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 

   

Advice to Millennials

-- By Tom Phillips

Many years ago, when I was 17, I remember telling my girlfriend in a panicked tone – I’ve gotta figure out something I can be great at – the world’s best.    It was beginning to sink in that my pro basketball dreams were going nowhere, and I needed a substitute.  What could it be?  Acting?  No, she said, not acting.  

A few years later I took my confusion to a favorite professor, who must have been feeling cynical that day.  What can I be, I pleaded.  His advice was to become the world’s leading expert in a field not many people were interested in – Spanish cookery, for example.  I scoffed at that.  Soon, I set out for San Francisco, where I hoped to launch my career as an idolized folk-singer. 

Fast-forward thirty years or so to middle age, when a colleague of mine, a celebrated TV journalist, asked me what I was doing with myself.   I described my modest position as a newswriter, and he looked at me in alarm.  “That’s a wasted life!” he said.   

Wounded, I rallied.  Wait a minute – That’s not all I do.  I play music, I teach, I’m a minister’s spouse, a father of many.  He quickly apologized, but I could see where his values lay.  He felt that anyone with any talent should use it to the utmost – and not let other, lesser goals stand in his way. This fellow had dropped out of college to pursue journalism, his health was awful and his personal life was an unholy mess.  But he loved his work, and he was very famous, and rich. 

I think of these exchanges because recently a 16-year-old granddaughter of mine repeated, almost verbatim, my teenage panic speech:  I have to find something I’m great at!  Volunteering in a hospital had soured her on the medical field, so she needed a substitute.  What could it be?  Acting? 

The world is awash in bad advice these days, and has been for some time -- maybe since the dawn of the industrial revolution, when the one-trick pony entered the ring, and people began to hear that they should decide early what they want to “be,” and narrow their focus.  The new role models were industrial tycoons, or scientists in search of a cure, or mad artists, or fabulously wealthy financiers. Today we admire relentless entrepreneurs like Mark Zukerberg, pasty zillionaires like Warren Buffett, super-athletes like Tom Brady and Tiger Woods, and actors and rock stars who barely went to high school.  They’re all great at something.  

It was not always thus.   Back in ancient times, the goal of education was “mens sana in corpore sano” -- a sound mind in a sound body -- and learning was physical as well as mental.  And the ideal was not greatness or “expertise” in one subject, but a broad competency – the ability to recognize the soundness of an idea in almost any field of knowledge.  Up until modern times an educated person was able to move between fields of endeavor – applying knowledge of the arts and sciences to create, to invent, to do battle, to think and act across the whole range of human activity.   Such “renaissance men” are rare today, but they still exist.