It's a nightmare, it must be a nightmare, this detached sense that we're being herded, funneled -- no, inextricably pulled as if on a conveyer belt -- into a void that looms ever closer. We're not fighting. Why are we not fighting, I wonder? Why are our leaders not fighting? We're being polite. We're following the rules of decency. We're empty. We're numb. In the way of dreams, we are paralyzed, somehow unable to move. We watch, distantly, the maw of the mechanism that will grind us, and everything of beauty into dollars and dust.
It's not a nightmare, of course, it's not a dream. It's what everyone with sense or wisdom is feeling right now, following the inexplicable re-election of the worst president in US history, a president who fully intends to be a dictator and a brutal one.
I do have dreams, vivid ones, sometimes nightmarish, sometimes even, maybe, possibly, premonitory. I had one such dream, just before waking, on the morning of January 5, 2021. Although I actually lived then just outside the Beltway near DC, in my dream, I was in my childhood home, in the garage, with my family, three generations of us, all happily working on some project together when the room was flooded with the sudden, blinding flash instantly recognizable to anyone who grew up with, or is just familiar with, the "duck and cover" drills that a generation or two of children were taught would somehow help them survive an atomic bomb. An instant later, the windows were dark, walled off by dirt and uprooted, upside down, massive oaks thrown up by the blast. My last thought before waking was that DC had been hit. And that nothing would ever be the same.
I don't claim any ability to perform mystical premonition -- I think anyone who was even vaguely aware of the then-current events knew that something big, something earthshaking was almost a certainty on January 6. Megalomaniacs aren't known for willingly giving up power -- and this particular malignant narcissist was being asked to not only step down from the role of the most powerful leader in the world but from the only position that would shield him from a well-deserved fate of rotting behind bars. It would have been infinitely more surprising had he behaved in a decent, honorable way.
So, with my premonitory powers suitably demeaned, I suppose it's only my mind's last-ditch hope, a subconscious Hail Mary pass, that my dream last night involved Trump's failing to be inaugurated, thanks to a scheme, or set of schemes, put into play by people in the current administration and Congress and aides, in which I was inexplicably involved. (In defense of the actual members of the administration and Congress and aides, no real, recognizable individuals were involved in my dream version, although I did see someone who looked much like an actress would, playing the role of AOC -- I think my subconscious, as well as conscious mind, finds it hard to believe that she, and those like her, are taking Trump's reinstatement with a resigned sigh.)
I'll spare you the details of the dream, the memories of which are fading, as they do, but imagine a cross between a sophisticated scheme of political intrigue and a comic farce of the same, involving key people finding themselves locked in rooms, clever misdirection, and the surreptitious administering of non-lethal but poleaxing drugs that leave people, including the orange one himself, wandering around the White House in an impotent daze, unable to remember where they were supposed to be or what they were supposed to be doing. He in particular was last seen (from the back, thankfully) weaving down the halls of the White House giggling to himself, in just his tighty whities.
I suppose it's false hope, a vain hope, that, in Hollywood movie or dream-like fashion, we'll be saved in the nick of time by some last-minute plot twist or superhero -- after all, we've been failed again and again, it seems -- our hopes built up that Garland will save us, or Mueller, or Smith . . . but one by one they've fallen from the pedestals that we, with great hope, set them on. But I suppose we can be excused for trying to retain the last vestiges of optimism, of trying to wish into existence a flicker of light at the end of the tunnel, to hang onto that dream, to sleep for just five more minutes -- because the idea that evil has won, that the liars, the cheaters, the gleefully cruel have triumphed over goodness and light and hope is just too painful to face.
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