Still Life by Edward Drobinski - HTML preview

Still Life

Page 229

And now they know their friend is gone fer good

[CURLY]

Good

[BOTH]

Pore Jud is daid

A candle lights his haid

[CURLY]

He's lookin' oh so purty and so nice

He looks like he's asleep

It's a shame that he won't keep

But it's summer and we're running out of ice

[BOTH]

Pore Jud, Pore Jud

Written by Rodgers and Hammerstein for “Oklahoma.”

Pemulis is the tactician. He maps the terrain, calculates the fallout, and plays Eschaton like a chess master with a thermonuclear twist. His precision is ritualistic, almost sacred. But John Wayne? He's the myth. He wins not by playing the game but by refusing its terms. His approach is situation irrelevant because he's not bound by the logic of the simulation. He's the cowboy who walks into the war room and shoots the map.

In the wake of the assassination and the grotesque gamification of political violence, we're seeing Pemulis types trying to parse the chaos, build databases, archive threats. But the John Waynes; those who operate on mythic instinct, are louder,