials scurry\r\n     Back to our royal order-- in a hurry!\r\n     Every Englishman cry ho! Ho!\r\n     We are the law where'er we go!\r\n     No more talk of rights and shit\r\n     When Sam Adams and damn'd Hancock are in the pit!\r\n\r\nDICKENSON\r\nHow was the conduct of the troops? Did they\r\nbrandish anger, or seek simply to keep the peace?\r\nHow lawful was their goal?\r\n\r\nADAMS\r\nTell us a story we can live within. My taste\r\nis not for such a bloody tartness.\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nI'll sharpen your ardors to the spur\r\nwith the whetstone of my story, and nag to neighing\r\nour native horse's sleepsome flanks until they hang\r\nin bloody flags of victory!\r\n\r\nDICKENSON\r\nYet, how was the conduct of the troops?\r\n\r\nPAINE  [Pointedly ignoring  DICKENSON.]\r\nMaximum courage mustered then!\r\nEyes straight, backs clicked, men sixteen to sixty\r\nwho knew that their stiffness here would put\r\na backbone in their new-made American nation\r\nstood steady and at ready when those Redcoats\r\nbled into their sight. Old Jonas Parker,\r\nspavined captain of the ticking Minutes\r\nkept his roll-call of boys at regiment-ready\r\nagainst the bright influx of Major Pitcairn and his men,\r\nneither giving offense, nor yet bending his neck\r\nto the black boot of wrong law; steady\r\nfor themselves more than against the troops.\r\n\"Ye devils! Ye rebels! Lay down your dour arms\r\nand disperse! Space to your waste acres!\r\nThis is Britain, and I am Britain's hand,\r\nyou the smacked rump of incivility,\" cried Pitcairn,\r\nand Lexington's men, outnumbered two or three to one,\r\ndid not pretend to obey his voice, but waited\r\nwith civil incivility in their paitient ranks\r\nuntil they heard good old Jonas Parker call \"Dis-\r\nmissed!\" and, patting each shoulder as he spoke,\r\nbade his men each one to \"Go on home, son,\"\r\nwith a \"We've taken our stand for today, friend,\"\r\nor \"no God's peace'll we break this day,\r\nnor yet obey the slimy blackguard limping by.\"\r\nTis a point easily missed, but vital:\r\nno deadly offense was taken, nor none given\r\nas our men walked slowly toward their homes and beds\r\nor out to reap private fields, arms shouldered\r\nand not thrown down, a rifle each by their ears,\r\nand no offence given, but all a slow obeyance\r\nof their own chosen man, Old Jonas, and none other.\r\nAnd then it came! The glory of this story!\r\nAn empty shot snapped apart the infant dawn.\r\nCalamity! Heart-wrench! Confusion! Death's\r\nhovering covenant that seals all pasts and\r\npollutes all futures with its bloody baptismal\r\nmade his harrowing entrance upon the scene of retreat\r\nand came raining vengeful down on that innocent crowd;\r\nnone knew the source of that discordant noise,\r\nall were witness to the shrapnel result of it.\r\nBodies crowned the common ground; gaped corpses,\r\nchipped limbs, shouts, distortions imposed by force,\r\nwild, angry, bitten faces, lightning arms,\r\ntrigger clicks, astonished blasts, after-effects\r\nof numbing thunder, displacement of peace, fists\r\nramming renewed shot into a musket there, beside\r\na dead friend's final look or dying stranger's howl,\r\nthe British line all a pall of gunsmoke\r\nas if in angel's wings they were enshrouded.\r\nA deadly start has this adventure of the heart.\r\nLet none shrink from it! Our men fell there\r\nblanketed by defeat, and swaled to their final home.\r\n\r\nALL\r\n[Various expostulations.]\r\n\r\nRANDOLPH\r\nDo my ears hear truth, and that\r\nfrom the long-faced scoundel Paine?\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nMy tongue does bear a true and fruitful report.\r\n\r\nRANDOLPH\r\nFruitful is it? And bloody hell shall be\r\nour orchard. Your words grow from a cannon-mouth.\r\n\r\nISIAH\r\nYes. We shall make a strange fruit a hanging\r\nfrom a gallows-tree.\r\n\r\nPAINE  [Throwing his gazette.]\r\nYou can read about our eventual victory that day\r\non the overleaf.\r\n\r\nADAMS\r\nVictory?\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nThe British marched on to Concord, destroyed\r\nsome spoil of goods, a trifle of shovels, and some other\r\nwarlike items, and were greeted shortly after\r\nby some hundreds of our \"armed farmers.\"\r\n\r\nADAMS\r\nAnd they fled Concord?\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nAnd with a heavy cost. Two-hundred sixty-three\r\nBritish were picked off by our harrassing fire\r\nbetween wronged Concord and their Boston barracks.\r\n\r\nADAMS\r\nAnd how many lost we?\r\n\r\nJEFFERSON  [Reading.]\r\nForty-nine.\r\n\r\nADAMS\r\nIt's a miracle. Against crack troops....\r\n\r\nJEFFERSON\r\nAnd you think we can carry this fight\r\nagainst the King?\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nWho can know what is to be? I see not;\r\nalthough my hopes rise with your honors.\r\n\r\nDICKENSON\r\nYet how was the conduct of the troops; did they seek\r\na lawful goal or no?\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nTheir conduct was wounded,\r\ntheir argument was death, and their goal\r\nour sacred Liberty.\r\n\r\nRANDOLPH\r\nI don't know if I've the stomach to digest this talk.\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nHave you a stomach then to eat the King's balls?\r\nFor it is your self-assurance of free days\r\nthat he cuts up on a golden platter you have paid for\r\nand then feeds to you.\r\n\r\nRANDOLPH\r\nWe are all free Englishmen here.\r\n\r\nADAMS\r\nThe Parliamentary system of government\r\nis the best in the world. Peers speak\r\nclearly to their causes and interests, and often\r\n\r\nagainst the king. Are we without redress in this?\r\nSurely our safety clamors somewhat in their mouths.\r\n\r\nRUSH\r\nWas it to the cause of our safety and future\r\nthat British muskets clamored at dead Lexington,\r\nas Paine here reports?\r\n\r\nADAMS\r\nI don't rightly know....\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nEvery evil law penned and passed against our interests\r\nsped to our shores from that paid den the Parliament.\r\nOh, they parled our parleyed desires into their purses;\r\nthere's not a man among 'em who wouldn't sell\r\nour birthrights to their bidders for one shelled-out\r\nshilling! A damned evil bunch, I say!\r\n\r\nFRANKLIN\r\nOverstating the case, perhaps, but this notion\r\nof virtual representation hardly seems to hold water.\r\nDon't you agree Adams?\r\n\r\nADAMS\r\nI do. To say that our rights and problems\r\nare under the care of those who live in England\r\nwho have similar rights and problems, is the same\r\nas being in England and voting for members of Parliament\r\nourselves, is well, as my Dad says, a stretcher.\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nVirtual representation is actual tyranny!\r\n\r\nADAMS\r\nWell, things are not so desperate as all that.\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nIntolerable!\r\n\r\nFRANKLIN\r\nAll our honest merchantmen have been hard hit\r\nby these recent taxations and exactions,\r\nthese duly lawful Acts of Parliament.\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nThese Intolerable Acts impose the King's misrule.\r\n\r\nADAMS\r\nThe Parliament is the best system of government\r\nyet devised by mankind.\r\n\r\nFRANKLIN\r\nSurely, though, not perfect.\r\n\r\nADAMS\r\nNothing is as perfection would have it.\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nLet us take our chances as they spasm at us!\r\nDemocracy's a caffeinated wind in our choiring quarter;\r\nlet's let an able nerve convince arms to move\r\nand not a tongue alone. Our dearest object\r\nforever is and must remain: INDEPENDENCY!\r\n\r\nDICKENSON\r\nRevolt! Treason! It's death for us all by your say-so.\r\nIt's not for honorable English boys, as I swear\r\nwe are all, to knock so glimmering a thing\r\nas a royal crown into rabble-democratic dusts.\r\n\r\nRANDOLPH\r\nI am not ready to dissolve into revolution yet.\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nResolve, I think you mean, for all's now certain\r\nthat had an airy unrealness to it before.\r\n\r\nADAMS\r\nBut what method of independence do you propose\r\nbeyond the bloody dawn of anarchy? How can these colonies\r\nhold together for a common purpose without a common center.\r\nThis is what the living symbol of a monarch provides.\r\n\r\nRANDOLPH\r\nHe's the father, we his children. Let's let\r\nour loyalty prove as royal as our parentage.\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nThat fucking rex-hex is a veritable Saturn of paternity.\r\nHe eats his spawn in the gross pleasure of his table.\r\nAll monarchy is crime, and steals its air of authority\r\nfrom the soveraignty of the common people, who can only\r\nconsent to be ruled. That consent denied, all is crime.\r\nWe have no voice in Parliament, yet must obey their laws.\r\nGentlemen, help! Are your reasons so impaired\r\nyou see not your chains? Am I not to see\r\nwhere I stand on earth, and make conjecture\r\nof my future state from a concern of self?\r\n\r\nDICKENSON\r\nIs not our soveriegn our source of soveriegnty?\r\n\r\nRANDOLPH\r\nTo kill a king is no good work for those\r\nborn beneath the throne.\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nKill a king? O to crush a dirty worm\r\nis every infected party's part. To cough oneself to health\r\nthe irretreivable right of every sick man\r\nin protesting protection of his natural vigor.\r\nAnd tyranny is a foriegn ill indeed. No thing for men\r\non this untried continent and infinite land, all future\r\nfrom our shores past green-infinite mountains, to... where?\r\nWe cannot see to the far end of this paradise, sirs!\r\nAnd would you be the wasp-coated servingmen\r\nto dish it up as if it were a new sherbert\r\nto midget empery's appetite? O tell me you would not\r\ndocilily serve such self-serving vanity!\r\nWhat faces shall we wear so that our souls\r\nstart not back appalled? Look to India\r\nif you would see how the King will treat us\r\nby slavish domination: sell us to a corporation\r\nfor eons of unendurable lackey-work.\r\nUnder the elephant's stupid foot! Not a place\r\nfor me, at least; I'll resign my part on earth\r\nbefore I'd crimp my free white neck\r\nbeneath such a ton of gross fat greyness.\r\n\r\nFRANKLIN\r\nAnd killing the king was never seen by me\r\nas necessary to assure our own liberty.\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nEven a moronic ox knows that once he's thrown his yoke\r\nhe needn't trample out his guide-man to stay ramping free!\r\n\r\nDICKENSON\r\nA moronic ox!\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nHe eats his children! Lexington was a snack, and he's\r\na starving robber defending his filtched appetite.\r\nWhat could be clearer?\r\n\r\nFRANKLIN\r\nAn old man gnawing on his pile of bones.\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nThirteen piles of bones, make no mistake!\r\n\r\nFRANKLIN\r\nA strong image, Paine.\r\n\r\nADAMS\r\nA painful one. Do display more taste, Thomas.\r\n\r\nRANDOLPH\r\nThe king has promised to hear our late sent\r\nambassador with his good ear, and overview\r\nall our penned petitions with a nearer eye.\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nThat eye of his put out Concord in the dark;\r\nhow shall it see honest parlance in its home-hole?\r\nOf his cheap, deaf ear----\r\n\r\nADAMS\r\nPaine, Paine, Paine, Paine, there is no\r\neasy touch of pleasure in this tough talk.\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nIf it is in the hard touch of truth to hurt you\r\ntake the wound stoutly, and put into your endurance\r\nconviction to hold those bruises honorable.\r\nThe pain we take for the convictions our best mind\r\njudges right enhances the goodness of their ends,\r\nand with this right end in view the intermission\r\ntransmutes itself to a bearable necessity.\r\nPleasure herself is a sort of raunchy taunt\r\nwhen dandled from a master's open toy-box, and not\r\nearned by a more decent labor of our brows and backs.\r\nA Dad's treat to trick his ranting child\r\nto a returning calmness, and then an ignorant sleep.