You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream. -- Edgar Alan Poe
I had a nightmare. I put an angry diatribe about the President and his administration on the Internet. At my Psychologist's office, the doctor tells me hypnosis will help me sleep. I walk down a stairwell in an infinite spiral downward. Back home, I write a manifesto. I fall asleep, woken up by a camera flash. I'm on my back, naked on the floor in a hotel corridor, covered by a mylar blanket. I look up at the photographer. In a prison common room, I'm waiting for my trial. The TV news lady says the President's poll numbers are up and Congress approved for the President a gold leaf ballroom.
This isn't what happened over a week ago in Washington, DC. The nightmare attempts to illustrate, besides my paranoia, a planned act of violence that once again played out differently than what was intended. A commentator pointed out that, for someone who graduated from CalTech, a prestigious engineering school, you'd think he'd have a smarter plan. I thought about the plan but didn't get far. I can't pick up a gun because of childhood trauma (for some, holding a gun imparts a feeling of power).
I read his manifesto. I won't bother to poke holes in his logic or what he was certain to be true, except for one important thing he didn't understand. When he left the cocoon that spawned his thinking and entered the harsh spotlight of a hallway outside a dinner attended by administration officials and journalists, he had no control over the narrative and no popular support for it.
The president may be awful or great, in the ancient Egyption monument builder sense of the word. Historians will someday look back, analyze the consequences of his decisons, and and reach a consensus. It's wrong-headed for us at the bottom to be obsessed with the man and his minions at the top of the political hierarchy while we can, let's hope, vote them out of office. We should instead focus on improving the small world outside our front doors.
Manifestos are definitely a thing. The CEO of Palantir recently published a manifesto on X. I recommend the Front Porch Republic's manifesto published in 2018. If I was to write my own, it would be a little different. I would, for example, replace "Front Porch Republic" with "Front Porch Democracy."
My manifesto would first acknowledge that here in the United States, the Constitution, for all its flaws, is the law of the land. Our political, corporate, and financial hierarchies may topple a hundred or a thousand years from now, but that's not the concern. The emphasis would be on localization and democracy. Localization is the creation of local manufacturing, energy, and jobs. This is thought to be unrealistic because "it doesn't scale." Today's economics will have to change to allow a local energy plant to exist without a return on the initial investment. This sounds like a version of the hated Green New Deal, but it's not communism. There will be work to be done.
Local democracy is simply counting the raised hands in a school auditorim.
Notes
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Deed - Attribution 4.0 International
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Edgar Alan Poe, A Dream Within a Dream
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Sara Radin, Why “neighborism” is having a moment
Vox, The Highlight, April 30, 2026
"After decades of social isolation, people are realizing proximity is a resource."
