LAOCOÖN
A Graphic Novel
Abstract
The US crack epidemic—hereafter The Crack Wars—marks a nadir in federal efforts to combat illicit drug distribution and consumption that is the War on Drugs. America’s ghettoized urban, suburban and even exurban African-American populations suffered disproportionately under the brutalities of an invigorated coke industry and draconian attempts by their government at prohibition. In 1996, Gary Webb’s San Jose Mercury News series ‘Dark Alliance’ captured national attention charging the CIA with some measure of complicity in the wholesale importing of cocaine (as part of its anti-communist interventions in Latin America), expressly for the industrial production and distribution of crack. This multimedia graphic novel will interrogate, in Rashomon-like manner: popular histories, social geographies, material landscapes, Zen dialectics and autobiographical narrative situated in a psychoanalytic framework, in an effort to offer competitive models against prevailing Crack Wars propaganda for understanding this episode of violently erupting American underworld.
Acts are interwoven throughout the graphic novel. Storylines are coded by stylistic visual cues, e.g. all geography and landscapes are related silently via Augmented Reality linear narrative and accessed via the LifePrint smartphone application.
The Laocoön
A Graphic Novel
FADE IN:
Epilogue:
“...Laocoön, followed by a num’rous crowd,
Ran from the fort, and cried, from far, aloud:
O’ wretched countrymen! What fury reigns?
What more than madness has possess’d your brains?
Think you the Grecians from your coasts are gone?
And are Ulysses’ arts no better known?
This hollow fabric either must inclose,
Within its blind recess, our secret foes;
Or ‘tis an engine rais’d above the town,
T’ o’erlook the walls, and then to batter down.
Somewhat is sure design’d, by fraud or force:
Trust not their presents, nor admit their horse.’
-Virgil Aeneid Book II, 49.
Laocoön, Neptune’s priest by lot that year,
With solemn pomp then sacrific’d a steer;
-Virgil, Aeneid Book II (trans. Dryden, p. 107)
ACT I
MONTAGE - WASHINGTON, D.C. - GEOGRAPHIES, CARTOGRAPHIES, AND TAXONOMIES.
The United States Capitol, cartographic center of the Nation's Capital.
A series of shots of Washington, DC's site plan follows:
Animations highlight the cities labyrinthine network of transportation arteries, highways, roads, bridges, tunnels, rail lines, and even sidewalks appear in a series of shots in order to illustrate the scale and transportation features of capital production in the nation’s capital. It will appear noteworthy, in both individual shots and in juxtaposition to one another, that the city boasts ample roadways, railways, and pedestrian pathway, allowing seemingly unfettered access to a region that offers no visible clues to a major manufacturing industry…
The camera moves quickly for the most part, but at times lingers floridly on the visual relationship between trees and thoroughfare, the cherry blossoms (in bloom or snowing) revealing a riparian geography and the organizing principles of a national capital (e.g. monuments, militarized public space), the gingko, elm and oak offering prodigious canopy to the city’s diverse pedestrians. How do we understand the relationship between this culture and the natural geography of the land?
Washington, DC is the political center of the United States, poetically the center of the universe, and the signification of that power is rote for contemporary Earthlings. Beyond its Federalist, Neoclassical, Classical Egyptian, colonial, modernist and postmodern iconographies, the city is secure. The airspace is guarded, the waterways are narrow, the city’s political heart (the White House and Capital) are surrounded by military and paramilitary installations, themselves serviced in turn by telecommunications, intellectual and cultural infrastructure unique in the history of the world for its thoroughness and coordination. A series of shots of suburban and exurban geographies ancillary to Washington, DC and illustrating the material relationships that make much of the city’s function--as capital city--possible:
Waterways, rivers and Chesapeake Bay leading from the Potomac, up its banks and cliffs to suburban Northern Virginia, and the Pentagon (serviced by the Brasilia-twin ‘Crystal City’)
...the CIA (a languid and rolling visit through bucolic Fairfax to the CIA’s farm) across the Chain Bridge
...and back along two rivers to Ft. McNair, the Navy Yard, Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling, including fire and police training, and the Anacostia neighboring neighborhood
Further along the regions byzantine network of poorly planned roads at breakneck speed to visit almost endless War Memorials Arlington Cemetery, and yet more bases (AFB, Quantico, NSA, etc.)
