A Liberal has his WORST NIGHTMARE - REVISED for UNDERSTANDING

September 30, 2009, 4:00 a.m.

The Metamorphosis

In which our liberal author awakens one morning from uneasy dreams . . .

By David Kahane

I have a nightmare.

Conjecture - I have a nightmare that sometime before the 2010 elections, the scales will fall from your eyes and you will see us as we really are.

Conviction - I have a nightmare that you will read C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters and realize that it is not fiction.

Opinion - I have a nightmare that you will read Plunkitt of Tammany Hall and get firsthand instruction in how we steal elections.

Opinion - I have a nightmare that you will read Machiavelli’s The Prince and realize that we got there way ahead of you.

Fact - I have a nightmare that you will read Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead and recognize us in the figure of Ellsworth Toohey — the “friend” who is in fact your mortal enemy.

Fact - I have a nightmare that you will read Dickens’s Bleak House and see us in the character of Mrs. Jellyby, the “telescopic philanthropist,” who lets her own family go to hell while she frets over the fate of an African tribe.

Fact - I have a nightmare that you will re-watch Saving Private Ryan and realize that Corporal Upham, the liberal stickler for process played by Jeremy Davies, saves the German prisoner’s life only to get most of his platoon killed, including Tom Hanks. And then commits the very war crime he tried to stop.

Fact - I have a nightmare that while you’re enjoying the scatological dialogue and ultra-violence of Pulp Fiction, you’ll realize that Vincent Vega, the unbeliever, dies unredeemed in Butch Coolidge’s bathroom, while Jules, who accepts the reality of miracles, grants absolution to Pumpkin and Honey Bunny and is thus saved.

Fact - I have a nightmare that you will go back and watch any B-movie made between 1933 and 1963, like Gun Crazy, and see an America that was not afraid of inanimate objects like firearms, and instead blamed the man for the crime.

Fact - I have a nightmare that some of you are old enough to recall a time when the law was an honorable profession, the Constitution was not so deconstructed that, essentially, all that is left of it is the Commerce Clause, and your doctor charged a fee for service and made house calls.

Conjecture - I have a nightmare that when you think of the late Ted Kennedy, resting peacefully at Arlington Cemetery, all you will be able to see is Mary Jo Kopechne, gasping for air in the Oldsmobile while the senator returned to his hotel room and went to sleep.

Fact - I have a nightmare that you will remember that Sirhan Sirhan was a Palestinian who hated Bobby Kennedy because of his support of Israel.

Fact - I have a nightmare that you’ll realize that, far from being a right-wing nut, Lee Harvey Oswald was a self-proclaimed Marxist who defected to the Soviet Union, came home with a Russian wife, agitated on behalf of Castro’s Cuba, tried to re-defect to Russia, returned to Dallas, brought his rifle to work, and killed JFK with a classic marksman’s shot group: miss, hit, kill.

Fact - I have a nightmare that you’ll remember that, in the week leading up to the murders of George Moscone and Harvey Milk, there was no right-wing “climate of hate” in San Francisco as Nancy Pelosi, aka Maerose Prizzi, would have you believe. Instead, the city was riveted by the murders of Congressman Leo Ryan and journalists Don Harris, Bob Brown, and Greg Robinson at the Port Kaituma airstrip on Nov. 18, 1978. This was followed by the “revolutionary suicides” of hundreds of Jim Jones’s radical-leftist Peoples Temple followers, most of them African American. One of the suicide notes read, “I, Marceline Jones, leave all bank accounts in my name to the Communist Party of the USSR.”

Fact - I have a nightmare that people will eventually realize that Dan White, who shot Moscone and Milk not over gay rights but over Moscone’s refusal to give him back his seat on the Board of Supervisors, was a Democrat.

Fact - I have a nightmare that one day Dianne Feinstein, a good and decent woman who not only was there but owes her entire national political career to the tragic events of Nov. 27, 1978, will straighten out Maerose Prizzi, as well as the rest of the country.

Fact - I have a nightmare that eventually you will recall that, just a few years after the events depicted in Milk, the newly liberated gay community in San Francisco was decimated by AIDS.

Opinion - I have a nightmare that one day you will recognize the destructive philosophic effect on the American way of life of the “Institute for Social Research,” aka the Frankfurt School of radical neo-Marxists — Adorno, Horkheimer, Fromm, Habermas, Marcuse et al. — who, fleeing Hitler, arrived in America in 1934 and promptly affiliated with Columbia University, where they injected their notions of “critical theory” and “scientific Marxism” into the body of American academe.

Conjecture and Fact - I have a nightmare that one day, perhaps during another Great Awakening, the Supreme Court will overturn Murray v. Curlett, which outlawed school prayer in a lawsuit brought by Madalyn Murray O’Hair, the founder of American Atheists. In 1995, O’Hair was murdered along with her son and granddaughter by another American atheist, who chain-sawed their bodies into bits.

Conjecture and Fact - I have a nightmare that one day the Supreme Court will overturn Roe v. Wade, thus returning abortion to the states — although, alas, we will never get those 40 million dead souls to pay into the Social Security system.

Opinion - I have a nightmare that I will still be alive when the Mother of All Ponzi Schemes finally beggars the nation, and the heroic, eco-friendly childless couples starve to death as they realize they forgot to manufacture their old-age meal tickets.

Opinion - I have a nightmare that you will finally understand what the Manchurian Candidate, “mmm mmm mmm / Barack Hussein Obama,” meant by “fundamental change.”

Conviction - I have a nightmare that one day Bill O’Reilly will wake up and realize that he’s letting a valuable television franchise descend into idiotic “culture warrior” and “body language” segments, and that he needs to stop hawking his books and Factor gear and remember to dance with what brung him — before the audience abandons him in favor of Glenn Beck.

Fact - I have a nightmare that we liberals won’t be able to stop Andrew Breitbart or any of the other maquis now shooting at us from every tree and from behind every rock, turning our own tactics against us, mocking us and rendering us frustrated and impotent.

Conjecture - I have a nightmare that W. will go on national television, rue his not naming a viable successor, castigate McCain for his disgraceful accommodationist campaign, and apologize for not fully executing the Bush Doctrine when he had the chance.

Fact - I have a nightmare that, one day soon, the New York Times will collapse into irrelevance, along with Time, Newsweek, and The New Yorker, and no one will be there to set the TV networks’ agendas, forcing you to once more think for yourself.

Opinion - I have a nightmare that you will pick up a copy of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals and actually read it, boring and poorly written as it is.

Conjecture - I have a nightmare that you will organize and rally to take back your country from the frauds, poseurs, hollow men, gangsters, communists, atheists, perverts, Daley Machine hacks, ballerinas, and Jake Lingles who have parlayed a desire for Change, a touching but absurd reliance on Hope, and a huge dollop of racial guilt into something this country has never seen before.

Opinion - I have a nightmare that you will come to understand the truth of Goya’s axiom that “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters.”

Opinion - I have a nightmare that Sarah Palin will get the Republican nomination for president in 2012.

Opinion - I have a nightmare that she will win, scattering us like so many scuttling Gregor Samsas.

I have nightmare that . . .

Opinion - Nah. Never happen. You’re too stupid.

— Like Jack Valenti during the reign of LBJ, David Kahane sleeps each night a little better, a little more confidently because His Serene Highness, Barack Hussein Obama, is his president. Don’t even think about disagreeing with him, or with any of the sentiments expressed above, at kahanenro@gmail.com, or by becoming his friend on Facebook, or by reading his Rules for Radical Conservatives, out from Ballantine Books next summer.

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