Dreams

Such a weird dream last night! One of those then-as-now dreams where I was fifteen years old and my school was having a paper drive. It was a stormy Thursday night and I was bundling and stacking newspapers in Debbie Thomas’s garage -- when suddenly the wind blew in and, like the explosion at the end of Zabriskie Point, the news was everywhere!

Among the things I saw amidst this swirling slo-mo collage was a front page picture of the World Trade Centre's Twin Towers; a book review that mentioned Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias” (1818); a picture of Georges Clémenceau about to sign the Treaty of Versailles; and a picture of Donald Trump watching a Yankees game with his son and George Steinbrenner.

What am I to infer from this mess of text and image? Well, I am sure I am not the first to compare the Twin Towers to Shelley's “two vast and trunkless legs of stone.” Nor am I the first to point out that the last big country to be humiliated prior to the U.S. on September 11, 2001 was Germany at Versailles in 1919. As to what happened approximately 15 years after these humiliations? In 1933, the Nazi’s seized power and in November, 2016 Donald Trump will be elected the 45th president of the United States.