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Yesterday, Sam got home from nature school.  I can’t complain too much about the educational value of it.  They took a couple of field trips, saw a couple of museums, and made them read a little bit before bed.

The great thing is, they made them go to bed every night at a set time. (He started to say 8 something and then quickly amended it to 9 p.m., suddenly realizing how this was going to affect his life)  This will strengthen our case at bedtime and make our lives infinitely easier.

The problem is that we can’t get Isabel (3) to go to bed at a set time, especially if she has slept during the day, which she usually does.  If we are forceful and put her into bed and extremely patient, reading or talking to her until she goes to sleep, 5 minutes after we leave the room, she is up like a jack in the box and coming into the living room.  If we are lucky, she is smiling, asking for a glass of water and wanting to sit and watch TV with us.  If we are unlucky, she is crying and being completely irrational.

Do you need to go to the bathroom?

No!

Would you like a drink of water?

NO!

Do you want to go to sleep on the couch?

NOOO!

Do you want to stay up all night and drink beer?

NOOOOOO!

Sometimes it sounds as if we are raising a little Republican.

Anyway, it’s great to have Sam back home even though it means my quiet interlude, during which I was supposed to get a lot of writing done but didn’t, is over.  I’m glad.  I was getting bored.

May 12^th, 2011

Insanity, of course can be defined in many different ways:  continuing to do the same thing expecting a different result, an inability to distinguish between right and wrong or posing a threat to themselves or others.  There are also, of course, clinical definitions:  Schizophrenia, extreme depression, narcissism (yes, I’m probably guilty of that one- we’re all a little bit nuts).

By the 1^st definition, I think it’s obvious that conservatives (which is defined by MerriamWebster as a proponent of conservatism, which is tending to maintain things in their current state.  It has been defined politically, since FDR, certainly since Reagan, by the Republican Party) are insane.

The economic debacle we are currently in shows that the economic policies we have had since 2001 are not working.  Deregulation is not leading to a stable marketplace.  Lowering taxes on the rich does not increase overall tax revenue.  Yet conservatives, certainly the ones in government, want to continue down that road and they obstruct any efforts to find a new, better way.  That is insane.

An ability to distinguish between right and wrong is pretty obviously a part of the conservative mindset as well.  I’m certain that most conservative Americans were raised, like me, on a steady diet of cheesy WWII movies.  The evil German saying “Ve haf vays to make you talk,” and the evil Japanese locking people in hot metal boxes in the blazing sun,have been drilled into their psyche.  Yet they seem to think torturing prisoners is just A.O.K.

Pre-emptive wars on false pretexts, massive killing of civilians and imprisonment without trial have all been championed by conservatives.

That is not just a difference of political opinion, that is an inability to distinguish between right and wrong.

The danger to themselves and others is clear as well.  If we drown in oil because we were too shortsighted to develop solar, wind and other alternative forms of energy, it will be because of conservatives who refused to accept manmade global warming as a fact.  If we get into WWIII because of our global belligerence, it will be conservatives who are to blame.  If the economy continues to fail, it will be because we are continuing the same policies that caused the problems in the first place.

As far as the clinical definitions, of course, tests could and should be done to determine whether liberals or conservatives are more prone to schizophrenia, depression, neurotic behavior, etc…Why not?  We should know.

I’m not actually a psychologist, but from what I can see on the surface, conservatives are nuts.

When I write poetry, that is in the moments when I am trying to write, not those rare and wonderful moments when the poem just comes to me, I often leave little notes to myself, like, eh, that line is crap, and it’s rather counter-productive, because then I wonder why I wrote the line at all, and it makes me more hesitant to write the next line, which of course slows down the next line after that, so as an artist, as a writer, as someone who wants to have an image of his psyche registered in the archives of the noosphere, I am an elderly female driver going 40 miles an hour in the fast lane, and I am the man behind her, leaning in total futility on his horn.

When I leave little notes to myself like that I feel like the guy in “Memento,” which is a movie I would recommend to anybody but I’ll say no more not to ruin it.  Another movie I like for very similar reasons is 60 minute photo, I think it’s called, maybe it was 30 minute photo, I don’t know, with Robin Williams, but it was not a comedy.

Anyway, I’m working now on a series of poems that start with the line “as individuals we really aren’t that great” and I see 3 different directions to go.  And the notes aren’t helping.

I just went for an amazing walk.  It began because someone told my wife there was a way to walk from our house up into Vitkov Park, without walking through the tunnel and going up the other side.

