Setting: A French classroom in Saint N’importe Qui
Muslim Girl with foulard:
You look nice today. Cool hat. Where’d you get it?
Jewish Boy with yamakah:
Oh, thanks. My grandfather took me to a shop on rue des Rosiers for my birthday and I picked it out.
Muslim Girl:
Why don’t you take it off when you’re inside?
Jewish Boy:
We’re not supposed to.
Muslim Girl:
I know that old routine. I’m not supposed to take this scarf off either.
Jewish Boy:
It’s pretty though. Nice pattern.
As they continue to talk, Catholic Girl enters discretely, hides behind the teacher’s desk, and listens in on the rest of the conversation.
Muslim Girl:
Thanks! It’s an update of an old model my grandmother used to wear. Of course she sewed her own, but this one is from Marks & Spencer…
Jewish Boy:
Nice. (Awkward pause.) Say, there’s this dance next week and I was thinking…
Catholic Girl jumps from under the desk brandishing an enormous, glittering, gold crucifix which has been hidden in the bosom of her navy blue school uniform on a long gold chain.
Catholic Girl:
If you camel fuckers think you can get away with this on our campus, you’ve got another surprise coming. Off with the headgear, donkey-back trash.
Jewish Boy:
I’m no fuckin’ Arab, bitch, and I’m not takin’ off nothin’.
Muslim Girl pulls back from Jewish Boy and contemplates him with dismay.
Catholic Girl:
Listen, this is God’s France, buddy, and here we’ve got separation of Church and State: the separation of all your sick pagan churches from our Holy Catholic Atheist State.
Jewish Boy:
Our religion is older than either of your heretic rites and will triumph in the East, West, North and…
Muslim Girl:
Oh, please! You had to beg the world for the little patch of land you’ve got, and you only manage to hang on to that thanks to American military toys paid for with dirty oil dollars. Once the whole Arabic world falls into line behind the real Allah, we’ll blow you Jews off the map.
Catholic Girl (hysterical with laughter):
But you never will get organized, will you? You can’t even decide which Allah to follow.
Jewish Boy:
Do you think you’re any better little Catholic girl? What about the Orthodox Church, the Protestants, the Baptists, the Fundamentalists…
Catholic Girl (still laughing):
Oh, please. Like we care about all those distinctions. The Pope is the president of humanity. He rules over all you Arab-African desert dustballs.
Enter the multi-cultural, ethnically ambiguous, religiously curious, sexually ambidextrous young American boy (or is he a girl?), eating fat-free vegetable fries from a recyclable take-out bag stamped with the name of a politically-correct vegetarian take out chain. He speaks French with a very heavy American accent.
Amerithang:
Bonjour, mes amis.
Catholic Girl:
You butt out of this, MacDo.
Jewish Boy:
Yeah, who asked you?
Muslim Girl:
Don’t you have a building to finance?
Amerithang:
Now listen guys, I don’t know what’s gotten on your tits, but I just came to say hello and invite you to the first meeting of a social group I’m organizing. We haven’t thought of a name yet, but we’re going to discuss cross-cultural issues of race and gender identity.
Catholic Girl:
Look, fag. We don’t need you corrupting our incoming foreign labor with your perverted ideas of sexual promiscuity. Go get lost in a sauna and catch AIDS. We’ll cry for you when you’re on your deathbed on France 2 news.
Muslim Girl:
It’s amazing how these Yankees think they can whip into another country and dump all their petty bourgeois psychological problems into the laps of real minorities.
Amerithang:
But what’s all this nonsense about homosexuality being an American thing? Americans hate gays more than anyone!
Catho-Girl (to the others):
Don’t buy his homo-capitalist Rambo-lover spiel.
Amerithang:
Lesbians and gays are a real minority group! We’re fighting against the same social ills as other oppressed peoples! We can team up with you guys! See, it’s religion of all sorts that have built the capitalist, communist and despotic governments of the world. If we can only learn to love each other without restrictions from the Quoran or the Old and New Testaments, we’d be a lot more…
Muslim Girl:
There he goes with his book burning.
Amerithang:
But no! I want to let you freely walk the streets with or without your traditional costumes!
Catho-Girl (addressing Muslim Girl):
To peddle your ass to fat American businessmen buying oil from Westernized sultans.
Jewish Boy:
Then he’ll put crack in your husband’s tea and fuck him when he passes out.
Amerithang:
Oh, come on! Crack is a stimulant, not a downer, and you can’t put it in tea.
Catho-Girl:
Seems you know a lot more about the stuff than an innocent bystander.
Amerithang:
It’s almost always we, the minorities, who are taken in by drugs. We’re the ones oppressed by the dominant society seeking a scapegoat…
Muslim Girl (speaking in a trance as if to herself):
I have seen the future of the world and it is full of the shame of my people stomped down in the desert dust under the hooves of faggot American soldiers.
She continues by reciting lines from the Quoran in Arabic over the following lines.
Jewish Boy (like Muslim Girl):
I have seen my Israel fallen down in flaming bushes, her soldiers beaten off by the seldom calloused hands of a million American queers.
He continues by reciting lines from the Old Testament in Hebrew over the lines that follow.
Catho-Girl:
Well, that sure took care of them, didn’t it? Now I’ll just give old Popesy a call and wheel him over to the Middle East this afternoon just in time to take advantage of this little mood swing. He can whip up a speech about the homosexual brainwash of traditional society. That’ll get ’em to chuck out their condoms and back to cranking out some more undernourished babies.
She takes her American passport and credit cards out of her purse.
Catho-Girl:
There, now I’m all ready for my little business trip to Washington…
Amerithang:
But who are you serving exactly? God? France? Your family? The USA? The Western World? The Devil?
Catho-Girl (thinking for a minute):
Gee, I dunno’…
She gets an idea.
Catho-Girl:
But it sure works! I guess stomping down the masses from the top of the shit heap is just part of human nature. They’d do the same damn thing if any of their currencies could compete with ours.
Amerithang:
So what are you saying, that we all have to buy our way to liberty?
Catho-Girl (taking a charge plate out of her purse):
What’ll it be, gay boy, Master Card or Visa?