The Strangest Dream

 Picasso: Guernica

Vaccinated at last, on the eve of Easter I flew masked across America, not looking out the window, not talking to my neighbor, and arrived in Seattle to see my new granddaughter, already nine months old.  My sleeping meds disappeared en route, probably somewhere in the TSA security gauntlet.  I went to bed, prepared for a rough night.  And I dreamed:  

Forty years, forty years.  The phrase "forty years" kept echoing in my head, like an anvil chorus, like an indictment, like a sentence imposed by a merciless court.   There was music, a vicious descending line that came down like a hammer, repeat, repeat.  And I saw men taking sledgehammers to a nursery, to the place where their children play, bringing down their hammerheads to pulverize everything, to turn it into trash, shards, the ruins of a civilization.  

I awoke in horror.  Trained to see dreams as an extension of myself, I thought -- can this be?  That drugs to help me sleep have been repressing the real me, a sadistic wrecker of all I supposedly love? 

And I saw this was only partly true.  The real me was a bystander, one who has stood by and watched for forty years as men with purpose took sledgehammers to a civilization -- deliberately destroying the world that had been a-building, the world meant for their children and grandchildren.  

I had dreamed the Reagan Revolution.  

In brief:  

The bursar began with a blast:  "No one's entitled!"  

Money replied -- God Bless the Child!

A burning Bush stormed the desert -- read my lips, read my lips.  With a giant sucking sound, he was consumed by a clown.  H. Ross Pierrot said I told you so.   

In came Billary, a two-faced monster.  Not asking, not telling, ending "welfare as we know it," defending, defining, defiling marriage as we knew it, signing a bill of rights for bankers to do it.  The Bill came due.  

An archfiend had been laden with a plan to attack America.  It worked even better than he dreamed. 

Another Bush took arms against a sea of troubles, an Axis of Evil with heads in three directions.  Mission unaccomplished, the Bush was consumed.  Exit Axis, rising sea.  

Enter Mr. Noh Drama, with "greatness thrust upon him."  He purred, he demurred.  Single mothers took third jobs, fathers were hounded to Honduras. The archfiend was shot and thrown into the sea.    

Finally came the Beast, slouching through Bethlehem down the Capitol stairs.  A mob seized the palace.  Four years later, "the carnage ends here." 

In comes an old man, been Biden his time. Joe and Jill run up the Hill, to fetch a pail of oughta.  

-- Copyright 2021 by Tom Phillips 

In the Nursery