|
|
|
GUBERNATIO: Now you're licking my lingua. I think we find a place for you at my poisonal social club. GULLIVER: Umberto's Hunt and Clam-up Shop? GUBERNATIO: You know my digs? GULLIVER: I've been by. GUBERNATIO: That's where we keep the Vox Populi turned on high and we always do Our Thing. GULLIVER: Yes, the Our Thing. GUBERNATIO: You want a little? GULLIVER: Struzzi? GUBERNATIO: White Poontang. GULLIVER: I beg your pardon? GUBERNATIO: Bianca Gattina. The way I figures you can't afford to touch it. Too hot, too scandiferous, but the aroma, mah man, I can give you plenty cover and you can sniff your hard-on away. GULLIVER: A puff of smoke and a whiff of white. Send Bianca by. White Swan and Black Cat'll put her through some paces. Now, tell me, what sort of decisions would I be making? GUBERNATIO: Decisions? GULLIVER: You would have me making decisions, wouldn't you? GUBERNATIO: Si, si, for your folks! Like where they go for a little sterilization. GULLIVER: When they get a little preggers a little too often. GUBERNATIO: Volare! You fly to my heart! GULLIVER: And a little vaselinectomy? GUBERNATIO: You cut off their vaseline you increase their syndrome deficiencies and cut down their mighty numbers. GULLIVER: Rackets and rickets, easy, greasy, you've got a long way to slide. GUBERNATIO: O, you slide and you slide. For Colored Boys Who Have Considered Youicide When the Rainbow's Not Enuf. GULLIVER: When the rainbow's not enough. GUBERNATIO: Andiama al Umberto's! Mangiamo, you going to eat us right up. GULLIVER: Merde! GUBERNATIO: Eh, we offer you major crapola and all you can say is Excuse my French? GULLIVER: I want four hundred years. GUBERNATIO: No, no, not no Slaveship Earth. What do you really want? MAYOR: What do you really want? (CARDINAL honks "What do you really want?") All Three: What do you really want? GULLIVER: I want all the Liliputzers and the Schlongdignagians and the Bennie Bouncers and the Mnhmnhyouhs to climb Lemuel's ladder. MAYOR: Whaddahesay? GUBERNATIO: I noa near him. MAYOR: I noa hear him. GUBERNATIO: Whaddahesay? (CARDINAL honks Whaddahesay I noa hear him I noa hear him Whaddahesay.) GULLIVER: I want White Swan and her sisters at Hedgerows Farm not to be taken out of the future. (MAYOR, GUBERNATIO, and the CARDINAL overlappingly "Whaddahesay?") GULLIVER: I want Black Cat and the hundred thousand million Homeboys never to hear that fusillade again. (Again the MAYOR, GUBERNATIO and the CARDINAL) GULLIVER: I want Lemuel Louis Gulliver freed from Cloud Cuckoo Land of Stymietown. MAYOR: Off his rocker I want I want a bialy with a schmear. GUBERNATIO: I want my struzzi. CARDINAL: (CARDINAL honks "I want my honker".) GULLIVER: I want and will have-- WHITE SWAN: C-L-I-M-A-X-X. (This is it - the Wrap and the Rap. WHITE SWAN leads us in. BLACK CAT plays air bass. Everyone pours in.) WHITE SWAN: C-- GULLIVER: Congress WHITE SWAN: L-- GULLIVER: Law WHITE SWAN: I-- GULLIVER: Integrity WHITE SWAN: M-- GULLIVER: Maximum, as in wage. WHITE SWAN: A-- GULLIVER: Action Jackson WHITE SWAN: X-- GULLIVER: Excellence WHITE SWAN: X-- GULLIVER: Excellence Congress no money can buy Law no people it fry Integrity is what you see Maximum is the bum rush wage Action Jackson Action Jackson Ex ex ex ex straw din nary Ex cog i tate Ex ex ex ex excellence THE REST: Pres pres Pres Pres President GULLIVER: Climb Climaxx Climb Climaxx The badder the ladder The hipper the hopper The madder the Dadder The bigger the bopper Celebrate Legalize Inculcate Maximize Activate Exaltate Excellence Concertize Legislate Immunize Maximate Analyze Axcentuate Excellence THE REST: Pres Pres Pres Pres President Lemuel Louis Gulliver GULLIVER: Coalition Legacy Inclusion Morality Agenda Xxcellence Xxcellence ALL: Xxcellence GULLIVER: Crossroads Liberty Involvement Magnificence Africa Xxcellence Xxcellence All: ExExExEx Xxcellence GULLIVER: Common Ground Love Invincibility Mountain Atlanta Xxcellence Xxcellence All: Xxcellence GULLIVER: Chicago Louisville Indianapolis Memphis Alabama Xxcellence Xxcellence When I was a child growing up on Iron Road on Chicago's Great South Side, the Stockyards were still in use. Every day the cattle, the pigs, the sheep, the oxen were driven into massive holding pens. They all squealed and bleated, mooed and snorted themselves crazy waiting for the wrecker's axe. This was before mechanization when gigantic men - African, Slovaks, Croatians, Polish Jews, Finns, Germans - personally did the killing, men so hardened and begrimed with the slaughter of beasts that the animal blood had gotten up under their