Col. Arthur Freemantle:
You call yourselves Americans, but you're really just transplanted Englishmen. Look at your names: Lee, Hood, Longstreet, Jackson, Stuart...
Lieutenant General James Longstreet:
My people were Dutch...
Col. Arthur Freemantle:
And the same for your adversaries: Meade, Hooker, Hancock, and - shall I say - Lincoln! The same God, same language, same culture and history, same songs, stories, legends, myths - different dreams. Different dreams. So very sad.
Barry B. Benson:
Mister Sting, thank you for coming. Your name intrigues me, I must say. Where have I heard that name before?
Sting:
I was in a very popular band called The Police.
Barry B. Benson:
And yet you've never been a police officer of any kind, have you?
Sting:
No, I haven't.
Barry B. Benson:
No, you haven't. And so you see, this is just another example of bee culture being casually stolen for nothing more than a prance-about stage name!
Sting:
Oh, please.
Barry B. Benson:
Have you ever been stung, Mr. Sting? Because I feel stung, Sting... or should I say, Gordon M. Sumner?
Layton T. Montgomery:
That's not his real name? You idiots!
Dr. Warren Koven:
The human voice is not real complex. It's a sound that nature has very little difficulty mimicking. Now, what I'm gonna play for you is real. It was recorded in a farmhouse in the Berkshires, 1976. [He begins typing on his computer]
Dr. Warren Koven:
It was heard by multiple witnesses, caught on tape, sworn to in an affidavit. Okay? It's the real McCoy. Uh, please. [He beckons Becket over, and Becket slides his chair to sit near the computer. Koven starts a brief audio file that sounds like someone sighing or whispering]
Dr. Warren Koven:
Isn't that amazing? This is an authentic aural event. Now, that's probably what we call a chi cluster. It's a build-up of chi field energy then released into the sonic spectrum.
Bryan Becket:
But it's not words.
Dr. Warren Koven:
What do you mean?
Bryan Becket:
How does it come out as words? You know? In an intelligent sentence structure.
Dr. Warren Koven:
Well, it doesn't. I mean, maybe it does once in a million, like those monkeys typing sonnets, but...
Bryan Becket:
No, but it did. For me. The voice that I heard spoke. It did not just say oooh ahhh, it said something like, "An old trunk." And it kept repeating it, over and over. "An old trunk," or "In an old trunk." As if to suggest that I...
Martin Q. Blank:
Don't you think that maybe you're just upset because I told you what I do for a living, and you got upset and *you're* letting it interfere with *our* dynamic?
Dr. Oatman:
Whoa. Martin. You didn't tell me what you did for a living...
Martin Q. Blank:
Yes, I did!
Dr. Oatman:
You didn't tell me what you did for a living for *four* sessions. *Then* you told me. And I said, "I don't want to work with you any more." And yet, you come back each week at the same time. That's a difficulty for me. On top of that, if you've committed a crime or you're thinking about committing a crime, I have to tell the authorities.
Martin Q. Blank:
I know the law, okay? But I don't want to be withholding; I'm very serious about this process. [pause]
Martin Q. Blank:
And I know where you live.
Dr. Oatman:
Oh, now see? That wasn't a nice thing to say; that wasn't designed to make me feel good. That's a... kind of a... not too subtle intimidation, and I, uh, get filled with anxiety when you talk about something like that.
Martin Q. Blank:
Come on, come on. I was just kidding, all right? The thought never crossed my mind.
Dr. Oatman:
You did think of it, Martin! You thought it, and then you said it. And now, I'm left with the aftermath of that, thinking I gotta be creative in a really interesting way or Martin's gonna blow my brains out! You're holding me hostage. That's not right.
We have to create culture, don't watch TV, don't read magazines, don't even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow. The nexus of space and time where you are now is the most immediate sector of your universe, and if you're worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowered, you're giving it all away to icons, icons which are maintained by an electronic media so that you want to dress like X or have lips like Y. This is shit-brained, this kind of thinking. That is all cultural diversion, and what is real is you and your friends and your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, your fears. And we are told 'no', we're unimportant, we're peripheral. 'Get a degree, get a job, get a this, get a that.' And then you're a player, you don't want to even play in that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.
