[MUSIC FADE-IN - BOBBY MILLETT]

Ah yes, the Fool. Thrice fool & thrice again if truth be known. Foolish enough to think perhaps the new millennium was a clean slate that we might come back a short distance correctly. Still a long way from where we ought to be, but I thought perhaps...ah, what foolish nonsense that was. Bush the 2nd made hash of that ray of hope. Well, there was always 2010 and a fresh start? Maybe it took a decade for the fresh start to kick in. Fooled again. 2016 and the next Mad King took the throne. A certified fool I was, and so the play began. Well, I thought, maybe 2020 will be the magic to unfool the fool. The Mad King and his court would be history and we could pick up where we'd left off. Oh fool, poor fool, thrice again I was. At least the Martian invaders had the good manners to drop-dead in the 1938 invasion. The ghost of Donald J. Trump just won't quit. He continues to haunt us, malevolent Mad King that he is, spreading his lies and chaos across the nation, destroying anything he can get his mouth on before any election, just as he has done in the past. The invasion of these destructionists doesn't stop. Their lies and destruction spread and intensify, assaulting the nation from every imaginable direction.

I'd had retirement and fat vacation from War of the Trumps in mind. Foolish idea that was. It was an intrusion into an otherwise imperfect enough world that brought with it only more lies, chaos and malevolent destruction on an unheard of scale. Everywhere one looked during the Mad King's reign, only the wreckage of its assault on every agency and aspect of governance came into view. His ministers being wholly incompetent and unfit for anything other than destroying the agency they had been assigned to manage,the King himself completely disinterested in anything that did not directly serve his own ambitions for power, wealth and approval.

It was a very low-hanging metaphor that couldn't be missed. The invasion of the planet by the rapacious Martians bent on total destruction in Orson Wells' masterful 1938 broadcast, now a Mad King dedicated to the same ends in our own era. A caveat CBS lawyers insisted Orson tag to the end of his Halloween prank turned panic, or the first presentation of The War of the Trumps, conceived in the pumpkin patches of Halloween 2020, a moment in which the order of the world, for good or ill, hung in the balance of the tiniest of all creatures, smaller than the smallest of germs to which those Martian invaders succumbed. Only this time it was the most abstract and ephemeral of defenses upon which the fate of our planet depends. The 2020 votes were tallied and re-tallied, counted and recounted, challenged and re-challenged. The invaders tried every trick, used every weapon they had at their disposal to defeat the defenders of democracy. Only the barest whispers of margins, percentage points and resolves of the voters held the line and decided the matter. The Mad King had been deposed and now I could put the Halloween horrors behind me and move on to more interesting projects. Or so I thought.

What none of us reckoned was that this Mad King, our once-and-never again Commander-in-Tweets, had been evicted from the palace but took the throne with him, along with a lot of other things that didn't belong to him. The premonition at the end of the 2020 presentation was that the ghost of Donald J. Trump was not quite vanquished and if your doorbell rings..., well, the destruction continues and the shadow of the Mad King and his lies would not only cover half the kingdom, but half the halls of governance that by custom should have been handed over to the new ruler.

Fool again for thinking these destructionists would settle for anything less than to reduce the order of the world to ashes in their quest for the lost kingdom. Far from it. The winds of chicanery and chaos never stop blowing and the minions of destructionists go right on bowing to their mad king, that he might rule forever over the lost kingdom of lies in the lands of the Dark Ages.

It became clear that it would take more than our votes to write the next Act in the War of the Trumps. And so, that first presentation was updated with the question marks that were eclipsing the demise of the Mad King and his throne of lies. The ghost of Donald J. Trump was still out ringing doorbells when Act 1 Part 2 took shape in 2021 Twice the fool, I had no more stomach for this kingdom of lies. The damage already done had been considerable. I gave up expecting it to be repaired, not by this President nor for many generations of Presidents still to come. Still, I thought perhaps enough was back on track that might relieve me the prospect of having to write Act 2 of this damnable review.

