The Interview
…A trip through dreamland
Tongue-in-cheek disclaimer: Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, in the following exposition is purely coincidental, however we understand why our readers might believe otherwise.
What if…
Picture this. You awake perspiring with your heart racing as if you’d just run a marathon. At first you think a medical malady may have made you palpitate and panic. But as the physiological manifestations slowly recede, you realize you had a dream, a fever dream that accounts for these symptoms. Some dreams are gone as soon as we rise, but others stay with us, every detail, the words, the people, the colors still vivid and there for the conscious mind to replay. You remember and begin to re-experience the subconscious scenario but now without debilitating emotions.
The scene seems to be set in the future, decades hence. Several bespectacled craggy faced people, dressed in shabby bland suits and dresses are digging through dusty boxes, pulling binders from broken shelves, and frantically scrolling through images displayed on the screens at their several workstations. Some of their faces look vaguely familiar, but you can’t place them. In that poorly lit dingy environment, EUREKA! is exclaimed from one corner of the room. “Look what I found!” Everyone, including you as a participant in this story, gathers around one display where with the click of a mouse a video begins to play.
The interview: A stolid interviewer of nondescript appearance, seated across a small desk from a stiff uniformed sharp featured bureaucrat, is saying in a heavily accented English, “This interview is being recorded for the archives.” They both glance first at a machine on the desk and then up at you. After your initial fright, you realize that they are looking at the camera recording the video. Much of the interview was garbled, but a question halfway through was, “How does your section plan to defeat our primary adversary?” You get the feeling that they are talking about some clandestine plan, and that the interviewer is a government media stooge and the interviewee is a military spook of some kind in the service of his country. The lengthy halting response from the noticeably squirming operative was clear as a bell.
“Those people have democratic elections, and we know that that their voters choose candidates based not on policy and character but on likability, salesmanship, and well-earned or unearned fame. So we will seek and promote through social media a candidate who satisfies those criteria while at the same time has indeterminate loyalties and will be susceptible to our turning him or her into our asset. In other words, we need a huckster with a winning personality. Even if turning fails, such a person in leadership will greatly weaken our opponent. Our psychology section has provided a profile for our use. For optimal results, we need to find an untrustworthy homophobic racist scofflaw who is a narcissistic egomaniacal avaricious sociopathic infantile ignoramus with no moral center and who cannot distinguish truth from lie. Extreme malleability, gullibility, and authoritarian tendencies would also be useful. Such an individual, according to our profilers, would be the perfect person to run a country and would be the favorite of the majority of anti-elite, anti-intelligentsia, underinformed voters.”
You know that if you replay that dream, the details will be different. But first you wonder why that particular drama was in your head in the first place and why those studious investigators who unearthed the interview did not tell you whether the agency’s nefarious plan was ever implemented and if it bore fruit. You awoke just before the big reveal. Damn!
Your best guess is that you awoke in such a frightful state because you subconsciously feared that the plan had succeeded and that you might find yourself in its aftermath in the real world today, rather than in the fictional future that indigestion before retiring the night before may have launched.
You are driven to learn if any of what you dreamed could be based on true discoveries. You ask the Google AI for examples of discovered archives of spy agencies and learn that:
Several notable spy agency archives have been discovered and made available for research. These include the Mitrokhin Archive, which contains handwritten notes about KGB operations, and the archives of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Other agencies with discovered archives include the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) and the East German Stasi.
OK, that discovery is happening now and in the recent past, but your dream was set in the future. Of course, we know that dreams can deform and transpose reality. Times and places may not be what they seem. You decide not to avail yourself of the services of a therapist, at least not yet. You just hope that your wild imagination ran away with you and that you need not worry that such a catastrophic eventuality could ever arise in your waking world.
Playwright in making
You decide that before memory fades further, you need to write what you remember. While entering the story in your journal you realize that you can embellish. You can insert your own text where the words were garbled in the dream. Now it looks like act two of a three-act play. What led up to the interview must be in Act One and what happened to the election subversion plan afterward must be in Act Three. Surely that cadre of unkempt researchers had uncovered those answers – they were just missing from your dream. You choose to produce a full-fledged account of the fairy tale, despite you having had no formal training as a novelist or playwright. But you can imagine that you were one of those future historians uncovering all the secrets of the past.