nails and in along their arms and chests and was pumping in their hearts and down into their legs and so complete was this takeover that not a drop of human blood remained in their veins. But this transformation didn't make them dumb, it didn't make them without feeling, it didn't strip them of their humanity, unless you say they had been stripped of that the day they took up the axe. No, it made them one with the beasts of the earth, even as they brought down the axe. And when the animal cried out, the man cried too, for he knew as this primordial blood rose in his face and the stench invaded and overpowered everything and everyone for miles around, he know that someday the violence and the inhumanity would have to run its course. Today, the Stockyards are gone, but the brutality and the desolation have spread. No longer confined to a few square miles on the South Side, the lust for revenge increases, revenge against the innocent for the very crime of being innocent. So why has the violence not run its course? Why has the inhumanity spread? Why has the cancer grown? Was that African who brought the axe down on the shoulders of that bullock wrong to feel the agony would sometime end? Was that Lithuanian who thundered that axe on the neck of that ox wrong to sense that the agony would sometime end? No. It's always darkest before the morn. As a boy in that darkness on the coldest blowingest winter days, I got out of bed to begin my work. There were cracks in the windows and a light blanket of snow across my grandmother's quilt which she'd made from every old patch of cloth, wool, silk, gaberdeen and crockersack. Snow on the floor and the smell of carnage in the air. As the light began to push through the sawdust, I saw my younger brothers and sisters, still under the quilt under the snow and I thought dear Lord give me the strength when it's darkest. Always darkest before the morn. My generation is the transition. I have the blood of man and the blood of beast and I have the stink of the age-old charnel house in my brain and the smell lets me never forget that the man and the beast are one. Theirs is the common stomping ground, the Mother Earth, a thing of beauty and power and culture. Always darkest before the morn. All over the globe, from Watts to Liliputz, from the North End to Schlongdignagia, from the land of the Inuits drowning in alcoholism to the land of the Houyhnmhnms seeing only Red Eye, from the mines of Jestrzebie Solidarnosc! To the mines of Pretoria Amandla!, from the barrios of Buenos Aires to the universities of New South Despair our courage is undermined, our resolve is spat at, our character is stomped on, our common ground is rebuked and nuked by Chaos Loss Injury Malevolence Abandonment Xxcrement Exclusion Xxcrement Always darkest before the morn. I was not supposed to make it. You see, I was born of a teenage mother who was born of a teenage mother. I know the-- Chaos Loss Injury Malevolence Abandonment Xxcrement Exclusion Xxcrement Always darkest before the morn. Something else I know and that's the fundamental challenge of our day. The ending of economic violence. The violence of that Black and that Lithuanian against that bullock and that ox, economic violence against both man and beast, smells down through the decades, wafting into the economic violence of today. But that African and that Lithuanian knew that they had not begun that violence, they knew they were in the middle of that violence and we know we can be at the end of that violence. Always darkest before the morn. I am here to bring you a sword. A sword that cleanses us of violence, a sword the tip of which is bathed in sweet potato pie, Cool Papa Bell I hear you calling, Jackie Robinson, you are my personal inspiration, my mainest of baserunners, Satchell Paige do look back we are gaining we are all gaining. How so? A World Voter Registration Drive taking Mother Ground to high places. If the mountain will not come to Mother Ground, Mother Ground will go to the mountain. Black Cat and White Swan will go to the mountain. Mayor Schmolloch and Gubernatio Macchio and John Cardinal O'Condom will go to the mountain. The Reverend Al Blimpton, Soul Senator #1, will go to the mountain. And the lions and the lambs, the tortured and the torturers shall lie down together on top of that mountain. And we'll all cry and exult. Cry freedom. It's always darkest before the morn. Keep hope alive. I love you very much. I love you very much. Cry Freedom. Celebrate Love Integrate Move Act Exclaim Exult Exalt Excellence Excellence Excellence. |