Don’t rob yourself of your dreams. They may be all we ever have, and that just might be enough.

What fools we are. We build air castles, long for things we may never have, wish for a better way of life and a better world. In short, we dream. Our dreams are smooth and shiny, and they glow with a soft, appealing light. They are born in our minds, carefully nurtured and fed until they take on their own shapes and have a life of their own, at least in our mind’s eye. Everyone everywhere has dreams, without exception, some of us more than others to be sure, but we all dream.

There are those among us who would deny that, but they are bigger fools than the biggest dreamers. Perhaps they have ceased to dream when their own dreams went unfulfilled. Maybe their dreams were sour, vengeful affairs that crippled their souls. Who knows what happens to some people? Whatever the case, they are the people who scorn the dreamer and dismiss their dreams. Theirs must be a sad and empty existence. What they don’t know is that the fulfillment of dreams is not the point of dreaming. Dreaming is the point, the act of imagining what is not, letting our minds go wherever curiosity and imagination might take them. 

If one is able to dream, then one is able to act upon those dreams, and dreams that come true can affect the whole world. Dreamers gave us the the Magna Carta, railroads, the Pieta, polio vaccine, the Taj Mahal, airplanes, the Mona Lisa, Beethoven’s Fifth, wine, poetry, Ferris wheels, spaghetti, Huckleberry Finn, roller skates, popcorn, the Brooklyn Bridge, chocolate, tractors, sunglasses, light bulbs, a round earth, the moon landing, velcro, balloons, super-soakers, miniskirts, telephones, computers, Corvettes, jelly beans and America. A lot of the people responsible for those things were ridiculed as dreamers, maybe told they were wasting their time on things that would never be. But they were dreamers, those people, every one, and dreamers know things.

Dreamers know that their dreams are step 1. They also know that not all their dreams will work out. But some do. Step 2 is working on making that dream a reality. So are steps 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 or however many steps it takes. Usually the dreaming is the easy part, unless you’re Albert Einstein, who’s whole body of work was dreaming; thinking about things and writing down his thoughts. He left it to others to prove his dreams, content to dream other dreams. Well, Einstein’s dreams turned out to be completely accurate and mathematically perfect when his seemingly outrageous theories of General Relativity and Special Relativity were tested scientifically. They changed science and the world. He often said that his laboratory was his mind, a pad and a pencil. A real dreamer’s dreamer.

There was once an American dreamer who shared his dream with the world. He never lived to see it come true, but Dr. Martin Luther King dreamt of a world where his children would be judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin. Forty five years later America took him up on that challenge and elected Barack Obama to be our next president, the first African-American to gain that office and an event that was unthinkable in 1963. Martin Luther King was assassinated five years after delivering that speech, and he seemed to know his life would be a short one because of his dreams and his activities, but he never hesitated to share his dreams and labor to attain them, not just for himself, but for all men, the oppressed and the oppressors alike, that we all might live in a better world. 

His dreams and his untiring efforts to achieve them had already been instrumental in the passage of the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the National Voting Rights Act of 1965. In his last great speech on April 3,1968, the day before before his death, he spoke candidly of not making it to the fulfillment of his dream, and how that mattered very little in the great scheme of things. He did not fear the dream killers, and granted them no power over him. The Dream was out there, it was public property. The Dream was growing and would not die with Martin Luther King, in spite of mighty efforts by those who would crush his dream. On January 20, 2009, a huge part of a dreamer’s dream comes true, and the world is changed for the better once again. And so we dream again, and see what else we can change.

MERRY CHRISTMAS AND HAPPY CHANUKAH TO ALL. IT’S TIME TO ENJOY OUR FAMILIES, COUNT OUR BLESSINGS AND GIVE AND GET LOVE. FOR AT LEAST A DAY OR TWO, BOB CRESPO.COM AND THE DEPARTMENT OF POINTING OUT THE OBVIOUS WILL TAKE A BREAK FROM THIS STRIDENT WORLD AND SEEK THE COMPANY AND THE SOUL-ELEVATING COMFORT OF OUR LOVED ONES. HERE’S WISHING EACH OF YOU A HAPPY HOLIDAY FILLED WITH JOY, GOOD PEOPLE, GOOD FOOD AND PRECIOUS LOVE. WAGE PEACE.