A pulsing visual rhythm brings road, fortress DC and predominantly black neighborhoods in geographic relation to one another, even the histories of formerly black, Jewish, and marginalized neighborhoods present an opportunity to understand the role alienated and exploited labor plays in generating the surpluses of value that make politics and cultural production at this scale a global reality
The penultimate sequence explores the telecommunications arrays that festoon the District, Maryland, and Virginia, the DMV is splotchy, like some dog suffering mange, with satellite dishes, antenna arrays, and hard wires, fiber optics and related lines in service of its role in cultural production. Deluging shots explore the intersection of telecom and flight paths, the Brooks Brothers suit and the courts, law firms, and regulatory agencies responsible for the dissemination of policy and praxis
A final series of shots reveal the intellectual class enjoys a space produced in part via an architecture that boasts its proximity to the icons of political power, i.e. GWU is blocks from the White House, & Georgetown is across the river from the CIA and Pentagon, there are specialized intellectual spaces illustrated
FADE TO BLACK:
“...timeo Danaos et dona ferentis.'
-Virgil Aeneid Book II, 49
INT. SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS
Reporter Gary Webb, our Laocoön, is working in the hectic bullpen at the San Jose Mercury News, takes a phone call from a woman claiming to understand and able to describe a criminal narcotics conspiracy
GARY/LAOCOÖN
(incredulously, relaxed, lean and sharp)
I did get your earlier messages. Thanks for calling. Yes, I’m Laocoön, a Priest of Poseidon, yes, how can I help?
I sacrificed a bull to please him, and no, I’ve no truck with Athena. Wha? You’re boyfriend’s a pusher? Rafael Cornejo, right, I see? You have proof?! Ok, so the assistant US attorney… NO, not at all, I won an award for that bullshit I wrote about LAPD asset forfeiture profiteering...you read it? Oh, I appreciate that…, yes, so I have some sense of the possibilities of government corruption, especially around cocaine so…
I guess I could do that...the hearing is on the 14th? I look forward to seeing whatever you have sure.
DAWN GARCIA
(brilliant, harried, and in no mood to manage)
Yes, that’s fine Laocoön, interesting really. You scored with that bullshit LAPD was pulling. The Mercury News appreciates your sacrifice. Do this, look into what the Cornejo girlfriend says and see what pans out. If what you’re saying about the US Attorney’s office not pursuing his higher-ups...what’s the name? Blandon? Blan-don? Yeah, follow-up with that, see what’s.. Yeah, I trust you.
GARY/LAOCOÖN
(giddily, at a shared computer terminal at the SJMN and speaking with a colleague)
The World Wide Web is useful! I have been able to identify the key figures of the Nicaraguan cocaine cartel; The key figures of the California cocaine ‘retail’ cartel. I have learned about the Kerry Committee hearings. I have learned the long history of the interventions of US capital in Latin America. I have learned of the long history of cocaine production in Latin American in the context of North American hegemony. I have also learned about the political history of Nicaragua, its relationships with its neighbors and have charted the rise of the authoritarian right in Central America. I have successfully mapped the Nicaraguan oligarchy and perhaps as important, the history of the Nicaraguan underclasses.
CUT TO:
CHORUS
(A timer appears, it is counting down from 15 or perhaps 20 seconds. And the author appears, as if from within the story, brought to bear, in hand, in a mood, as it were and for interrogation and inquiry. )
By what means are we speaking?
Even now, we are discussing a thing that is past. I myself wonder along these lines. How is it that we have found ourselves in dialogue? By what means are you speaking? By what means do I speak? Not even a thought has arisen, is there still a sin, or not. Master Yunmen said, the sin is as big as Mount Sumeru. Why did Master Yunmen say, ‘The sin is as big as Mount Sumeru’?
CUT TO:
EXT. -LINCOLN UNIVERSITY - DAY
Holding court in the center of the campus quad, the camera finds an African-American late adolescent male, a ‘70’s cool cat, afro natural, thin and confident, cigarette insouciant and defying gravity, hanging from his very African lip; he is chatting with a retiring, very wool-colored, young, brilliant, pretty, and athletically shaped woman. Her clothing signifying money and New England, despite her environs, despite her relative swarthiness. She’s announcing to him that she is pregnant.
