Ideas & Analysis

Putting My Dreams on Hold

Dare I hope that I've turned the corner? We'll see in the morning. At least the black-and-blue hasn't gotten any worse, and I'm taking the pain pills less often.

And I've been thinking about dreams. A lot of people thought that yesterday's entry described a dream made up for the sake of a funny story, but it wasn't—the dream was real and unfolded precisely as described. I had another dream last night with the same odd characteristic in common: No outlandish elements. I dreamed that I was at my godfather's dairy farm near Green Bay, Wisconsin, standing in the open doorway of the farmhouse watching the cows champ grass in the pasture, like I did when I was there in the 50s and 60s. They were ordinary cows eating ordinary grass, and the house was precisely as I remember it, even though the farm was sold and the house razed over thirty years ago.

I think that's the key: My dreams for the last few nights have been composed entirely out of things remembered, not things made up from whole cloth, as they so often are. I've never met Hilary Clinton, but lord knows I see her enough on TV, and she did grow up a scant couple of miles from where I did. And the outlines of the situation were familiar: I used to visit a lot of offices when I was a Xerox tech rep back in 1974-76, and for the most part I was treated well by the office managers and secretaries who were in charge of keeping their cranky copiers running. I was generally offered coffee or sodas, often with doughnuts or chips, occasionally sandwiches, and sometimes odd things like taffy apples. (I went home once with a zucchini in my coat pocket, though I dislike them and eventually had to throw it out.) More surprisingly, these people (almost always women) generally liked me and had the wisdom not to blame me for their malfunctioning machines, many of which were ancient limping electromechanical clunkers that desperately needed scrapping. I tried to be helpful in return: I was sometimes asked to “look at this damned telephone” or see if I could make a balky radio work. My record there was spotty, but I did what I could and they appreciated it.

I think that Hilary Clinton was standing in here for the archetype of the Good Customer, the ones who knew that I did my best to help them. I enjoyed being a tech rep, even though I knew I wouldn't be doing it for long, just as I enjoyed my visits to Uncle Joey's farm in the early 60s. The Xerox job was peculiarly rewarding—I'm still not quite sure why—and I'm guessing that my dream-maker mechanism was reaching for “comfort memories” and gluing them together with the same abandon that it often glues together weird creatures and impossible architecture and machinery.

So where did the weird creatures go? I have a theory that I tested today: I think that the pain pills anaesthetize the machinery in my subconscious mind that creates brand new things. I tried working on two of my numerous “hanging fire” SF projects, and it was startling how completely incapable I was of making progress. I did a little better on Old Catholics, which is a contemporary mainstream novel about people in Chicago, not an adventure set far in the future on peculiar worlds. Still, I had a great deal of trouble being truly creative today, in any way at all—and I think I'm doing as well as I am on this entry right now simply because I'm due for another pill in an hour or so, and my gums are starting to hurt. I think it's telling that I have taken a pain pill (two of them, actually, of two different kinds) right before bed every night since Monday, so that the chemicals have had their greatest effect while I sleep. (Which is the idea—otherwise I wouldn't sleep.)

I'm starting to miss the weirdly creative theater of the mind that I have always experienced, even though it sometimes disturbs me. I have fair confidence that it will return once the pill bottle is empty. I'll let you know.

Why Is Iowa Special?

And so the whole wretched business begins again, as the anointed tribal elite in Iowa gather tonight to caucus (which comes from an obscure Kickapoo Indian word meaning “to put tribal defectives in a dark room and order them to run around in circles acting like idiots”) six months early or possibly four years late, depending on your perspective.

It's well known that I hate politics, and so don't talk much about it. I don't talk much about dark green leafy vegetables either, but that doesn't keep some knuckleheads from holding that they are the keys to eternal life. But I bring up questions now and then that no one else seems to be asking, like this one: Why does Iowa get to be first, and winnow the slate of candidates before anybody else gets a shot at them?

Here and there you may possibly see the question posed, just before the anointed elite and Big Media tut-tut and say that that's the way it's always been. (Which, by the way, was a major argument in favor of retaining racial segregation.) They then change the subject. More rarely, someone with more guts than sense dares to answer the question, generally by declaring that Iowa is somehow special in a demographic sense. Special? Hey, we're all special today, right? (Ask any third-grade teacher.) You hear the term “microcosm” a lot, generally from people who don't know what it means. As the Wall Street Journal reminded us this morning, the only Iowa caucus winner in recent memory who went all the way to the White House was Jimmy Carter.

In truth, there's nothing special about Iowa that isn't special about Nebraska, Wyoming, or South Carolina. The current primary system gives people in early states power over the choices of people in later states, and that is not a good thing. This leaves us two other alternatives: 1) Have a single national primary in all states on the same day to select November's candidates, or 2) try something else.

Alternative #1 would be better than what we have now (which is simply idiotic) but there's a strong argument against it: Without that early “momentum” obtainable in small states like New Hampshire and Iowa, the big states would select the candidates. This is a reasonable objection, and basically the same one that sustains the Electoral College, which is neither as good nor as bad a mechanism as many people think. (It could use improvement, but let's forego that discussion until November.)

What else can we try? Well, one mechanism seems obvious to me: Assign each of the 50 states a random number from 1 to 50, and then run primaries on 25 consecutive weeks, in which the states that pulled 1 and 2 hold primaries the first week, those that pulled 3 and 4 the second week, and so on, with the states that pulled 49 and 50 primarying (is that a verb? Hey, everything else is!) last. If by some fluke larger states pull small numbers in 2008, it's likely that smaller states will get the same fluke in 2012. But for the most part, it'll be a good mix, and most important of all, not a predictable one. No candidate would be able to snatch momentum by spending months studying the idiosyncratic specialness of Iowans or New Hampshirians and then pandering to that specialness. They'd have to be able to pander to the specialness of any state at all, or (better yet) give up pandering completely and stand on their records.

Such a Randomly Ordered Sequential Primary (ROSP) could make the Giant Pander an endangered species. Now that would be special!