Strange Dreams

ZNet Commentary
December 31, 2006
By Paul  Street
http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2006-12/26street.cfm


I keep having the same two crazy dreams.  I'm just not sure what they mean. In the first dream, George W. Bush becomes obsessed with disproving the charge that he's a "chicken hawk" - a military hawk who has never seen or experienced military action and its terrible consequences.  He has a vision from God.  It comes to him in prayer.  He orders his staff to call up the Pentagon and arrange for him to be flown to Iraq to participate in a night patrol.  "Make it a dangerous one," he says.  He reaches into his bottom desk drawer for a bottle of whiskey.

"This will show the world I'm not a wimp like they said my Dad was," Bush thinks to himself.  "Hell, I'm going to lead this SURGE myself."  

The Army sets him up with a unit three miles outside the U.S. base in the Iraqi town of Ramadi. He climbs into a moderately well-armored Humvee. Ten minutes into his adventure, with sweat pouring down from under his helmet and the smell of bourbon on his breath, the Decider hears a loud explosion.  

Everything goes quiet and numb.  His head is swimming.  There's a bright shining light.  Soldiers and medical staff are yelling, but he can't hear a word they're saying.  Everyone around him is staring at him in horror.  Some are looking down to where his legs used to be.  Bush looks down himself and sees two bloody stumps.  "It's so unreal," he thinks, "why don't I feel anything?" 

He starts to lose consciousness but is jolted back awake by a sharper pain than he ever knew existed.  He looks over to see a badly injured soldier.  The soldier couldn't be more than 18 years old.  He's lost half of his face.

The soldier turns to the dying president and says, "so what did you think was going to happen, asshole?" A band is playing "Onward Christian Soldiers" somewhere off in the distance.  It's dressed up in suits of armor like the ones worn by the Medieval Knights portrayed in those recruiting advertisements the Armed Forces used to put on American television.  Bush's last sensation on earth is the feeling of his shrunken soul being sucked down into the molten center of the earth.  He hears the laughter of Osama bin Laden. I hear a Jimmy Hendrix riff from "All Along the Watchtower."  

The dream ends. 

The other dream is less historically specific.  It's set in Texas and involves Laura Bush. Texas still has a lot of oil, which makes me think it's set in the past.  And the First Lady is a teenage girl, which would put things back in the early Sixties.  But the surroundings look contemporary and even futuristic, strictly 21st century.

Anyway, in my dream young Laura Welch is driving her father's Lexus (it's definitely not the Sixties) up to an intersection in Midland, Texas.  She sees Michael Dutton Douglas - the high school classmate she killed with her car (by running a stop sign) on November 6, 1963  and and tries to warn him. She's about to scream, "Watch out, Mike, I'm coming to kill you," when she's stopped in her tracks by the angry voice of an Asian soldier. He's yelling at her in Chinese.  He's saying, "STOP" and "HALT" and "THIS IS A CHECK POINT" but she doesn't understand a word. She turns her car to the left and sees more Chinese soldiers yelling and now pointing their guns at her.  She becomes frightened and confused.  She tries to hit the brakes but she hits the accelerator instead.

A single shot from a Chinese AK-47 pierces her skull.  She dies instantly as her car crashes into a gas station pump and explodes.  It's all caught on tape.

The soldier who killed her is relieved.  He's been in Texas for two weeks and still hasn't had an "insurgent K.I.A." ("killed in action").  His comrades had been starting to give him a hard time.  "Nice shot, Yao," one of his fellow soldiers says.  "It's about time. Way to waste a Starch Face."

The scene shifts to Beijing, where the wife of the Chinese head of state is being interviewed by a reporter.  The First Lady of China denies that her nation's occupation of the Southwestern United States - conducted with a coalition of forces that includes tens of thousands of Mexican soldiers determined to avenge the seizure of Mexican lands by the U.S. during the late 1840s (after the Mexican-American War) - is motivated by an imperial Chinese desire to control North American oil.  She says the occupation is going much better than the Chinese people know.  "The media," she says, is making things look worse than they really are.

Then I see Michael Dutton Douglas.  He's making an improvised explosive device of some sort.  The slaughter of Laura Welch (who he had recently dated) has turned him into a national independence fighter.  The bumper sticker on his car reads "Don't Mess with Texas."  A missile from a Chinese drone blows him up. An entire apartment building goes up in flames, killing 24 innocent civilians.  That makes for 1.5 million American dead since the occupation began…on November 6, 2023.

The Americans' deaths and identities are unmentioned in China's leading newspaper of record's daily "Names of the Dead" feature.  The only victims recorded in that section are the sturdy peasant sons and daughters who have given their lives in China's inherently noble struggle to defeat the "terrorist" enemies of "civilization" in (just coincidentally) oil-rich Texas.

Then I'm sitting in an out of the way Beijing coffee shop listening to Jimmy Hendrix and talking to somebody who calls herself an anarchist.  We both agree that nobody seems to care about all those faceless, nameless American victims of Chinese foreign policy.       

I know these dreams are whacked out.  George W. Bush would never be caught, well, dead doing anything actually dangerous in Iraq.  He and the rest of the imperial "elite" believe that they are too privileged and precious to actually put their bodies on the line for the criminal policies they advance.  It's the job of poorer and darker Americans to die for their high-state lies.  And I don't think he's going to start drinking or coking-up again.

The notion of China having the capacity to invade and occupy part of the U.S. is just as preposterous. And of course Texas tapped out most of its oil along time ago.  I don't know if Michael Dutton Douglas had small munitions potential.  I don't think they allow Hendrix to played in China. And I don't believe in Hell (or Heaven).

But dreams aren't about rational thought.  And these ones must come from somewhere. I wonder where.

Paul Street is the author of many books, articles, speeches, blogs, reviews, and book chapters.  He can be reached at paulstreet99@yahoo.com