\r\nBut pain, if deep enough applied, can hack at lies\r\nand leave us without those false comforters\r\nor with none but that rough comfort-burr of truth:\r\non such a thorny ground I would barefoot go\r\nand discount the cheap tinsel promises we have now.\r\n\r\n[PAINE exits.]\r\n\r\nRANDOLPH\r\nCan we come to no agreement or cordial compromise\r\non these impending matters?\r\n\r\nRUSH\r\nAnd what of the dead at Lexington and Concord?\r\n\r\nJEFFERSON\r\nI wonder if they'd be pleased to know they died\r\nin the spirit of compromise.\r\n\r\n[JEFFERSON exits.]\r\n\r\nDICKENSON\r\nIndependency! Really!\r\n\r\nFRANKLIN\r\nOur old lives lie extinguished by a fiery word.\r\n\r\nRANDOLPH\r\nShall we make adventure with all our lives and loves,\r\neven unto the death, upon the thin subsistance\r\nof a word?\r\n\r\nADAMS\r\nLet us make our banqueting hearts eager to eat up\r\nthe roaring employment of our days ahead.\r\n\r\n[PAINE and JEFFERSON outside collide with a PASSERBY.]\r\n\r\nPASSERBY\r\nWhat do we have here? What's this?\r\n\r\nJEFFERSON  [With a warning note in his speech.]\r\nPaine....\r\n\r\nPAINE  [Blissfully ignoring him.]\r\nA moment, my friend, when speech and circumstance\r\nmight intersect, and the right word tell all.\r\n\r\nJEFFERSON\r\nWell. Now independence is on the tongue.\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nSoon it shall be in every farmer's hand\r\nand each rough-and-ready plow-black hand\r\nshall be flexed alive against the tyrant-ranting King!\r\n\r\nJEFFERSON\r\nWell, I don't think everyone's exactly convinced yet.\r\n\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nOh, but where the able tongue purloins the sense\r\nlong enough for uneasy conscience to make\r\nits essence's slippery entrance, why then\r\nhow long laggard will the deciding mind remain behind\r\nthat sets its sharp fence of reasonings against\r\nany backward step? This trined tongue of intent\r\nbut once insinuated into the clear air here\r\nwhere our most honest thinking occurs\r\noverturns an eon of inherited predjudice\r\nand flatters us to action.\r\n\r\nJEFFERSON\r\nRevolution occurs first in the minds of the people.\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nAnd words alone may make the mind revolt!\r\n\r\nJEFFERSON\r\nTotal treason.\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nCommon sense.\r\n\r\nJEFFERSON\r\nPaine....\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nAre you ready for the revolution?\r\n\r\n\r\n<a href=\"#Top\">Top^<\/a>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<a name=\"_SCENE_4\" id=\"_SCENE_4\"><\/a>\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>SCENE FOUR<\/h2>\n<pre>\r\n[The Rush household. PAINE is hunched over an apparatus, intently.\r\nRUSH is at a second table.]\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nBack when I took the book at the Headstrong Club,\r\nobnoxiously orating on my dual theme\r\nof free and freer, I never thought I'd race to a Rush\r\nwho collapsed history's wide actions to his narrow minute\r\nand then decided to make that pressured minute EXPLODE!\r\nOh ho! I've homed in on the Homer I adore,\r\ninto American image has the Greek passion passed surpassingly,\r\nwillful Iliad, all fight and farce; that was the book\r\nthe most ornery, obstinate talker packed back home\r\nfrom our rum club there in pederasted England.\r\nHow can you hear a man's ideas clear\r\nwhen all he want's is you to tiddle his slumming bum?\r\nHere the air's freer, even the gal-pals I've got\r\nwould sooner nail me for my abolitionist views,\r\nand hear them articulated through and through,\r\nthan dwell adored in the moony blues of my open eyes.\r\nThey turn my ocean of appeal into a puddled pond\r\nof \"whys\" and \"why nots\"--- defending deafeningly--\r\nand deftly!-- each of their own articulate points\r\nwith finnicky pricks as razor-exact as any man put forth.\r\nRush! Rush! That vile white thing, spin it here.\r\n\r\nRUSH\r\nI've measured it to the grain, Thomas.\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nAgainst the grain were better service in our cause.\r\n\r\nRUSH\r\nI've gotten enough splinters trying to get this damned...\r\n\r\n[PAINE lights a short dry rush upon a tallow and inches it towards\r\n the apparatus.]\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nAnd now...\r\n\r\n[A loud blast, fire and light stains them. BETTY rushes in, with\r\n needlepoint.]\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nHa ha!\r\n\r\nRUSH\r\nWe need to run a confirmation trial.\r\n\r\nBETTY\r\nWhat is all this noise? You and your songs, Mr. Paine, really!\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nMusic it is dear lady; the potent pop\r\nof your own soma-dose of freedom, madam.\r\n\r\nRUSH\r\nBetty, you'll never guess. We've probably got\r\na home-source of gunpowder to gag the gaggle of Brits\r\nclipper-shipped to liberty-clipping port\r\nin old New York.\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nA practical means of resistance.\r\n\r\nBETTY\r\nResistance? Oh, like that slow glow\r\nthat goes along a spiral wire\r\nbecause its fighting the shock-circuit of electricity,\r\nlike Dr. Franklin showed us that one time.\r\n\r\nRUSH\r\nUh, yeah, I guess so!\r\n\r\nBETTY\r\nNice. That's got some potent potential for that handsome,\r\nnon-spurious, supposed future you reference so sweetly,\r\nI suppose. Maybe my granddaughters in that then\r\nwill reel alive in the freedoms that you scribe, Mr. Paine.\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nMiss Rush, your brother and I have been systematically\r\neliminating the apparent obstacles to the inevitable\r\nseparation of the United States, if I may so term it,\r\nand heather-buried England. That is all.\r\n\r\nRUSH\r\nI'll be damned-- uh, pardon me sis, if that ain't ALL.\r\n\r\nBETTY\r\nAnd do you think this swivel-switch from hitched\r\nto ditched and unhitched inevitable, too, Benny-boy?\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nI'll make my glad-handed geopolitical appeal:\r\nThe interests of two such mighty continents cannot go\r\nforever together. Nature's stitching plates pull apart\r\nall such useless causes in havoc and catastrophe.\r\n\r\nRUSH\r\nVolcanoes and earthquakes are the makings of such\r\nopposite energies; their spumed fumes increase the splendor\r\nof our sunsets years after such upsets, and that's a sign.\r\n\r\nBETTY\r\nSo now you believe in signs, brother, whose medical studies\r\nseek to have the physician's hand rain tender cure\r\nupon itself, opposite the stupid superstitions\r\nback-land indians chant and leech-hacks quack at the corner?\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nThe coming hail that'll separate us and England\r\nshall be in a maiden's mittened mit minted in a trice,\r\na housewifely confection of saltpeter, etc.\r\nplaying the displayed hand of raging nature\r\non the timescale of one human mind's design.\r\n\r\nBETTY\r\nAnd how will you pay for your halo, Mr. Paine?\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nIn bliss increments, and laughing all the way.\r\nHow, dear Miss Rush, will you dividend your sorrow?\r\nNo thing in nature is sad that follows\r\nand fellows its natural qualities.\r\n\r\n[PAINE hunches back over the apparatus as BETTY and RUSH talk.]\r\n\r\nRUSH\r\nLet's pick unlocked snoring Pandora's\r\nsweet locked box.\r\n\r\nBETTY\r\n         Would you midwife chaos\r\nout of so infolded a coffer?\r\n\r\nRUSH\r\nAnd stand a panting paterfamilias to a punchy Paine?\r\nFor shame-- if I would not!\r\n\r\n\r\nBETTY\r\nHmmm.\r\n\r\nRUSH\r\nSweet sister; think of how all the world would unfurl\r\nin that stolen moment's triumphant freedom.\r\n\r\nBETTY\r\nHmmm.\r\n\r\nRUSH\r\nThe blood of Concord is on our souls!\r\n\r\nBETTY\r\nThe colonies in congress assembled have not yet\r\nresolved for independence. Indeed, they seem more willing\r\nto barter back King George's oppressions\r\nfor some few tax concessions and call it victory.\r\n\r\nRUSH\r\nAfter the story Paine told everyone today, you wouldn't\r\ntalk like that, sis. If you had heard it, felt it.\r\n\r\nBETTY\r\nWould you rush to war all alone\r\nmy imploring little brother?\r\n\r\nRUSH\r\nI'll race to it!\r\n\r\nBETTY\r\nIn childhood you were ever an utter terror\r\nand leapt to grow up to my mark upon the doorjamb,\r\ncrying, \"I'll be bigger than Betty, ever!\"\r\nAs, indeed, now you are. And I had washed you\r\nin the cradle, and given you all my light-touched cares,\r\nand tended to you every way-- no matter!\r\nYou still would raise up your eye at me\r\nand say, a very presumptuous seven then,\r\n\"You are but a woman; I will be a man,\"\r\nas if that made all the difference.\r\nAs, indeed, it has. For you outpace me every way\r\nin the world's affairs, and take the stick\r\nto idiocy, where I may merely, indeed, I must\r\ncreep contented to crosshatch stitch my sayings\r\nand put all of my wry commentary, all the luster\r\nand insight of my rich story and view-point\r\ninto needle-pointed pillows for your big feet\r\nthat have battered back home at a flat run\r\nfrom high deeds indeed, wherein (or where-out, rather)\r\nI had been by my sex excluded.\r\n\r\nRUSH\r\nBut you are a woman, sister, and all\r\nthe revolutions of the earth cannot turn\r\nthat fact about. What do you think of him?\r\n\r\nBETTY\r\nHe's a rude man, and a strange.\r\n\r\nRUSH\r\nHe's a great man, and right when all of an age\r\nlavishes itself in wrong opinions.\r\n\r\nBETTY\r\nA kingly man.\r\n\r\nRUSH\r\nDon't say that, or he himself will blow\r\nbefore ever another report of powder sounds.\r\n\r\nBETTY\r\nDo you not now note how that he hears us not,\r\nbut is all by his fluid mind engaged awash\r\nin the high-tide flooding of his destructive pulse\r\nwhereby he sees a world engulfed; and yet he sings,\r\nand that not humbly and to himself, but loud\r\nand tunelessly. Has that hanging face of his\r\never tied on a smile that was not a one\r\ntried out in high irony, a sort of victor's ribbon\r\nof sly teeth grinning his awkward opponent down?\r\n\r\nRUSH\r\nThere is something in a man's part to love\r\nthat which sparks some friction in its giving,\r\nand thereby's not too slickly conquered.\r\n\r\nBETTY\r\nIndeed, he is a great contrarian,\r\nand takes it as his pleasure to be opposed.\r\n\r\nRUSH\r\nAnd yet he'll answer you point by point in argument,\r\nbroadsword aside his million rapiers how you will.\r\n\r\n[RUSH hands PAINE something for the experiment.]\r\n\r\nBETTY  [Aside.]\r\nI'll give his wits a trial, and spot out\r\nthe color of his cholor with my brightness.\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nThank you, Rush. There. Now we must wait a minute.\r\nNow, what were we discussing?\r\n\r\nBETTY\r\nWhy men must make war on their common sense.\r\n\r\nRUSH\r\nLike that soused Davy Rittenhouse who failed to perfect\r\nhis skyward-aching inch of telescope from his couch?\r\n\r\nBETTY\r\nHis Orrery accomplished the opposite,\r\ndowning downy heaven to the ground.\r\n\r\nRUSH\r\nYou can peer at the Plieades from a squatted perch\r\nand still reach pleadless your two finger's-worth.\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nSay, rather, that he and I raise man into his sphere,\r\nand there see celestial fire. For man's all vision,\r\na heavenly eye widowed to the earth,\r\nan interplanetary planetarium of one.\r\n\r\nBETTY\r\nAnd what of India, Mr. Paine, what vision operates\r\nto manacle that subcontinent in so white a vise?\r\n\r\nRUSH\r\nEveryone knows that its simply appalling over there,\r\nall lice and infection, and worse, and more;\r\nthis sick world itself has how many untreated sores.\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nLet's get black Sam in on this one: Sam!\r\nSamuel Lemuel, alert, arrive, at once, speed,\r\nhoist aboard, hop up, jump the gun, jam with us,\r\nspike the volley man, and get your ass in here!\r\n\r\n[SAMUEL enters, stands in solemn silence by the door.]\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nListen.\r\n\r\nBETTY\r\nAgain, what do you think of the British errancy\r\nin India, Mr. Paine? Is it an experiment\r\nin increased slavery-efficiency, the turn\r\nof mankind on man, a lesson in whips\r\nand a pungent moral on productivity,\r\nsprung all awry and a-wrong, or is it a thing\r\nmore simply evil in its derivations?