So, this morning after she left for work, I went exploring.  We’ve lived here 8 years, so I was a bit skeptical, but there it was.  You have to walk down a narrow lane with mesh fences topped with barbed wire on either side, squeeze around a concrete barrier which is obviously there to discourage you but since there was no sign sayng “entry forbidden” I went on, up some stairs and through a tunnel under the tracks and the weird part there was that, although the staircase and tunnels are obviously brand new, the walls are covered with graffiti, the worst kind, incomprehensible scribblings in bubble letters and really thick, bright paint.  Then, at the top of the stairs there is a wider, taller concrete barrier that you can’t go around but by this time I wasn’t just going to go back down so I climbed over it, walked across the construction workers access road and I was in the park.  A tangled, wild, seldom visited side of the park.  It was very pretty and I had a panoramic view of my neighborhood, which was pretty awesome.

It is a lovely spring day, not too hot, not too cool, it must have rained overnight because things are wet, and bright and shiny.

Then I proceeded into the park proper, and I haven’t actually been there for a couple of years, even though it’s right next door.  There’s quite an amazing g trampoline for kids, in the middle of a rope web.  It looked a bit dangerous to me, but I guess the theory  is that if a child is big enough to climb across the ropes and get to it, they are old enough to jump on it.

There was almost nobody in the park.  I saw a woodpecker pecking at a tree and stopped to watch him.  It was like not being in the city at all.

Then I walked to the nearest bus stop and ran into Emma, from Australia, who I hadn’t seen for a couple of years until about two weeks ago we ran into each other on the Metro, and this is our 3^rd very random meeting since then.  We took the bus one stop and then walked back through the tunnel to Karlin.

She had to teach a class there and I took a quick walk through blog park and then home.

I wish I  knew more of the names of the plants and trees and birds.  I can tell you the lilacs are in bloom and it’s lovely.  The chestnut trees have their white flowers on which look like miniature Christmas trees.  And I watched a group of quite large birds, as big as pigeons anyway, with bright white chests, white and black wings, and the rest black.  They were very beautiful, but I wish I knew their name.

First, let me state that I do believe in the principal of innocent until proven guilty – in a trial.  In an investigation, everybody’s a suspect.  Isn’t that the premise of every detective show on TV ever?

In any investigation, a few things must be considered.  Who had motive?  Who had the means to do it?  Who had the inclination, i.e. who had a record of this sort of thing?  Who is trying to block the cover-up?

There is no shortage of suspects with motive.  The buildings’ owner, Larry Silverstein, because they weren’t profitable.  The PNAC (Cheney, Libby, Wolfowitz, Perle), who wrote that they would need a “Pearl Harbor style event” to implement their neocon agenda.  The CIA, which has a lot of the same players as the PNAC.  The Israelis.  Rupert Murdoch.  George Bush.  And, of course, Islamic extremists.

Next, means.  I really just don’t think that Al-Qaeda could have pulled something like this off.  There has been nothing like it since.  As horrific as the bombings in Madrid and London were, they were basically just people walking onto public transportation with bombs.  Nowhere near the same level of sophistication.  The CIA, on the other hand, has toppled governments in Chile and Iran.  9/11 would have been well within their capabilities.  That takes care of the inclination argument, as well.

Now, who has been trying to block the investigation?  That’s pretty much everybody on our list of people with motive, except for the Israelis and the Islamic extremists, and I’m not entirely sure about the Israelis.

Here’s how I suspect it went down.  The PNAC wanted a Pearl Harbor style event, and Larry Silverstein wanted out of a money losing situation.  The head of security for the WTC (Marvin Bush, the President’s younger, and presumably smarter, brother) found excuses to shut the buildings down several times in the months prior to 9/11, while a crew of about 25-30 very athletic, militarily trained, highly motivated, CIA right wing nutcase black ops guys ran up and down the stairs, planting some state-of-the-art explosives at key points throughout the buildings.

Whether or not the highjackers were successful with their boxcutter coup or not, there were probably remote devices in the cockpit to steer the planes into the buildings from the ground.  I suspect there had to be someone on the inside of the airlines as well, but how hard would it be to have a CIA mole get hired by one of the airlines as an airplane mechanic.  They’d probably been in place for years.

I don’t have any inside information.  I’m just guessing.  But unless and until the incident is properly investigated, that’s all anybody can do.