Dreamers Comments

Yes, I know that movie! I wanted to like it more than I did. Bernardo Bertolucci is one of my favorite directors. His Last Tango in Paris had a great scene in which Marlon Brando first reviled the corpse of his wife and then breaks down and wants to join her in death. I've never forgotten that scene. But the three kids in The Dreamers never get beyond posturing even though the streets are burning. They live vicariously through films. But their passions are curiously stalled. I was in Paris just after the Revolution of 1968 and the students pulled me into their activities. And they were really committed and they adopted me for a time as one of their own. It was a time of fervor, we lived a larger life than we thought possible, the rumor was Jean Luc Godard was filming nearby, not dreamers, activists - trying to jump-start a utopia, We've got 30 years to make a New World, one of the leaders kept saying.

Indeed. Indeed. I am often in Washington, D.C., which place glistens with the ghosts of liberties defended, injustice protested, battles that will never, should never, be questioned, and courage and lives spent on nothing at all. Contrast the very moving Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial across the way, the pillars of the World War II Memorial down the Mall.