Money

[This is a monologue from a very early play of mine, High Strangeness, written in 1988 when I was 27 and knew everything. The action of the scene is that the monologue is being spoken by an idealistic young man who’s trying to impress a comely young woman.  The play was produced a couple of times in the early 90s and the monologue was a semi-regular fixture of my one-man shows.]

…and if you needed furniture, you made furniture. If you needed clothes, you made clothes. Everybody had the skills they needed in order to survive. You knew how to grow food, or find food, you knew how to sew, how to spin, how to weave, and if you didn’t, then you knew someone who did. So you worked something out, a bushel of corn for fixing a shirt, I don’t know. But now, but now, what do we have? No one knows how to make anything. Could you make a shirt? I can’t. A toaster? A refrigerator? A car? Bake a loaf of bread? It’s impossible. We can’t conceive of the work that goes into any of those things. The clothes we wear, the food we eat, where did we get them? We traded some pieces of paper and shiny metal for them! Or better still, we showed the shopkeeper our plastic card and got them for nothing! And so we become disassociated from our own possessions. And from our fellow human beings. And from our environment. And from our God. And why? For what? Money. Money is the answer to every question you can ask in this world. What is time? Money. Why do I work? Money. What keeps society from breaking down? Money. Why don’t we grow our own food anymore? Because we can can pay other people to grow it for us. Without money we’d starve. How did buildings get so tall? Because we can pay other people to make them that way. Without money we’d still be having, I don’t know, barn-raisings. Money goes beyond being good or evil, money is simply there. Everywhere. It’s like saying air or fire is good or evil. Money is the fifth element. And it cancels out the original four because it can take their place at any moment! You don’t need to be able to tame fire, you just need to pay your gas bill! You don’t have to douse for water, a buck-fifty will get you a bottle of Perrier on any street corner! Scientists say that everything is a form of energy, but they’re not taking it far enough, everything is really a form of money! The sun isn’t the source of all life, it’s the source of all money! To the Indians, the land was sacred, it was holy! But anyone will tell you today that it’s just capital waiting to be exploited. Everything we do, everything we see, everything we feel, everything that affects us does so because someone is making money off it. No one and nothing escapes. The whole planet is a business: Earth, Inc., assets 48 kazillion dollars! What is that?! Is that a planet?! Is that a race?! Is that a reason for opening your eyelids in the morning? When things get this bad, something always happens. It could be one of a million things: nuclear war, environmental crisis, worldwide depression, all of these…it’s an interesting time to live.