All Over the Place

Pursuing Happiness


Reporter/ Surveys show more people watching your version of the trial.

Producer/ PIZZAZZ!

Reporter/ Yes, but a different, tenuous truth, hardly fair. Nearly fiction. Meanwhile, the real jury trial goes on. With awful consequences possible.

Producer/ Do you get up in the morning and look at the mirror to affirm your grave credentials? We're play-ing!

Reporter/ Some news reports are even ignoring the actual trial and featuring your bushwah!

Producer/ I'm hardly surprised.

Reporter/ And your virtual victim is swaying the people in the actual courtroom, and probably the jury too. Crazy! And much of it is fabricated. Or unknowable since she’s dead.

Producer/ Oh a fact or two in there. But for her kind of soliloquy to have impact; well, you fashion it, of course. From focus groups. That’s the art of today. You know…it’s dawning on me that I’m merely saying what everybody knows. Except you.

Reporter/ You've already showed the accused as murderer! Replay after replay from every
conceivable angle.

Producer/ Well, you must stand for something in this life! And in the virtual version also. We're going for conviction! Pounding and pounding that idea home!
Why not? And we got our own forensics from our own inventive labs. Death sentence for sure! Wake up! He’s a sonofabitch.

Reporter/ But what if…innocent?

Producer/ What does that word mean, really? I wouldn't apply it to you and me.

Reporter/ And your investigators! Rosa and David!
What they don’t know they invent!

Producer/ They’re vulgar. Truth is vulgar. And they’re in cutthroat competition with each other, but they’ll be fucking before trials end. Hey! That’s five, ten extra basis points right there.

Reporter/ Christ! You’re creating you own world! Insane!

Producer/ Then everybody is.

Reporter/ We've got to…find a core…something! Before it’s too late.

Producer/ We have! Take the Super Bowl. Last freaky play, ball bounces off Jet Helmet, Eagle grabs it, runs the other way. Touchdown! And Philly drinks Champagne.

Reporter/ Tremendous game!

Producer/ Still is! But in our DVD, it smacks helmet and falls to turf. Jets win! We've sold millions through that gorgeous New York Jet site, and Professor Telranon of Duke says our version will become the historical record.

Reporter/ But it’s lying. It’s all lying. Everything is lying! We can't go on like this!

Producer/ Nonsense. People get what they want. It’s the definition of happiness. Guaranteed in the Constitution—the good part, not the one politicians wipe their ass with.