CUT TO:
EXT. -NEW ENGLAND, SUMMER FIELD NESTLED IN A ROLLING HILLS
She reminds him quietly that she dropped out. That he is less than available for the baby. He looks fantastic in a suit, his tie fly, his defiance of station emblazoned in swagger, and he vows diligence, demands deference due his executive stature, and ability to offer her a middle-class life with options to grow right here in New England. He is absorbed with an identity and imprimatur made available under the auspices of the General Electric company. He is suddenly part of vast social machinery capable of producing power plants for cities as grand as Tokyo, nuclear weapons research and his own work at the bleeding edge of labor relations. Here the black man, resplendent with a retinue of code-switching that speaks to an agrarian south, the post-war shipyards and consumption apparatus of low-New England and its ghettos as well as the psycho-babble laden speech of the late 20th-century denizen of the corporate body politic.
CUT TO:
INT. LIBERTY SAVINGS & LOAN DC - DAY
Her young boy is at work with her. She is almost constantly propositioned. She is disposed so well to the teller task. Her silk dresses, Leggs--the egg-shaped cartons fascinating the child no end, an oblivious, poor boy’s nesting dolls--hair coiffed curly in some mild reference to her nearly illegible blackness and signifying her birthright, a higher station, a space for a nascent intellectual of leisure, an appropriately melancholy bon vivant perhaps, jet-setting on the art of someone clairvoyant enough to know her as sui generis in both form and function. Since leaving the project boy-gone-good in Vermont, that is to say, since deciding the corporate perks of drinking with his boss, and fucking whoever would return the favor, and in spite of Vermont’s cloying ability to generate nostalgia instantly--a beauty so visceral, especially in summer, so diaphanous the air full of blooms, the smells of healthy grasses, bright flowers and the calls of every memorable bird-she’d eschewed the hippy look.
CUT TO:
INT. NIGHT -PHILADELPHIA ROW HOUSE PINOCHLE PARTY
She’d tossed off a good portion of the meek. She found late funk, weed, pinochle and a modicum of the lower-middle class blackness that threw her into high yellow contrast against a more iconic urban and black struggle. There will be Gap Band, Brothers Johnson, Chaka Khan playing, reifying the sense of a newer black individualism. The boy’s mother will be smoking, perhaps rolling, passing a joint. She will be better at cussing than the men here and not likely to cordon herself off among the women. Her cards slap the table with impossible energy and the boy will smile at the feat.
This Woman
(Eyes crackling with math, social maneuvers and aesthetics, bra-less and effortlessly fine, comfortable holding court a bit at the weed seed garnished card table)
Yowza, yowza, yowwwza! That’s my motherfuckin’ trick. Get your nasty hand back and look back at what just happened to you.
(To the sleepy six-year-old peeking from the stairs, decrescendo to a bedtime tone)
Aww, baby, it’s waaay past your bedtime. Why don’t you go get in the bed? I’ll be right up.
(She will look in on him, tenderly, many hours later and oblivious to his insomnia. Speaking to her live-in boyfriend, Roosevelt Watson, chestnut-colored, with a preternaturally warm smile and the black male’s speaking voice for charming)
His father is getting married and has a great job. This is not really an appropriate environment for a six-year-old. And I think I’ve outgrown you, Roe. You’re beautiful, but the Post Office, your boys are already smoking marijuana...No, no...I’m sure.
You’re being so mature about this. End of this month yes.
CUT TO:
EXT. CHICAGO ELEMENTARY SCHOOL ROBERT TAYLOR HOMES - DAY
The boy is bullied. The boy is the color of wool and proper. The boy is very quiet, very observant and always wondering now, why the air, the buildings, the ground-both grass, and stone-are all so grey, so brown, so filthy.
BULLY
(Bully is 25 kids in a YMCA school bus, and then a YMCA pool locker-room, floor dynamic with great and shiny chitin, roaches seemingly active participants in the creation of this reality. Bully is also a brutalist modern elementary school, playground complicity, teacher feigning ignorance of the erupting beauty in her classroom, the minds so eager and stymied by macaroni projects, the pasta also complicit and awaiting adhesion, the apparatuses of industry and transportation all so complicit and the boy somehow suspicious even of the great buildings’ chests pushed up high above the Dan Ryan )
Hambone, hambone have you heard, Momma gonna buy me a mockingbird.
