Someone Should Write This Play

The major political candidates are at a big debate -- the black guy, the woman, the white handsome southerner, the old military hero, the charming preacher/evangelical, the businessman and/or the creepy robotic religious cult member, the old jowly southerner, and the New Yorker. My god! Look at the fucking archetypes! Look at the paradigms! What are missing? I mean - besides proportionate representation? It's the American narrative writ entirely in symbolic faces. The apotheosis of where television has led us. All the candidates aren't "telegenic," they are instead the best that television can produce, with its limited depth, in terms of understanding America.

Anyway, the major politicians are at a big debate. It's like a survivor-type show of course, Road Rules, where some of them have already been sent to the sidelines and are waiting for their chance to come back on the big finale show and say what they really think of each other personally. The remaining candidates eye each other warily. At this point, they're so tired that they can't think of anything to say but the most tired general platitudes. Republicans spit out words that aren't even sentences "Tax and spend!" "Commies!" "Terrorists!" "Traitors!" "The Rights of the Unborn!" Democrats are mostly tired and insincere "We're just taking it one game at a time and the good lord willin', we'll all float in raised boats." "We are family. I've got all my sisters in me." "This campaign is about you."

A chorus, an aria, a real song that mixes baptist gospel with evangelical gospel with christian rock with classical choral music with a little jazz (you know "america's classical music"), about you, the voter, the empowered, the one who this government is by, for and about. "You, you, you" in all the notes and styles on the American topography.

Then the debate keeps getting interrupted by characters from America's past. Famous icons. Unknown laborers. Archetypal images. John Hancock will not stop passing out his autograph. Thomas Jefferson hits on both the woman and the black candidate. Sojourner Truth. Harriet Beecher Stowe. Colonel Chamberlain (that guy from the Civil War; I think his name is Chamberlain?). Franklin Roosevelt. Cary Grant. Emerson. Madison. Edison. Einstein. Everyone. It's a fucking party/orgy/nightmare. We can't tell whether they're real people or just played by actors to appear real to us.

And outside the hall something is killing off the rest of the people in the country. Maybe its a slow plague. Maybe its a big bomb threat. Maybe its starvation. Nothing specific. Whatever it is, its the subject of much hand-wringing and the occasional really good joke. As long as its a good joke. Maybe an actual person wanders through periodically but decides that he'd rather go back outside with the people he knows personally and loves. Even if it means dying, he'd rather be with the real people he experiences everyday. A few of the real people, however, don't make it back out alive. The icons and the politicians rip them apart or eat them or imprison them. Or, some of them, as though bitten by a zombie bug, don suits and turn in to archetypes themselves.

At some point there also has to be a dance number. Probably to Michael jackson's Thriller. led by Michael Jackson himself.