A Nightmare of Metaphors

Sleepless in Chicago

Martin Luther King Jr had a dream. I had a nightmare.

It started with a metaphor about how Chicago is a prison without any walls or locks. The prisoners can escape if they choose to, but they don’t. In places like Chicago many of the criminals and their victims are inmates incarcerated by the payments they receive instead of the bars that used to confine prisoners. So most of them stay.

The plan to control them by making them dependent on the jailers worked like a charm. The victims don’t know how to escape from the open gates. The criminals don’t want to.

A prison is nominally operated by the warden. In this nightmare the current warden is Lori Lightfoot. She appears to be running things but she is actually just a meat puppet for the prison board members. She gets paid to act the fool and take the heat for the horror show created by those who actually run the place. She is the perfect puppet because she actually believes she is in charge. Nothing is sadder than that delusion.

I’ll leave you to speculate about who the prison board puppet masters are.

My nightmare then morphed into a different metaphor about a swamp that never gets drained. A former President promised to “drain the swamp” as a campaign slogan. Whether he actually tried to do that is debatable. Decide for yourself. But the fact is, it never got drained. Some of the old snakes were merely replaced with different snakes and the people were left to flop in the shallow green water like dying fish in a summer devoid of rain.

In my dream I see Lori Lightfoot flopping around on the floor of city hall like those pitiful dying fish. That image alone turned the dream into a nightmare.

Later as the nightmare continued, my mind wandered to the prisoners who tried to escape from Devil’s Island prison by buying the same bottomless boat that others had bought many times before them in the 1973 movie Papillon. I’m not sure what the symbolism on that one is since the people in the first part of my nightmare were not even trying to escape. They merely talked about it. Maybe it was about Chicagoans who want to escape but can’t.

The final two ingredients in my mixed metaphor soup were random thoughts about plantations and the slaves who never ran away. And then about the wild pigs who didn’t try to escape the three sided pen after they got used to the free corn that was placed there daily. Some dream huh?

I’m told mixing metaphors is always a bad idea when writing. Writing about your crazy dreams also is probably a bad idea. But it was a nightmare, not a dream. And I won’t be able to put it aside until I put it on paper. Or at least into the cloud.

All of this seems odd to me. It’s really only a nightmare for the people who are still forced by circumstance to remain where criminals are allowed to prey on them without fear of meaningful consequences.

I was born in Chicago. I grew up there, raised a family there and finally escaped from there. So why am I still fixated on the nightmare that that place has become?

Perhaps it was the eggnog I had before bed.