A Dream of the Primaries

I don’t usually remember my dreams, but when I do . . . ho boy.

Last night, I dreamt that John Kerry and John Edwards paid me a visit in order to win my support in the primary. Which is to say, they were trying to convince me to vote for Kerry — Edwards confided that he knew he wasn’t going to win, but that Kerry had promised him the VP slot. I was quite flattered that they should give me such personal attention, but I had one important policy question before I gave them my response:

“What about the increase in bear hunting?”

Whoosh. The scene changed to a grizzled old guy in flannel talking about how hunters used to hunt all sorts of different animals, but now that the market for bear meat is so lucrative, they’re not hunting anything else. He expressed concern for the bear population, but when a living’s to be made hunting bear but not deer, what’s a family man to do?

Whoosh. I watched, as if from the top of a cliff, as the grizzled old guy shot down a brown bear and took it to the bear meat market, where there were dozens of wicker baskets filled with bear meat. Then suddenly at my elbow this guy appeared who had no individual identity but I instinctively knew was a Democratic Presidential Candidate.

“I can hunt bears too!” he exclaimed. “No!” I hollered, but he was already down there in the wilderness going after a _polar_ bear. I tried to shout out to him that polar bears are unusually dangerous and he should be careful, but of course he walked right up to a big dirty polar bear, who mauled him almost casually and then ambled away. The last part of the dream is the politician gushing blood in a way that’s so gory it wakes me up and I have trouble getting back to sleep.

Interpretation? I’m not even going to _touch_ it.