Scene:  [THIS SPACE FOR RENT]

BRIAN:  But, you know what?
BOB:  What?
BRIAN:  It's really all quite sad.
BOB:  What is?
BRIAN:  Watching the USA, now.  Watching it on tv.
BOB:  What do you mean?
BRIAN:  It's kind of like watching the beginnings of the death throws of a glorious empire.

Pause.

BOB:  How do you mean?
BRIAN:  They're so frightened.
BOB:  Yeah, you're right, they are.
BRIAN:  Scared of everything.  Afraid of everybody.
BOB:  They're scared to even look out the front window.  So to speak.  Like terrified shut-ins.
BRIAN:  People from the USA used to say that they loved coming to Canada.
BOB:  They used to say it was so quaint.
BRIAN:  Coming to Canada was like "going back in time."  That's what they used to say.
BOB:  And they were right.
BRIAN:  Coming to Canada was like going back in time, once.  If you came to Canada from the USA.
BOB:  Things were older in Canada.  Technology wasn't as prevalent.
BRIAN:  People were more conservative and British-seeming.  Even in the 1970s.
BOB:  We had a black-and-white tv when I was growing up, in the 1970s.
BRIAN:  The phone system was older, in the country.  There were still party-lines, even in the 1980s.  People in farms didn't have their own phone numbers.  They shared phone numbers, in Canada, in the 1980s, in some areas.
BOB:  But, now....
BRIAN:  Now, Canada has the Internet.
BOB:  So does the USA.
BRIAN:  But Canada has more came connections.  And a lot of these connections are highspeed.  This is while the majority of the places in the USA still use a primitive dial-up service to access the Internet.  They use the phone.
BOB:  I remember a Doonesbury strip that was parodying the slowness of the Internet.  The entire strip was about waiting for one panel of Doonesbury to "load."  I remember reading it, and thinking, "This is only funny if you've got a dial-up."  And then I realized that they still used dial-ups in the USA.  And that seemed to primitive.
BRIAN:  They're switching over, now, to highspeed-- finally.  But highspeed's been all over Canada for years.  The USA is trying to play catch-up.
BOB:  And they don't have Interac.  Not like in Canada.  You still have to use cash in the USA when you buy things.  The majority of stores in Canada have Interac.  That's not the case in the USA.
BRIAN:  Also, Canada has more bank machines.
BOB:  You cannot get access to money in the USA, not as readily as you can in Canada.
BRIAN:  And hydrogen fuel cell technology is being explored and pioneered in Canada.  Far more readily than in the USA.
BOB:  And we still have socialized medicine.  Healthcare is very cheap.
BRIAN:  And we use Metric, not gallons and quarts, not Imperial measurements.
BOB:  And we gave the world Marshall McLuhan.
BRIAN:  "The medium is the message" means more now, in these "Iraq War" days, that it ever has before.
BOB:  So does "the medium is the massage."
BRIAN:  And in a recent poll more and more Canadians claim they don't belong to an organized religion, and lots of even the ones who do belong to an organization don't go to church regularly, or at all.
BOB:  As opposed to the religious reassurance in America.
BRIAN:  Canadians are growing up.  They are thinking for themselves, more.  They don't need "experts" who are ultimately no smarter than the average Joe on the street telling them what to believe.
BOB:  Recently, Canada has come under fire by the USA, again.  This time for having too many freedoms.
BRIAN:  That's so quaint.
BOB:  Going to the USA....
BRIAN:  ....it's like going back in time.

Pause.

BRIAN:  And they still haven't found any "weapons of mass destruction."
BOB:  They found a lot of really ornate, kind of insanely baroque furniture, though.  And one of Hussein's sons had a personal zoo and a bunch of really cheezy pictures of cars and supermodels.
BRIAN:  Yeah.  That's almost as good.
BOB:  And they found some guy, too.
BRIAN:  Who?  They're finding lots of "guys" in Iraq.  'Cept for Chemical Ali.  I guess he's dead, or something.  But there's always Rihab Taha.  They're calling her "Dr. Germ."  I think she's the only woman who warranted a card.
BOB:  The guy I'm talking about is Abu Abbas.
BRIAN:  Oh.  Him.  So what?  He's just a retired Palestinian terrorist.
BOB:  Sure, but he has ties to al-Qaeda.  Or so I hear.  And they found him in Baghdad.
BRIAN:  Yeah, but that doesn't prove anything.
BOB:  The US media is saying that it's proof that Iraq has ties to bin Laden.  After all, he was found in Baghdad.
BRIAN:  Yeah.  Sure.  But by that logic the USA has ties to bin Laden because some of the people who flew the planes into the World Trade Center trained, and were living, in America.  Just because a person is physically present on the soil of a country doesn't mean that country has any "ties" to any other country that the person happens to have "ties" to.
BOB:  Well, it's war logic.
BRIAN:  If Abu Abbas was found shopping for a fishing rod in a mall in Cleveland, does that mean that Cleveland has ties to al-Qaeda?  Stop grasping, people.

