Global week in review: the Dash Brothers of the Roundtable


PHINEAS
Gathered again at the old Drink & Think, to mull over the events of the week, with some mulled wine perhaps.

GABRIEL
Weak mulled wine.

MORGAN
Very weak.

CHRISTOPHER
Any good news?

THERON
Depends. Civilization continues its increasingly swift decline into self-annihilation accompanied by tragic self-parody. Is that good or bad?

MORGAN
The Yankees lost.

PHINEAS
There you go.

CHRISTOPHER
What's the first legalese phrase any of us learned?

GABRIEL
Any rebroadcast of the pictures and accounts of this game without the expressed written consent of Major League Baseball is strictly prohibited.

CHRISTOPHER
You got it.

THERON
The war against terrorism got clarified. According to one of the Generals, it's the Christians against Islam.

CHRISTOPHER
The Crusades 2003. Another sequel.

MORGAN
It's more like Judeo-Christianity/Islam against Buddhism. That's the real conflict, in effect. On every level.

THERON
I don't know, you've got to give Dick Cheney credit. He said there were al qeda in Iraq and sure enough, there are.

GABRIEL
A whole new meaning to self-fulfilling prophesy.

THERON
Pretty soon there'll be WMD too.

PHINEAS
Speaking of Halliburton, our reconstruction money is not only going to good old lobbyist-heavy American companies instead of the Iraqi companies and professionals who built the stuff in the first place-you know, the stuff we bombed-but our efficiency minded companies there are hiring cheap labor from really poor countries to improve their bottom line, while half of the Iraqi workforce is unemployed.

THERON
Lessons in free enterprise don't come cheap.

PHINEAS
The Red Cross got bombed. The idea that wars had rules was always absurd in a way. But now that wars don't have rules---

THERON
Like pre-emptive defense?

PHINEAS
Exactly--then it's beyond absurd. It's not absurd horror. It's pure horror.

CHRISTOPHER
That's what we've got cable news for--absurd horror.

GABRIEL
How about them Democrats?

MORGAN
It's Anybody But Bush. And Lieberman.

GABRIEL
Look at the best seller list--all those liberals.

MORGAN
Only if you have "lies" in the title. The public may not know much. The public may not want to know much. But they know everybody is lying. And they want everybody to know that.

THERON
So to sum up: Iraq is fiery chaos, as are southern California suburbs and the sun. You know, the solar flares thing. Anything else?

CHRISTOPHER
The Kansas City Chiefs were kind of fun to watch this week.

PHINEAS
We're coming closer and closer to some ultimate understanding of our place in the universe.

MORGAN
And some woman at a coffee bar will get the final insight just as the Vorgons destroy the planet to make way for a cosmic bypass.

PHINEAS
Something like that. Though truth is stranger than even science fiction.

THERON
Happy Halloween!