I promised you body parts this weekend — and I deliver! Originally, I was merely planning to note the ongoing mystery of the shoed feet that keep washing up in the North Pacific, which, like all other phenomena, has a Wikipedia page. And there was that dog who dug up a child’s foot in Alabama recently.
But let’s get back to politics: You might be amused to hear (and I’m not making this up) that after writing yesterday’s entry, in which I mentioned sometimes having bad dreams about bureaucracy and flowcharts and the like, I actually took a nap and, as if parodying my own blog entry, had just such a dream.
It was likely influenced, fittingly, by political worries and by the ads for the new movie Blindness, a partly-political thriller about a population reduced to chaos by unexplained temporary blindness.
I dreamt that I was attempting to take a bus into some town, only to be told sternly by some manager that “There are no more passengers today” — and he meant despite the fact that a vast, Katrina-like relocation of people, with their bundled possessions, seemed to be occurring. Frustrated, I went online (at my parents’ house) and realized that entire populations were being relocated, with coldhearted efficiency, as a mere dry run for Newt Gingrich’s “Real Solutions” plan reforming government, which (when I’m awake) is just his attention-grabbing PR blitz to keep a 2012 presidential run viable (though everyone knows the only real victors in 2012 will be Quetzalcoatl and the Hollywood version of Aslan).
Recall that Gingrich was the main orchestrator of circa-1994 GOP reform efforts that included a push for term limits (the topic of the debate I’m hosting in two days at Lolita Bar, since Bloomberg and the City Council are suddenly less than enthusiastic about their own term limits — bring everyone you know who cares).
Well, in the dream, I found the complete flow chart of Gingrich’s plan online, and it was so mindboggling complicated and involved shipping people to and from so many towns that I decided it warranted linking to from my blog entry of yesterday.
But then I noticed that water seemed to be dripping from a few spots in the ceiling of my parents’ house, in more than one room, despite there being little or no rain outside, and I mentioned it to my father, who at first seemed unfazed but then looked with uncharacteristic terror at the figure approaching the back steps and spluttered “The — the delivery man!” At which point I woke up.
And in the real world, Gingrich, a very smart guy, is not in charge — so which world is the nightmare, really?
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