A Dream to End a Nightmare

I had a most vibrant and bizarre dream last night; it was both haunting and hopeful . . . a full-spectrum middle-of-the-night Technicolor fantasy. But oh what a hallucination . . . a danse macabre set just beyond the portals of hell; its dramatis personae consisting of IMPOTUS, Vice President Pence and members of that omnium gatherum (motley crew) known as The Cabinet: V.P. Pence, A.G. Barr, Secretaries Pompeo, Mnuchin, Esper, Bernhardt, Perdue, Ross, Scalia, Azar, Carson, Chao, Brouilette, De Vos, Wilke, and Wolfe, as well as sub-cabinet officials Meadows, Lighthizer, Grenell, Vought, Haspell, Wheeler and Carranza. For reasons best known only to my subconscious and perhaps Dr. Freud, I held center-stage, wielding a gavel while mostly holding the attention of 23 pairs of eyes and ears. I was speaking about their boss, the 45th POTUS:

“Ladies and gentlemen: I deeply appreciate your giving me a few minutes of your time. What I want to discuss with you may well change the course of American history. I know, it sounds terribly dramatic and I am a “Hollywood Brat,” so it’s likely that what I’ve got to say is part of my genetic inheritance. Nonetheless, I have also been deeply enmeshed in politics - both its history and practice - for more than half a century, so what I am about to present is also embedded in my personal experience.”

“By now, you are all, at some level, fully aware that the man you serve is deeply, deeply flawed - intellectually, psychologically, and morally. By now you know that he is a raging egomaniac, a pathological liar and a textbook narcissist. He is intellectually flawed, lacks even a simulacrum of curiosity, and is, at least to my way of thinking, a thoroughgoing moral albino. The intellectual side of him reminds me of how Mark Twain described King Arthur in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (Ch. 28): ‘He wasn’t a very heavy weight, intellectually. His head was an hour-glass; it could stow an idea, but it had to do it a grain at a time, not the whole idea at once.’ You all have your individual reasons for having kept your collective mouths shut during the first 3 years of his presidency as he has told an average of 10 lies a day while turning the United States into a subsidiary of his personal financial empire. You have stood by while he has befriended many of the planet’s most notorious dictators and autocrats while mocking, belittling and making public enemies of anyone and everyone in the American government and society who does not agree with him. You have remained seated on your thumbs and been utterly silent while he turns our free press into traitors and the vast majority of immigrants, refugees and asylees into murderers, rapists and unrepentant drug dealers. How can you live with yourselves? Behind closed doors some of you may have winced; in public, you have acquiesced. To say the least, this, in no manner, speaks well of you; it makes of you little more than heinous abettors.”

"I simply cannot imagine what you’re thinking about when you are alone, your heads on your pillows in the dead of night. Could it be that some of you, due to your religious weltanschauung or eschatology actually find merit and prophetic fulfillment in the effect your boss has on the world? Do you somehow believe he is the one prophesied by the Bible to oppose Jesus and substitute himself in Christ's place before the Second Coming, and that therefore you are more than willing - even delighted - to put up with all his neuroses, nastiness and utter b.s. in order to bring about the end-times as found in the First and Second Epistle of John? God help us if that is the case for those among you - like Pence, Pompeo, Barr and DeVos, who are yearning for the fulfillment of prophecy.”

“Doesn’t it brother you that unlike any other president in American history, IMPOTUS has shown an all but pathological disdain for building global alliances and forging meaningful cooperation at a time of international crisis? Instead, he has used the Covid-19 pandemic as an excuse to carry out his most vile political programs, such as totally shutting down immigration to the U.S., shoveling hundreds upon hundreds of billions of dollars into the maw of big business, and drawing deep divides between so-called ‘red and blue states.’ Are these the actions of a leader . . . let alone a sane, liberty-loving human being? This president will go down in history as the worst, most maladroit, unprepared and venal in history. If he had his way, he would cancel the 2020 election and continue absorbing more and more power during a time of political, economic and medical crisis. My question to you at this point is ‘Why oh why do you remain silent?’ Are you afraid of him? Afraid he’ll fire you and call you dirty names? Oh come now, every one of you took a deep cut in salary to assume the positions you now occupy. Are you afraid that if you turn on him it will mean the end your career in public service? Tell me: after what you’ve gone through with IMPOTUS, would you ever want to continue serving the public?”

“As New York Times White House correspondents Katie Rogers and Annie Karni wrote in an extensive piece just the other day, he has pretty much isolated himself in the White House’s family quarters, watching endless hours of Fox News and spitting out dozens upon dozens of angry, vindictive cyber thunder bolts. ‘The president sees few allies no matter which channel he clicks. He is angry even with Fox, an old security blanket, for not portraying him as he would like to be seen. And he makes time to watch Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s briefings from New York, closely monitoring for a sporadic compliment or snipe. Confined to the White House, the president is isolated from the supporters, visitors, travel and golf that once entertained him, according to more than a dozen administration officials and close advisers who spoke about Mr. Trump’s strange new life. This is a man on the verge of a total collapse.”

“Don’t you, ladies and gentlemen of the Cabinet, understand that under your boss, America has lost much of its prestige, thus becoming an embarrassment both at home and abroad? That we’ve lost our role as a beacon of light; that we are increasingly becoming a second- or even third-rate nation while much of the world is now looking to China and Russia for leadership and guidance? Does this not concern you? Are any of you willing to stand up, put on your political armor and scream out ENOUGH IS ENOUGH?”

“If only you had the courage and conviction to use the ultimate power of the Constitution, and invoke the 25th Amendment, thereby declaring that this man is mentally incapable of carrying out his mandated duties, you would be accomplishing more for the future of the United States than any contingent of Generals, Admirals and front-line troups?” If there will be any of you who needs a quick twenty-twenty on the 25th Amendment, which was originally suggested by Dwight Eisenhower and ratified on June 10, 1967, just ask; I’ll be glad to help you out. Any questions or concerns. . .?”

It was at this point that my dream came to an end and I found myself stretching and, has long been my early morning custom, doing everything in my power to recapture a dream or two from the night before. This particular dream . . . the one based upon a monstrous nightmare . . . seemed so real that I had to immediately grope for the bedside radio and flip on NPR’s “Morning Edition” in order to see if perhaps it hadn’t been a dream . . . that the nightmare had really, truly ended. But alas, it was a dream.

Ever since, I have been daydreaming; hoping against hope that those 23 pairs of eyes and ears will have the same dream tonight . . .tomorrow at the latest . . . and that once and for all, this nightmare will end.

God knows, we all need it.

195 days until the next election.