I’d finished watching a movie about the military in Argentina, the dirty wars of 1976 to 1983 where 
nearly thirty thousand people were arrested and shoved into cars. Disappeared. Mothers marched down streets with pictures of the missing planted on their chests. Madres. But wait a minute. Isn’t that what’s happening in the United States, our president lassoing clouds with rolls of masking tape for his magalogue cover-up of the sun? Sing a sad song of six pence. The King is in his counting house counting all his money. Dinna feel like a shadowy cold and dark horizon that’s surrounding our country, men and women in camouflage patrolling our cities with their faces to the ground? Carrying guns in the capitol, all along the watchtower, the wounds of the nation festering. Superstition and ambition shouting on one side, science and tolerance on the other. Yet everywhere I go, people continue to climb the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, view the Jefferson Library, leave photographs of soldiers at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The last time I counted the names of the dead was on the walls of a Prague synagogue. Cicadas and sirens sing to each other across the National Mall.