I've been thinking lately that Alexander Hamilton was not a bad guy. This is probably a sign that I am getting old. As a short sketch, Alexander Hamilton was probably the most conservative of the founding fathers, although today he might actually be called a liberal, because he believed in a strong central government. His greatest ideological rival was Thomas Jefferson, who wanted a nation of self-sufficient independent farmers. Hamilton wanted rule by the elite, and thought urban populations, involved in commerce and industry were the backbone of our country. Even though it wasn't our country yet.
In my dream, Alexander Hamilton was still alive, and some hundreds of years old. He had successfully written the constitution he wanted, where a strong central government had kept factional and regional rivalries down for hundreds of years. If you are thinking this is a coherent and prosaic dream, I should point out that he was also reincarnated as Elvis Presley. Only in this alternative universe where the United States followed the Hamiltonian path, Elvis Presley never got to be Elvis Presley. The United States never participated in World War II, and there was never a post-war Baby Boom or a mass culture that produced Rock N' Roll. And perhaps in Alexander Hamilton's America, run by autocratic elites, there was never the type of regional boiling and fermentation that would have produced rock music. All of which I tried to explain to Hamilton/Presley, although I don't know how much of my explanation got through.
The differing views of the founding fathers on the role of the federal government has been endlessly debated (Although many people also seem to believe that they were much like the Super Friends, had no differences, and were all devout libertarians, which was how America was ran up until Tip O'Neill invented federal bloat in 1978, but I digress), but my dream adds something new to the debate: not that I was directly debating it with a founding father, which has probably been done in many hastily scraped together eighth grade civics papers, but that I was doing so with a founding father who had been reincarnated as Elvis.