\r\n\r\n\r\nRUSH\r\nThey really do clobber those people over there\r\nsomething awful; the stories that pour from there.\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nIs it really much worse than the charmless oppression\r\na moody husband may in law dagger upon his wife?\r\n\r\nRUSH\r\nThe white Rajah last month put twenty men to death\r\nfor disappointing his wife at her afternoon tea-taking.\r\nThe relatives of the dead men were hard-put\r\nto pay their burial fees, since before killing them\r\nthe white Raj had fined each man the sum total\r\nof his back wages to purchase the repair of his wife's\r\n\"injured tranquility.\" Can you imagine?\r\n\r\nBETTY\r\nDon't have to, quite obviously.\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nNo more barbarous analog of man's inhumanity to man\r\ndo I know to shout about.\r\n\r\nBETTY\r\nIs it the worst I've heard, or felt on my flinching skin?\r\nI couldn't honestly say.\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nTo honestly say: it's such a treasure.\r\n\r\nBETTY\r\nWifely obeying, sisterly sashaying,\r\nis there not to be more of me than the female means\r\nto some redoubtable, spouting male end?\r\n\r\nRUSH\r\nSin, sin; to so self-slay and self-say so.\r\n\r\nBETTY\r\nAnd yet I'll still be the one to cook up\r\nthe skunking gunpowder at home, so you wild boys\r\ncan be out and shooting off your guns. Hmmm.\r\n\r\nRUSH\r\nWhy don't you write it up, Paine? Put out plainly\r\nwhy American and Britain should part ways?\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nPerhaps I'll start. I foresee a day\r\nwhen the tripartite freedoms of 1), America from Britain,\r\n2) blacks from the whites, and 3) women from\r\nthe scourging and scouring positions, will occur.\r\nA good day. Let's purge the scourged. Why can't\r\nthe spastic rest of humanity see as me, and know\r\nthe limitation on the freedom of one consciousness\r\nclaps chains about the rest? Severe delimitations\r\nof the honey of one-one-one-i-oneness. Why the output\r\nof every nation would double on the morrow\r\nif every slave hand and female back could see\r\nan honorable profit in their own actions,\r\nain't that plain?\r\n\r\nRUSH\r\nSounds like common sense to me.\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nCommon Sense. A good, solid Scot's title.\r\n\r\nBETTY\r\nYou're an alarmist. Always shouting wolf\r\nwhen most folks don't feel that bad off.\r\nIt's a comfort-level thing, and not much else.\r\nThis tissue of issues tears to nothing\r\nwhen pressed to the pins of daily affairs.\r\nThis talk and bluster, what's it ever accomplished?\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nThen let's be precipitate! I'll call all the hail\r\naghast from heaven onto our current crop of snotty\r\nnot-problems, and crush the grain until all's level!\r\nAn Alarmist? Yes, I like it. Alaruum!!\r\nUnshell the clarion bells in carillion tones,\r\neach note echo-honing on its brother tone-- oh ho\r\nwhat a mastery of symphony would America then be!\r\n\r\n\r\nBETTY\r\nYou want to be under the thumb screaming bloody\r\nmurder awhile, then you'll see-- most folks, well,\r\nif they're not in hell with you, they don't\r\ngive a damn. When you're in a coma long enough\r\nyou get inured to the hurt. Worse thing you can do,\r\nsometimes, is raise the hopes of the injured.\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nWell, Samuel, you've been silent as Pylades\r\nand cool as a Pharaoh;\r\nywhat's your take on this?\r\n\r\nSAMUEL\r\nSeem Mis Betty got de view o' de oppressed.\r\n\r\nRUSH\r\nTrue enough.\r\n\r\nSAMUEL\r\nAin't no easy thing living out in dese times\r\ngots everything of yourself shackled to another\r\nhis words switching you every way which and back\r\nrunning your life around an' no respite\r\nno water-break on dem dere hot backbreakin' days.\r\nOver your own shoulder go your eyes, instead of front,\r\nto see what the future got in store for you\r\nat the mad hands of another, no wife-hands there,\r\nno chil' touchin' a knee you can keep, no folks\r\nor other love-thought guiding the master's hand\r\nor tempering dat man's any act; damn no humanity in dem things\r\ngot all twisted about some who-knows-how!\r\nYour eyes all lookin' and no sass passable\r\nout ov your mouth no matter: damn, the things I give\r\njest ta say my mind right out once afore I died.\r\n\r\n[PAINE has been busily re-doing the experiment.\r\nA loud blast, fire and light stains him.]\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nRush, our hypothesis is uncannily and without con, confirmed!\r\nWe've got the unlocking formula for cheap gunpowder\r\nsifted from shelf-available ingedients! O pretty Betty\r\nand damned Samuel-- you'll run free and rack the world with cries\r\nof all-ecsatic exultation unassailed soon enough!\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>SCENE FIVE<\/h2>\n<pre>\r\n\r\n[PAINE sits composing Common Sense. He is drinking steadily.]\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nA searing halo-scab crusts my forehead;\r\nI do not know how to make my imaginings real.\r\nNot God, but my own luminous mind has brought me here,\r\na shuttle of empty light over tar-dark waters.\r\nHow intemperate is this life's little tempest that\r\nconvulses the scarring rictus of my neighbors' hearts?\r\nI paddled the black Atlantic on my sheer wings to say the one\r\nright word that will flame this marsh-gas bay\r\nof waiting rebellion into the manifesting Heaven\r\n    my vivifying vision begets.\r\nDestruction and creation are chopped from but one block:\r\nthe diamond iceberg of imagination is my worker's pick\r\nI pick and choose with, editing the mired files of reality.\r\nIt chimes and rings against-- against I know not what, but yet\r\nit rings-- oh-- it is against itself it rings the hardest,\r\nchimes and rings with a futile fury, as if\r\nit burned light to so strike itself and be thus made\r\nilluminable. And I am a charitable, black matchstick demon\r\nchained to the whirling mill-wheel of this work,\r\nstriking and striking in the blinding brightness of the Pit.\r\nOh, well, I know not how well I am, or yet\r\nhow well I may be; there's a soapy hope, shall I grab it\r\nmerely to have it slither from my gripping?\r\nEach hour's a blinked link in Life's gold chain:\r\nwe demand our days be daisies and link them in vain.\r\nEvery boiling colony seethes hissing against the king;\r\nhis trans-Atlantic scepter rusts in the salt distance.\r\nWild opinion everywhere is corrosive against this tyranny,\r\nthis thing mouthing royal order and tradition\r\nagainst a fraying wind. So this is how my magic mist of Liberty\r\nbegins its insinuations: in the libelous acid-bath\r\nof naysaying complaint. Well, you never know what\r\nyou want until, like a baby denied its nipple,\r\nits tickled from you. Sore feet pay the cobbler, as they say.\r\nHow will the common people my Common Sense ingest?\r\nHistory has its tides, yet I'll surf the crest\r\non my hand-made revolution for the masses, by the mass!\r\nI'll be the first to print what they niggling feel\r\nand reduce all loyalty from monarch madness to sane\r\nthemselves--- as infinite human potentiality, nothing less.\r\nHunched in my prision of skin, how insanely rips\r\nmy ineluctable spirit towards its transcendence!\r\nA free bird will shread its wings against a cage,\r\nno matter how golden. Men will in one blood-thumped second\r\ndestroy the finest system of governance devised on earth\r\nin all her generations to get back a single whiskey-lick\r\nof the uninhibited Liberty they had tasted heretofore.\r\nOne reckless pulse, and all the noble past\r\n            is pushed to the stinking heap!\r\nDesire is infinite; possibility is finite;\r\nbut the true, determining actions of men that shape\r\ntheir crowded cowed lives hived striving together,\r\neven to the half-done mark half as well\r\nas a lazy anthill's improvisational organization\r\nare few, few indeed-- and sparely placed in history.\r\nThis is my minute to push the wisp toward incandescence,\r\nmy arriving fire's the one to transmute rebellion's bonfires\r\ninto individual Liberty's multifarious candleabra,\r\nthe thousand stabs of light burned true out of today's\r\ninflammable haystack of discontented \"maybes.\"\r\n\r\n[PAINE pulls a quill from an inkpot.]\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nCome, my feather, and fan the damning flame,\r\nwe're fallen angels all and still squeak at the light\r\nlike deluded bats in our hopeless caverns: fly,\r\nmy feather, on hopeful airs and the destruction's\r\ndaring updraft, on into the sun of reason, a winning Darius\r\nfuelled by his whipping ambitions from light to light.\r\nBelow us, all the old monarchy's fluxed in immolating ruin;\r\nabove, the reasonable sun draws us on until as sweet mists\r\nwe rise to his imperishable realm: a radient and radical\r\nfarmfield of high Enlightenments. Flock to freedom,\r\nmy angel minions, or perish dully all in hesitation's flames.\r\n  [PAINE begins to write.] I write in light!\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>ACT II<\/h2>\n<pre>\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>SCENE SIX<\/h2>\n<pre>\r\n\r\n[Before a tavern. Enter three idiots.]\r\n\r\nJOHNATHAN PLOUGHBOY\r\n These are suspicious times.\r\n\r\nTIM RIDDLE\r\n Then it were well to suspect everything, and keep a watch-out.\r\n\r\nJOHNATHAN PLOUGHBOY\r\n And our civic duty too.\r\n\r\nDICK CIVIC\r\n And if you keep a watch out, you shall find the time to\r\n be roundly burgled. Watches are rare jewels in a poor place.\r\n\r\nTIM RIDDLE\r\n Well, then, how else to find out the time we're in?\r\n\r\nDICK CIVIC\r\n And if we're suspicious, we can deduct it.\r\n\r\nJOHNATHAN PLOUGHBOY\r\n Well, it is night plainly enough.\r\n\r\nTIM RIDDLE\r\n Know you by the dark, or by the lack of daylight?\r\n\r\nJOHNATHAN PLOUGHBOY\r\n Why, by the lack of daylight, for there's many seasons\r\n for it to be dark in.\r\n\r\nDICK CIVIC\r\n Ay, my wife will put me to 'em oft and oft.\r\n\r\nTIM RIDDLE\r\n It's tyrannous tough to be a bride's thing.\r\n\r\nDICK CIVIC\r\n If the bride have a thing, I would suspect myself,\r\n and think me no true man.\r\n\r\nJOHNATHAN PLOUGHBOY\r\n Then what if you give her a thing?\r\n\r\nDICK CIVIC\r\n Why then I would respect her under near examination, and\r\n have no more doings with her, if a divorce could not\r\n settle the peace between us.\r\n\r\nTIM RIDDLE\r\n Absence then would keep the peace.\r\n\r\nDICK CIVIC\r\n And a peaceful piece is a pretty peace.\r\n\r\nJOHNATHAN PLOUGHBOY\r\n And the maids will be warring their skirts over their heads again\r\n to get out the piece.\r\n\r\nTIM RIDDLE\r\n [Looking around.] This is someplace hereabouts.\r\n\r\nJOHNATHAN PLOUGHBOY\r\n It behooves us to entrance it-- if it is a tavern.\r\n\r\nDICK CIVIC\r\n I have some reading. I shall spy out the sign, if I see any.\r\n\r\nJOHNATHAN PLOUGHBOY\r\n Spying is a bad offense, unless it be plain.\r\n\r\nDICK CIVIC\r\n Then, if it be a plain sign, without marks, I shall spy out\r\n if I shall read of it, or no.\r\n\r\n[PATRON exits.]\r\n\r\nPATRON\r\n[Sings drunkenly.]\r\n    Lib-bert-ty tib-bert-ty tree!\r\n    Lads of Athens, faithful be\r\n    to thyself\r\n            and Mystery!\r\n    All the rest is perjury.\r\n    Lib-bert-ty tib-bert-ty tree!\r\n\r\nTIM RIDDLE\r\n Well, is he a spy or no?\r\n\r\nJOHNATHAN PLOUGHBOY\r\n I see he is a plain man with nothing to doubt him above\r\n the average.\r\n\r\nTIM RIDDLE\r\n Are you well-knowing of it?\r\n\r\nJOHNATHAN PLOUGHBOY\r\n Ay, he is enough like me to leave no assurance. And I am as\r\n plain a man as never took note.\r\n\r\nDICK CIVIC\r\n Well, then, if he is as plain a man as you, I shall attempt\r\n a reading of him.\r\n\r\nTIM RIDDLE\r\n As long as there is no sorcery about your business. I am\r\n from Salem.\r\n\r\nDICK CIVIC\r\n My business has no beginning to source it, sirrah. Not even\r\n a passim Salem.\r\n\r\nTIM RIDDLE\r\n Well, and he was as drunk as a skunk, was he not?\r\n\r\nJOHNATHAN PLOUGHBOY\r\n A plain drunkard, as I ought to know who owns a mirror.\r\n\r\nDICK CIVIC\r\n I revelation that he was drunk, sirrah.