Act One: Your country, that is the narrator’s county, has been at odds with a nation halfway around the globe for decades. Both have intelligence services that study the cultures and habits of the adversary’s people and government, especially of their leaders. Everything from saber rattling to polite diplomatic exchanges have come to naught. Your country will certainly never alter its form of government, and the other guys seem unwilling to budge as well. Patience on both sides is running thin.
Unlike your people who have codes of ethics that prevent many actions and that make the alternatives labor under review forever, your opponents have no such strictures. They decide, since direct confrontation is not working and may lead to a hot conflict, the best approach is to corrupt from within. All agents in the field are charged with identifying exploitable weaknesses in your county’s infrastructure and system of governance. Second only to a massive cyberattack, the unanimous proposal is to replace current leadership with pawns who can be manipulated – the rationale being that the electorate is so fickle that it can be easily played.
Act Two: The interview was incomplete. Some dialogue needs clarifying and augmenting. You had no idea that the string of adjectives heard in the interview was even in your sleeping vocabulary. Aside from adding stilted chitchat between the uncomfortable subject and the straightjacketed media representative, the final question and answer must be, Q: “Will it not be difficult to find a candidate who personifies all of those personality traits in one person?” A: “Yes, at first we believed that would be the challenge, but thanks to the confidence placed in us by our Dear Leader and the God-given righteousness of our governmental philosophy, we have already identified the perfect patsy.” You feel you must stick to the essence of the story as dreamt, but you wish you could sneak in a few positive comments about those voters who ultimately must have regretted being conned.
Act Three: As you pen the end of your first foray into scribing a screenplay, you realize that this story, your original dream, does not propose a Manchurian candidate. Rather it relies on manipulating a home-grown dupe through clever falsely fawning admirers and on manipulating the electorate through Internet invaders who fill social media with irrebuttable-in-real-time misleading conspiracy driven drivel and fake news.
Dust to dusk
You feel better now. Having turned the near hysteria of waking from a scary dream into a well-documented reprise with your own waking additions, the trauma has passed. You do not intend to submit your prophetic piece to a publisher because it’s too personal, and the story is so unbelievably outlandish, it couldn’t possibly compete with what real authors produce. As you retire that evening, confident that a sound uninteresting sleep is imminent, you chuckle out loud at how you were for a day overtaken by such a ludicrous tale of international intrigue, perhaps never knowing why your imaginative subconscious ventured into such dark territory.
Credits: All images modified after openAI.com’s DALL-E image generation.
Nota Bene: Others may ruminate differently. But be warned: In my case, seeing or hearing something quite trivial -- a saying, a store clerk’s mannerisms, or bad grammar on a food product’s label – triggers a stream-of-consciousness extrapolation toward grander notions and generalizations. That is what often happens in these posts. ADDENDUM: Those subscribers who have been here for a while will have noticed that at times Ruminations has veered into diatribes. I make no apology. I just want my readers to know that it’s quite intentional. When events come close to making the ‘blood boil,’ that discontent bubbles up here.
Disclaimer: Any and all opinions expressed here are my own at the time of writing with no expectation that they will hold beyond my next review of this article. Opinions are like a river, winding hither and yon, encountering obstacles and rapids, and suffering turbulent mixing of silts from its depths and detritus from its banks. But just as a river has its clear headwaters and a fertile delta, so do opinions, notwithstanding any intervening missteps and uncertainties.
Reminder: You can visit the Cycloid Fathom Technical Publishing website at cycloid-fathom.com and the gallery at cycloid-fathom.com/gallery.
Forthcoming posts (unless life intervenes)
Scale
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30 June 2025
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7 July 20254
The Substitute
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The Purpose of Purple
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21 July 2025
Are we there yet?
…The age of patience
28 July 2025
The Permission Mission
…Le contraire du laissez-faire
4 August 2025
