Yesterday’s entry was a faithful, unembroidered recounting of a dream I had Friday morning, February 14, while NPR was offering live coverage of the UN Security Council ‘debate’. Confrontation is a better word for it.

At any rate, I fell asleep just as Blix was speaking and awakened with a mighty shout of terror as the small child ran toward me crying.

In writing the piece I found it extremely difficult to keep focused on the task at hand – describing the dream – and keep my own personal politics out of the writing. I found it very interesting that Eric was reminded of the exploding baby vietnam anecdote.

I believe that means I successfully kept my personal politics out of the piece and kept it open to personal interpretation.

Additionally, since it’s a dream, there are some very clear elements in the dream that I can elaborate on.

I couldn’t find my wife, indeed, I was separated from her, because of an act of war (or something much like a full-scale aerial bombardment of the city I live in). Today, (Saturday) we kept a date to see The Two Towers one more time before it melts away from theaters. The film’s showing coincided with the peace march here, which is where I really wanted to be, felt obligated to be, and kept thinking about, squirming and sweating, throughout the whole film.

When I had discussed this with Viv, she had expressed, in the wifely manner, her disinterest in attending the march. That is to say, she would only say “If you want to,” while her body language forcefully indicated her absolute distaste for such a thing.

She is the child of people who fled a country in the wake of a socialist revolution, in fear of her father’s proclivity for talking back to, oh, cops and emigration officials. She’s been very effectively led to fear and doubt the motives of progressive activists in the wake of our WTO experience by nothing more than a lack of courtesy displayed toward her for her political ignorance on globalization issues. My paranoia, fear, and hatred of the political leadership of the United States, both the specific crew in DC at the moment and in general over the course of my life, have not improved her willingness to see me express my political perceptions in any meaningful way.

In response, I have actively choked off my outrage and political analysis, which, really, if you knew me personally in the past, is sort of like hearing me say I’ve stopped eating, or joined the church.

So we went to the movie.

The exploding children are as clear and direct a depiction of my feelings toward the idea of parenthood as might ever be concocted.

The other elements in the dream are all drawn directly from a mishmosh of things we’ve experienced via the media or directly. In my case, the happy, chattering crowd on the hillside is clearly the crowd awaiting the implosion of the Kingdome early in the morning of my birthday a few years ago, an event which obviously echoes another einsturzende neubauten that happened not too long ago.

I do recall in the dream believing that what I was witnessing was a punitive strike by the Air Force against Seattle, that we were the recipients of that “Shock and Awe” crap that surfaced in the media last week or so. Which raises a further issue – I fear the dissolution of our country under the weight of the divergent political perceptions that have been unleashed, and I don’t doubt that such a dissolution will end in fire and blood.