\r\n\r\nTIM RIDDLE\r\n And what think you well of that?\r\n\r\nDICK CIVIC\r\n Well....\r\n\r\nJOHNATHAN PLOUGHBOY\r\n Well...!\r\n\r\nDICK CIVIC\r\n Well....\r\n\r\nTIM RIDDLE\r\n Come, sir, what think you well of it in all these wells?\r\n\r\nDICK CIVIC\r\n Well... I think it be as plain a sign as any that we're\r\n come to a tavern.\r\n\r\nJOHNATHAN PLOUGHBOY\r\n Oh, well then, let's make a boldly into it, and mark an\r\n entrance where he did come out-of-doors.\r\n\r\nTIM RIDDLE\r\n Come; let's subtly then.\r\n\r\n[They enter. A RECUITMENT OFFICER is signing men up for the war.]\r\n\r\nDICK CIVIC\r\n What are all these men a-standing about and signing?\r\n\r\nTIM RIDDLE\r\n It is a signal that I am suspicious.\r\n\r\nJOHNATHAN PLOUGHBOY\r\n Ay, then let's sniff slowly.\r\n\r\nDICK CIVIC\r\n I for one had rather not smell.\r\n\r\nTIM RIDDLE\r\n Then nose about without breathing.\r\n\r\nDICK CIVIC\r\n And thus sufficate? I had rather smell myself.\r\n\r\nJOHNATHAN PLOUGHBOY\r\n No you wouldn't.\r\n\r\nAMERICAN RECRUITER\r\n Why do you men stand in such amazement?\r\n\r\nJOHNATHAN PLOUGHBOY\r\n Why, because we've found ourselves in a maze, and cannot\r\n wend about of it.\r\n\r\nTIM RIDDLE\r\n As long as there is beer, I shall bear it.\r\n\r\nDICK CIVIC\r\n Ay, in your gullet.\r\n\r\n\r\nTIM RIDDLE\r\n As long as my money holds out my arm shall hold out too.\r\n\r\nDICK CIVIC\r\n Ay, and a mug at the end of it.\r\n\r\nJOHNATHAN PLOUGHBOY\r\n And your gullet too; pouting out fat and burpish.\r\n\r\nAMERICAN RECRUITER\r\nAre you men ignorant?\r\n\r\nJOHNATHAN PLOUGHBOY\r\n I suspect.\r\n\r\nAMERICAN RECRUITER\r\nAre you ignorant of the news that the Continental Congress has\r\npassed a resolution for independence?\r\n\r\nJOHNATHAN PLOUGHBOY\r\n If I am, they have kept it independent of myself, and assorted\r\n their cause of independence right well.\r\n\r\nAMERICAN RECRUITER\r\nThere's a maze in such a speech.\r\n\r\nDICK CIVIC\r\n Ay, true said, friend.\r\n\r\nAMERICAN RECRUITER\r\nAccording to the resolution, we are now to be no more of England,\r\nbut only of ourselves.\r\n\r\nJOHNATHAN PLOUGHBOY\r\n And if I am not myself, I am as Englished as any that\r\n never spoke a true tongue.\r\n\r\nAMERICAN RECRUITER\r\nWell, then. Have you read the Common Sense by Tom Paine?\r\n\r\nDICK CIVIC\r\n Say yes.\r\n\r\nJOHNATHAN PLOUGHBOY\r\n Yes.\r\n\r\nAMERICAN RECRUITER\r\nThen you know he makes the case plain to every faculty,\r\nthat we should be a separate peoples, and that the king\r\nis no more than a brute beast to oppose us.\r\n\r\nJOHNATHAN PLOUGHBOY\r\n The king a brute beast?\r\n\r\nAMERICAN RECRUITER\r\nAy, and tyrannous. And that we have the power to form a\r\nbetter self-governance than his could ever be. And that we\r\nhave the power to make the world over again in our lifetimes,\r\nif we but put our shoulders to it and follow our hearts\r\nand hopes.\r\n\r\nJOHNATHAN PLOUGHBOY\r\n Then, if the King rule us, we are no governors, and lack a rule.\r\n\r\nTIM RIDDLE\r\n Why, that's plain anarchy.\r\n\r\nJOHNATHAN PLOUGHBOY\r\n And if we would run about under that, it were a dark day.\r\n\r\nDICK CIVIC\r\n Ay. And no light to see a tavern by.\r\n\r\nJOHNATHAN PLOUGHBOY\r\n But I see one plain. Or what else do I spy?\r\n\r\nAMERICAN RECRUITER\r\nYour friends are in some confusion....\r\n\r\nJOHNATHAN PLOUGHBOY\r\n Ai me! Then it is anarchy come down among us from on high,\r\n as they say.\r\n\r\nTIM RIDDLE\r\n It is the crucible of God's will.\r\n\r\nDICK CIVIC\r\n Very plain, very plain.\r\n\r\nJOHNATHAN PLOUGHBOY\r\n Then we must be governors at once, and no delay for light\r\n to see ourselves by in suspiction, lest the time fly by.\r\n\r\nTIM RIDDLE\r\n That's a truism.\r\n\r\nJOHNATHAN PLOUGHBOY\r\n And a friendly one to lead me on. [To RECRUITER:] Say,\r\n if I sign this, is governance back among us all?\r\n\r\nAMERICAN RECRUITER\r\nWe shall fight for it to be so.\r\n\r\nDICK CIVIC\r\n And blood shall be spilt in the contest?\r\n\r\nAMERICAN RECRUITER\r\nAy, or else it were no fight.\r\n\r\nJOHNATHAN PLOUGHBOY\r\n And all this is Common Sense?\r\n\r\nAMERICAN RECRUITER\r\nVery common.\r\n\r\nDICK CIVIC\r\n Oh. If you read this thing, friend, your eyes are traitors.\r\n\r\nJOHNATHAN PLOUGHBOY\r\n For certain a traitor.\r\n\r\nTIM RIDDLE\r\n Ay, it's very plain, very plain.\r\n\r\nJOHNATHAN PLOUGHBOY\r\n And did I say I read this?\r\n\r\nTIM RIDDLE\r\n Ay, you did, and with no little prompting of friendship.\r\n\r\nJOHNATHAN PLOUGHBOY\r\n And if my friend lead me on to traitor my eyes, shall\r\n the rest of me be anathema?\r\n\r\nDICK CIVIC\r\n Ay, very much so. And if you are anathema, you are\r\n no friend of mine to my nose to stick out stinking so.\r\n\r\nJOHNATHAN PLOUGHBOY\r\n Oh, and if I am no friend of yours, I am no traitor,\r\n since then no friend did lead me on to read this\r\n Common Sense.\r\n\r\nTIM RIDDLE\r\n There's the king's man!\r\n\r\nJOHNATHAN PLOUGHBOY\r\n And none no more so loyal as I.\r\n\r\nDICK CIVIC\r\n Then are we ready to look down at your papers and\r\n sign up, sirrah, being no eyeing traitors, but that we\r\n give out an equal naying to all.\r\n\r\nAMERICAN RECRUITER\r\n Here's quill and ink.\r\n\r\nJOHNATHAN PLOUGHBOY\r\n But yet hold off. And if I sign this, what shall I be?\r\n\r\nAMERICAN RECRUITER\r\n From your loudness, I'll put you down as an ordinance officer.\r\n\r\nJOHNATHAN PLOUGHBOY\r\n And if the ordinance be of a great enough caliber to keep\r\n the peace easily, I shall be a peace officer too.\r\n\r\nTIM RIDDLE\r\n Only if it break the peace.\r\n\r\nJOHNATHAN PLOUGHBOY\r\n Ay, truism enough. And then either way I shall be an officer,\r\n which I was in England.\r\n\r\nDICK CIVIC\r\n And that's as sure a truism as ever I heard, or they all be false.\r\n\r\nJOHNATHAN PLOUGHBOY\r\n Let them all be false, these truisms, so long as that mine is true.\r\n\r\nTIM RIDDLE\r\n And if it's true, your shooting will go well.\r\n\r\nDICK CIVIC\r\n If it makes others go astray, it shall.\r\n\r\nJOHNATHAN PLOUGHBOY\r\n Truism enough, friend.\r\n\r\nTIM RIDDLE\r\n [To RECRUITER:] And what shall I be in the lists?\r\n\r\nAMERICAN RECRUITER\r\nA dead man, most likely.\r\n\r\nDICK CIVIC\r\n You're a true enough large caliber target to get killed.\r\n\r\nTIM RIDDLE\r\n And as long as I count as two hits, I will be satisfied\r\n to have played a bigger part than most.\r\n\r\nJOHNATHAN PLOUGHBOY\r\n That you do already, friend.\r\n\r\nDICK CIVIC\r\n And if I witness such purgation, I shall be happy.\r\n\r\nTIM RIDDLE\r\n And I too, if I should live to see my death.\r\n\r\nJOHNATHAN PLOUGHBOY\r\n God save you! And if you should chance to see it not,\r\n I'll report it to you in the hereafter.\r\n\r\nTIM RIDDLE\r\n Slow your oath! If God saves me, we shall miss each other\r\n in damnation.\r\n\r\nJOHNATHAN PLOUGHBOY\r\n Ay, I had forgot that. And I would not miss you for all\r\n the world.\r\n\r\nDICK CIVIC\r\n If you miss him, you are no ordinance man at a shot.\r\n\r\nTIM RIDDLE\r\n True.\r\n\r\nJOHNATHAN PLOUGHBOY\r\n And if I am true, I am an ordinance man; so I shall not\r\n miss you, friend, on either the field of battle here or\r\n hereafter; and if I am an ordinance man, then I am a peace\r\n officer again as well, and serve the King by example what\r\n my loyalty is.\r\n\r\nAMERICAN RECRUITER\r\n Ay, all that, if you sign here.\r\n\r\nJOHNATHAN PLOUGHBOY\r\n And then we should be back among the English by your scheme?\r\n\r\nAMERICAN RECRUITER\r\nYes. And many a man better than you.\r\n\r\nJOHNATHAN PLOUGHBOY\r\n Why, there is no better Englishman than myself, God save the\r\n King, sign me up.\r\n\r\nAMERICAN RECRUITER\r\n Sign you up, sir. Can you make your mark?\r\n\r\nJOHNATHAN PLOUGHBOY\r\n And if I was not as loyal an Englishman as the King, I could\r\n sign my name as well in any language, mark me.\r\n\r\nAMERICAN RECRUITER [Offering paper.]\r\n Here then.\r\n\r\nJOHNATHAN PLOUGHBOY\r\n And will I serve the King a good turn, if I assign this?\r\n\r\nAMERICAN RECRUITER\r\n Ay, if you disturb his sleep enough to give him a turn.\r\n But truly, sir, you can do the King's service no better\r\n service than to remove yourself from his.\r\n\r\nJOHNATHAN PLOUGHBOY\r\n And I will be among English again, if I go my name here?\r\n\r\nAMERICAN RECRUITER\r\n Ay, I have said so. You'll be thick among the thick.\r\n\r\nTIM RIDDLE\r\n And what was our aim among 'em?\r\n\r\nAMERICAN RECRUITER\r\n Why, if it's a right good aim, to rid the land of them all\r\n by death or expulsion.\r\n\r\nTIM RIDDLE\r\n Back to England?\r\n\r\nAMERICAN RECRUITER\r\n Ay, or hell.\r\n\r\nTIM RIDDLE\r\n Oh, well then, you were a constable in Exeter, were ye not?\r\n\r\nJOHNATHAN PLOUGHBOY\r\n Ay.\r\n\r\nTIM RIDDLE\r\n And you will be back among the pushers to Exeter then.\r\n\r\nJOHNATHAN PLOUGHBOY\r\n Oh, and I will be at the front of the pushers, policing\r\n my fellow Englishmen back to district, as was my wont at home.\r\n Oh, now, if this is my duty again, sign me up, and God save\r\n the foundation!\r\n\r\nDICK CIVIC\r\n And I might be a legal spy, among the Englands, with no threat\r\n of the interminable?\r\n\r\nAMERICAN RECRUITER\r\n If we end this conversation, and you all sign, there is\r\n no more interminable thing on earth that has ended.\r\n\r\nDICK CIVIC\r\n I see your meaning hidden plain. Sign me up too, Johnathan.\r\n\r\nTIM RIDDLE\r\n Ay, me too. I cannot mark to write, whether I will or no,\r\n so mark me-- I am as loyally suspect as either of you two!\r\n\r\nALL:\r\n God save the King!\r\n\r\n[They sign.]\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>SCENE SEVEN<\/h2>\n<pre>\r\n\r\n[At General Howe's Long Island Headquarters. The three man\r\ntroop escort in this scene are the same three new recruits\r\nfrom previous scene.]\r\n\r\nPRESCOTT\r\nAt Bunker Hill and Breed's demoralizing debacle\r\nwe showed his highness' ass-men something of our toughness.\r\n\r\nFRANKLIN\r\nBut we were defeated!\r\n\r\nADAMS\r\nI'd sell them a thousand such hills, such defeats,\r\nif they paid such a price for each overweening tiptop.\r\n\r\nPRESCOTT\r\nWe wouldn't crouch and scat at the first smacking.\r\n\r\nFRANKLIN\r\nIndeed. We hissed a something spectacular\r\nfrom the advantage of our barricades. While we held them.\r\n\r\nADAMS\r\nAnd now we are off to the foul Howe dispatched\r\nby the snatching patch-work of Congress\r\nambastardored to sew our mini-victories\r\ninto this truce-rag of defeat. We come to combine\r\nour bilious biles in one puke of peace,\r\nnothing more. It's foul, I say.\r\n\r\nFRANKLIN\r\nThen be the watchdog, Adams, and, if things issue foully,\r\nlick back up such peace to its initial indigestion.\r\n\r\nADAMS\r\nIf I must, I shall.\r\n\r\nFRANKLIN\r\nTom Paine put a pretty piece of the populace\r\nbehind our designs with his invective.\r\n\r\nPRESCOTT\r\nMy brother signed up the moment he finished his first\r\nread-through of Tom's lopsided Common Sense.\r\n\r\nADAMS\r\nI have offered my corrections to his ill-digested ideas\r\nas Publius Civis; there's no way we can live with\r\nhis spastic democratic demands.\r\n\r\nPRESCOTT\r\nAnd yet, without him, we'd be almost armyless.\r\nI can't tell you the crowd of talk his\r\npamphlet shouted out of hiding.\r\n\r\nFRANKLIN\r\nAnd such a groundswell re-geared the keel\r\nof our Continential Congress, Adams.\r\nYou know it. The July Fourth resolution for\r\nindependence would never have passed without\r\nthat tippling inch of doing pressure\r\nundoing our tentative members' insecurities.\r\n\r\nADAMS\r\nYes, yes. The man's a genius demagogue;\r\nI'm just glad he's on our side.\r\n\r\nFRANKLIN\r\nAnd now we have a real war on our hands.\r\n\r\nPRESCOTT\r\nSpeaking of which, I don't like the way\r\nour sullen Sullivan came limping back captured\r\nfrom our host Howe's enemy camp so fat and feted,\r\nlegging it to Philly all hot and ready\r\nto pant a peace and plant upon our honors\r\na king's kiss.\r\n\r\nFRANKLIN\r\nWe're well to walk here warily, inching our steps.\r\nIt's certain no compelling king, in his habit of command,\r\never gave his executing general his full mind\r\nsince time and kings began.