In the News April 2026

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'm posting an angry diatribe about the President and his administration on the Internet. I'm in a Psychologist's office. The doctor tells me hypnosis will help me sleep. I'm walking down a stairwell in an infinite spiral downward. I write a manifesto. Woken up by a camera flash, on my back, naked on the floor in a hotel corridor, and covered by a mylar blanket, I look up at the photographer. I'm in a prison common room, waiting for my trial, watching the TV. The TV news lady says the President's poll numbers are up and Congress has approved for the President a gold leaf ballroom.

My nightmare attempts to illustrate, besides my paranoia, how little control one has over how a plan directed against powerful people will play out in real time. As for what happened over a week ago at the Correspondents dinner in Washington DC, a comedian commentator pointed out, as a joke, that for someone who graduated from CalTech, a prestigious engineering school, you'd think the gunman would have a smarter plan.* I wasn't asked to come up with a better plan, but I started to think about one. I didn't get far. The thought of picking up a gun was followed by, "wait, someone could get hurt." For some, I understand, holding a gun imparts a feeling of power that must overwhelm gentle thoughts.**

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 thing he must not have understood. When he left the cocoon that rearranged his molecules and entered the harsh spotlight of a hallway outside a dinner attended by administration officials and journalists, no one would agree with his narrative. If he saw himself as righteous, the public saw evil or mental illness.

The president may be awful, or great, in the ancient Egyption monument builder sense of the word. Historians will someday look back, analyze his decisons and their consequences, and reach a consensus. It's wrong-headed for us at the bottom to be obsessed with one man and his obsequious minions*** at the top of the political hierarchy. If we could agree that they are truly awful, I believe we can vote them out of office, even if it takes sixteen years. In the meantime, we should focus on making the small world outside our front doors better.

Manifestos are definitely important as expressions of intention, written by people with diverse backgrounds. 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, I'd acknowledge first that 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 shouldn't be the focus.

The two themes of my manifesto would be localization and democracy. Localization is the creation of local manufacturing, food production, and energy. Because workable local solutions generally don't scale, the financial system would allow a company to build a local project without expecting a return on the initial investment. The financial system should be creating wealth for both the company and community.

Local democracy would replace "Front Porch Republic" with "Front Porch Democracy." Local democracy is simply counting the raised hands in a school auditorim.

Thank God I'm not writng a manifesto.

Notes

• Deed - Attribution 4.0 International
  
• Edgar Alan Poe, A Dream Within a Dream
  
• * I could be addicted to youtube videos.
• ** Gentle thoughts I am thinking are like waves lapping on the shore of a small lake. To hear them but you have to pay attention. They aren't words you say to yourself, that you could say out loud, when you make an inner soliloquy. But other words beside gentle might make more sense, like temperate, altruistic, quiet, forgiving, thoughtful, careful, et al.
  
  Mental illness is the real evil, when the id or ego is damaged and one or the other talks to you. The antique Freudian terms
• *** English has colorful words to describe a slavish underling: minion, lackey, sycophant, toady, toadeater, fawner, servile flatterer, lickspittle, truckling self-seeker, bootlicker, ...
• 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."