Contrary to what some people would have you believe, there are more than two types of people in this word. There are actually three: pessimists, optimists and drunks. Of the three, the least disappointed person is the pessimist, since he expects nothing, the most pleasant is the optimist, since he is always filled with hope, but happiest is the drunkard. A drunk doesn’t care one way or the next if his glass is half empty or half full since he knows it’s going to be empty in a flash, and then full again, then empty again, and then full again and so on and so on until he’s feeling happy, confident, loving, powerful, wise and free.

You have to feel sorry for all those very wealthy people who just lost all their money to investment frauds. Or not.

Time for predictions for 2009. It’s too late to jump on the crippled economy bandwagon since that seems to be on everybody’s predictions list. Besides, that is not a real prediction, it’s simply reading the newspapers and figuring out we’re heading for lean times. Well, no shit, Nostradamus! And then there’s Condoleezza Rice’s doozy, predicting that Barack Obama will continue Bush The Younger’s disastrous foreign policy. Sort of makes you understand how she’s stuck with the guy for the whole 8 years of his presidency. She’s just as loopy as he is. We should have known all along with that 1950’s sit-com hairdo.

Predictions for the New Year should be grounded in reality and very plausible. Some are pretty easy, like this one: A better and smaller iPod will be introduced at a press conference where Steve Jobs will creep everybody out again. There, that was easy. Bobcrespo.com could stick to no-brainers like that one in the interest of accuracy, but that’s too easy and not nearly as much fun as swinging for the fences and really trying for something new and different. What the hell, they’re only predictions and we take them about as seriously as we do our New Year’s resolutions. Here goes:

In January, Shotgun Dick Cheney will say goodbye to the American public by shooting a few more of his friends in the face just for the hell of it and then order Bush The Younger to pardon him. He will then retire to one his favorite undisclosed locations to complete the process of becoming completely automated.

Osama bin Laden will release a new video around the time of the inauguration. In a departure from his usual minimalist style, for this one he’s going big budget and will employ back-up singers and dancers and feature the rapper Ludacris to interpret his message in hip hop poetry. Gone will be the simple backdrop of rocks and the studio set, for reasons that will remain unexplained, will be a recreation of Emerald City from the Wizard of Oz.

In a combination of Green Eco-activism and anarchy, outlaw bicycle gangs will appear on the scene. Animosity between rival gangs will result in a rash of drive-by slappings and spirited insults. No one will take them seriously.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the President of Iran, will begin wearing shoe lifts and wearing his hair in a high pompadour. He’ll still be short but he’ll be real creepy.

In the final game of the 2009 baseball season, the Yankees newest and richest pitcher ever, the burly 6 foot, 7 inch tall C.C. Sabathia, will set a baseball record by hitting 400 pounds.

Scientists will discover nothing of any use to anyone and cure no diseases but will find some planets a billion light years away and make up a few diseases that can be “cured” by expensive drugs with weird side effects that can be countered by other expensive drugs with weird side effects, and so on and so on. A brand new Nobel Prize category in marketing will be awarded.

President Barack Obama will create a new government agency, the Department of Comedy. The first Secretary of Comedy will be Carlos Mencia. His duties will be up to him, the president figuring he’ll come up with something entertaining to take America’s mind off the 2nd Great Depression.

Sarah Palin’s daughter Bristol will give birth to a son and Governor Palin will insist he’s the Messiah and announce the beginning of the Rapture. Later in the year, Bristol will earn big money posing for the centerfold of Playboy magazine. Governor Palin will declare her daughter a witch and a servant of the Anti-Christ, who she will identify as Al Franken.

Vladimir Putin will start dressing like Stalin. Not to be outdone, the recently retired President of the United States George W. Bush will start showing up at Texas Rangers baseball games dressed as Uncle Sam.

Former boxing champion George Foreman will come out of retirement to fight for the heavyweight title at age 60 and win it with a with a fifth round knockout of Vitali Klischko delivered with a body blow. That is, George will belly-bump the champion into the ropes, trapping him there with his huge fat body before punching him silly.

At the end of 2009 the economy will suddenly recover and the Depression will end when the lost trillions of dollars suddenly reappear just as mysteriously as they vanished. A huge accounting error will be blamed. President Obama will decide to keep the Department of Comedy around, just in case.