\r\n\r\nADAMS\r\nYou step into my argument like a trace-horse, Franklin,\r\nand make my meaning race at double-speed. Let's circuit\r\nour commission to its finishing here and now\r\nand decide against Howe's howsoever persuasions\r\nbefore he licks us nickering to a different ribbon.\r\nTo whatever he says, we'll be Yankee stags,\r\nand bray all nays.\r\n\r\nPRESCOTT\r\nYea, I say, if ye'll have me\r\nstamping after your quick fetlocks, Mr. Adams.\r\n\r\nFRANKLIN\r\nToo fast, too fast! My coursers, discourse!\r\nOften has a score of words done more good than blood.\r\n\r\n[Inside Howe's Headquarters, as a servent lets the Americans in.]\r\n\r\nHOWE\r\nBunker Hill was not worth the blood that muddied it,\r\nall with sour redcoats harshly sauced. We're alone\r\non a continent of able axes anxious to hack at us.\r\nOur detatched detatchment runs too ruinous a progress\r\nagainst the tartness of their muskets' invective;\r\nforce of arms, so detatched, is too gruesome a prospect\r\nto assure our royal appetite's respite. Where's dinner?\r\nThese cordial colonials who served us comeuppance\r\nin the cups of our own heads are coming mustered now\r\nto my marooned house in strategic Long Island,\r\nstepping to the drum-tap I command. With a swelled sweetness\r\nwill I greet them, and with honeyed words defeat them.\r\nThere's enough lush fat in this America to go round!\r\nTake the damned lamb off its twisting spit at once, Pierre!\r\nWe'll throw these rough-housing, somber blue boys a tax break\r\nand mate them back to the hungry bum of our loving monarch:\r\na king's kiss! God save the king!\r\n\r\n[HOWE toasts. Party enters.]\r\n\r\nFRANKLIN\r\nWe had some difficulty in finding you.\r\n\r\nHOWE\r\nOld grievances are like old shoes\r\nand make every new step painful.\r\n\r\nADAMS\r\nWe'd gladly give you the royal boot\r\nso you would only be forced to paddle back\r\nto England, and not march on to war.\r\n\r\nHOWE\r\nYour tongue's too sharp-- upon my soul!\r\n\r\nADAMS\r\nDo not make it slash practice upon your heart\r\nor you shall bleed for it.\r\n\r\nHOWE\r\nCome, let's to dinner, and bury our hatchets\r\nin some four-footed meat. This Paine of yours, with his\r\nCommon Sense, prates like another Pericles,\r\nbut instead of honorable union with his King, his tears\r\nand tearing protestations rip a fetidness from fertile fields\r\nand from the bludgeoned dead of cold Concord\r\ndraws out in dark and dusk the musky fungus Discord,\r\nand lets set florescing the million attendant lichens\r\nof intolerable Democracy. Surely such a scheme\r\nset rotting in so pure and wide a garden as America\r\nis anathema to gentlemen such as yourself.\r\n\r\nADAMS\r\nDemocracy's a mob in a garish coat of laws\r\nso patched and pinched with imperfections\r\nthe crazy wind of Anarchy will chill its wearer\r\nto the bone.\r\n\r\nHOWE\r\nThere's the fellow!\r\n\r\nFRANKLIN\r\nNot all of us are of a color to tinge\r\nour constitutional formulation to his solution.\r\n\r\nHOWE\r\nThere's the fellow! So, know from me\r\nthat the King shall all his purse of taxes\r\npour back out upon these shifting shores\r\nand leave to the discretion of yourselves\r\nall nattering money matters in the future.\r\n\r\nPRESCOTT\r\nSo Sullivan said, who jogged to jar\r\nall our apprehensions with your words.\r\n\r\nHOWE\r\nIf Parliament permits, of all this I can assure you.\r\n\r\nFRANKLIN\r\nThat smacks of a start.\r\n\r\nADAMS\r\nIf the King is willing to resign in principle\r\nhis sovereign right to tax without consent....\r\n\r\nHOWE\r\nIn principle? Never; how could he lose those rights\r\nthat God and all law's precepts align to grant him?\r\nBut he shall relent in the unspecified interregnum\r\nand let your novus ordo seclorum play alone\r\nalong these shores' as-yet-untested serrations.\r\n\r\nFRANKLIN\r\nLet's taste more.\r\n\r\nHOWE\r\nHere's another slice: but re-swear your royal loyalties\r\nto crown and England as we down this swish of wine--\r\nand all the rebels shall stand with a pealing repeal\r\nof soveraign pardon upon their clamoring crimes.\r\n\r\nADAMS\r\nCome you here with the power to pardon?\r\nSo you may say. But you are wrong. You have not that power.\r\nHe who can pardon can only pardon one who has\r\nby erupting interruption of some hallowed right\r\ndone some wasteful wrong. Since we did give no such offense\r\nyour presumptive pardon lacks its puissance.\r\n\r\nHOWE\r\nNot swear back again to the King?\r\nHow then could you be his loyal subjects?\r\nHow then could the fraternal breach be healed?\r\nWhat other budding buss should be our business\r\nif not that?\r\n\r\nADAMS\r\nAnd should we swear our allegiances to this King\r\nand against our sacred Liberties? I think that each\r\nman-jack among us would rather die today and be free.\r\n\r\nFRANKLIN\r\nOur enduring liberty is to live and be\r\nself-deciding, self-governing, and free.\r\n\r\nHOWE\r\nThe King himself is now more royally aware\r\nof all your colonial gripes and groanings;\r\nshould he now go deaf to them? But trust his majesty!\r\nHe feels your pain.\r\n\r\nADAMS\r\nShould the mugged man trust the cut-purse?\r\nOne who then, to palliate the offense\r\npromises to pardon those he has offended?\r\nOnly the drug-addict and his pusher continue\r\nin mutual love when all basis for trust is cut.\r\nI'm not so high on the purled word Sovereignty\r\nto muster up my trust for absent kings\r\nabsent the gravest assurances.\r\n\r\nHOWE\r\nGrave assurances shall we all have in eternity\r\nif we four cannot conduct a living peace\r\nto this entreating table tonight.\r\n\r\nFRANKLIN\r\nYet you yourself declared your guarentees\r\nprovisional to Parliament's approbation.\r\n\r\nHOWE\r\nHow could it be otherwise? I own not a man of them.\r\nThey are free to vote their conciences before the King.\r\n\r\nFRANKLIN\r\nYou see my point then.\r\n\r\nADAMS\r\nThey vote freely, and with free voices,\r\nwhile we are bound in a virtual reality.\r\n\r\nHOWE\r\nBut they shall approve at home what I do say\r\nin the field; I know it. I know they will.\r\nI have the King's consent in this, and his voice\r\nshall over-master their static, if they profess any.\r\n\r\nADAMS\r\nOne voice is no voice if it rules others to silence,\r\nbut is itself rather a sort of pestilent silence,\r\nchoking all.\r\n\r\nHOWE\r\nBut the King is the State.\r\n\r\nFRANKLIN\r\nIf that state is a desert.\r\n\r\nHOWE\r\nI am a man of worth, and a worthy gentleman;\r\nmy voice will float upon the controversy of these waters\r\nand oil to a calmness the place of Parliament--\r\nMy voice and impress shall not there be ignored.\r\nMercy or annihilation is mine to procure.\r\n\r\nADAMS\r\nAnd yet, you have no power to say the last.\r\n\r\nHOWE\r\nDash it! I am an honorable gentleman! And that\r\nis enough; or else there is no England for you\r\nto spurn or rejoin.\r\n\r\nPRESCOTT\r\nAny who would consent to these bribing bids\r\nloves not himself, and deserves not his Liberty.\r\n\r\nHOWE\r\nLet your rebellious feet leave my premises\r\nand walk alienate from soveriegn sod forevermore\r\nif you are all of a mind to decline this overture.\r\n\r\nADAMS\r\nMy Liberty is not so cheap as your threats.\r\n\r\nFRANKLIN\r\nNor is mine available at the price of your promises.\r\n\r\nHOWE\r\n  [To an aide-de-camp.]\r\nI hereby proclaim a general amnesty to all\r\nAmerican troops; post it on every tree.\r\nAny who would come in to us, bring in,\r\nand in they shall dart, back to the royal right;\r\noh they'll come, and at a run, to the fraternity\r\nthey had so unbrotherly abandoned.\r\nAnd you shall all be hung on the yardarm\r\nlike damned pirates, without so much dignity\r\nas a peasant who expires in the dirt. Get out.\r\n\r\nADAMS\r\nCome. We'll pull ourselves away.\r\n\r\n[They exit.]\r\n\r\nPRESCOTT\r\nHowe's amnesty could scuttle all our hopes,\r\nand leave us with not a man at the yawning gunwales\r\nof our ship of state.\r\n\r\nFRANKLIN\r\nOught we to have been so obdurate, Adams?\r\nPerhaps our perversities will scurvy us\r\non these ominous high seas of independency.\r\n\r\nADAMS\r\nOur fruits at least shall be of our own growing\r\nand not vined tentacle-like from glum London's\r\nemcumbering Parliamentary hothouse garden.\r\n\r\nFRANKLIN\r\nWe'll go forward then, and not froward.\r\n\r\nPRESCOTT\r\nDamned be any backward hand now.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>SCENE EIGHT<\/h2>\n<pre>\r\n\r\n[By a campfire.]\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nI sit here, in seared hearing of this bleak defeat\r\nof stormed Fort Washington across the bleary Hudson,\r\ntapping out my day's thoughts atop a resting drumhead\r\nwith my slim measure of ink and brain. There's England,\r\narterially red, pulsing well against our held position,\r\ncrashing in on our cornered troops. Gate's smashed;\r\nthe flimsey picket fence is overrun with stumblers and others.\r\nMy ambling hands stain with this useless soot of words\r\nwhile those patriots gore the earth with blood.\r\nDid certain sniping words of mine send out\r\ncertain men the English shot? I've nibbed my quiet quill\r\nto loud killing, and redden my shameful papers\r\nwith unlucky deaths, haphazard as a rash of dotted i's.\r\nIts what I wanted, non? And yet: to win is all.\r\nTo half-carry our half-escape hunchbacked into raw dawn\r\nand not to win by our hard-bearing turtle-crawl\r\nI count a sin against myself that I cannot grave\r\nin any shape of peace. We must win. We must.\r\nHow to do it, though? That's the fucking crux---\r\nand my dreams all harshly in my lumpen throat\r\ncry me quiet until I wake unworlded, and quite wordless.\r\nHow much harder will it be for us to win free?\r\nI follow my boyhood dream of liberty like a beir\r\nfrom funeral to funeral.... How long til it's my own?\r\nOur boys tumble in the grass with graceless playlessness\r\nand speed toward the imagined safety of the dark.\r\nWe haven't the boats to nip across the uneven Hudson\r\nand tuck our losing men back into New Jersey's nighttime.\r\nAs thin and blue a line as my retreating vein\r\nscatters from the hazard of the onslaught, a blood splotch\r\nof advancing redcoats; all green's blotched black\r\nin the firelight's withering fritter of light.\r\nTiny legs, tiny arms, tiny, silent screams\r\nthat only roar back awake in my rearing dreams.\r\nWhat deserveless death is coming to those humble ones?\r\nAll the hard hopes I had stitched together in a gale\r\nto reach these unimpeachably peachy shores\r\nare forced apart oh so easily in the deadly breeze.\r\nI watch these snows thunder silence upon the dead.\r\n\r\n[A BOY enters.]\r\n\r\nBOY\r\nSir, Genr'l Washington's requestin' your presence\r\nrespectf'lly next time he hits a camp in the sticks.\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nThat'll be Hackensack or some such.\r\nDanke, boy.\r\n\r\nBOY\r\nDanke? What's that?\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nGerman for \"Thank You.\" Something to say\r\nwhen the Hessians overrun our frail position,\r\nour wickedly thin picketline of foundling blood.\r\nNot your own, I hope, of course.\r\n\r\nBOY\r\nNor you neither, sir. [Pause.] With respect, sir....\r\n\r\nPAINE  [Thinking.]\r\nYes? You still here? What is it?\r\n\r\nBOY\r\nAm I dismissed, sir? I think I gotta drum retreat.\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nHmm. Yes. [Hands BOY the drum.] Scat!\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>SCENE NINE<\/h2>\n<pre>\r\n\r\n[At WASHINGTON's tent.]\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nToday I shall wowingly reimagine my swatted world\r\nand its crookedly connived constitution with truth's force;\r\ndivinity, with a little human imagination,\r\ncan get the job done. These are the times....\r\nI shall orate an augerful of frothing truth\r\nand not swallow back a word while I live!\r\nThis dirty tent, thrashed in the back-sizzle of new hail,\r\ntied frozen down in these grimy woods,\r\nhere's a place to lay sweet newness on the earth,\r\ninaugurate a heart to the swift weird will of one,\r\nhere's a place, an altar of activity to actively\r\nannounce my grown-tough truth, a fabled place, perhaps,\r\nwhere future disaster or glory laps at circumstance\r\nand sheer human will overturns all the tides that meet!