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.
The first half reminded me of Arthur Dent staring at his digital watch not knowing what makes it work.
The last part reminded me of this…
http://earthweb.ess.washington.edu/~mkoko/pictures_home/farside_einstein.gif
Nice 🙂
Next you should do a monologue from Moneys point of view…. “Spend me. SPEND ME!” lol
Interesting perspective.
I can make a shirt, can build my own furniture, have grown my own food and can bake a loaf of bread. And someone had a barn raising about ten miles away from my house. I could probably cobble together a toaster if I put thought into it.
That young man’s perspective is as alien to me as mine is to him, it seems.
Well, the character is an art critic in downtown New York, if that helps you any.
For the record I could bake bread, make a toaster and a refrigerator and even a car. Mine would be nothing like what you’re used to, however, because I’d be using the knowledge I do have on hand. That’s the fun of being a writer! Learning all kinds of neat trivia to help you get by!
Also, I am 27, and all I know is how much I don’t know. And unfortunately for saying that I always come off as a smug prick, but I’m really just astounded and the vastness of it all.
Off-topic, but to educate the masses it should be done
James Buchanan Jr., William Henry Harrison, Andrew Johnson, Warren G. Harding, Jimmy Carter, Ulysses S. Grant, Franklin Pierce, Martin Van Buren are ALL worse presidents than George W. Bush. If would like me to eleborate on all their faults, just ask, but for all of Bush’s faults, he hasn’t managed to start a civil war, like Pierce and Buchanan did, nor create such an overtly corrupt government like Grant or Harding.
Sorry Todd, maybe you could get back to those Spielberg analysis. Those are MUCH more fun to read.
Re: Off-topic, but to educate the masses it should be done
By posting anonymously, I assume you stand by nothing you say and are merely trying to stir up shit. Noted.
Re: Off-topic, but to educate the masses it should be done
I don’t have an account here. My name is Jeremy if thats the only argument you have to stand on.
Re: Off-topic, but to educate the masses it should be done
Someday when we’re debating the relative disasters of Grant, Harding, etc, I will put a special call out to you. Until then, please confine your attacks to the topic at hand.
Re: Off-topic, but to educate the masses it should be done
“If would like me to eleborate on all their faults, just ask”
Ooo, I can feel your fingers twitching as you get ready to spew some irrelevant bullshit into a thread that has nothing to do with what you’re talking about. That must really ache.
Money is the fifth element.
I like that. Interesting thought.
If you want to see Todd perform this monologue, on Wall Street itself, take a look at this: http://www.mediaburn.org/Video-Preview.128.0.html?uid=742
(Sorry, as a guest I can’t embed a link.)
He’s at minute 37:12.
–Ed.
You seem aware that this argument is rather reductive, given your series of disclaimers (“a very early play of mine,” “written…when I was 27 and knew everything,” “the monologue is being spoken by an idealistic young man who’s trying to impress a comely young woman”), each of which serve to distance you from the text of the monologue (not to mention that the context within the play is not provided). So I’m sort of curious why you posted it. I don’t really want to make the effort to tear into its assumptions if they are already known, but I’m not sure exactly why you posted it otherwise. And it’s hard to judge based on what you included without knowing what you excluded.
Generally I agree with the political comments you make on this blog, and I agree with your character that, for better or for worse, it’s an interesting time to live. But I’m not sure what you’re getting at today. And since I’m looking for an actual discussion and not a fight, I just sort of want to know what our terms are here.
“each of which serve to distance you from the text of the monologue”
…and I figured it goes without saying, but obviously a playwright’s character is not simply his mouthpiece.
All I mean by my disclaimers is that, as a writer looking back on the piece, I feel like it’s a little obvious and a little jejune — I like to think my attitudes have grown a little more sophisticated in the past 20 years. While I don’t necessarily disagree with the sentiments expressed, the piece doesn’t stand on its own, in spite of the fact that I often performed it out of context — it’s the world viewed through a specific, narrow lens. In the context of a one-man show, it can be surprising and forceful, but in the context of an informed debate on world economics, it’s naive and, let’s face it, hysterical, and not in the good way.
Why did I post it? No special reason, really — every now and then there’s something in the news that reminds me of an old piece and I post it to show different aspects of my work — If you click on the “monologues” link in the index, there should be a number of other examples. I did these monologues in clubs and theaters in New York for six years or so, and built up a minor reputation because of them. Every once in a while I like to look back and see my younger self from a distance.
Oddly enough, I didn’t have any particular political point to make by posting this one today, just that the world economy is in the news and this is my old piece on that. Bob Dylan sang “Masters of War” at the Grammies during the initial attacks of Desert Storm, even though he had written it thirty years earlier. I’m emphatically not Bob Dylan, but this is the best I can do. I made sure that it was a minor entry for the day, one of four or five if I’m not mistaken [three, to be exact, although the previous entry was written a mere three hours earlier], so that it wouldn’t be interpreted as some kind of bold, authoritative statement — just a diversion.
Thanks for taking the time to consider it — you’re the second person this week who’s accused me of being reductive, which embarrasses me since I had to look it up to find out what I was doing wrong.
Thanks for clarifying! If you have no political point to make with the post then I don’t really have anything to discuss, since I can’t see the benefit of arguing about capital with a fictional character. (For what it’s worth, it’s he, not you, that I accused of being reductive.)
As an example of your work, I quite like it. It nods at an archetypal perspective within the cultural dialogue on capital and capitalism without necessarily losing the character in it.
(Since you mentioned that the character is an art critic, I have to ask: is there an art dealer in High Strangeness?)
There is an art dealer in High Strangeness, but she remains offstage throughout.
To give you a little more context, the speech is actually the opening of the play. The lights come up, and there’s this young man, delivering this rant to a young female artist in her studio. Once the rant runs out of steam, he says “It’s an interesting time to live,” then there’s an awkward pause, then he says “But, to answer your original question, yes, I do like your paintings.” The character is meant to be, if not quite a buffoon, then a Serious Young Man with an axe to grind. He goes on to interpret the young artist’s paintings as “a critique of late corporate capitalism,” a phrase a mentor of mine used to throw around that used to drive me crazy. (In the play, the young artist’s paintings, by the way, are rectangles of pure, flat gray, and the young artist has no idea what the critic is talking about.)
re: ‘ Once the rant runs out of steam, he says “It’s an interesting time to live,” then there’s an awkward pause, then he says “But, to answer your original question, yes, I do like your paintings.” ‘
That made me laugh out loud. Thanks.
— Paul Worthington