And if that mockingbird don’t sing, Momma gonna buy me a diamond ring.
BOY
(The boy’s mind alive with memories of a mother suddenly missing from his daily life. The hambone rhythm so present, and tempting.)
How do you do that?
BULLY
(Bully is 25 kids in a YMCA school bus now and big and confidently inspired by the work of creative composition, the live audience and a technically sophisticated call-and-response system, here interrupted by the cherubic, outlandishly dressed and pre-pubescent interlocutor)
WHAT'D YOU SAY LITTLE MOTHER FUCKER? I. WILL. FUCK. YOU. UP.
CUT TO:
INT. MIDDLE SCHOOL NY - DAY
The boy is too quiet. Working too hard to fit in. He knows all the answers to all of the questions in each of the classes. The whites are relentlessly ignoring his bright light cast across the faces of his classmates. At home, abandoned by his parents, a mother now free to sniff uptown, sugar daddy coke, proper cocaine, you sniff it in the boutique’s fitting room, all by oneself, if you can afford to SST to Paris, to Rome and shit; a father drunk, and drunk with upper-middle-class access to white power, the boy is ridiculed and chastised and run ragged by his stepmother, no friends in white, blue-collar streets. The boy is suicidal in fifth grade.
BOY
(Boy is 12 or 13 and chubby. He has overdosed on diet pills. He has performed Debbie Harry in the French Au Pair’s make-up, heels, and dress, with the motorcycle jacket, although Steely Dan feels like music written just for him, as if to help him with the mnemonics necessary for indexing abuse, change and those emotions too large and labyrinthine for words. He has learned to fight--and in front of mixed pubescent and pre-pubescent crowds--during a second year spent with the only adults capable (his dad’s parents) of daily meals and laundry for an eight-year-old, just underneath the cut of SouthWest Philly, is undefeated and at times able to call up a demon to conduct martial feats. But his grandpa has reminded him, that his momma doesn’t love him.)
I believe I may have learned to fly. It’s a sort of floating. I hold my breath and become light and focused enough explore the immediate geography under the total cover of this projected self.
They must all realize I am a brilliant boy.
FADE TO BLACK:
ACT II
MONTAGE - NICARAGUA
The Central American nation of Nicaragua. It’s geologic context and geographic realities. The camera travels an Archimedean spiral, animated to illustrate its relations to other Central American states, the Caribbean, South America, y El Norte. A survey of climates, significant waterways, and bodies of water.
Managua juxtaposed against Lima, Bogotá, Tegucigalpa, San Salvador, Mexico City, Miami, Texas, L.A., and San Francisco effectively delineates the path of cocaine from the Global South to a variety of neighborhoods in the US
Agricultural material history is presented via archival and fresh footage of Big Sugar’s pipeline, Big Banana Republics, even the store
GARY/LAOCOÖN
(Innervated, traveling widely and picking up steam in the illustration of a vast criminal, multilateral cold-war proxy conspiracy led by the United States. An unease has however set in as warning after warning from trailblazer reporters and informants hint to Webb that the project fates his doom)
This Contra Counter-Revolutions is some fucking Hydra. In Central America you’ve got all these Somocistas, I mean in Nicaragua, in Tegucigalpa, San Salvador, Guatemala City, wherever, and they’ve handlers, the CIA is running them with the Argentinians...This shit is perfect. They’re responsible for most of their own funding, despite Reagan’s National Security Directive 17 allocating funds to support anti-Communist bullshit in the region, and they’re running guns, medical supplies, light trucks and yeah, fucking coke and its proceeds back and forth.
Wait though, I’m looking at transcripts from all manner of folk detailing graft in-country and more importantly a network that connects Columbian freighters and a crew of frogmen, with former Nicaraguan Guardia button men, and a transportation network through Medellín and Cali cartel controlled airfields, overland routes to Miami, Texas and out to San Francisco and L.A.