\r\nHa ha! I in my mock coracle-cockle will toss the turbulence\r\nin my humanly mouthed direction on towards perfection,\r\nand not drop dropsey-sick into the old worm trails\r\nthat so lovingly lattice the past with irking defeats,\r\nthe benighted unlightedness of my predecessors.\r\nWhat have they ever lived to light their way to\r\nbesides death and the present tyranny?\r\nThis present tyranny and trumpeting injustice that makes me\r\ncurl curdled against it and call to the remote sky:\r\nI must! I must! Can Justice exist when all are not free\r\nto imagine it into some hammered shape of perfection?\r\nCome rain, come storm, come snow,\r\n   withering blizzard or puffing drift,\r\n      I see the forecasted crests' shapes\r\nand do not spurn my own straightness of purpose!\r\nI'll knock at the tent-- and may that tent let me enter!\r\n   [Crowing:] I've come! I've come! I've come!\r\n\r\nWASHINGTON  [Waking up.]\r\nIn God's name, who the hell is that!?!!\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nTis I, in the blaming name of no God but my own:\r\nThomas Paine. I was sent for, and adjudged the cause,\r\nand, having backhanded the winter that would stop me,\r\nI have arrived.\r\n\r\nWASHINGTON\r\nOut of the rocks themselves, it would seem.\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nOut of the furious snow storm, certainly.\r\n\r\nWASHINGTON\r\nSir, you have arrived with the chill swiftness of a ghost\r\nswirled from the white nightmares of my dead sleep.\r\nEven this midnight entrance brings my writhing mind\r\nto the one thing, one problem constant as a drumbeat:\r\ndesertion. My ranks are as thin as Franklin's pate\r\nand as hungry as if he had sucked up all their suppers.\r\nGeneral Hamilton corralled his men on Boston Commons\r\nand harangued them in a shaming speech to ask 'em\r\nif they'd extend their rebel enlistments by a stretch\r\nof even four days forward from the new year nearly here,\r\nand not one in four stepped forward. A general amnesty now\r\nwould unman us down to zero. I thank the Deity\r\nthat Howe had lied to Adams and them on Long Island;\r\nour cause could not survive his generosity today.\r\nThis is our first hard year of winter, man,\r\nand is like to be our last. Our cause\r\nin bloody abortion stands, and the restless snows\r\nare cherried with our deaths. Exhaustion cannot rest,\r\nbut churns on harrassing dreams even in ditched sleep.\r\nWe cannot win. We must not lose. What brave words\r\ndo you bring to one so confused?\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nThat liberty is no ghost, genr'l, but our only reality;\r\nas alive as the men and women that imagine it.\r\n\r\nWASHINGTON\r\nAs fiery as your pamphlets, Paine.\r\nI wonder, are you as soon burnt when tossed\r\ninto the crossways rash heat of war's crucifying fire?\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nThe test! The test! My tongue itself's a flame\r\nand my heart smoulders knowingly enough aghast against\r\ncold England's distant injustice, heart-pressed\r\nby the eager evil of those Tory lords\r\nto our honest American breasts, jammed\r\nby that pampered tyrant rattle-ranting\r\nfrom his damned castle to pull our pitch\r\nof mutual coalition back into the spastic Atlantic.\r\n\r\n\r\nWASHINGTON\r\nThis damned seige of defeat has the men down\r\nand near drowned. They won't take it, and it's\r\nhit them hard in the balls, by God.\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nSelf-slavery will hit them harder.\r\n\r\nWASHINGTON\r\nWell, if the troops could be fed upon long letters,\r\nI would believe we have the best commissary on earth.\r\nUntil that time....\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nIf they live long enough to take their ease\r\nafter a beating defeat by the Despot\r\n(those who don't go hanged, or bang-banged by a squad),\r\nthey will live to sire enslaved great-grandsons\r\non an English fiefdom, a Parliamentary playground\r\ncarouselling their dear ideals into bright, shining lies.\r\nThey'll mint their new mine of liberties to cuffs\r\nand not coins of free exchange for their inheritors.\r\n\r\nWASHINGTON\r\nIt's hard watching your soldiers starve.\r\nNursed in the pilgrim night by three generations'\r\ncrazy liberation, I don't think they're ready to back out\r\nblackened in the eye and soul by imperial men.\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nI'd hope no man so backward and willful\r\nagainst his own golden chance. This hour'll\r\nnot come round again in our winding down, Washington.\r\nThis glad hour must be held aloud and told on every wind\r\nor die soundless as a tear in a velvet coffin.\r\n\r\nWASHINGTON\r\nStill have to shoot 'em if they go south on you,\r\ncan't have commiseration turn to dissolution,\r\nshoot 'em in the back if they won't turn round and take it;\r\ndamned hard to take, giving out the orders for that,\r\nand their own blood frozen on their broken feet,\r\n      swaddled in scraps, feet looking like bloody babies,\r\nboth the feet of them that get shot, and those\r\nthat do the shootin'. Nothing good in any of it.\r\nCan't even bury the ones you shoot, really, pile ice\r\nover the snow, call any whiteness sticking up ice\r\nand hope you're not in the same place same situation come spring.\r\nThere was one we near buried just today,\r\n        how young was his soft-seeming face\r\nturned brutal-hard. I looked down at him, the neutral shovel\r\nsplashed the lime like powdered light upon him,\r\ndown on his face, down his shoulders, and on down.\r\nLittle hope and great heartache. And the Brits\r\nsit in fine fettle, fat Hessians eating Christmas goose\r\nand other potables denied us in this war.\r\nStings, hurts; too tough to tell of,\r\n      even to speak a word, in some ways.\r\nWar's not for honor. Little accomplishment, vain days\r\nblizzarded against us. No gentleness left in nature\r\nor ourselves....\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nNo gentleness....\r\n\r\nWASHINGTON\r\nSo, you're the demented Brit who gloveless shoved\r\nthe demos-rabble toeward towards sabre-rattling self-\r\nemancipation. So, what do you think of the present situation?\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nMy divine mind, in uncluttered creation of itself,\r\nfollowed out the currents of the current, royal knot\r\nand proceeded by hard thought to daringly undo\r\neach weave-waver of the fiber that I could\r\nback to the looming first pluck and spool\r\nof their dreaded threads, the initial conditions\r\nthat made tyranny the inextricable inexorable\r\ntangle of that spun thread's outcome; primary causes\r\nand first principles alone I allowed my by-myself mind\r\nto trace, fingeringly unravel and sinlessly unstitch.\r\nLet us begin as I myself had started: since the king\r\nis as cipher-zero without his thousands of subjects\r\n(and since my ton of words is a weightless nullness\r\nin his Highness' lead-adapted ear, a nothing of disgruntlement)\r\nI interviewed those who knew of their self-soveriegnty.\r\nAnd in this I came to the native wildness\r\nof individual Liberty, the unsold self we each\r\nreach into the create a god or nod to a soveriegn,\r\nor rebellingly unleash a quicksilver rain of disdain\r\non these things that had kited over us\r\nin the temporary high-wind of our self-ignorance!\r\nThe clowning crown has clasped these freedoms to crow\r\na know-nothingness of impressive feats and feasts\r\nand dangling fates down the echo-alleyway of tin-eared history:\r\nhere a man is pinned to a rickety stick\r\non Golgotha, there a Spartacus rises whip-angry\r\nagainst a reviled slaver's salveless hand.\r\nIn the caved-in carved tomb of our own commonwealth\r\nthere is glorious evidence and incident enough\r\nto black the tides with ink of their telling.\r\nBut these secret histories of freedom's shouts\r\nI'll not relate beneath your tent tonight.\r\nTo those others who knew it not, I reminded them\r\nthat they are born free and only sell themselves\r\ninto the ruined pool of subjugation by their actions:\r\nthe daily prayers to resign their wills to a blank diety,\r\nthe dread repeat of illegal laws obeyed, and not examined,\r\nlike a stupid boy camp-following a dumb drum\r\nfor its deaf, mesmerizing beat, and not because he knows\r\nthe red fields of timeless agony he's entering.\r\nBy these simple repetitions a life is lived---\r\nand if it makes me spit my charming heart\r\nlike a ravaged, bloody flag upon the nation-stick\r\nof my invective pen...\r\nwell, then, that's the least I could do,\r\nmoved to make a human sound at all I see and feel.\r\n\r\nWASHINGTON\r\nYou know, don't you, that I never toasted\r\n\"King and Country\" after I had read\r\nyour damnable scribble?\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nA sound decision. Redounds unbounded to your\r\ninevitable credit as a freethinker, Genr'l.\r\n\r\nWASHINGTON\r\nOh, things redound to me from all directions,\r\nMr. Paine. Hundreds of things come cannon-balling my way\r\ndaily. It's a fell acre of hell out there. Fell indeed.\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nYour Americans need you, Washington.\r\n\r\nWASHINGTON\r\nMy Americans! Fuck, I need a drink. The rum, Tom.\r\nTo splash my unbelieving eyes with horrored sights\r\nand tear out my clear hearing with death-sighs\r\nseems this war's only purpose. I swear\r\nthis retreat eats out our hearts before the Brits\r\ncan shoot them out of our chest, via the spine.\r\nTo all tyrants' demise!\r\n\r\n[They drink.]\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nTyrant and subject, master and slave....\r\nWASHINGTON\r\nMaster and slave are the old world's vaunted divisions.\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nA vision of divisivness! Old blind-maid Fate!\r\nSuch a damned dumb mummery, an antique peep show\r\nunfit for the finer feelings of mankind.\r\nWhy would I rape my innocent innards simply\r\nto be declared, by my own owned slave, the winner?\r\n\r\nWASHINGTON\r\nA thin satisfaction for an enslaved brain, I agree.\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nWhere's the meat for a heaving heart\r\nin that withered domninion?\r\n\r\nWASHINGTON\r\nI don't know. I don't know. It seems\r\nan unreal disease to me, a Macbeth infliction,\r\ngoing to bed on empty ambitions to awake in nightmare.\r\nIts a dirty world, and Hackensack is the center of it.\r\nNow it seems, at least. But you are a fine man\r\nwith a pen, Paine. You're Common Sense united a nation,\r\nnamed it, gave it a sense of itself, etc., etc.\r\nCan you turn the trick again on my demoralized boys?\r\nThey'd like a vigorous victory, a proud hour\r\nupon the field of honor, but if we took on England\r\nfull force to force in coercing battle, we'd be down and out\r\nin a minute, bayonetted embarrasingly back to colonial status.\r\nThis retreat through New Jersey has been a heartbreak\r\nto every barefoot dogface shivering with us.\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nI'd love to, but I'm plumb out of rum.\r\n\r\nWASHINGTON\r\n  [Opening a trunk, pulling out a bottle of rum.]\r\nSit your cockney ass down and have a few;\r\nwe'll warm the warning ink over the fire here.\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nI always keep a juicy pouch in my crotch-pocket;\r\nif it freezes down there, I'd just as soon\r\nsnap off my whole career as a pen-man, monseuier.\r\n\r\nWASHINGTON\r\nHave another.\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nTo the survival of the ideal in the real.\r\n\r\nWASHINGTON\r\nWhat can we do for each other but get dunking drunk?\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nFabius, baby, the best of life is but inebriation.\r\n\r\nWASHINGTON\r\nYou know, don't you, that after I read Common Sense\r\nI could no longer toast 'Long live the King?'\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nGo to bed, Washington, go to bed.\r\nYour head's in a rum sack, and my heart's\r\nfar too tense-excited to beat asleep now anyway.\r\nI'll write, I'll write, and give these fragments of a dream\r\nhard words. Let no tyrant sleep tonight\r\nbut that some oppressed slave\r\ngoes by his bed breathing nightmares\r\nupon his naked neck. Open wide your restless eye,\r\nfor I shall be a scampering Scavola, I swear,\r\nwith a rib-tickler of heart-stopping razor words.