The National Hockey League will make history when in a hockey game between the Detroit Penguins and the Philadelphia Flyers, not a single fist fight breaks out. Disappointed fans will riot.

The Supreme Court will decide that gay marriage is just fine, but not for any civil rights reasons. In a majority opinion, Justice John Paul Stevens will explain that the court has decided that in light of the fact that nearly 50% of all marriages end up in divorce court, gays just haven’t been doing their fair share when it comes to supporting the legal community.

Everybody in Zimbabwe except for President Robert Mugabe will die of cholera and Zimbabwe will truly be his alone. Upon learning of this, the United Nations will breathe a sigh of relief and form a Blue Ribbon Panel to study the continuing genocide campaigns elsewhere in Africa. Their non-binding resolutions will be due in the year 2013.

The overwhelming Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress will pass a law outlawing fedoras, not for any particular reason, but just because they can. In a show of solidarity and civil disobedience, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh will start wearing fedoras. The Democrats get a huge kick out of the whole thing before the Supreme Court tosses the law.

Sports Illustrated Magazine will declare that golf and bowling really aren’t sports after all, but games, and they will cease to cover them. Their indisputable logic will be that even people who are really out of shape can excel at these activities that require minimal physical exertion, no strategy beyond the obvious object of the game and no defense. No one will argue since golfers and bowlers aren’t too keen about breaking a sweat.

Bernard Madoff will be found not guilty at his trial for defrauding his fellow super-wealthy people on the grounds that they were gullible and greedy idiots begging to be ripped off. Adding insult to larceny, the judge orders his victims to pay his legal fees.

Oprah Winfrey will announce her plan to stay fat for good when she finds out that Las Vegas bookmakers have a betting line on her weight fluctuations. The over/under number recently hit 258 pounds plus or minus 3. Disappointed oddsmakers turn to a betting line on when the immensely fat and drug-addled Rush Limbaugh finally has a stroke or a heart attack. Betting is brisk and the smart money goes with the stroke.

And finally, the new Harry Potter movie will be released and will do no business at all when people realize what silly drivel it all was in the first lace.

Never hurt anybody you don’t mean to. That’s just sloppy. Focus!

In case you haven”t been paying attention, there was a lot of news reported in 2008. Outside of volcanoes and dopey pet stories, the news always seems to revolve around people. Who did this, who did that, who had this done to them, who killed who, who won, who lost, who died, who thrived, who stole Granny’s nest egg and so on. Being that the 2008 hour glass is swiftly running out of sand, it’s time to restate the obvious with an annual People In The News Recap. 2008 was a pretty tumultuous year with a lot going on and a lot of people sticking their two cents in and a lot of very big stories. Earth shattering, stunning and momentous and whatnot.

Let’s ignore all that. No sense adding even more blah-blah-blah to the big stories. Suffice to say that Bush The Younger kept screwing up this nation in ways no one thought humanly possible, Barack Obama won the dubious honor of cleaning up after him and for a kicker the greedy corporate princes finally achieved their goal of stealing all the money. We know all that. Heard it said in a thousand ways and it’s still the same bleak mess with the only ray of hope some skinny black guy out of Chicago who for all our sakes had better be more than good, at the minimum great. Miraculous would better. Enough said about all that.

So, what else happened? Oil prices shot through the roof and then came back down again just to let us know that the venal swine who run Big Oil and OPEC (is there a difference?) can screw up our lives pretty much anytime they want, as if we needed that irritating reminder. Baseball free agents scooped up whatever millions were left over from the Wall Street Greeding Frenzy. TV got even worse with more reality shows and shit-coms, one dumber than the next. In an unprecedented  occurrence, the rich didn’t get richer, but the poor still got poorer, models of consistency. In Africa, genocide continues to be such a success that some people have decided that adding slavery to the mix sounded like a fine idea. At least for the slave owners, anyway. The slaves are not so crazy about it. Like they say, everything old is new again. Look at Somalia and their pirates. Very retro.

This was another year when a lot of people looked for excuses for their poor behavior, nothing ground-breaking there. Unfortunately for the screw-ups, however, this is The Information Age, so the old standard excuse that they didn’t know any better doesn’t work so well anymore. It’s not like they can claim that the information was unavailable when eight year olds can look it up in about a minute and a half. Expect next year’s excuses to be more dementia-oriented and of the blaming-the-other-guy variety.

