Another 9/11

Twenty-five years have now passed since what may become the defining point of a generation. Sixteen years, almost to the minute as this is being written, terrorists attacked the Pentagon, the World Trade Center, and were overcome by the passengers of an airplane over the hills of Pennsylvania. All that time, and we still cannot make any sense of it.

The trouble is that there is no sense to be made. To be sure, we can understand the reasons for even such terrible actions, in the same way that we can understand the reasons Hitler did what he did. Yet that is not the same as understanding.

How do we, how can we, come to actually understand rape or murder or thievery, mass murder or any any other evil which may be added to such a gruesome list, if we are to be decent human beings ourselves? It is only in a warped mind where such heinous acts may be justified. As such, reasonable people simply cannot understand them. It is beyond their ability; it is, to them, pure nonsense.

So the goal today should be to remember. Remember the victims and their families, remember the countless acts of heroism that day, remember even the perpetrators of such despicable carnage if for no other reason than to remind ourselves that such twisted souls do exist, seeking the ruin of those not in lockstep with them. But hopefully, remember even so that their redemption may be possible. If we are the good people we claim to be, even that shouldn't be so difficult of a task on so difficult of an anniversary.

About Lindsay

Jeffrey Dahmer. Ted Bundy. David Berkowitz. Charles Manson. And yes, yes I am. I'm about to add Lindsay Clancy to this list.

I'll be blunt: you have to have at least a touch of insanity to commit gruesome murder. Every person on that list demonstrated a degree of it, at times to reprehensible proportions. Ted Bundy violated the corpses of his victims until they were too decomposed to be of any use for his wicked desires. Berkowitz thought, if we can take him at his word, a dog from Satan was ordering him to kill. Charles Manson? He clearly broke the code of the Beatles' White Album to gain instruction. You get the point.

Lindsay Clancy systematically executed her three small children. She clearly put a lot of thought into it. Was she insane? I'm not sure if or how much that matters. 

The men on this list were put to death, or, at least, institutionalized for life. Jurors created no excuses for them. Yet "He had the hardest time getting off the fact that Lindsay viciously killed her children," said one Clancy juror, knocking the holdout juror who would not grant a not guilty verdict. That statement itself is insane. She couldn't hear the profound stupidity in what she was saying?

Another juror said the holdout couldn't point to one piece of evidence for a guilty verdict. Does Lindsay murdered her children not count? Again, an insane comment.

This type of dismissal of murder one worries me more about the future of humanity than the Iran War, Donald Trump or AOC, homelessness and many other societal ills. A segment of society is trying to defend murder based on mental health. Never mind that thousands of women who suffered post-partum depression did not kill their babies. Lindsay should not get excused for that. What kind of jury pool do we have when folks think that way? Are any of us safe when and if such an attitude towards very basic questions of justice permeates society?

Did you notice she wasn't quite so successful at killing herself? Yet she was a nurse. She surely knew how to accomplish that. If she actually meant to. Yes, I think her attempt at suicide a rather obvious subterfuge.

Bundy got the chair. Manson died in prison. Clancy should be in jail or confined to a mental institution. For life. An overwrought sympathy for her dilemma if, and that's a big if, she really was momentarily crazy, is a denial of justice to her children, and thoroughly despicable.

Cleveland

This past weekend was a great one, for me anyway. My sons and I spent it in Cleveland, Ohio, where there was more to do that I had expected.

For starters, we picked the right baseball game to attend. The tumbling Detroit Tigers lost three of four to Cleveland, but won Saturday night 6-0, the game we saw. I picked up another MLB hat, and the Cleveland home cap is a nice one. It will see the light of day from time to time as I try to rotate my baseball hats; no point having them if all they do is sit in boxes. 

Sunday we saw the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. One of my favorite bands, Paul McCartney and Wings, were the centerpiece display, so it was pretty cool to view that retrospective along with all the other exhibits. There was even a chance to vote on the 2027 inductees to the Hall. I voted for Weird Al Yankovic. He deserves it. I mean it.

