-- By Tom Phillips
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| 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 meet our new granddaughter, already nine months old. My sleeping meds disappeared enroute, probably somewhere "in security." I went to bed, prepared for the worst. And I dreamed:
Forty years, forty years. The phrase kept echoing in my head, an anvil chorus, an indictment, 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 people in dreams as fragments of myself, I thought -- can this be? My meds were repressing a wrecker of all I supposedly love?
But no, most of me was a bystander, one who watched for forty years as men took sledgehammers to a civilization -- destroying the world that had been a-building, the world meant for their children and grandchildren.
I had dreamed the Reagan Revolution.