Other people in the news included some poor sap who got trampled to death at a Walmart store by shoppers who stepped over his lifeless body to fight over the privilege of buying cheaply made Chinese crap for their kids for Christmas. There was a lady who got a face transplant, a pretty generous gesture by the donor, who unlike a kidney, had no spare. A lot of scientists were in the news this past year, not for any exciting breakthroughs they’ve made in any of their fields of endeavor, but basically to wring their hands over global warming and to announce that they guessed wrong on lots of things. Well, there’s no shortage of Discovery Channel and National Geographic shows about scientists who came before them and actually discovered and invented things for these achievement-challenged dopes to narrate so they can still feel useful and smart. That’s something, no?

Then there was the guy who won a whole bunch of gold medals in the Beijing Olympics in spite of the chunky-stye air. To his credit, he came home and claimed his rewards: hundreds of millions of dollars in endorsements and a stripper girlfriend. And speaking of China and the Olympics, their government officials restored the world’s confidence in their commitment to tyranny when they revoked any freedom of the press and the internet they had temporarily granted during the Games immediately following the Closing Ceremonies. Snuffed them out like the Olympic torch. People were sort of unnerved by whatever limited openness and access they had allowed while the world spotlight was on Beijing, but that great rift in The Force was restored by the intrepid Chinese leadership with a deft combination of brutal crackdowns and dire threats. Well done, Comrades.

Mercifully, no new Harry Potter movies were released this year, but the bleak forecasts for 2009 turn even grimmer with the announcement of a new installment of this geek series being released in the Spring of 2009. Meanwhile, Hollywood producers are fearful that they have exhausted all possible comic book characters being translated into big box office movies and have rejected scripts depicting Archie and Jughead as super heros with uncanny strength and mutant abilities and several others exploring the possibilities of making Zap Comic’s Mr. Natural a crime-fighting hippy. So far, the committees and focus groups that make movies these days are undecided what the next moronic trend ought to be.

In celebrity news, always a source of stellar journalism, there were the usual suspects getting drunk, arrested, sent to drug rehab, making incoherent political statements, switching sexual identities, announcing some really boring personal transformation and appearing on Dancing With The Former Stars. Nothing to sink one’s teeth into, even with Madonna’s splashy divorce. What did her ex-husband expect? Exactly who did he think he married, Marie Osmond? You don’t get a pit bull and then complain when it bites the neighbors. But we’ve seen this all before, so everyone was delighted when in an end-of-the-year coup, the ever-reliable Paris Hilton reported she’d been robbed of $2 million in jewels because she left her front door open. You go, girl!

The New York football Giants had a good year, winning the Super Bowl against the New England Patriots, a team everyone had ordained beforehand as the Best-Ever-In-The-Universe-For-All-Time-And-Into-The-Future. Which is why they actually play these games. Just in case the unexpected happens, you know. Also having a banner year was video star Osama bin Laden, topping the charts with several incoherent diatribes made in Pakistan, of all places. He’s been having quite a few good years since he burst onto the international scene in September of 2001. Having less successful years were a series of bin Laden’s #2 and #3 men, guys who seem to draw Predator Drone missiles like flies to rotten fish. Nervous Al Qaeda aides are jockeying for non-consideration for the vacant posts, feverishly nominating the other candidates as being far more worthy.

And speaking of candidates, John McCain had a pretty disappointing 2008, but his running mate Sarah Palin took the opportunity to set herself up to be irritating on not only a national, but a global scale for many years to come. Which is not exactly good news for her soon to be shotgun-wed son-in-law Levi Johnson, an amiable enough piece of trailer trash who didn’t seek all this publicity. Now his Mom’s been arrested for possession of the prescription drug Oxycontin, Rush Limbaugh’s favorite intoxicant, er, that is… pain killer. Young Mr. Johnson figures it’s only a matter of time before the crystal meth lab in his family’s garage is uncovered.

As for anybody else making news in 2008, well, they know who they are and so do we. Most are better left unmentioned since they are either thieves, killers or crooked politicians. Items of good news have been few and far between, pretty much beginning and ending with the Giants winning the Super Bowl and Obama’s election. And so just like every other disappointing year we turn to New Year’s and a new beginning, a fresh and clean new year for us to swear we’re going to cherish before we crap all over it. Can’t wait for next year’s’ happy recap about all the great things we’re going to accomplish. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all.

