Dreamers

“Sometimes the only realists are the dreamers.” Paul Wellstone

Progressive Democrat Paul Wellstone won election to the U.S. Senate in 1990, upsetting Republican incumbent Rudy Boschwitz, and served Minnesota for 12 until dying in a plane crash along with wife Sheila and daughter Marcia.  Previously a tenured professor of political science at Carleton College, he was twice arrested, in 1970 for protesting the Vietnam War and in 1984 for trespassing during a bank foreclosure protest.  A champion of the working poor and society’s outcasts viewed with suspicion by the FBI, Wellstone voted against authorizing the use of force in Iraq two weeks before his untimely and mysterious death. 

 Waiakauhi Pond at Hualalai Resort

Edwin H. Whitlock wrote me from Kailua Kona, Hawaii.  The self-described former Gary garbage collector is a limo driver for Four Seasons Resort Hualalai and Gold Coast Town Cars.  His family has been prominent in Gary’s African-American community for four generations.  The letter, titled “Beloved Gary,” began, “I’m a dreamer.”  Whitlock hoped to interest me in serving on an advisory board of Project USX, a bold dream for transforming Gary into a model city with the help of multi-millionaires that he meets on a regular basis, such as Larry Ellison (founder of Oracle Corporation and worth more than $56 billion). Describing his “big dream,” Whitlock cited innovations taking place in “smart cities” such as Songdo, South Korea, and Masdar City, Abu Dhabi, and wrote:

  Due to her proximity to Chicago, transportation networks, preserved natural resources, lakefront, etc., as well as undervalued land, Gary is perfectly situated to be developed as an example for what an urban center can and should be. . . .  By utilizing the best minds, technology, and vision, Gary can be transformed into a true model city, a city of the future where crime, corruption, and patronage politics are virtually non-existent – a green city where conservation and sustainability are primary.  Such a plan would attract philanthropists like Bill Gates and progressive companies such as Virgin Air and Google.

Built from scratch in the past 20 years, Singdo, South Korea, located 40 miles from Seoul and dubbed the “City of the Future,” boasts cutting-edge infrastructure and 40 percent open space.  Masdar City, also a planned municipality, will rely on renewable energy sources and mass transit plus plentiful bicycle paths.  Early boosters claimed Gary was a “Dream City,” but corporate profits took precedence over scientific town planning; hardly any land was set aside for green spaces.   

I replied to Edwin Whitlock’s inspirational proposal by saying I’d be honored to serve on an advisory committee, joining Gary stalwart Vernon Smith, already on board.  I replied:

  About 110 years ago A.F. Knotts, working as land agent for U.S. Steel, bought up property to prepare the way for the city of Gary and the integrated steel mill (an engineering marvel) known as Gary Works.  I've heard that some people are presently doing this, but that would be a good way to start.  I am familiar with the role the Whitlocks have played in Gary's history and recall one family member during the 1970s who wanted to have the city's name changed to Du Sable.  I lived in Honolulu 50 years ago while earning a master's degree at the University of Hawaii and envy you.  Keep dreaming.  Mahalo and aloha. 

During the 1927 Gary Emerson School Strike Councilman A.B. Whitlock castigated the surrender to “mob rule,” after segregationists succeeded in preventing African Americans from attending a school where they could take college prep courses.  Vernon Smith’s mother was one of the pupils transferred to an inferior school.

At the Archives to talk to Steve McShane’s class about the Gary schools under progressive educator William A. Wirt and afterwards, Ron Cohen dropped off a New York Review of Books issue containing Janet Malcolm’s essay “Dreams and Anna Karenina.”  Malcolm takes issue with critics who describe Tolstoy’s novel as an example of preternatural realism.  Not only is the work filled with dream sequences both nightmarish and sentimental, Anna Karenina has a dreamlike quality.   Malcolm writes:

  We experience the novel, as we experience our dreams, undisturbed by its logic.  We accept Anna’s disintegration without questioning it.  Only later, when we analyze the work, does its illogic become apparent.  But by then it is too late to reverse Tolstoy’s spell.

Produced by Cars genius Ric Ocasek in 1994, Weezer’s triple-platinum “Blue Album,” on heavy rotation at the condo,  “Buddy Holly” and “Undone – The Sweater Song.”  The final cut, “Only in Dreams,” contains this chorus:      

Only in dreams

We see what it means

Reach out our hands

Hold on to hers

But when we wake

It's all been erased

And so it seems

Only in dreams

Roy Orbison's “In Dreams,” like so many of his classics, is heartbreakingly sad.  A “candy-colored clown they call the sandman” sprinkles stardust that produces a beautiful dream, but “just before dawn, I awake and find you gone.”  The final lines:

It’s too bad that all these things,

Can only happen in my dreams

Only in dreams

In beautiful dreams.

Speaking of dreams, I had some doozies in Palm Springs, California.  Unfortunately (or fortunately) I can’t still remember them.  One caused me o scratch the left side of my face.  If only we could control the content of dreams.

Grammy winner Beck’s “Dreams” made Rolling Stone’s Playlist and merited this comment:

  We love sad folkie Beck as much as anyone, but dance-y Beck is even better.  This funky little groove is giving us Midnite Vultures flashbacks in the best way possible.

“Dreams” contains these lines:

All day and all night, I wanna get me free

Nothing gonna get me in my world.

On Facebook a link called “celebrate pride” allows people to make their profile picture rainbow colored, as Beamer Pickert, Chris Kern, and granddaughter Alissa have done.

George Van Til, incarcerated in Terre Haute, sent along with an article from The Economist entitled, “Briefing American Prisons: The Right Choices.”  The lead sentence reads: “America’s bloated prison system has stopped growing.  Now it must shrink.”  A Sixties idealist inspired like Bill Clinton, by John F. Kennedy, Van Til dreamed of serving the public interest in a professional capacity and did just that for many years.

I loaned Dave Serynek Davis Burner’s “Herbert Hoover: A Public Life.”  Like James Buchanan, Hoover was an admirable man and dedicated public servant but a failure as President.  Hoover couldn’t prevent the onset of the Great Depression, just as Buchanan couldn’t prevent the Civil War.