McKinley's dream

A novel I must check out because I, too, have used McKinley's dream in my work, in a play I co-wrote 30 years ago with historian Mark Falcoff, A Brown Man's Burden. Unfortunately never produced. The dream below is astounding -- I think it marks where U.S. foreign policy went wrong, never to recover. McKinley put "God on our side" once and for all, and disaster has followed.

clipped from query.nytimes.com Books of The Times; Life (and It's Cheap) in a Colonized Culture By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT Published: March 22, 1990 Dogeaters By Jessica Hagedorn 251 pages. Pantheon. $19.95. Part way into Jessica Hagedorn's poetic, satirical first novel, ''Dogeaters,'' President William McKinley falls to brooding over what to do about the Philippine Islands. In an actual 1898 address to a Methodist delegation - included as part of the novel's intermittently documentary technique - McKinley tells the group how he decided one restless night that ''there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, by God's grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow men for whom Christ also died.'' He concludes: ''And then I went to bed, and went to sleep and slept soundly.''