America is a nation of dreamers, who are too often ignored by both major parties. 

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It's been a while since I last wrote on these pages. Back in those days, I was a regular columnist for the original Private Eye newspaper (renamed as City Weekly), when the Jazz were a team dedicated to more than just future draft picks and "Stockton to Malone" was more than a car lot. After five decades as a criminal defense attorney, I have finally been paroled to retirement.

As a son of Bingham Canyon, I learned life from my Croatian father—an unrepentant union man and FDR Democrat—and my Italian mother, who both worked outside the home and supported us with a firm hand. I am, in the words of my old law partner Brad Rich, a "curious combination of red and redneck."

If I offend you by what I write, it's on me and not City Weekly. But as the great middleweight boxing champion Gene Fullmer once explained, "You've got to roll with the punches. You are going to get hit." Fair warning.

I remember writing a column about the 1992 presidential election, covering it in a gonzo style reminiscent of journalist Hunter S. Thompson. Today, I'm not sure I would recognize the 42-year-old guy who wrote that earlier piece about "Slick Willie" from Arkansas. Although I still have some of that younger man's whimsy and skewed view of mankind's foibles, the intervening decades have left greater fear for the country of my birth.

American history, though flawed, nevertheless illustrates the greatest experiment to govern not only from the seats of power but from the seats of the pants of the common person, with all their differences and degrees of greatness, intelligence, stupidity and mendacity. In light of that history, I hate where we have gotten today.

A pox on both the right and left of the political spectrum and our inability to sing outside of the personal/political/cultural scale of "Me-Me-Me-Me!" There is no suitable joke for the narcissism of America right now, at least as we receive it from our platforms of self-righteousness.

Following the assassination attempt against Donald Trump, I called a Republican lawyer I once met at Wisconsin's American Family Field to tell them how sorry I felt for the country. I hoped for a moment of time—just like after John F. Kennedy was killed—when public hatreds would be toned down and we could have greater cooperation as a country (minus the horror of the horse-drawn casket down Pennsylvania Avenue).

Kennedy's interregnum period lasted a while; the post-Trump period of goodwill didn't even get out of bed and put its shoes on before it was over. I find no humor in President-elect Trump and so I find myself unable to write about him following this recent election. I hope he changes; I pray that he actually reads that book he says he loves, and the Constitution of the United States (which he also claims to revere).

Recently, in an effort to clear my head, I took the pooch around the Utah State Capitol complex. The people currently working on the construction projects there were breaking for lunch in groups. Two men out of the hundreds were sitting on the curb of State Street, lunch boxes opened, speaking with one another.

My Spanish isn't good enough to catch everything, but these men were talking about what they were doing after work. It reminded me of the Carl Sandberg poem "Child of the Romans," regarding Italian railroad workers—men like my grandfathers, father and uncles. These two working men of Mexico, now Americans, were sharing dreams about their futures like the Italians eating their bologna sandwiches in the poem.

I usually walk up to the Capitol with my dog two or three times each day. Many if not most of the workers are of Latino/Hispanic heritage and I have even asked some of them whether the Republican legislators and executives for whom they were hired to build these amazing structures ever stop to talk to them.

You know the answer, but the same could be said about my party, too.

Which of our leaders actually considers why people like these construction crews work so hard and eat lunch on a dirty, dusty street? Neither Kamala Harris nor Donald Trump really cared, in my opinion.

One used them as a target for abuse as rapists and killers. The other used them as a group whom she felt were beholden to the left because they were part of "our" traditional base and, well, they just had to support her.

But for all the blithering fusillades of opinion issuing from party websites and media outlets, no one knows what the dreams of those workers I saw really are. America is not only "one nation under God," but "one nation out of many dreams."

I believe we are doomed unless we begin to realize that we probably all have dreams that are really very similar at their core—no matter what our accent or dialect or sex or identity or color happens to be.

Yet, the people elected to govern really don't talk to those construction crews directly about their needs—and not just to them but to all of us—without the filter of pundits and platitudes and polls and spin doctors.

The American dream must move away from the nightmare that is presently residing at its heart, courtesy of the Elon Musks and Koch Brothers and Soroses of this world. You, like I, want a safe life in a country free of 24/7, 365-day political bloodsports, where you aren't perpetually asked by Kamala Harris or Mike Lee for a handout. We all want to have a job and a home and a family (however constituted) in a land where everyone is free and equal.

That's the dream. And it has always been the dreamers who build America.

Private Eye is off this week. Send feedback to comments@cityweekly.net.