\r\n[Pause.]\r\n\r\nWASHINGTON  [Dead drunk.]\r\nI'm going to bed.\r\n\r\nPAINE  [Also drunk.]\r\nMaster and slave, master and slave,\r\nwhat ideals are these that I, I Tom Paine,\r\ngive my rewinding, revolutionary mind\r\na flickering minute's undecided pause?\r\nOh, I'll do it as an exercise for my right mind,\r\nto think on the world as I wouldn't want it,\r\nas it really is without our devout success:\r\nall sliced into that dicotomy of master and slave,\r\nsaved and burned, trashed and polished, sweet\r\nand sour... heh heh. That'll clear my brain\r\nfor the real theme free selves, even stuffed in slave-skins,\r\ntragic masks of forced labor wearing gulag scalplocks,\r\nget crucified on the high wire of history for: Liberty.\r\nIf I were a wailing slave, a murderer and a bum,\r\nwhat would my outlook look like? I'd sing:\r\n\r\nI trod to prison on burning feet\r\nAccompanied both before and back\r\nBy squadroned angels in heaven's black\r\nReceding into the abject divine;\r\nThey ferry souls upon their backs;\r\nI was trussed against the horizon's line\r\nBut had no captors I that could see\r\nBut my squad of angels to accompany me.\r\nI am John Brown and will not come down;\r\nCold murder of the one or the all.\r\n   Spartacus defied when hard men called\r\n   And deified more angels than God.\r\n\r\nMy hands were bound in threads of blood;\r\nI struggled against harsh cordage once\r\nAnd was blinded by a golden hood.\r\nMy guilt has come and gone many times\r\nAs I recalled or forgot my crimes,---\r\nYet all about me I feel the wings\r\nOf my locust angels on everything.\r\n\r\nThe Executioner flips his lash\r\nIn mockery of innocence:\r\nIrrational murder has made him\r\nOne with the common tide\r\nRaising his spade with the bladed wave\r\nThat falls to his own side;\r\nBy every blue, angelic face he may erase,\r\nBy every thought he kills, he's less.\r\nI am dead but still can chant\r\nAll a passing artist's passions out:\r\nInterior echo of the outward shout.\r\n   Spartacus defied when hard men called\r\n   And crucified more angels than God.\r\n\r\nAre my grim limbs, hanging inverted here,\r\nAbove the midnight chrurchyard's grave\r\nAbove all that ghostly-priestly rant and rave\r\nAll exalted sacrifice has won\r\nAll ecstatic triumph has known?\r\nAll scatters backwards madness-chased\r\nInto a rolling blizzard-ball;\r\nInsect angels surround my ground\r\nAnd their wailing wings buzz-sing:\r\nWhore or chaste, the world's laid waste\r\n\r\n Come kill the one or the All.\r\n\r\nThese are the times....\r\n\r\n[PAINE begins writing.]\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>SCENE TEN<\/h2>\n<pre>\r\n\r\n[At the tent the next morning.]\r\n\r\nWASHINGTON\r\nIn God's name, Paine, get your fucking ass out of bed!\r\n\r\n[WASHINGTON kicks  PAINE in the head.]\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nIn God's name, never. On my own account, well,\r\nI'm still too curious to see how the sun goes round\r\nto not get up. I suppose.\r\n\r\nWASHINGTON\r\nHmm. That was one fuck of a twister\r\nwe had on ourselves last night. Hmm.\r\nGot your damned words?\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nYes, yes. They're all here. I'll need\r\na windless spot where I can be tender\r\nwith the stiff sheets, though, the midnight ink\r\nfroze on the pages before it could dry right.\r\n\r\nWASHINGTON\r\nStand in the shadow of my horse's ass.\r\nThat should almost be cover enough. The men\r\nare trembling assembled in the field outside.\r\nGod, what a poxy lot! Yet I need more\r\nof their innocent number if we're to remain\r\nfree in theory, and grasping after the fact.\r\nWipe your sandy eyes and read, Tom.\r\n\r\nPAINE  [Reading.]\r\n<\/pre>\n<p>\n&#8220;These are the times that try men&#8217;s souls. The summer soldier and the<br \/>\nsunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his<br \/>\ncountry; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks<br \/>\nof man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have<br \/>\nthis consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious<br \/>\nthe triumph. What we obtain too cheaply, we esteem too lightly: &#8216;Tis dearness<br \/>\nonly that gives everything its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price<br \/>\nupon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as<br \/>\nFreedom should not be highly rated.&#8221;\n<\/p>\n<pre>\r\nTROOPS  [Singing, sort of.]\r\n    Rum and water for old Tom Paine,\r\n    With rum and water he'll save our ass again;\r\n    The angels he'll entreat\r\n    To parliament and debate---\r\n    Convinced they don't exist,\r\n    They'll dissipate for shame!!\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nI am a glorious boy and spiral where I will,\r\ngiving ground to none on history's high dunghill.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>EPILOGUE<\/h2>\n<pre>\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>SCENE ELEVEN<\/h2>\n<pre>\r\n\r\n[Seven years later. PAINE and WASHINGTON are on a small skiff\r\nat Rocky Hill, testing the waters there for marsh gas.]\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nFart in the jar, George.\r\n\r\nWASHINGTON\r\nThomas, hand me the fucking wine.\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nWe only have champaign; you know that.\r\n\r\n[There is a loud, resounding sound.]\r\n\r\nWASHINGTON\r\nThis patriotic celebration is costing us a fortune.\r\n\r\nPAINE  [Hurrying, knocking  WASHINGTON out of the way.]\r\nCap it! Cap it! We'll have to seal this with wax\r\nas soon as we paddle back, duck and stroke home\r\nto test the gas' composition and capacity.\r\n\r\nWASHINGTON\r\nYes, Tom, yes. By all means, immortalize my farts.\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nAh, George, can you really believe its all over?\r\n\r\nWASHINGTON\r\nOh, I can. I can.\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nWhat's next then for our interminable freedoms,\r\nour unfinished zip to achieve and be?\r\nWhat new-foliaged laurel shall we yearn\r\nto pursue, where will our dragonfly likes alight?\r\nWhat driven-down or under-rated item\r\nshall we ressurrect to its original worth and virtue\r\nas we have the Roman Civitas regained,\r\nregained and raised to a serious, religious,\r\nreal and human highness?\r\nWASHINGTON\r\nGood God, Tom, do you really need a cause\r\nbeyond the simple one of peace? Look around--\r\nour continent and countrymen are at liberty;\r\nwe do as we choose in loose co-mutuality. Ain't that\r\nenough to subdue your rough wishes and manicness?\r\nI could live a thousand years on a simple acre.\r\nAnd if we keep this acre free, I shall.\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nMy future includes a rupture of the ancien regime\r\nand a spectacularly faceted new Republic for France.\r\n\r\nWASHINGTON\r\nI've heard of the stacatto of disturbances\r\nfrom over there. You'll have to be quick.\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nThey themselves have seen our experiment go aright.\r\nThey themselves have helped it come to be.\r\n\r\nWASHINGTON\r\nTheir country's perhaps high-tide high enough to try.\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nThey elevate the meaningful mind\r\nto a fair height.\r\n\r\nWASHINGTON\r\nI believe they might marshall a martial example\r\nfrom the flying bayonet involvement thay had here.\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nLayfette and his flueur-de-lis lisp\r\ntook some narcotic quench of our opiate trip\r\nand trapses to try his new tropes\r\nagainst the Paris galleries' rope.\r\n\r\nWASHINGTON\r\nSalons and sinister men. Old guard Admirals\r\nfin the dry land like sharks there, Tom.\r\nYou be careful.\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nIf I take my naked innocence with me\r\nwho can denude it?\r\nI'll add my optimistically throated note\r\nto their plangent Plantagenet choir.\r\nWe'll uncrown a king\r\nand set a fresh French 'mister' on his feet.\r\n\r\nWASHINGTON\r\nNothing like seeing how unhinged reality really is\r\nto buck up those with a new good thing\r\nto begin to believe in.\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nAmen. [Pause.] And I've an iron bridge design\r\nI'd like to place across the commercial twirl\r\nof a swinish seine over there. Someone may buy into it.\r\n\r\nWASHINGTON\r\nI wish you well with your ungovernable,\r\nfanatic fondness for newfangledness.\r\nHarness it as best ye may.\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nI shall. I think each day somehow\r\nhas a new, untried trueness in store for me,\r\nif I can but strike an aim at its burning center,\r\nrelease myself,\r\nand fly fast enough to the alarming target.\r\n\r\nWASHINGTON\r\nPerhaps your iron bridge will arrow you there.\r\nGood thing we weren't trying to unrivet one\r\nof those things as we retreated from the British!\r\nWe might've lost the war if your ingenuity\r\nhad quicker tempo, Tom.\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nSome new solution for it dissolution\r\nwould've come to dismantling hand at the time.\r\nOf that I haven't the slightest doubt.\r\n\r\nWASHINGTON\r\nNeither the Continental Congress, nor any\r\nprivate subscription among the victors in this contest\r\nhas been ferreted to light to fund you Tom\r\nor underwrite out of sheer gratitude your existence.\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nIt figures. Just as well I'm on my way then.\r\nIn fact, I might construe my dear adieus as overdue.\r\n\r\nWASHINGTON\r\nThis ingratitude of an entire nation, and that\r\nnation my own, and yours, the nation we invented....\r\nwell, it shames me deeply, and I am weak\r\nagainst the shame, dear man.\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nI gave every penny-ounce of my thousands of pounds\r\nearned by my copyrights of Common Sense and the Crisis Papers\r\nto buy wool mittens and good socks for our soldiers.\r\nI don't regret that for a second.\r\n\r\nWASHINGTON\r\nYou gave the cause all. And now they'll let you starve.\r\nIt sheds a low dishonor upon our high enterprise.\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nHistory and latter ages will whip 'em with it.\r\nIngratitude's a monster. And folks love\r\na good monster-show.\r\n\r\nWASHINGTON\r\nIf I catch 'em first, I'll tan their asses\r\nand pick their clicked wallets to the last centavo.\r\nBy my word, Tom, I will.\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nWe'll spat first. After all, I'm a real bastard,\r\ndon't forget.\r\n\r\nWASHINGTON\r\nI will never forget you.  [Pause.]\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nHere I sway, myself a slender reed near under,\r\nassailed by restless visions, atop my mass of swamp\r\nand lurching as much as any church\r\nfrom my crow's nest tip of tippling star-farsightedness;\r\nyet out my mechanical uncertainty I'll fix up\r\na metronome of reform and dance its spectacular minuet\r\nuntil all the thin paper-writ music is trashed\r\nto my stamping, and then revives, recomposed as ashes!\r\nBeyond this midnight miasma, past the trinking taunts\r\nof revellers drunk in their assumptions\r\nor dear friends ready to measure their coffin-acre\r\nof sweet peace and lie quiet down until\r\n(all egregious through torn lips) their skeleton-smiles\r\nappear, I see a certain city arise, arise and assert itself\r\nin the indefinate halo of a final outline\r\namidst this subtle shower of soft-starring sparks.\r\nAmongst the plush pastures of memory, and still\r\nhere in this present dark of work and hope\r\nI see a filiment-winsome construct of pure light arise\r\nand flicker about me over the sussurations of these reeds.\r\nO barbarous clearness in this evening's dark! I see\r\ngreat cities of new men and new women, full of\r\nfree sex, free life, kindnesses, harlots and cymbals!\r\nBut of their dancing souls they have made no whores;\r\nhazeless lightness and two million souls alight and free....