Dream Log: Power

I dreamed I was in a huge enclosed space, so big that thousands of us were in there without feeling crowded. Most or all of the floor was carpeted. In the center of the space various sorts of fancy coffee were constantly brewed and dispensed. There were plenty of comfortable chairs and sofas and coffee tables. 

I and thousands like me roamed the space, men and women all dressed like executives: Presidents, Premieres, legislators, judges, lobbyists, chairpeople of boards, analysts, pollsters, strategists, financiers, entrepreneurs, party leaders, journalists, fixers, negotiators, some us having moved through several of those categories. We moved through this large indoor space making deals, breaking promises, forming coalitions, wheeling, dealing, moving, shaking. I had the impression that we were all pros, that no-one was there because he or she was born rich or became famous in something other than politics.

But I also wondered to what extent we might be fooling ourselves. Kings and queens have been known to believe that everything is just as it should be and every position deserved. There was no clearly-established career path I could see from truck driver, for example, to here.

I might have been tempted, in earlier eras, to call this place a "smoke-filled room," except I didn't notice anyone smoking. On the other hand, many of us seemed to have serious caffeine habits.

I made deals, strategized, huddled, sized others up and they sized me up. This was fighting with all but the physical violence. Some of the people in this room would no longer look at me or shake my hand. I assumed this was temporary in some cases, but not all. Trust was an asset in here, as much as political office and money. It was unwise to squander any of them. Or so it seemed to me at least. 

We struggled with each other, made alliances, shifted alliances, with the fates of corporations, markets, nations, the fates of many, many people at stake. Some of us world-famous, others always to be unknown to those many people whose lives we affected. Some of us, young and old, amazingly idealistic. Others amazingly cynical and heartless. Young and old.

On the perimeter of the space were doors with lighted signs above them: "EXIT" in orange letters. Now and then someone would come or go through ones of these doors. I had no idea where we were: Manhattan? London? The Central Asian steppe? I didn't know, and it really didn't matter to me. We were connected to the whole world.

And then I woke up.

 Buy The Power Broker by Robert A Caro at Amazon: https://amzn.to/3PiSCyJ

Dream Log: Clueless Corporate Chairman

I dreamed I was in NYC, and I agreed to take over a non-vinyl music store, even though I have never shown any aptitude for business. The store was bare white walls illuminated by bare light bulbs on the street-level floor of a big 1920's skyscraper, the previous tenants had moved everything out.

I already had a couple of employees in this space, and they came with me to another one whose interior resembled a 4-car parking garage in a suburban apartment building, except that there were no vehicles and no fuel smells.

More employees kept joining the company, and if any of them doubted my competence, they hid it well. I ran motivational drills to foster esprit de corps. In the meantime some of the employees did what they would do in a music store, actually buying and selling the CD's and keeping records and so forth, without my having to ask them to do it, which was good, because I didn't even know any of the words involved. If an employee came to me for help or advice I would usually either slap them on the back and tell them they were doing great, or tell them to ask another one of the employees. I began to get the feeling that this method was actually working well and that the company might turn out to be a success.

Adjacent to the part of the business space which resembled 4 parking spaces, there was an alcove with windows that let in a lot of sunlight. Some employees, on their own initiative but with my praise, were turning the alcove into a place that looked like a colonial American alcove. There came a problem when they were starting a process which turned some beer into something that smelled like the animal poop in a colonial American barn. Some of the employees were upset about the poop smells. I solved this problem by simply telling them to use other smells, like the smells of budding flowers. Then I poured a pint of the beer, made sure that it did not smell like poop, and took a sip.

It occurred to me that I was not certain that any of the employees was as old as half my age. (In addition to my other shortcomings as boss, I had not looked at any of their applications, where I could have learned their ages.) It seemed wrong to me to continue to abuse their naive, misplaced trust in me. I decided that the best thing to do would be to pick one of them to replace me. I was beginning to think about who should replace me when I woke up.

The Brightest Spotlight in the World

In a private conversation, Samuel Johnson said that politics is the last refuge of a scoundrel. Surprisingly, the politician Johnson had in mind when he said this was Edmund Burke. James Boswell faithfully recorded the conversation, and published parts of it later, with Burke's name omitted, in his Life of Samuel Johnson. Johnson was very careful (this part of the conversation made it into Boswell's book) to say that he wasn't certain that this particular politician was a a scoundrel. But if he were a scoundrel, politics would afford him a refuge he did not deserve.

Johnson was notoriously hotheaded, he made all sorts of rash judgements which aren't generally accepted at face value, and I don't think we have good cause here to wonder whether Burke was a scoundrel. Even Johnson himself qualifies his damnation and says that maybe Burke is a scoundrel, as if he himself knows better than to say such a thing. I suspect that whatever Burke had done or Johnson suspected that he might have done to enrage Johnson, Johnson soon got over it or realized that he had only imagined the cause of his rage as having emanated from Burke.

And in any case, the great majority of the people who for two and a half centuries have heard and repeated the bonmot "Politics is the last refuge of a scoundrel" have never associated it with Burke, and just thought of it as a general warning about what politics can sometimes do when it is misused.

And it may have been a sound warning in the middle of the 18th century. But does it still hold weight today?

No, I really don't think so. I think it's much less true now than it was even 20 years ago, let alone 250. Media coverage of politicians has become so much more meticulous, and access to that coverage has become some much closer to universal, that politics today may be the last place where a clever scoundrel would run for cover.

Donald Trump has been a crooked, lying businessman for decades, that's what he's used to. As a businessman he didn't get away with all of his lies, but he got away with more of them because 1) people only did business with him when they chose to, unlike all of us having to deal with him being POTUS whether we like it or not; and 2) as a businessman he didn't have nearly as much media scrutiny. If you thought something he said was a lie, you couldn't just punch up a video of yesterday's board meeting to compare it to.

Who was it who first referred to the Presidency of the United States as "the brightest spotlight in the world"? Whoever it was, I don't think they were speaking during the Washington or John Adams or Jefferson administrations. Perhaps as recently as the Eisenhower administration, politics might have been a good place for a crooked businessman to run to after he had burned too many bridges in the private sector by burning to many customers and contractors and business partners. Perhaps.

Perhaps Donald Trump is so old-fashioned that he thought of politics as a good dark hole he could always scurry into when he wasn't getting with things any more with business as usual. Maybe he's so dumb that he scurried away to hide in the brightest spotlight in the world.

Be all of that as it may: the spotlight obviously isn't bright enough yet, or Trump never would've come near the Republican nomination, let alone the White House. Changing from the Electoral Collage to simple majority popular vote for POTUS would brighten things up a lot. And although my regular readers may be tired of me saying it over and over, let me say it again: proportional representation!