Nobody loves you like your mother. Well, maybe Granny, but that’s about it. Good thing, too. How many sweaters can you put on?

If you read a lot of conservative and Republican opinion pieces, after a while you barely notice the pervasive anti-New York bias in a lot of their messages. It is so pervasive and matter-of-fact you sort of read through it to get at what they are really trying to say. It seems to be an underlying assumption, like the sky is blue and New Yorkers are rotten subversives bent on destroying America. Being a lifer in New York, born and raised here, you sort of get used to all manner of blatant and subtle put-downs of your home town. And being a New Yorker, you really don’t give a rat’s ass who approves or disapproves of you, but once in a while you wonder how this attitude came to be so prevalent. And you realize just how lucky and blessed you are to live in New York City, a place like no other.

You know, of course, that’s it’s not Utopia and has its fair share of problems, but you look at it like Winston Churchill looked at governments when he said: “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” Well, that’s New York, and people have been knocking it forever but have yet to come up with a better idea. So some invent a New York loaded with subversives and liberals. I’m a liberal and yet I don’t find all that many people who share my views. My own children often disagree with my politics. Most people are fairly conservative around here. 

As far as subversives go, I’ve met very few, and I’ve met thousands and thousands of people. I could count them on the fingers of one hand and get change, and they’ve been harmless fools whose only transgression was being boring. Last I checked, the biggest subversive in America in the past 20 years or so, Timothy McVeigh, wasn’t from New York City. He came from a small town in western New York State, Great Lakes country. He graduated high school and then joined the army and saw combat in the first Iraqi war, earned a Bronze Star and received an honorable discharge. He was neither boring nor interesting, he just sort of existed in an invisible sort of way, and seemed like a typical son of Middle America; quiet, hardworking and earnest. Until he killed 168 pople with a truck bomb in Oklahoma City, that is. He didn’t seem so typical then. So, you never know who’s who. Why paint anybody with any brush when you don’t know them?

But people like to equate New York with perceived enemy locales like Moscow at one time or these days Tehran. Now, I don’t know much about Tehran except that it is the capital of Iran and home to some decidedly poor excuses for human beings in the halls of power there, but I can’t really summon up any animosity towards the city itself or Iranians in general any more than I ever considered Moscow to be an evil city filled with evil human beings. Maybe if I got to know them and they annoyed the crap out me, but only then. Demonizing strangers and creating enemies where there are none is something most New Yorkers leave to others. And if we get to be designated as Sodom and Gomorah in the eyes of some people who have never set foot in the place or met any of us, well, who cares? We still have to get up every morning and go about our business, and there’s enough to worry about in this world other than people’s silly impressions of you and your city.

New York is often lumped in with Los Angeles as being somehow different from, and hostile to America. I know about as much about Los Angeles as I do about Tehran, but my general impressions are that it’s a very American City, Spanish name and all. Hollywood is there, lots of Mexicans, plenty of blonde haired people, palm trees and great weather all the time. Sounds okay except for their appalling lack of snow. What Los Angeles and New York do have in common, though, is that the American Dream Machine was invented in those two cities, the ideas by which all of America defines itself. In New York it is located on Madison Avenue in the advertising industry, in L.A. it is in Hollywood and their movies. 

So how these two cities came to represent to many Americans all that is wrong with our nation is a mystery. Almost half of all Americans can trace an ancestor to where I live, in Brooklyn, and every single American has enjoyed the movies great and otherwise that are produced in Hollywood. Both New York City and Los Angeles attract more tourists than any other American cities. So you wonder. Was it something we said? Do some people still need a bogeyman that bad that they make up stuff about places and the people in them? Seems pretty odd. Nobody seems to complain about Wichita or Denver. Well, that being said, let’s put the finger on who the real bad people in America are. That would be  the city and the people of Sheboygan, Wisconsin. Now there’s an enclave of godless liberal subversive traitors if ever there was one. Why Sheboygan? Well, why New York and L.A.? So why not Sheboygan? To hell with those pinko rats bent on unraveling the fabric of American life!