Last night I had the strangest dream, about the world of Edgar Allen Beem.

It began in a trendy little bistro in the Yarmouth area, where I overheard a conversation among what looked to be successful business people, or to some, I suppose, capitalist pigs.

They said that Beem and his fellow travelers are race-baiting, America-hating, liberty-loathing statists. They whispered that Beem and his cultural elitist friends are self-absorbed Ameriphobes; effete intellectuals and artistes devoted to the hard-core collectivist ideals and moral relativism embodied in the Humanist Manifesto that is their bible.

“They’re seriously anti-Constitutionalists; it’s scary,” one particularly prosperous gent said. “They hide behind common-good rhetoric, hoping it will earn them high-ranking positions on the Politburo when the revolution occurs. They use ‘multi-culturalism,’ ‘social justice,’ and other precepts of the culture wars to gain the support of the great unwashed.”

All agreed Beem and his friends aren’t much fun; they are, instead, angry and determined to destroy the American experiment as we know it. They are modern-day Utopian pirates. And they can’t wait to don their uniforms and centrally plan our every step.

These dreamy comments may reveal a bias, but they also pretty much happen to be true.

Pem Schaeffer
Brunswick