This waylaid tennis prodigy, Rick Ross, Freeway Ricky Ross, is the protege of a fucking Somocista. That Somocista, in turn, is indebted to the blind eyes of Federal executive authorities, an alphabet soup of not-giving-a-fuck Reaganites, for the wherewithal-bureaucratic, judicial, paramilitary and military-to engage his indigenous enterprise in a massive transnational drug trade.
And here’s the fuck-ing kicker. The coke, it’s not for your nose any longer. The kids were inhaling that vapor-thank to Peru and a US Congress disinterested in Peruvian suffering that's what? 100 times more addictive and then...crack. What the fuck.
CUT TO:
EXT. THE BLOCK BERG ST. - NIGHT
BOY
(This dude is in his late teens, sporting a Howard University jacket and surrounded by friends, boys and girls, all so confident in the face of the relentless upstate hawk, serving addicts they trickle by on foot, and in cars in the background. The kids’ fashion is precocious, indy, black as fuck and he stands out for his nerdiness. His monologue is intermittently attended by his posse )
Whiling pockets of deposit-insured time away in that urban-grey reverie they’ve allowed the hard, I have considered them, my enemies, and hated each one. Like long ago as a boy in dirty apartments, on streets deserted during the white flights, five to twenty years my senior, leaving ghosts and the hollow sounds of spectral money bags (clickety-clank, boom-bap) there are warped hours to be spent slightly nauseous in the warmth of dusty indoor sunlight. No intent short of something like something offers harbor from the mind suffering cosmic wanderlust. I am heading to NYC for a spell. I will visit the Puerto Rican video store for chocolate Thai. My crew--these fools right here--will represent my well-meaning groove, because they are good guys and my dreams will look like movies do. You seem to be wondering. You look to me a lot like I do when I am myself. You grimy, and weary, in pain, but somehow so very delighted, remind this man, de un país Negro, of the nature of things. So uptown in the video store, I’ve been spotted, and this warmth will lead to a greater cold stepping back out onto the ground of potential with a phat sack of weed, and no movie, but a strong sense of having been made love to. This is a recurring dream, with no end, and in it, I know the emotions synchronous with the absence of sensual affirmation. Not that I care, I’ve a strong back, a big ass, and training from Shaolin’s western chambers, so I don’t need any encouragement. In fact, I’ll be heading downtown soon, after shopping Harlem for more signs that I am black to show the planet that I am black because I am black and not at all willing to go for any okey-doke. I need some black empowerment embroidery to defend the faith. A rosy cross.
“This bitch rockin’ tight pants and her ass looks right for longer than I can remember ever even being that shook by a bitch right?” A pause and then, “so she like looks back and gives me the like, ill half-tooth cheesy right?” His man is all, “...right, right, whahappen’ god?” He comes with this, “so I rolled on her real respectful, like the Don got faith in the moon, and tol’ her she hit me in the chest with a blow I ain’t expect, from Saturn, and I gotta have that, I gotta know you, or I’ma buss.” He breathes and loses a moment to a drunken bass style that tossed the riff and the lyrics to the upbeat, clever enough to grab a baby’s attention for at least five minutes, then he concludes with this, “She grinnin’ through my whole soliloquy, and she steps up to the god, her titties was touchin’ the god’s Avirex, and she pops this shit at me in the middle of lip-syncin’ the lyrics to this ill-ass Ghostface-‘…last week you burnt an old lady’s retina.’ “Papi you got crazy butter in your mouth and you stand strong as men can on days the sun be lovin’ women to browns.” ’-I thought them thick Coke bottle jammies might protect her, but it didn’t Pa, the lady’s blind and it’s all your fault. I went down to jury court and you walked.’ “…And a bitch like the Earth right here could ice the Don’s mind fo’ real, but…” “And I kinda looked off god, but she was all ill with the nails in the torso of the Don, I got like electricity off the kung fu, she was crushin’ me god, she goes, ‘You gotta back down Black, you’re too shiny Sun, and I ain’t interested in nothin’ more than breath and fire.’”’…very expensive championship, shit, Rock’s known for his wedding day. Bitches give you props, look you tie the knot, you got my man popped in the most famous era, like when Paid in Full dropped.’ “..so just watch me Sun, you don’t gotta touch.” The Don and the god-body seem to be very interested in the razor crafted from so much sexuality, and so much violence feigned, and huge badunkadunk hollow sound music. This razor cuts me through to the bone. My bones respond to this club. I don’t really have all that I need to get by. I’ve spoken to women here, and I’ve screwed up my face for effect prior to speaking to men. These men and their roughness are like my need to deny my population of endangered feeling and raw relationships. Plus, I want to connect with some ghetto-booty. Special effects here are larger than my life, or most any life.
