These pieces were written for the Six Sentence Challenge, with the prompt word ‘ingredient’ This week, one serious, one silly.
Capitol ingredient
You would think that the essential ingredient to any form of dictatorship would be blindingly obvious to even the most casual observer.
Especially when that ingredient is blind obedience to a leader who promises that the reward for that obedience is a future of unimaginable contentment and fulfilment, along with chest-bursting pride in your country and the vanquishment of all enemies that may threaten its future, and thus your future.
And when such a future is threatened from within by those opposed to the leader’s ambition for your national and personal best interests, you will happily go along with as many losses of rights to naysayers as the leader thinks necessary.
Until the time comes when it dawns on you and your neighbours that not everything that the leader says and does is necessarily in your best interests and one of your neighbours ventures to say so, only to end up in prison for ‘re-education’ or facing a firing squad.
And then you realise that while you were dreaming of an idyllic future, the Constitution, The Bill of Rights, the rule of law and anything else that could curtail the leader have disappeared, he has become Leader for Life, and that you have become a slave.
And you remember your parents telling you that Hitler was elected and you recall saying to them ‘That was Germany, we’re Americans and he’s not like that’ as you went out the door on your way to the Capitol.
The Six Essential Ingredients for success in a Hollywood script – A writer’s guide
- When a group of people is faced with a tidal wave, a volcano erupting, bombs falling etc, at least one character has to shout “We gotta get outa here!”
- When the enemy tanks pour over the ridge playing ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ on loudspeakers and firing rocket launchers, someone has to say “Wait, did you hear something?”
- When someone’s partner walks in on them and finds them snorting coke and having group sex with several wombats, they have to say “Wait! I can explain! This isn’t what it looks like.”
- When the last of the engines on your plane dies and it starts to nosedive, someone has to say “I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”
- When Genghis Khan knocks on a chieftain’s door and tells him to hand over his lands or he’ll take them by force, the chieftain has to say “Oh, yeah. You and whose army?”
- When a kidnap victim has to sit with their feet in cold custard and with their eyes taped open so they have to watch endless repeats of the Kardashians, the victim has to say “Why are you doing this to me?”
Six Crooked Highways 
So true. So sad.
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Well, at least the first piece. 😉
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Fave pick: #6. If I were forced to watch even one Karashian, I’d give up whatever “secret” info the torturer wanted.
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Me too. 🙂
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😊
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I’m with the anti-Kardashian brigade!
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As are all sane human beans. 🙂
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I read Kardashian as brilliant money-making strategies and a gullible audience.
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And I read that with immense sadness.
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Capitol Ingredient nails it. I had a small number of world leaders (and wanna-be-world-leaders) in mind as I was reading, but the big orange baby wins. Good observations, Doug 👍
Lol. Too funny about The Six Essential Ingredients for success in a Hollywood script 😂
#4 – “I’ve got a bad feeling about this.” The Star Wars franchise has ‘contracts’ that this line must be said at least three times per movie, even in scenes when nothing bad is going to happen.
Makes me think of: “Let’s split up!” (usually uttered unwisely in any zombie/horror/alien/apocalypse/ movie when the team are perfectly safe in numbers)…
Doctor Jekyll: “Let’s split up!”
Mr Hyde: “Good idea. You go this way… I’ll go that way.”
😀
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Excellent examples, Ford. I intend to unashamedly steal them. 🙂
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“I intend to unashamedly steal them.”
Hollywood script chain of replies:
#7 “I’m calling the cops!”
#8 “You dirty rat!”
#9 “You’ll never take me alive, copper!”
#10 “I’m planning on escaping this cell tonight. You in?”
😁
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I’d keep adding to the list but then I’d have to shoot you. 🙂
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Surely there is no challenge to reconciling the ‘inhabitants’ of the first Six from the second.
It is not such a matter of the masses becoming aware as it is the individual accepting their responsibility.
fun Sixeseses…
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Indeed, clark. Well observed.
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I’d actually be curious to know what the explanation might be for those wombats in #3. Good description of the transition to becoming a slave in the first story.
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Thanks, Frank. Re the wombats, so would I. 😉
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good post, six sounds horrid, three sounds tricky! and illegal.
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Thanks, UP. I doubt that doing anything with wombats is illegal in the US. 🙂
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The saddest thing about your first six, Doug, is that it applies so widely right now.
The rulers of both the UK and France are both hurtling to the right of Mr G Khan (#5) in their diminution of human rights and general psychopathic behaviour.
The happiest thing about your second six is that I know nothing about these Kardashian people
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The saddest thing, CE, is that we humans never seem to learn from history. Re the Kardashians, believe me, ignorance is bliss in their case.:-)
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Two great pieces, Doug. Sadly, much of the first piece rings true. And thanks for the guide to Hollywood script writing. I think I can start now. Can’t help feeling there might be a 7th ingredient to be added at the end of your first story – ‘Maybe this has gone too far.’
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Thanks, Jenne. Looking forward to your first Hollywood blockbuster. 🙂
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Unless we watch very closely, history does repeat itself.
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The first is frightening, because it’s true.
The second is funny, because it’s true.
Truly a fine pair of Sixes.
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Many thanks, D.
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Regarding Ingredient #2:
Back in the early 80’s in grad school in a southern state (US), we were all studying for finals from our tiny low-rise grad dorm, we heard the strains of Ride of the Valkyries come floating through our windows from the high-rise undergrad dorm across the street. Apparently, the frat boys on the 6th (top) floor were tired of studying, and so decided the set their couch on fire, crank up Wagner, and throw the burning thing out their window to the courtyard below. No one was hurt, the couch was not burning as I walked past the next morning on my way to the library, and there may, or may not have been consequences. It was the 80’s so…
Brings back memories!
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Indeed, Liz. Mine is from ‘Apocalypse Now’, with Wagner being broadcast from the choppers and the Colonel saying ‘I love the smell of napalm in the morning’. Much more grim.
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Yep, I think that’s where Frat Boys got the idea.
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