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I don’t blame Ayn Rand. I blame Batman. Adam has become an enthusiastic fan of the comics. And so I have been learning about the comics. American comics generally participate in an ideology which radiates out from a central preoccupation with crime. And not any crime. The two great crimes are jewel robberies and bank robberies. There’s a reason for that: these crimes make the rich the victim. This is the great animating vision of the primal American super-world. Once you catch on, you can detect it in other children’s books as well. It nourishes the topsy turvy vision of reality that infects American politics, and that identifies celebrity with heroism. Unfortunately, the political struggle for the hearts of children has not been fought very hard by the American Left. Mister Moneybags, that funny character who pops up in translations of certain texts of Marx, never made it to Gotham City. But as I have recently learned, looking around the Internet, some radical factions in the

I turned off the light. In the sudden flush Of the dark you took my blinded hand. Leading me into the next room, hush, you minted light in the time a coin lands on heads, then out went the annunciation. To bed, to bed, you said I said In this way haloed the occasion And bed it was, and bed…

A week ago I was going out of the public library in kind of a hurry. It was nearly time for me to pick up Adam. But, as I passed through the main lobby, I was too attracted by a display not to stop. Two people were behind a desk, making paper cranes. In front of them, an interested girl was being instructed in the oragamic art as well. I thought, Adam would like one of those cranes, so I asked the woman if I could have one. The answer was no, but I could make one. And due to one of those failures of the will to which I am subject, instead of saying no, I’m in a hurry, or saying no, I am the most lousy folder ever to set foot on planet earth, a menace to gift wrap and boxes,  I said alright. What followed was a painful five minutes for both me and my teacher, who must have thought, as I clumsily folded the wrong way here and sloppily failed to make one fold equal to its other there, that I’d been sent to test her. She passed the test. Now and then she’d grab my misshappen piece of pape