I leave New York for work tomorrow, and I need more of DC like… I just don’t. I just don’t know how to provide myself with the same prescience they have in midtown Manhattan, stalking down white boys in full regalia. I got Tim and I can express myself with moments of adequacy in all four elements of hip-hop. You got dirty dishes, you got dirty laundry, you got roaches. And you don’t know shit about money. These are not my enemies. These are not the cadre. They do not launch sorties and try to establish fortified lines.
I walk along, like a marine, on point in Da-Nang. I am nervous. I am afraid to pull out my nine. My completion number remains poised in the ether. If completion is reached, as the numerologists who have been accenting the work of priests since prior to yo’ mommas’ birth in Bedrock try to characterize your years of sagacity, with a nine, and all my real niggas just throw they guns up, and there ain’t Uzis made in Harlem, and you can take ‘em outta the ghetto but you can’t take the ghetto out of them, and every other ironic circle of life in these cities can be found on the horizon that is every potential for contact with another being, then can I be wrong in my aggression? Well, who gives a fuck?
It suddenly becomes important to me to walk with height. I just need to make sure that my level nine contracts become announcements to the entire fucking planet. Like an old nasty poor man in a sandwich board shoe sale sign. He’s just walking up and down Connecticut Avenue, half smiling and looking so much like the enemies of my people. Man, I would that the powers were real for the righteous. I have my walking tall though. I have my screwed-up face. I have my times. I have at least twenty-two dollars and plenty of quarters. Quarters are more important than dollars even. One should carry the twenties and quarters.
I’ll be poking my head in there in about fifteen minutes. I will go to work and I will wash some of this ghetto off my soles with mindful concentration. I will let people know who I can pretend to be, and they will fear me. Slowly, a well-hung Greed greets me at the entrance to my ground zero. I hustle. I reach down deep and do my best James Bond. I start smiling at you the smile of the multitudes and begin to feel like that steely-eyed Afghani woman from National Geographic magazine they started setting up part two of the war on brown folk with. I will demonstrate, the proper verb form, and I will participate in the inane banter and mind-shame that greets you everywhere save a few books, like two movies, and travel to some countries. At this point, .you’ll begin to slow down, stop spinning cogs for the sake of protection, and get caught up. Settling down even further, I will begin to question that bodega green. I will forget Spanish Harlem and my mother’s stay at Sinai-no-quite-across-the-1-1-Oh. I will allow the great wall of my lord and liege Charlie to distract me long enough to lose my juiced hold on the internally constructed maelstrom that has become my representation of god-bodied five percenters, and uniformed six to ten p.m. corner tokers, and those shiny girls-to-broads that you only truly encounter if you live there. I will get lost in the valley. A more shallow chap or one deeper could lead a better fight. I have no idea how to return, and here they are, arranged as in a late model super-hero lineup, ready to rumble on the cover one way, and already in that ass on the splash page, with the nasty, phat, teal-highlighted, grey, eye laser already headed (impossibly omnipotent) for my whole chest out this bitch. Muthafuck, and out this bitch, ample perversion to reference the planet. The greed, and the fear, and the lethargy, and the pain, no not the pain, and the anger, are some big-ass, time-for-some-action assassins. Public enemies, but like, they take this shit real personal. My enemies train ‘round the clock, and I’m zooted. I bought that Thai stick on the outskirts of the galaxy, and flashback for reference, It seems I’ve chosen.
Love? Absolutely, and worshipped perfectly at full potential from the god-like. I am covered in it. I am covered in it. At my next white boy sighting, in full regalia, slowed on the way to get white-boy music from a mega-store, I will offer the following contact:
Recognized, or not, a stream will flow loosely, and with every kind of mud, and rock in it, through my mind to gurgle the sticky slap sounds of I can not know what I do not remember about you.
