A BLOWBACK: SEASON TWO SCRIPT EXCERPT

Dan Fogelberg to mulch candidate:
Can I invite you back to my pad for a little man mulch? That’s potatoes and eggs, with optional cilantro, avocado and plain yogurt, all mashed-up on the stove. It’s a signature dish for the enemies of Teflon. Gotta make it in an iron skillet. Teflon, besides the unpleasant flaking that occurs when you use metal utensils on it which you’re not supposed to, (but everybody does because they’re too lazy to follow the rules of using something that was invented for the lazy), besides all that, at high temperatures (approaching 600 F) harmful compounds may be released… anyway, the real reason for my hatred of the stuff is aesthetic. You just can’t get a good finish on the food; it doesn’t brown a steak for shit. So anyway, come back to my place and I’ll make you some real man-mulch in a man-pan.

I BESEECH YOU, LOADED BIG WIG:

Don’t steal this to make a real TV show! If you want to produce it and have the cash, give me a call!
Ok, here we go:

Early in the Iraq War

As American governmental hubris rises to new levels, humorous humiliation of other countries comes into vogue. Defense Department guys find this tactic especially appealing as a blackmail tool to shore up our “terror-fighting coalition.”

An intercepted memo: Rumsfeld to boyfriend, Re: The Polish:

[Of course Rummy, in blunt-headed way, lets famous stereotypes shape his expectations of peoples]
memo reads: "We’re just going to fly those Poles to Nevada and tell them its Iraq, outfit them with super-soakers and dumb-looking gear, and make a TV show about it."

The Polish lovably fill their gullible role, rationalizing every artifact and revealing American detail they come across:

Pole #1 to Pole #2, after passing a small strip mall with a 7-11 and an In-N-Out burger joint: “Well I guess the Americans have had some real success here. Though who would’ve guessed In-N-Out would’ve gotten here before the Big Two, McDonald’s and Burger King.”

Pole #2: “No-bid contract. In-N-Out is how the invasion was supposed to go”

Pole # 3: “Let’s hurry up and get to the celebration place!”

With the help of Walden Media, the Defense Department develops the show and holds it over Poland’s blonde head until they commit more troops:
“This stuff won’t air as long as you guys give us a few more pop-gun battalions. And you guys have to be the ones giving wedgies and Indian burns to detainees in our secret prisons, and tell everybody it was your own damn idea if it gets out.”

PETE COORS, BERTOLUCCI

For anybody who's been taken aback by the sudden swerve into pedophilia town in the "Fogelberg Time" section of Episode 2 of Blowback, the creepiness of this Barbie clip will come as no surprise. Jim has claimed that the Barbie skit represented an embryonic phase of our allegorical joking about children's briefs, but the truth is young people all over the globe have always wanted to joke about dangerous stuff. Recently we realized that just offending and testing boundaries without complex, chunky backup puts us in teenager/Sarah Silverman land Sarah Silverman land = bursting the bubble of joke taboos or political correctness without remembering the conditions under which that protective bubble inflated (actual kids getting "de-briefed"). This eureka jibed well with our instinct to over-explain everything; so here it goes:

Some people wonder why we're making libelous cracks (saying Pete Coors diddleshitted around, etc) about the "touchy" topic of feeling kids: Well we're identifying the bad guys (politicians of the right) with sexual predators in order to highlight the behavioral link between pederasty and fascism. One lofty allusion: Donald Sutherland's Attila in Bertolucci's Novocento . Bertolucci makes this link in his films more than once...maybe in The Conformist too- I could be wrong, "reverse West and East, you get what I'm saying though. Oh man, it's even worse than before", I just ruined a good attempt at shoring up stuff with a in-joke: two quotes from Blowback: Season 1 dialog .......