Now, Thrice fool, I stand before you, bespoke in the costume that befits one who so, so badly misjudged the soundness of his own judgments. No doubt we fought like hell to keep this republic, and did so by the narrowest of margins without any sign that the destructionsists would give up on their agenda. By the ides of march, I knew that Act 2 of War of the Trumps would need to be written. But what could one write? More of the same, "A Republic if you can keep it?" A mantra or a question mark that conjures up its own doubt barely concealed in those catchy words of resolve.

Act 2 makes no predictions nor does it seek any certainty in the course that had been charted for this nation long before the Donald Trump was making his first deal to get himself born in an incubator in Queens. Bad deal that was, for us, not for him. A season of real witches and their agenda of spreading malevolent evil throughout the land, now passes easily though the membranes of a democratic republic. More than half the women of America now live in slave states, having had the sovereign ownership of their own bodies taken from them in one fashion or another. A third of the destructionists who ran for some office in these just past mid-term elections have won seats in our government and taken up positions from which they can spread their lies, gum up the works and fire at will on an unarmed public. As local school boards are being breached and taken over, the defenseless minds of our children are stuffed with false histories, books are banned from their libraries and their teachers gagged from providing real facts about the world which they will inherit. Our children are being put at risk in ways that can never be undone. As for the homeless, well, what is to be said of any society that denies their own kind a place to stand, sit or lay down on the earth, save in their graves? By the ides of October, how could I refuse the need to lay out the failures of our failing democracy which Act I had barely touched upon.

We govern ourselves with a system in which the fate of the planet, certainly that of our species, hangs on the balance of a few percentage points one way or the other. Yet we remain fixated on the idea of 'keeping the Republic.' That ambition offers only one possible outcome, the Lost Kingdom where the lie rings true and which the Mad Kings desperately wish to find and assemble. Act Two puts all that aside, instead it asks the more difficult question, "When better than anything else isn't good enough, what then?"

And so I appear before you as I am, three-times the fool, to welcome you to this comedy of tragedies where the interesting isn't always true, but the truth is always interesting.

I beckon you then, follow this fool into the halls of madness where the best exits, perhaps the only exits, are but a mirror's distant. What? Why are all the seats in the theater empty? Because the others are all assembled and ready for the tour, anxiously waiting for you to finish listening to this fool. Best hurry now, or you'll miss the bus.

[THE CUCKOO SONG - FADE-OUT]

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Your Guide
   for the
Sertão Tour

This is the entrance to the Sertão of madness, named for a region in northern Brazil so criss-crossed with meandering pathways and caatinga scrub that even the indigenous tribes living on its edge once dared not enter for fear of getting lost and never returning.

Our Sertão is a little different, for we are awash in a maze of Mad Kings into which we have already wandered, perhaps too far to ever find our way out. It is the terrain of our own minds, played out in the world around us, as you can see. As dangerous and trecherous a landscape as the Sertão of Brazil ever was. The Mad Kings and their lies spread out before us in every direction, assaulting the very meaning of living hospitably with one another. Getting lost in the fogs of chaos, lies and confusion is the least of our worries. We live in a world of our own design which threatens to vanish into a universe of dead planets. The Trumps, the Putins, the Xi Jinpings, the Kim Jong Uns join such a long history of Mad Kings that it is useless to try to name them all. It matters not if they proclaim their kingdoms to be 'democracies' or 'autocracies', 'socialist' or 'capitalist', 'fascist or 'anarchist'. They are all Mad Kings and all oversee kingdoms awash in lies and madness. In their Theater of Pain they manufacture the scripts of inhumanity as if they own the copyrights to our reality . Orson Wells said it best when he said, "the destruction of the Martians is only a reprieve, to them and not to us." As our esteemed fool-in-residence mentioned, the Martian invaders of 1938 had the good manners to end their ambitions of conquest and drop dead on our doorsteps. That did not stop their successor destructionist invaders who have been plotting and planning their conquests long before the Martians arrived. Much longer than the dreams awakened in some obscure incubator in Queens that basketed a once and wannabe Mad King of the future. Having achieved, by fluke, his position of power from which he could preside over a field of destruction as wide as any had ever been, our own Mad King failed to show the most basic of courtesy our Martian friends mustered when faced with a fatal disease. Instead, the ghost of Donald J. Trump gave the deadly virus wings of its own to spread his lies as far and wide as he could.