CUT TO:
CHORUS
(A timer appears, it is counting down from 15 or perhaps 20 seconds. And the author appears, as if from within the story, brought to bear, in hand, in a mood, as it were and for interrogation and inquiry. )
By what means are we speaking?
Even now, we are discussing a thing that is past. I myself wonder along these lines. How is it that we have found ourselves in dialogue? By what means are you speaking? By what means do I speak? Not even a thought has arisen, is there still a sin, or not. Master Yunmen said, the sin is as big as Mount Sumeru. Why did Master Yunmen say, ‘The sin is as big as Mount Sumeru’?
FADE TO BLACK:
ACT III
When, dreadful to behold, from sea we spied
Two serpents, rank’d abreast, the seas divide,
And smoothly sweep along the swelling tide.
Their flaming crests above the waves they show;
Their bellies seem to burn the seas below;
Their speckled tails advance to steer their course,
And on the sounding shore the flying billows force.
And now the strand, and now the plain they held;
Their ardent eyes with bloody streaks were fill’d;
Their nimble tongues they brandish’d as they came,
And lick’d their bissing jaws, that sputter’d flame.
We fled amaz’d; their desn’d way they take,
And to Laocoön and his children make;
And first around the tender boys they wind,
Then with their sharpen’d fangs their limbs and bodies grind.
The wretched father, running to their aid
With pious haste, but vain, they next invade;
Twice round his waist their winding volumes roll’d;
And twice about his gasping throat they fold.
The priest thus doubly chok’d, their crests divide,
And tow’ring o’er his head in triumph ride.
With both his hands he labors at the knots;
HIs holy fillets the blue venom blots;
His roaring fills the flitting air around.
-Virgil, Aeneid Book II (trans. Dryden, p. 107)
CUT TO:
INT. SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS
Webb’s 10,000 word story runs. Cold war ag-trans threats to their production and distribution infrastructure that necessitate a covert war in Central America viz. Nicaraguan coast & interior; TBD; Military-Industrial Ag-Trans intersection viz. Central American airfields; DC/NY, FL/TX airfields [Military-Industrial Ag-Trans] and [Ghettoization-State Transportation] intersection viz. Texas airfield; L.A. Fed Housing; PCH 1; CA-101, etc.
Oil fields; DARPA-Raytheon, etc. as the emerging Knossos, i.e. labrys and labyrinth of strength and geography reveals itself to the intrepid reporter
GARY/LAOCOÖN
(enthralled to the sea, to snakes, sons subsumed to determined fate)
They are within the great horse! They are inside it FOOLS! Take down pieces in the LA Times, the New York Times, the fucking Washington Post published an article, I think to put Congresswoman Waters in her place, alleging that blacks are more prone to believe conspiracy theories!
Fucking John Berry, John Kerry, already showed these connections, I’m not even the third reported to reveal these connections.
My paper?! My fuck-ing editor?! It’s already been edited.
Whatever the fuck, I’m taking finding winning a book deal and will...fuck those fucking snakes. The CIA has its touches. They touched them. Touch them. Touched them all. Incestuous fucking...
(his book is released. It does well. He does the circuit.)
Nah, it’s not enough. They’ve effectively relegated this story to the annals of conspiracy. Not even at the level of the wonder bullet. There’s nothing theoretical about history. Waters wrote in the forward for Dark Alliance that it will take the future to vindicate my work.
FADE TO BLACK:
CHORUS
(A timer appears, it is counting down from 15 or perhaps 20 seconds. And the author appears, as if from within the story, brought to bear, in hand, in a mood, as it were and for interrogation and inquiry. )
By what means are we speaking?
Even now, we are discussing a thing that is past. I myself wonder along these lines. How is it that we have found ourselves in dialogue? By what means are you speaking? By what means do I speak? Not even a thought has arisen, is there still a sin, or not. Master Yunmen said, the sin is as big as Mount Sumeru. Why did Master Yunmen say, ‘The sin is as big as Mount Sumeru’?
All filming on Nikon D850 DLSR Camera.
Filming on location at sites researched/selected for their suitability to document/illustrate material histories, e.g. Washington, DC, New York, Miami, Texas, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Columbia, and Peru.
Bibliography
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