I Had a Dream(s)

Everybody wants us to open a restaurant again, but I had a horrible dream last night.  The guy I hired as a dishwasher got charged with child molestation and the Restaurant Association demanded we shut down for years until by their graces they would let me open up again.  When I protested that I would go broke and my manager and I had nothing to do with the dishwasher’s crimes, the Assoc. sued me in court.  It was hell.  My elderly manager took it hard and resigned.  A few months later he died of grief over the affair.  Finally the Restaurant Association proposed a settlement.  We could start operations again, but I would have to fund a child abuse program to the tune of $60 million.  Then I woke up and told Shirley about my dream.  “So who were the dishwasher and manager?” she asked.  I told her some guys by the names of Sandusky and Paterno.  And in my crazy dream, the letterhead from the Restaurant Association kept saying “NCAA” (National Culinary Arts Association??). Let me ask you.  Would you open a business if the NCAA would hold your business responsible for criminal activity of a rogue employee?

Then everybody said I should think up something in the way of travel and tourism.  So I went to bed to sleep on it.  I dreamed of starting a luxury line of cruise ships.  But there are already so many of these.  So where could we go that would be new and different?  And then I remembered in my dream that the manmade global warming people were predicting that all the Arctic Ice would be gone by 2020.  More or less because there is some variation in the ice pack in the Arctic.  For example, last summer, the ice area increased by 60% and many seasonal sea lanes closed north of the Canadian Territories.  But not to worry, it will all be gone soon and the long-sought NW Passage will be ready, or even clear sailing over the north pole in about 5 years.  So if we start building a fleet of cruise ships now, we will be done just as the Arctic opens up.  All I am asking is that you risk your life savings to help me invest in this effort.  Would you do it? Maybe I should ask Al Gore to put his money where his mouth is.

That came after the nights I dreamed that I jumped on a time machine and traveled back to the eighties.  What could a guy do to make a killing in literature?  So I wrote a book about a philandering politician whose wife was bisexual.  Their marriage seemed to be one of convenience.  While he was governor, she moved out of the house. She only hitched to him because he was a rising star politically. When his affairs got out of hand and went public, she was in charge of demonizing his victims and ruining their reputations.  Then, amazingly he got elected President. Finally, after he retired, she went into politics in another state, like some carpetbagger, and then ran for President herself. But she lost to a semi-Marxist guy who was black.  So she ran again at the age of 69.   The book ends with her the likely nominee and maybe eventually President.  A majority of Americans can think of no other person in America that would be better.  So in my dream, I went to a publisher with my freshly written text and he was so incredulous.  He said it was so preposterous that no one would ever read such a thing. It insults the intelligence of the American voter and no such people could ever be elected to the highest office.  That’s when I woke up feeling like something the cat drug in.

I guess that dream must have bothered me because the next night it came back again, me in the time machine and going into that book publisher’s office.  “Okay, I want to write a fiction book about the future--what will happen after 1984,” I stated.  “And I think it should shoot the moon with wild happenings so that it just gets novel attention now, but sells later when some of the ideas just might come true.”  He stroked his chin.  “So what do you have in mind?” 

“The computer and phone.  The computer gets so smart it kills the encyclopedia business.  A worldwide information sharing system is adopted where you can buy and sell, ask and get answers of just about anything.”  He gave a smirk.  “Wow, you really are crazy,” and hooking a thumb over his shoulder he said, “See, I can’t even get the darned thermal paper to go in this printer for this Apple II-E.  They say it is just a glorified replacement for the typewriter.  How in the heck could it be hooked up worldwide?  We don’t have enough copper to put in that many lines.”  “No, by satellite,” I enthused.  And then there would be phones that were so smart they could take over like Dick Tracy’s wrist radio system, only they would be devices that you could write on, ask questions of, check the weather and find out where you were in the world. Even spend hours playing games on.”  “People would never go back to writing if they had voice communications.” He averred.  “Oh, no! They will use their thumbs and walk around sending texts to each other.  They will get so involved they will crash cars and when walking will run into things.”  “You have to be crazy!” he sneered at me.  “Hunt and peck with two thumbs?  And why not just talk? "Oh and something we can call social media, where  people put up all kinds of stuff about where they ate dinner and what happened to their pet.  Some people would get so much into this that they neglect the rest of their lives. "  He was holding his head in his hands now, "This is too outlandish.  I can’t support you writing such nonsense. Forget it!"

“All right, how about this.  The peaceful fall of international communism and it is replaced by various forms of fascism.”  “Now you are out to lunch,” he rolled his eyes.  “How do you propose to bring down communism peacefully-- in maybe a hundred years?”  “No really, it could happen in a half dozen years.  Christians will bring it down from within.”  “That’s absurd!  There aren’t any Christians in the communist countries.”  “No, imagine that the iron curtain opens up and we discover that nearly 1/3 of the people are secretly Christians.  They start marching in Germany as a peaceful protest with little candles and that brings the regime down.”  “But that couldn’t possibly be!  The government would turn their tanks on a peaceful protest the way they massacred the Hungarians in ’56 and slammed the door shut on the Czechs in ’68.”  “No, the communists get so caught up in an arms race with Reagan that their inefficient economy goes bankrupt and their philosophy is bankrupt against the arguments of the citizens.  When the people start to march, they are so many in number that the soldiers won’t turn their guns on their own people. Marchers overwhelm the authorities from Berlin to Vladivostok and tear down the Berlin wall with their hands.”  “Nobody would buy a story like that,” he turned serious.  Even if they believed the myth about there being some Christians. But  I kept talking. “As the world turns capitalist, the Chinese realize that their free market neighbors are growing exponentially all around them.  Grudgingly they open up to commerce and we discover 100 million Chinese are Christians that are changing the country from within.”  “What have you been smoking?” he asked.  “you know that Christianity doesn’t appeal to the oriental culture and China will never have any but the tiniest minority of them. Just look at Japan!  Indonesia! What kind of spirit do you conjure up to do this?”

“Look.  If you want to write futuristically, you need to write about traveling to the moon or Mars in a spaceship or something.” He coached me.  “No.  NASA gets almost killed off by a socialist President.  He makes them stop rockets and start doing stuff to support Muslims.  He was the first Afro-American President and everyone thought he was going to do everything right.”  “What?  You mean a guy like Jesse Jackson or Ralph Abernathy?  They are old news.  And socialist?  That’s impossible.  Why, America is growing under free markets and is the envy of the world.  We are in a cold war against the Russians. We’d never turn socialist.”  “Well this guy secretly hides his background and gets elected.  He immediately passes a nationalized healthcare but it doesn’t work.  The Democrats spend 8 years defending it and lose their kiester in the elections.  But meanwhile the socialist does hundreds of executive orders and bypasses laws right and left.”  “So the last chapter is he gets impeached,” the publisher grinned. "No," I sighed. "the Republicans wuss out." 

Then he sighed and told me, “I don’t know.  Your ideas are just too goofy.  This is the USA and people don’t just flee their senses that way.  Even as fiction this won’t sell.  Critics would destroy my publishing company and we’d go out of business.  Good luck on getting it printed somewhere.” 

 And with that my dream ended, and I realized that if you proposed today's world as fiction in the brave new world of 1984, you’d never have gotten it published.

 Gosh, I didn't even get to the part about Muslims becoming terrorists or the American economy becoming like southern Europe.