Late, Like Jonah: The Jonah Carnival#
A month of amateur plays about a catastrophe that has not happened yet — free to copy, and open for criticism.
The Jonah Carnival was meant to open on Petrov Day, Saturday 26 September. I missed it. I am late again, and I am deeply sorry.
Jonah, the prophet these plays are named after, first ran the other way. It seems to be the one part of his job I have mastered.
If the arithmetic on this site is right, no delay is harmless: the dice keep rolling while anyone waits, and I have waited too long. If it is wrong, the quickest way to find out is for someone to check it. Either way, checking beats waiting. So here it is, a few days late.
What a Jonah Play is#
Somebody, somewhere, has to be the person who notices in real time that a disaster is approaching for a city, and that city has to listen to avert it. A Jonah Play is a short play about that person and that city. It needs three people or more, a bedsheet or more, one die and no stage. Put it on in a city hall, a common room, a bar, a classroom, a street corner, and maybe even in a synagogue, a church hall, a mosque, or whatever other place of worship or gathering you can find.
The form is old. The purimshpil, the amateur folk play of Purim, turned the world upside down for a day, and its repertoire included Jonah. What is new is holding such a festival in advance, for a disaster that has not happened yet but could happen any day — if everyone continues as usual.
Two seed plays, and a guide#
Both plays can be performed as written, and you are most welcome to rewrite them in your own words and your own language. The whole idea, the rules and the ways it could go wrong are on the Jonah Carnival page.
Jonah-Play-b11 — Forty Days, Overturned is the book of Jonah itself, told close to the original: the call, the storm, the “fish”, and possibly the shortest sermon ever, preached to the great and cruel capital of the superpower of its day. It ends with Nineveh spared or overturned, depending on what the city does and how the dice roll.
Jonah-Play-b12 — Arkhipov and the Steel Fish is set on 27 October 1962 aboard the Soviet submarine B-59, which carried a nuclear torpedo the Americans did not know about. Twice that day her exhausted captain reached for it, and twice Vasili Arkhipov helped turn it around. That’s like winning WW3 for all sides. But despite this and similar victories, the dice keep rolling, year after year. The audience is asked who they want to win. Because if the dice keep rolling, disaster will win.
Fate or Destiny is a short guide for a potential introduction to the play or a discussion afterwards. It explains why fear is not danger, and how fate is not destiny.
Why these two dates#
26 September 1983, Petrov Day. The screens at the Soviet early-warning station Serpukhov-15 reported American missiles inbound. The duty officer, Stanislav Petrov, judged it a false alarm and reported it as one, at great personal risk. It later turned out to be sunlight on high cloud, which he couldn’t have known at the time.
27 October 1962, Arkhipov Day. The most dangerous day of the Cuban Missile Crisis (see Jonah Play b12 and sources there for what happened and why it matters).
Between them, the two dates hold both halves of the story: a machine that raised a false alarm, and people whom circumstances nearly pushed into “having to act”. Annie Jacobsen’s 2024 book Nuclear War walks through a credible scenario for our time in which a nuclear war runs its course in about 72 minutes.
The Jonah Carnival asks for a month to avert such disasters by asking humanity to change course for good. If a month is not enough, let’s keep going: any day that is called Today will do — until this ultimate disaster is averted. Welcome to what may be the Great Filter, the existential crunchtime, where humanity needs to decide where it wants to go and how it wants to live.
The one fact every play should carry#
Most people are more likely to die in an accidental nuclear winter than in a car crash. If today’s hair-trigger policies persist, the question is when, not whether: any yearly risk above zero, rolled year after year, ends the same way. The model on this site finds a global nuclear war more likely than not within a human lifetime. The danger lasts as long as the dice rolling continues. This website argues that the rolling can be stopped in a surprisingly gentle kind reasonable way. But who will check it out?
No precise number is needed for that analysis above. Readings of the record differ only in how fast. Given the stakes, the burden of proof lies with anyone who claims the dice can safely keep rolling. The computational model is public and built to be attacked: check an overview here. Assume that the person who built the model is probably wrong somewhere. But can someone please show how? And how certain can we be that this clear warning can indeed be ignored? Truly looking costs only a little.
How to join in#
Take a seed play, or start from scratch.
Rewrite it, in your own words and your own language.
Put it on, and tell us what happened. Post a photo, a phone video or a paragraph with #JonahPlay and #AuditTheMath, and send a line to FF+jonah-carnival@balospe.com: where it was, roughly how many came, and above all what went wrong.
Every play that keeps the seven rules gets a link from the Carnival page. The one that matters most: ASON is the only enemy, the Ambiguous Semantics Of Nothing, the trap of reading “nothing happened” as “nothing is wrong”. No nation and no person is ever the villain.
Please tear it apart#
The plays are at the stage this site calls a Mockup Model: ready to use, and open for criticism at the same time. Criticism of any kind is welcome, and especially on these questions:
Does it work as theatre?
Is it fair and kind to everyone it portrays, and safe for the people in the room, including children and those who have lived through war?
Where is it wrong, preachy, unclear or too long?
What would make you put one on, and what would stop you?
Replies to FF+jonah-carnival@balospe.com are most welcome, and the pages will change with what comes back. The Carnival page already says plainly how this could fail; a page that lists only its hopes is advertising.
Pass it on#
The most useful thing you can do in the next five minutes is to send this to one person who runs a room: a teacher, a youth leader, a pastor, rabbi or imam, a book club, a bar, a theatre group.
A text to forward
A month of short amateur plays about a catastrophe that has not happened yet: the Jonah Carnival, from Petrov Day (26 September) to Arkhipov Day (27 October). Three people, a bedsheet, one die, no stage. Two free plays to copy or rewrite: https://balospe.com/en/action/jonah-carnival/
If you can translate, please translate. No permission is needed for any of it (see the license below).
Late, but here. Offered not to be believed, but to be checked — and this time, to be played.
Sources. Petrov and Arkhipov: the Jonah Carnival page and, with the documented uncertainties about B-59, the Matheo-b16 forecast study (its Appendix SIA-X7). The 72 minutes: Annie Jacobsen (2024), Nuclear War: A Scenario, Dutton, New York; see also Politico Magazine (2024). The one fact and its arithmetic: Science. #AuditTheMath
Free to share: the Jonah License
Everything on this page is under the Jonah License (JoLi): CC0, public domain. Copy it, perform it, change it, translate it, sell tickets or not, keep none of the words or all of them. No permission is needed. Credit is welcome but not required.
The Jonah Licence’s one twist is about nothing. Doing nothing with it is not nothing. The license asks a single thing of all who use it, and cannot enforce it: “Prepare to explain on Judgement Day what you failed to do with any material you received under the Jonah License.”