\r\nWhen morning's blue minute ticks over me, her hands\r\nfallen gently upon my upward dreaming face,\r\nher few, revolutionary rays tempt me from the haze,\r\nher igniting light reviving the shapes of angels\r\nin sculptured flight, cracked as this faint lake\r\nin the river, whose soft sounds fall lonely and proud\r\non ears so attuned to softness, they seem of stone.\r\nTonight, the Alleghanies sharpen our idea of the sky,\r\nand each unknown height we arise to lifts our expectations\r\nhigher than ever the simple fickle breeze allowed.\r\nWhat pealing vistas now sound me out from core to pore,\r\neach real thing I see sprouts me new inward eyes\r\nto view the renewing of my own blue-black soul!\r\nTonight, newborn and pure, there are angels\r\nin my heart's moist architecture. Hyped\r\non the hypnotic caliber of my ressurrected senses'\r\ninsistence to feel and be free, I spot about\r\nand find myself the solo founding clown\r\nof this: the uninheritable! A dynasty of wishes,\r\nwith each free man or woman their own subaltern of want,\r\nthe maker of their own aching,\r\n              where the capacity to make\r\ntidal-waves above our cloud-shrouded heads unimpeded!\r\nThe sea's free step mingles music with my quick swishes.\r\nI am a pounding Poseidon commanding nothing\r\nbut the high wet wailing of my own hard-held heart,\r\na thing never suspected before in history!\r\nNow, and for the first time (ever!) we arise aroused---\r\nunknown music vibrates in booming theaters of real sound;\r\nour bones flare out in trumpet-expectation. Shall\r\nwe squeal revealed, and arise in no reprise, but first\r\nand then forever, born unchristened and new? Hopes dome\r\na billion glass minarets of spinaretted thinking.\r\nMy tongue injects the sky; each soveriegn tongue\r\ncarols its own beloved self-knowingness into new skies,\r\neach cry an alternate universe electrified to life!\r\nWe walk amazed, with new muds upon us, of new births,\r\nnew daring, new enterprise, new eyes staring to new noons;\r\nforever unsettled in our wish to wish again.\r\n\r\nWASHINGTON\r\nAh, yes, yes, Tom, how could any world deny you\r\nher churn of womb as genesis-crucible\r\nfor such fierce dreaming?\r\nI pray I don't see this infernal globe decompose\r\nto such an eviscerate, infertile dryness, friend.\r\nA few brief, blind sighs bind us to this life;\r\nand oh if those sighs moaned out all meaningless,\r\nhow could I even in this accident be reconciled to live?\r\nMy eyes take leave of their dryness once again;\r\nI'll baptismal your departing hope\r\nwith their wet graces. And now you transfigure\r\neach dark thing with such a harnassed wash\r\nof wanting, Tom. The light, the light!\r\nI am diamond-shot with stardust.\r\nOnly our awkward continent's tough, abrupt newness\r\ncan shove above the watermark as mountain enough\r\nfor the discovering blues of your high-stepping eye.\r\nI myself love the unlevelled tripping of your whim.\r\nI myself feel somewhat more guyed and bouyed\r\ntoward the honeyed fire-frets and fangles of the sky\r\nthan I had been before in my drowsy daze of peace.\r\nYet still, I think, I'll stay here, and if\r\nyour iron bridge steps you to a wider France\r\nwhere armed Liberty in her brightened gown contests\r\nChampagne plains with Kings, and her blooming bubbles\r\nare all of vilest violet blown from bleeding mouths,\r\nas restless then as my self-imposed repose\r\nshall then become, still I'll stay here and endure\r\nan unmourning peace, nor moult a doublet\r\nof fresh eagle feathers for my mounting spirit\r\nbut stay here by my doughty rounded hill\r\nand look up at our old stars\r\nin dewy-new happiness still.\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nLet us harnass our unmarked stars tonight\r\nand rip the quiescent swamp with light,\r\nas we've made this empty outlined nation\r\ntake our chosen colors of the limitless.\r\n\r\nWASHINGTON\r\nTorches aloft!\r\n\r\n[They raise their rasping torches on the quiet set.]\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\n    Liberty Tree, o Liberty Tree\r\n    What ye are ye know well, but oh,\r\n    What ye mean to be!\r\n    Listen, flusterless swans of the swamp!\r\n    Oh hear the tale, hear!\r\n    Never was one so drear,\r\n    Of how all the tyrranical powers,\r\n    Kings, Commons, Lords and sours,\r\n    United on the hour\r\n    And at one stroke\r\n    Had thought to choke\r\n    Our Liberty Tree, our Liberty Tree.\r\n\r\n    But then, and then, hee hee!\r\n    From North to South\r\n    Called the trumpet's mouth\r\n    And when we'd gathered\r\n    With ourselves in a lather\r\n    We united on the hour\r\n    With all of our power\r\n    And far and near\r\n    Conjoined at a cheer\r\n    In defense of our Liberty Tree!\r\n\r\nWASHINGTON\r\nYou do make the worst ditties, Tommy.\r\n\r\nPAINE  [Picking a fight.]\r\nTake your teeth out and say that!\r\n\r\nWASHINGTON\r\nIf I take my teeth out now, it'll be\r\nto keep myself from biting your fool head off.\r\n\r\nPAINE  [Shrugs.]\r\nThe marshlights are coming up\r\nin a uniform blue to the left there. See ye?\r\n\r\nWASHINGTON\r\nI see. A soft spot of color on the eye.\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nLet us conclude the experiment.\r\n\r\nWASHINGTON\r\nWe heave ourselves beyond experience with this!\r\n\r\n[They throw their torches in high arcs that fall in a swale\r\nof light into the soon-blooming swamp. The swamp catches fire.]\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nEverything is illumination in God's suspiring fire.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>THE BEGINNING<\/h2>\n<pre>\r\n\r\n===FIND THE ORIGINAL LINE!!===\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nWASH speaks of death-fears. Paine replys:\r\nThese irrational itchings are as nothing\r\nto my sainted clarity; my clear cerebration\r\nshall not scab its supple greys with superstition.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nPAINE\r\nLike Pericles, I shall not perish from my time\r\nbut live on, an ever-ringing voice of high snap,\r\nregular to the regular folks, a jolt\r\nto those nuzzle-nursed on the old fogy ideas dead-past,\r\naccepted ways batted into raw heads and kept\r\nout of tired habit and petty custom for the sake\r\nof that nappy slap-happy pontifex, Farce.\r\nToday I shall wowingly reimagine my swatted world\r\nand its crookedly connived constitution with truth's force;\r\ndivinity, with a little human imagination,\r\ncan get the job done. I shall dance to my own tough\r\nand jangled, mangling jingle,\r\n              ice skate over the void,\r\nhere in the sweet salt aftermath of creation, my own,\r\nthe sweated spray every individual makes and spades from torpor,\r\nhis own mossy square acre of oceanic freedom.\r\nOnly Poseidon, of the old gods, stood by Prometheus\r\nas I recall, the welter salt spray of water okaying\r\nthe backdraft spread of the englightened flame;\r\nhe saw their realms as mutually imperishable, no doubt,\r\nthe flounce and rash flash of flame no threat\r\nto the underwater underworld wavery haze-vision of Neptune's\r\nmisted mirth, the roly-poly water god girdled\r\nin frowning sea-coral fronds and crowned with a spiked squid\r\npetrified by the old wet man's honor in choosing it\r\nfrom his wonderous habidashery. Ai! Electric eels squeeled\r\nin dry delight at Prometheus, friend of the free--\r\nthey, whose dear god took every shape and sweated ecstatic\r\nup to heaven to weep back down in the ramming rain.\r\nI am wild lightning in those black swells, and a fire\r\non the highlands of this first and best time of men!\r\nThese are the times....\r\nI shall orate an augerful of frothing truth\r\nand not swallow back a word while I live!\r\nThis dirty tent, thrashed in the back-sizzle of new hail,\r\ntied frozen down in these grimy woods,\r\nhere's a place to lay sweet newness on the earth,\r\ninaugurate a heart to the swift weird will of one,\r\nhere's a place, an altar of activity to actively\r\nannounce my grown tough truth, a fabled place, perhaps,\r\nwhere future disaster or glory laps at circumstance\r\nand sheer human will overturns all the tides that meet!\r\nHa ha! I in my mock coracle-cockle will toss the turbulence\r\nin my humanly mouthed direction on towards perfection,\r\nand not drop dropsey-sick into the old worm trails\r\nthat so lovingly lattice the past with irking defeats,\r\nthe benighted unlightedness of my predecessors.\r\nWhat have they ever lived to light their way to\r\nbesides death and the present tyranny?\r\nThis present tyranny and trumpeting injustice that makes me\r\ncurl curdled against it and call to the remote sky:\r\nI must! I must! Can Justice exist when all are not free\r\nto imagine it into some hammered shape of perfection?\r\nCome rain, come storm, come snow,\r\n   withering blizzrd or puffing drift,\r\n      I see the forecasted crests' shapes\r\nand do not spurn my own straightness of purpose!\r\nI'll knock at the tent-- and may that tent let me enter!\r\n   [Crowing:] I've come! I've come! I've come!\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nFROM\r\nSCENE TWO\r\nIf an upright fellow speaks low, why the poor word's\r\ndiscredited and given some high sheen of his\r\nmoral height and more sober quality, against\r\nthe insistence of its syllable; and if a man,\r\na base, a twisted, a poor and lunatic soul\r\nto whom the phasing moon is monitor and mirror\r\nof his unsteady moods and inconstant thoughts,\r\nbacklighting the weird proceedings of his strange eye\r\nturned blank inward on a sick imagination,\r\nif such a man, a vile, distemperate wretch\r\nshould speak in clear ululation, as even\r\nthe reckoning of God on his last Judgement Day\r\n(when all is overtaken by his mystery of mercy)\r\nwould have all men speak, in accents to shame the angels\r\nwith his bright crystal syllables and sweet tricks,\r\nwhy then the very heavens themselves take a taint,\r\na very palpable taint, from his silent loud-spoken\r\nbastardry. His very perfidy will roar him down,\r\nthough he sing a hummingbird to stillness.\r\nNo matter how clean, no matter how absent of evil\r\ngo his words to their intended hearts\r\nthey shall inherit an afterburn all of black\r\nand burnt miming umber umbrage by his stooping use\r\nof those chosen words, and not others, those words\r\nuntil all that was thought fit for tender human ears\r\nis blasted, blocked, confounded, drowned in deaf tones,\r\npoured void upon the incomprehension of the world,\r\nerased from the tight mating poets crave\r\nof sound and sense. The entire penning tenor\r\nof my trial of life is to the language of its use\r\nblameless stranger in this respect, and pleads in tongues\r\na real nearness at the docket of the hours every day,\r\na nice binding of human man and mouth-motion\r\nwhich no other ordination I know of so obdurately requires.\r\n\r\n\r\n<h2><strong>END<\/strong><\/h2>\r\n<\/pre>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A play about the words and deeds of Revolutionary Hero Thomas Paine. GREGG GLORY Text File Web Site &#8220;&#8230;our honored flag&#8230; asks no monarch to support her stars&#8230;.&#8221; &#8212; Philip Freneau, &#8216;On Mr. Paine&#8217;s Rights of Man&#8217; **** Top^ THOMAS PAINE In protestation of his time He found the human mind divine, Found the talk <a href='https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/posts\/the-alarmist\/' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1001002,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1740,1764],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6191","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-plays","category-the-alarmist","category-1740-id","category-1764-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6191","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1001002"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6191"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6191\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7353,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6191\/revisions\/7353"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6191"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6191"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6191"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}