Pause.

BRIAN:  The key thing, here, is I think people need something to fear, they love rehearsing their deaths.
BOB:  What do you mean?
BRIAN:  People used to live in fear, all the time.  And then we made civilizations, and religion and science and doctors.  And these things helped keep the fear at bay.
BOB:  Okay.
BRIAN:  But deep down inside we like that fear.  It gives us energy and makes us feel alive.  It gives us an identity because it gives us enemies-- and the simplest, most visceral way to get an identity is to actively hate and fear something.  When you do that you put both yourself and the thing you hate and fear into two tight, little, easily manageable boxes.  And that feels good because it gives you focus.
BOB:  And now that the Iraq thing is calming down and Syria seems like it's going to co-operate with the USA, Bush is still looking at North Korea.
BRIAN:  Well, yeah.  And that enhances the fear.  Because North Korea actually does have "weapons of mass destruction."  It has nukes.
BOB:  Or at least one Nuke.  Maybe two.
BRIAN:  Yeah, and it also has intercontinental missile ability.  It can launch that nuke across the ocean if it wants to.  And that, once again, is fear.  I mean if North Korea decides to lob a nuke into the USA, it will only lob one.  Or maybe two-- if it even has two.  And then North Korea will be turned into a crater by the USA.  But the casualties in the USA will be horrendous, further enhancing the all fear already burbling around in the 'States, and this will radically actualize the identity making potential that fear has-- AND THAT'S TO THE EXTREME, KIDDIES!!!  And, frankly I wouldn't blame the US for spazzing if they got nuked.
BOB:  Actually, North Korea's tech is so crappy their nuke would probably fly off course and, like, land in Moose Jaw or something.
BRIAN:  Well, yeah.  And so I think that Canadians should also sweat a little bit about North Korea, too.  I mean, even if the North Koreans don't mean to blow us up, Canada is still a much bigger target than the USA for a crappy missile guidance system to zero in on....
BOB:  Fortunately, so much of Canada is so deserted if the nuke lands here chances are it'll just vaporize a bunch of elk.
BRIAN:  But, anyway, this is a good example of what I'm talking about.  Fear.  We always have to be afraid of something.  War, SARS, Michael Moore, "evil and terrorism," George Bush, globalization, the left, the right.  We crave fear, and we crave the fear of annihilation.  People want this Iraq war to be a Biblical prophecy, they want the world to end-- or at least they want the end-of-the-world scenario without the actual apocalypse.  They want the world to end and they want to live to tell the tale, because the end of everything energizes them.  And this is because death is kept so far away now people need something to worry about.  Almost nobody died of SARS, almost nobody ever dies.  Chances are tomorrow everyone you know will still be alive.  Chances are also next year everybody you know will be alive.  And ten years from now, ditto.  Or maybe there might be one or two people dead-- maybe.  And when the Americans either killed themselves or the enemy it was always downplayed, or softened, made into entertainment.  We rehearse our deaths over and over and over because we've lost sight of death, we're sheltered from it and so it thrills us, and also because if we get to rehearse our deaths we can die again and again and live to talk about it, later.  We get the best of both words, life and death at once.  And it establishes ties to the past, to a primitive xenophobic past where we could all die at the drop of a hat.  There is no reason for any of us to die, any more.  No reason to wander around declaring war and snuffing each other like a bunch of crusading cavemen.  Not when we've got all these technological resources.  Not when we should be devoting all our time and money to ways to make us immortal-- and I mean really immortal, not the vague and fake immortality that religion offers-- and then finding a way to get off this planet and explore space.  But, in order to do that we'd have to shed all our primitive bullshit beliefs, be they Christian or Muslim or whatever-- or if not shed them rewrite them so they're not a bunch of grunting, exclusionistic, nonprogressive drivel.  Some people are doing this.  But not many.  Because in order to rewrite your beliefs into something worthy of the 21st Century, you have to recognize that most (if not all) belief systems are relative, and then you have to think for yourself and look to tomorrow, not wallow in the comforting blindness and soothing fear of the stone age.

Pause.

BRIAN:  The other day, I heard a noise in the sky and looked up in time to see a huge, black fighter jet swoop down super low over me.  And I thought, "Huh.  Maybe the USA is invading us now?"

Pause.

BOB: Well, this whole little "War Party 2" exercise was rather overlong, tedious and unfocussed.
BRIAN:  Kind of like the war itself.
BOB:  True enough.
BRIAN:  At least I'm steering away from ending this whole thing with the obvious joke.
BOB:  And that is?
BRIAN:  Ahem.  "That's what you get when you've got a country run by a dick, a bush, and a colon...."

Pause.

BRIAN:  Hey, don't look at me.  I didn't make it up.  I just heard it.

Pause.

BRIAN (looking at the ruins around him):  Fuck this garbage.  I'm going home.
 

NEXT:  Walking/Walking/Walking....
 

INTERLUDE.
Epilogue 43f.
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