an excerpt (and synopsis of) A CLOWN, A HAMMER, A BOMB, AND GOD

On April 1st, Good Friday 1994, an activist priest named Carl Kabat sneaked onto a Minuteman Missile base in North Dakota. Dressed as a clown (for he was, in his own words, "a fool for Christ"), he proceeded to disable a Minuteman III missile by hammering on the rails of the missile silo door. He was subsequently arrested and convicted of willful destruction of government property. He is serving a five year sentence in prison in Missouri.

A Clown, a Hammer, a Bomb, and God is based on this event. It borrows from the writings of Kabat and the other Plowshares activists who've attempted to explain the faith, moral outrage and sense of right and wrong that have driven them to take up arms against nuclear weapons by attempting to 'turn swords into plowshares'

. A Clown, a Hammer, a Bomb, and God has been performed at the Hague Appeal for Peace, The Hague, Netherlands, May 11-15, and the Hague Walk for Peace, May 16-30.

FATHER BEN:The title of tonight's work is somewhat misleading. There's a missile down there, not a bomb. But 'Missile' didn't parse with the rest of the title. Anyway, the fact that it's a missile carrying bombs--I should be off the hook. There are between ten and thirty Hiroshimas on that missile. Not separate bombs, but one bomb. With anywhere from eighteen to thirty times the explosive power of the one that the United States dropped on Hiroshima, Japan. That bomb was called... fat boy?... Little Big Man? Boy George? The point is, it was called something relatively inoffensive when you think of what it can do. The truly cynical of our age call it 'the fat white boy' bomb--The only people trusted with it are white people, and the only people it was ever used on were not white. Survivors of the Hiroshima bombing said it made the sky glow like a thousand suns had come up. And this was ONE bomb. Our bomb in that tube--even though it can cause hundreds of times the damage that Little Boy George caused, IT DOESN'T HAVE A NAME. That's right. A bomb that can light up the sky like a thousand suns isn't special enough to have a name any more. Oh, the Air Force has a designation for it--it's missile number M 29 of the US Air Force 321st Strategic Missile Wing. M29--that's a bus, not a missile. There are 30 Hiroshimas wrapped in that missile tube and the Air Force can't name it. Well, a couple of years ago some peace activists named it the "Disarmingly Simple". Really. We tried to name the missiles sarcastic names, because... well, there are 525 missiles and not everyone of them can be named the Auschwitz Special. Our friend Disarmingly Simple has 330 kilotons of explosive power. A third of a million tons of high explosives. And Disarmingly Simple can carry multiple warheads--three or four 330 kiloton white-boy bombs. The Hiroshima bomb, which lit up the sky like a thousand suns, blew up with the force of twelve kilotons. Now figure thirty times the Hiroshima blast times three warheads equals X if 12 Kilotons equals brightness one thousand times the sun's... carry the two...

I'm sorry, I'm really tired. As I said. Anyway, the point is, the missile below our feet is carrying weaponry far beyond need. (he runs over to the knapsack, pulls out a tabloid of suspicious origin and leafs through it)

I'm sure you all saw the headlines in the New England Journal of Medicine. (he stops, points at a headline)

RESEARCHERS AGREE--THE WORLD DOESN'T NEED MORE THAN ONE SUN AT A TIME.

One of the events in my life that put me on this path was a trip I took to Japan many years ago. It was when the memories of the bombing were more raw than they are now. When fat white boy detonated over Hiroshima in 1945, the light from it was so bright, it burned into buildings. And people standing in front of the buildings had their shadows burned into the stone and brick and concrete. It's all in the museum they set up in Hiroshima after the war. You could stand in front of a building all day every day for a hundred years and your shadow wouldn't burn into it. It takes a single fat white boy bomb to do in a tenth of a second what the sun can't do in one hundred years. And Disarmingly Simple has almost a hundred times the power of fat white boy.

And do you know where this is pointed? Do you? (he holds up a map of the former Soviet Union)

Okay. Neither do I, exactly. But let's say for the sake of argument it's pointed at Kiev. Kiev is a city that used to be part of the Soviet Union. Now it's part of the Ukraine. Kiev was a city when Moscow was just goat carts and mosquitoes. Kiev was a favorite stopping point for the Tartars, who came through and ravaged everything they could centuries ago. Kiev took a pasting in the Napoleonic war. It got mangled pretty badly again when the Germans rolled through it in 1943. Kiev is no stranger to bullets and cannon shot. And you know what? All of that destructive power, everything the Tartars, the French and the Germans unleashed on poor Kiev, can't begin to compare with one White Boy bomb, let alone the explosives on Disarmingly Simple.

Now, is Kiev still part of an evil empire? Last time I heard, the people in Kiev were lobbying for a McDonalds. The missiles that used to protect Kiev are being turned into saleable spare parts by the soldiers who haven't been paid. If leaders who inherited the Soviet Union aren't paying the soldiers who guard the nuclear weapons, and they aren't paying to keep them up, how dangerous could they be? And if we really wanted to stop them, why don't we just write them a check? Ukranians have to eat--maybe they'll trade their rusting missiles for a few thousand dollars. Maybe we can buy their missiles for a few thousand happy meals. I don't know about you, but I'm not scared of a country where you could buy their best weapons for McDonald's gift certificates.

And I'm trying to put this use of our weaponry in the perspective of a Ukranian. I'm pretending I'm living in Kiev and saving up my paycheck for months until I have enough money for an Arch Deluxe. My salary isn't keeping up with inflation, there aren't enough jobs anyway, the food and water is suspect ever since the Chernobyl plant blew up, and the future looks lousy. So why are those Americans spending all the treasures of the world to threaten me? Why are they still pointing missiles at me? If I were living in Kiev, I'd personalize it. I'd start saying "What's wrong with these people?".

I'm ten feet away from the silo that holds the death sentence for everyone within thirty miles of Kiev. None of us want that missile to fly over and blow up the city of Kiev. Do we? I said, DO WE?

Well, your name is on the missile. And so is mine. It says US right on it. If you've been paying taxes and living in the confines of the law, you can't pretend you didn't think the missile going off over Kiev was a good idea. You can't even pretend, the way the German civilians did after World War II, that you didn't know what your government was doing in your name. Even if you don't read papers or watch Television, you can't say you didn't know anymore. I TOLD YOU. After today, you'll never be able to say you didn't know.

You're welcome.

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