Dreamers of the Day

The rationales warp and twist and shift. The closer war comes, the simpler and stupider the choices. Are you a warrior or a coward? Are you with us or against us?

“All men dream,” Colonel Lawrence wrote, “but not equally. Those who dream by night wake in the day to find that it was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.”

“It’s the dreamers who do all the damage,” I decided as we watched yet another reckless rush toward calamity. “I swear, the world would be better off without them! You know what I’m starting to think? If you meet a dreamer of the day, you should wait until he sleeps again, and then just—just shoot him in the head!”

Francis stared, not so much aghast as disappointed.

“Well, that’s what the Bible tells us,” I said, defending myself. “It’s in Deuteronomy. ‘If there arise among you a dreamer of dreams, a false prophet who arises among you, thou shalt not harken unto him and neither shall thine eye pity him, but thou shalt kill him!’ ”

With half-closed eyes, Francis began to recite, “I have a dream … I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will sit down together at the table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day all of God’s children—black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics—”

“—will join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!’ ” General McClellan finished with him.

“Oh, my,” I said.

“There were those who believed the Reverend King was a dangerous man,” Francis reminded me, “and someone killed him for his dream.”

“All right then, what about Hitler?” I said.

“Gandhi,” Francis countered.

“Pol Pot!”

“Mandela.”

“So how can we tell the false prophets from the true?” I asked.

“By their deeds shall you know them,” George McClellan said. “Wait and see.”

“Wait and see,” Napoleon mimicked in a prissy voice. “That’s why Lincoln fired you.”

“And in the meantime, the damage is done!” I cried.

No one answered.

There was some excitement a little while ago. The ghost Nile has currents and eddies, just as the real river does. Every now and then someone new washes up. George spotted a man wearing antique armor climb onto the foggy bank, across the water. Ptolemy says the armor is Greek. He thinks the man might be Alexander the Great, so he and George have been trying to attract the newcomer’s attention. General Bonaparte is sulking. Just between you and me? I don’t think he wants the competition.

The idea of another soldier among us is making Francis restless, but I’ve begun to hope we can lure someone new to our group, if for no other reason than to distract our two generals from what’s happening among the living.

General Bonaparte has been particularly agitated lately. “Non, non, non!” he’ll cry. “Imbeciles! You ca

“This is going to be a military blunder as catastrophic as your invasion of Russia,” George predicted.

You can imagine how well that went over with Napoleon. Things have been pretty tense since then.

I’m sure you’ve realized that Karl Weilbacher was tragically wrong about his own nation but largely right about the Cairo Conference. Black seeds were sown, and I’m afraid you’re still bringing in the harvest. Rarely has so much been decided by so few to the detriment of so many as in that fancy hotel back in 1921. I thought at the time that Winston and his Forty Thieves were a high-handed, arrogant bunch, and I knew the Cairo Conference was significant when I stood on its edges. I never imagined that decisions made then would dictate history for a hundred years or more, or that America would get tangled up in it all.

I guess it’s easy for some people to convince themselves, as Mumma always did, that they’re doing something nice for others, something they suppose others must truly yearn for, something anyone ought to be thrilled and grateful to receive. And perhaps others do want it, or maybe they don’t, but people on the receiving end can’t help feeling that they should have been asked before somebody charged in and bestowed it. Naturally, people are resentful of ham-handed efforts to run their affairs for them, especially when they can plainly see a benefactor’s ulterior motives. And even when you mean well? Sometimes things are just none of your business.

“Americans have always looked at the Middle East and seen themselves in a mirror,” George McClellan told me recently. In his opinion, “Anyone could have predicted how all this would turn out.”

Well, I didn’t, but I certainly know something about gazing into the mirror of infatuation. Eventually it shatters, and you’re left with nothing but broken glass.

Francis says he’s fed up with the generals and wants to know if Rosie and I would like to try moving upstream. I’m thinking about it, but I may wait a while longer. This bend of the river seems to collect military people, and I am still hoping to run into Colonel Lawrence. Surely his name is remembered, and I can’t imagine that he never drank from the Nile.

Which sort of dreamer was he? I wonder. He seems to have concluded that he was a dreamer of the day, and hated himself for it, but I don’t think it was Lawrence’s fault that things are such a mess in the Middle East. There were many forces at work. He did his best, not that good intentions count for much.

The Arabs he lived among had every opportunity to shoot him while he slept and bring his head to the Turks for that enormous reward. They understood that Lawrence was for them, not merely using them for his own purposes. His dream was that they could be more fully and truly themselves, not just darker reflections of himself in the mirror of infatuation.

Maybe that’s the way to tell the dangerous men from the good ones. A dreamer of the day is dangerous when he believes that others are less: less than their own best selves and certainly less than he is. They exist to follow and flatter him, and to serve his purposes.

A true prophet, I suppose, is like a good parent. A true prophet sees others, not himself. He helps them define their own half-formed dreams, and puts himself at their service. He is not diminished as they become more. He offers courage in one hand and generosity in the other.

Well! I was hoping I could end my little story by saying something wise and uplifting, and I’m afraid that might be about the best I can do. Perhaps if I’d read more philosophy when I had the chance, I’d have something more impressive to leave you with but, you see, I just taught fifth grade and lived my own little life. When it comes down to it, I don’t have much in the way of advice to offer you, but here it is:

Read to children.

Vote.

And never buy anything from a man who’s selling fear.

Oh, dear. It might be too late now, but one last thing? Try not to remember my name.