The Nightmare Years

Everyone has bad dreams. Maybe you’ve had one as bad as the epic I had, a surreal nightmare that seemed awfully real. Haunted by menacing villains and pitiful fools, I tossed and turned, unsure whether I was sleeping in my own bed or awake in a pulp crime novel.

This nightmare seemed to last four years.

Anyway, here it is. Any chance you’ve had a similar one?

The dream revolved around a feeble, nebulous character, “Ol’ Man Grifter” (Ol’ Man Grifter, that Ol’ Man Grifter, he must know something…). He posed as a kindly grandfather-type who just wanted to heal the wounds of division and make nice with everyone. Unfortunately he was actually the most vile character since Simon Legree — ambitious though lazy, garrulous with nothing to say, an unprincipled conman who preached high principles.

Flashback scene in the nightmare: Ol’ Man Grifter always yakked about justice for racial minorities. But years earlier in a powerful institution just across town he’d been best buddies with several powerful gentlemen whose politics reflected tribal loyalties to the plantation-based side of the Civil War.

One of those buddies even began his march to power as an “Exalted Cyclops” of men in white robes. Hard to dream up nightmares like that.

In my dream, Ol’ Man Grifter was supposedly busy — yet not really busy, because as each day passed he lost another marble or two from his shrinking bag of cat’s-eyes. Shadowy “advisors” made the decisions required of the impaired man’s position, then told him what his decisions were.

Were they “advisors” or were they — uh oh! — The Lizard People? As can happen in nightmares, these creatures were hard to see, working in shadow, maybe slithering around some kind of basement.

It seemed that a once-powerful ruler had sent The Lizard People to “assist” Ol’ Man Grifter. In fact, that ruler had never stopped being powerful. He was a secular deity who once solemnly warned of rising oceans but now lived — isn’t that strange? — in a luxury shoreline estate with a lovely view of the presumably rising Atlantic Ocean.

Could the dream get weirder? It did. The old man showed up at an Easter event just to smile as the kiddos hunted for eggs. What could go wrong? He wandered off and seemed in danger of taking questions from attendees; that’s what went wrong. The handlers went into a panic and ordered someone dressed in an Easter Bunny costume to rush to the old man’s side, wave potential questioners away with his bunny arms, and lead the bewildered fellow away before some clever kid won the egg-hunting contest by discovering Scrambled Man. Nightmare stuff, but this actually happened.

As if Ol’ Man Grifter weren’t disturbing enough, the dream was line-of-succession haunted by a middle-aged woman, one who’d once been quite comely, her looks in fact having been her entree into politics. In the nightmare, her current role seemed some unpleasant hybrid of an aging fashion model and The Wicked Witch of the West.

This woman was assigned official responsibility for making the borders of the Progressive Land of Enchantment well-managed. But she apparently believed that meant “C’mon in, everyone on planet Earth! Free stuff for all!” If any of the PLoE’s loyal scriveners ever asked her about the borders (they hardly ever did), she would strangely reply with a near-hysterical cackle.

Sure, witches cackle. But this woman cackled at anything: subjects she didn’t understand, issues she couldn’t deal with, idle banter from a TV talk show nitwit, anything. Her humorless laughter and reliance on baby talk, frequently heard in this nightmare, frightened children and pets.

The minor players in my nightmare all played their parts with convincing creepiness. The Wicked Witch was assisted by The Man Who Always Lied. He kept calmly denying a clearly visible serial pedestrian invasion by many millions of benefits seekers. But rather than looking like he needed his own flying broom, this character looked like Uncle Fester from The Addams Family, except scarier.

Ol’ Man Grifter’s extremely blonde, 70-something spouse demanded she be addressed as “Doctor,” based on an education diploma from a facile university. Her doctoral dissertation was given this accurate review by Kyle Smith in National Review: “Sorry, I reserve that honorific for medical doctors . . . You’re not even an academic, you teach remedial English to community-college students, and your dissertation is kindling.”

This woman was an inner-circle advisor to Ol’ Man Grifter. So was his son, who had long served (with non-official portfolio) as his family’s overseas salesman of foreign policy influence, most profitably to Chinese communists and Ukrainian oligarchs. This son had significant interests in the pharmaceutical and escort industries, as spooky photos and videos of him indicated. He was also a painter of cat-vomit art, sold for large sums to leftists eager to make creative (and anonymous) campaign contributions.

The son kept self-damning accounts of his many crimes and treasonous business activity in a laptop computer, which he carelessly left at a repair shop. A dark comedy ensued, with the computer’s authenticity being aggressively denied by a newspaper that won Pulitzer Prizes for fictional reporting and by 51 former intelligence officials.

That “51” seemed pretty specific for a dream. And “intelligence officials” seemed a strange identification for people who had to be willfully stupid.

Comic sequence, but nobody laughed.

The strange figures kept coming. One doe-eyed fellow, put in charge of transportation despite having previously mismanaged transportation issues at a municipal position, ignored a major transportation disaster because the Ol’ Man Grifter regime did not like the residents there.

A Deputy Assistant Secretary of Spent Fuel and Waste Disposition — a man who used very heavy lipstick — lost his position the third time he was caught stealing luggage at airports, hoping to find attractive lingerie. A uniformed Assistant Health Secretary appeared in public looking like Eleanor Roosevelt in drag.

The only good part of a nightmare is waking up from it. It’s morning, you’re relieved to realize. The sun is shining and last night’s horrors were just a nightmare.

It couldn’t have been real — that time of ignored crime and incentivized crime, of sick men allowed to stalk girls’ sports and locker rooms, of governmental floods of dollars devaluing dollars, of entitlements and other rewards offered to all the world’s impoverished or criminal, with rulers of subnormal intelligence and competence enforcing destructive policies.

Did all that really happen, or was it just a bad dream? Well, in either case, it was a long night . . . .