One morning I awoke from a dream that I had become a Republican… As my wits re-assembled themselves I thought – this is terrifying! But, panting slightly, I delved back into the dream and saw that I had been happy.
In the dream I felt I could finally rest easy at night. I would no longer flail about in my liberal gloom and doom, because the way had become clear. I would no longer worry about injustice, crime at the highest levels, the destruction of democracy, nor about a pending climate apocalypse – because I was immune, I was on the side of right. I was now part of The Great White Way.
In the dream, I called my mother, who is dead, and told her I was switching parties. (She was not only dead, she was a liberal.) “I will now identify as white. Snow White.” She scoffed. I told her I was going to destroy the 123andme genome test that showed I had African ancestry, of which I had formerly been proud. “Have you forgotten you also have a trace of Cherokee?” No… but it was my grandmother who told me that. Some ancestral chick in Medicine Hat had gotten waylaid by a chief or something. But then my grandmother had dementia and I have no idea what her party affiliation was.
Then a glitch arose as I realized I could not destroy the database containing my true heritage. Of course not, because it was run by liberal elites. They run big data. Although, I thought, they sell it to Republicans, so maybe there was a way out. But wait, I thought, the only Republicans who could afford big data were rich ones. So why weren’t they elite too? Why should I not rage against them too. In the dream I thought to design a hat saying “Make America Poor Again”. It would have to be a dingy brown, but not a taupe because that was a color worn by elites.
Did Melania wear taupe? I thought I should investigate. I wondered about which colors were elitist and which were not. Bright red could go either way, although Trump thought he’d copyrighted it. Royal blue would seem a non-elitist color, but then Pantone had chosen it for the color of the year. Ha. That makes it elite too. Could there actually be a color of the people? That would have to be white. But then it might be black, which contains all colors.
I fell back to sleep in an agitated state and awoke a few hours later with a pounding headache. There was a second dream: I had been to a Trump rally and someone had ripped off my ball cap. Only in the dream it had said “Make America Normal Again”. I guess I decided that was a better word choice, because normal was so comforting and it heartened back to a time when there was such a thing. But then I dove back into this dream and found that I had been diffident this time, not happy. Not because of the hat, but because of how people were reacting to me. And I realized that I was a brown person in this second dream. Not all the way black, but brown… maybe Hispanic, or maybe Native American. And I had called my mother, and told her, but discovered she had become a Republican. She was still dead, but she was a Republican! She sneered at my discomfort at the rally. “I told you you weren’t all white. Now what? Don’t forget you’ve got a lot of Irish in ya, ya dumb mick!”
That night I tossed and turned. Glynda the Good Witch was in the dream, but she looked like J.Lo. She touched me with her wand and I felt so happy again. And I suddenly felt like a Democrat again. In the dream, I called my mother and told her that I’d changed my mind and asked if she was still a Republican. She laughed hilariously, with a sort of earthy vibe I don’t remember being hers. Then she began to speak, in a torrent of Spanish, laughing the whole time. I called her Mama, not Mom, and it made me even happier.
The next morning, when I looked at myself in the mirror, I was dismayed to find I was still white. And a dingy white at that. It is not the prettiest color at all, I thought to myself… But at least I am a Democrat. And I thought now that the color of the people should be brilliant hot yellow, because that was the color of the sun, under which we all toil, and love, and laugh, and fumble our way toward goodness. And that made me the happiest yet.
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