Back during the dark days of COVID, my partner and I managed to come down with the disease just a month before the vaccine was released. Thankfully, though we caught “COVID Classic;” we weathered it pretty well, and, aside from my partner’s sense of smell being all but gone for the next three years, the effects have been minimal.
Except for the dreams.
I never had really vivid dreams prior to COVID, but ever since, almost every night, Salvador Dali is art directing my Technicolor spectaculars. I’m having dreams more surrealistic and vivid than anything I can remember or imagine, until now.
But in this “post-constitutional” land we live in, the surrealistic seems almost normal.
One week we are told Tylenol causes autism (it does not), and, the next, our country is going to break our nuclear test ban treaties and start blowing atomic bombs up again.
Meanwhile, we have our own version of Dr. Strangelove influencing the White House and PeeWee German (Steven Miller) doing his best impersonation of Joseph Goebbels.
Our military is attacking speedboats off shore, slaughtering the occupants as “suspected drug runners” without the benefit of trials.
National Guard troops are assisting ICE to arrest and imprison suspected undocumented immigrants without a scintilla of proof other than the immigrants’ skin color and accent.
We have a man in the White House who is profiteering from his position, selling swag and worthless crypto currency like a patent medicine pitchman. What’s more, this blathering con man is doing everything he can to disguise the fact that his health is failing and creating distractions to keep America from seeing the Epstein files.
(Remember, these files have already brought down a prince of England and may well drag down some major banking institutions as well.)
Add to that the disgusting imagery of the East Wing of the White House being unceremoniously bulldozed to make room for a palatial ballroom — or throne room, more likely.
Meanwhile, a Republican-controlled Congress is wasting energy debating minutia while the government is shut down and millions of poor families are about to go hungry.
All this begs the question: How can weird dreams even begin to compete with the reality of America at this moment?
Honestly, it makes me wish that I was living in those odd but colorfully benign dreams and not in this dystopian nightmare we used to call a republic.
At least in the dreams I wake up.
And that is the whole point of this screed: Waking up!
We the People need to wake up and smell the dictatorship. Our elected officials need to wake up and take back the reins of government from a White House that sees itself as a “Unitary Executive” (read “dictator”).
Our founders created a very balanced idea of government with three co-equal branches, and it has worked pretty well — until now. It is my hope that somehow we can reawaken that spirit and start moving in a direction that provides more equality, more opportunity, more inclusion and less oligarchy, less discrimination and less authoritarianism.
We must awaken the spirit of our Constitution again, or we will all end up sleeping through the sad final act of the great American Experiment.
Hardy Haberman is a longtime local LGBTQ+ activist and a board member of the Woodhull Freedom Alliance. His blog is at DungeonDiary.blogspot.com.