This year's War of the Trumps tour will be in two acts. The first Act includes the parody of the 1938 broadcast first presented in 2020. The Martians were defeated, but as part 2 of that act describes, the invasion of the destructionists continues on. Act Two takes us onto the battlefields of the destructionist invasions which are in full swing everywhere we look.

Here, at the Portal to the War of the Trumps we will revisit Orson Wells' original 1938 radio broadcast of War of the Worlds, but in this modern context of destruction that is being waged all over our world.

I close with a short poem, "Mars Beacon" that was written in response to an earthworks sculpture planned but never realized by the late, esteemed, Isamu Noguchi. Originally he had titled the work 'Monument to Man'. On later reflection, he retitled it "Sculpture to be seen from Mars", an earthwork large enough to be seen from the wind-swept deserts of mars. It is a lonely reminder of what once was a very rare and promising experiment in the struggle for sentience in this universe, but now dedicates itself to its own extinction. Noguchi's work might be better referred to as a cenotaph rather than a monument. Like another only partially realized work, his cenotaph at the Hiroshima Peace Park, 'Mars Beacon' also refers to something that marks the end of those whose remains are located elsewhere. "Mars Beacon" was the result of a conversation I had with the ghost of Noguchi while I was working on a collection of poems about his life and his work.


Come along then, we are already quite late and quite lost. There is no choice but to go a long way out of our way if we are ever to get back that short distance correctly. We have followed these Mad Kings like tourists on a nature walk far too long. We have no option but to follow the tracks of the Beast wherever it leads, to see what it is that has turned us into the self-annihilating species we have become. Perhaps always have been. Will that help to bring down the BEAST and put an end to the madness and its lies? Whose to say? But, What else is there to do when "better than anything else" isn't good enough? Let's get going. Act 1, Part 1 is just the other side of this portal.

Truth? You want truth? These are the badlands, my friend. You won't find any of that here.

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[This text has no accompanying audio performance']

War of the Trumps is, of course, a parody docudrama that uses the 'sertão' as a metaphor for the badlands that the American mind has become over the past few decades—its politics, institutions, warring cultures and relentless reactive mytholgies steeped in the toxic brews of parnoia and delusion.

The sertão of north-eastern Brasil is quite a different matter. It is a real place with real people who, though among the most impoverished and neglected in the world, are also among the most perserving and courageous. It is a land that has suffered many invasions throughout its long history, from maurading gangsters and warlords to modern incursions that have brought with them oppression, exploitation and a heap of sorrows. Still, the native peoples of the region remain a determined one, fighting for their inherent right to live free and self-defined on their own lands. Amazing varieties of art, culture and an uncommon spirit reside in those regions, generally unknown to most outsiders, though tourism, gps and other tools of 'foreign invasion' are rapidly changing the landscape, with or without the consent of the people who live there.

On the 'Points of Interest' tab of the navigation bar you will find a section called 'The Sertão'. It is under construction, but will contain sources about Sertão history, life and culture and I encourage all to return and become familiar with the real world of Sertão life. Though largely unknown to the outside world, it is truly an amazing, vibrant place with much to not only enjoy but to learn about the variety of life and those who find interesting ways to make it work for themselves. As our Guide has reminded us, never mistake our Sertão, a land of hubris, treachery and seflish ambition, for their Sertão. There is a world of difference between these two worlds. But for now, we must travel through our own badlands to see what, if anything, might be done to help us find our way out of them to a saner, healthier and flourishing society.

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