A FILO STORY

What happens to a couple of guys concerned about our world but afraid of the trap of earnestness? I mean somebody has made serious inquiry in the public sphere a
wedgie zone and its not just the Republicans. For the founders of TeamFILO, junior high geek-fear fuels the development of this inexplicable defense: a falsetto inflection and exaggerrated Jersey smear whenever tackling the serious topics. "Got to cut this stuff with humor, heh-heh!" they say, sounding like some Bayonne Smokey Robinson.

THIS HAPPENED TO ME

To the list of delayed gratification fantasies-cum-hilarious nightmares, please add getting stuck in an elevator while having to take a crap. This happened to me. Or I thought that’s what was going to happen when the elevator took its time delivering me to my floor. It hung up a little along the way for no reason, giving me a chance to panic and stretch time . This stretched-taffy time was long enough for an elaborate rescue scenario to unfold. It went like this:

Fireman-“OK we’re coming in [door forced open] aw man what a revolting and ultimately sad tableaux!” meaning me in one corner, flattened in hunched shame, while what I couldn’t hold in is piled monumental, proudly stinky in the other.

Cinematically clear scenario over, my head switched to how I could make this situation better:

Well, if things unfold as that panic-movie predicts, there’s not much I can do but move out. But let’s say they rescue me before the dam breaks (or, more aptly, before the buckwheat flapjack battering ram I built with this morning’s breakfast bests the castle door). After some abbreviated thank-yous all around that I can explain later (me to firefighter: “dude, sorry I just ran away when you got me out of there- I had to use the bathroom real bad!”), I’ll make for my apartment. Execute a precise undoing of belt and pants as I turn the corner into the long home-hall stretch towards my door. Dropping pants completely would impede my stride, so they hang on my hips as I find my keys, select the two for my door, and form a key-turning grip with them in my right hand. When I make it to my apartment this preemptive grip assumption assures I don’t BM before I actually get in my place. A last-minute hallway collapse would be a disaster; brutally ironic for me and shocking/funny for the curious rescue crew peeking around the corner, wondering why I took off so quick.. With the door open I drop everything and sprint the fifteen feet to the can, dropping pants and raising seat in a motion I’d been mentally choreographing to be as efficient as possible.

And it would be the best (crap) ever
Besides actual splash-back from the log-drop that I would feel cool on the back of my thighs, there would an invisible misting of relief. That feeling would hang over the rest of my week like a drunken, benign haze that would make me feel lush and heavy. (Which is weird because you’d think the afterglow would be characterized by a lightness since what happened was all about dropping ballast).


Thinking about this inspires me to market the principles involved as a kind of mood management. A high derived from the sudden absence of pain and waiting.

I’ll bet pioneers, frontier farmers, or other gritty groups of the past never experienced what we describe today as depression. Folks grinding out a living in the Chinese countryside today aren’t a part of the prescription chemical culture. They may feel despair, hunger, fear, all of these in extremes. But for the most part they’re working too hard all the time, waiting for the pain of that to end, to elevate to the vain space of modern depression.

For people of the 19th century American frontier, a grueling routine and survival distractions provided “coverage” for any inherent chemical imbalances or melancholy bents they might have indulged with more free, neutral time.

So: how to simulate this “coverage” today ? Hold an open call for depressed folks, saying you’ll provide free counseling . Have a reception in the lobby, serving people those new high-fiber Kashi cereals (which I’m a fan of anyway- they’ve got lots of protein; they actually sold me on the cereal by plastering the protein/fiber stats on the front of the box in big bubbles ), make them drink a quart each of watery coffee, and put them in an elevator. (Since you’ve told them your office is on the 8th floor, none of these unmotivated sacks is going to take the stairs. If they do they’ll get a mood-lift of another kind from the endorphin rush of pumping calves and thighs- but that’s another issue). Make sure you can monitor people with a camera concealed in the elevator to make sure that if anybody looks like they are going to give up and let loose right there, the doors come open. Finally, after an interval determined to be the maximum stress period on a primed subject pre-involuntary colon blow, open the doors, right into a hallway of private sound-sealed bathrooms with Eno’s Music for Airports playing inside.

Ask whoever comes out of that routine if they’re still depressed.