i am driving through endless fields of waving corn. i get tired and pull over, in the shadow of an old barn. i get out the car to strech my legs and i light a sigarette while my eyes wander over the horizon. my thoughts are interrupted by laughter, which i figure must come out of the barn. curiosity guides me to a crack in the wood, and i look inside. the time my eyes take to adjust to the dark… holy shit. bush, rice, cheney, rumsfeld, wolfowitz and more of their ilk are sitting around a table. the words i managed to catch in between the bad jokes tell me that they are designing the new middle east. my eyes quickly scan the barn. some security guys, but they are all facing the table. i move away from the crack and look around me. no other soul to found. then my eye falls on some red shiny dynamite between the corn. it all happens very quick. grab the dynamite, take my lighter, shove the sissing dynamite near the crack and jump in the car. drive away as one life depends on it. the big bang, the image of the barn blown into pieces in the rearview mirror.
hours and hours of driving till the adrenaline is gone. a gas station and a diner. i slide in with the hope of not being noticed, and find myself an empty booth in a corner, with a view on the television. no need to be worried about getting noticed, i can’t even get my order taken, the few people in this place are glued to the screen. a big black whole in a cornfield. digital reconstructions of how the barn must have blown up. looks like a video-game. people are mesmerized. their mouths open, unable to produce a sound. no witnesses, no clue about the terrorist group behind this attack. i keep on driving for days and days, from diner to diner, from small town to small town. gradually people find words again, they start speaking, laughing, it’s over. whoever did it, maybe it was god, or perhaps the people, the important thing is that it’s over. a new fresh day.
i wake up in a great mood. go to pergolesi to work with marÃa, but we can’t begin before i’ve told her the dream. i also talk about the need to be in brussels now, for the first time ever i feel we need to be able to push and work the european institutions. is it about a feeling of political powerlessness connected to being in santa cruz? or connected to how mass mobilizations all over the world against the war on iraq ultimately failed to stop that war? i do not know…