The Hall is right on Lake Erie, and as it happened there was an air show. After the Hall, we were treated to the Blue Angels, the US Navy's tactical flying squad. Very impressive, close quarters formations. Those pilots must have nerves of steel.

We ended the main part of our visit watching Coyote vs. Acme at a restored theater (The Capitol) just off downtown. A great place to see a movie, and Coyote vs. Acme, about Wile E Coyote suing the ACME corporation for its defective products (anyone who has seen the old Warner Brothers cartoons know ACME) was worthy of the hype. I laughed out loud often. 

As always seems to be the case, it was over all too soon. C'est la vie. We'll just have to improve on it next year.

Shared Birthdays

As I picked up my rental car the other day, I dutifully offered a credit card and my driver's license to the young woman at the counter. "Hey! We have the same birthday!"

"You're 66?" I exclaimed.

She did not find the joke as funny as I did...

First Fruits

An Amazon reader mentioned this about my book A Subtle Armageddon: 

What I really enjoyed about the book was Mr. Cosgriff’s attention to detail. I could feel the things the man was experiencing for the first time. The way he described the man tasting an apple and drinking water for the first time was written really well. I thoroughly enjoyed man’s first encounter with wine! I’m a true crime/cozy mystery buff but I’m telling you, this book did not disappoint.

Thank you, dear reader! That's one of the points I want to get across. This last man on Earth begins with a total lack of experience of anything. Neither the world of the mind nor the physical world have any meaning to him as his journey begins. I want you to feel what he's feeling as he discovers the things around him, things we take for granted. yet what if we were to experience them for the first time? What would that apple taste like? What would sunrise and sunset mean to him as he saw the first of each? How could these experiences create a fully human being out of him?

Intrigued? Look here for the answers to these and other important questions.

Donut Anxiety

For a few years I taught college test prep classes. In an attempt to make students feel more comfortable and, hopefully, more open to learning, we allowed food and snacks in our classrooms. So I thought little initially when a young woman brought coffee and a donut into class one day. She set down her coffee, put the donut on a napkin, and, with the rest of the students, dutifully opened a textbook to the page I had indicated.

I began to expound about English grammar. She listened quietly and wrote a couple of notes as I went along. After a minute of two she took a pinch, literally a pinch, hardly enough to call a crumb, off of her donut and ate it. I thought quietly to myself, and very calmly, 'Take a bite of the donut'.

I continued with my lecture. Before long the young lady had another infinitesimal bit of her donut, then a tiny, bare, meager sip at her coffee. 'Eat the donut,' I said to myself, a little more encouragingly.

Rules of the comma were the rule of the day, so I pressed on. She took another vague nip of her pastry. 'Take a bite of the donut,' said Marty to himself, becoming perturbed at her manner of consumption.

After an explanation of comma rule three and a note about such, another pinch of donut. 'Take. A bite. Of your donut,' I thought emphatically. By then it looked as though a mouse had been nibbling at it rather than a human being eating it.

Comma rule five followed comma rule four. Pick, pick, pick at the donut. She wasn't eating the doughy ring so much as slow torturing it. That pastry was undergoing a horrible, painful death. My pulse raced; a drip of sweat formed on my forehead. My blood pressure rose volcanically. In my mind I was yelling, 'For the love of all that's good and holy in this world, take a bite out of that stupid donut!

The math instructor appeared in the doorway. We tagged teamed our classes and she had arrived to do a math review. I finished up, gave a homework assignment, and rose to go to the other room to talk about the comma there. As I made my exit I took a furtive glance over my shoulder. The young woman had just consumed another atom of her snack.

'Take an actual bite out of that donut,' the math teacher thought, with a touch of anxiety. I could see it in her eyes.

Lamenting the World

Everything, it seems, is a catastrophe these days. But is the modern world really that much different than the worlds left to history?

To be sure, there are superficial differences, and I don't mean superficial as unimportant. I mean it as not different in a substantial way. The atomic bomb is really only 'one more terrible way to die in a world filled with terrible ways to die' said the writer C. S. Lewis. I just finished a book about Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo and believe me, many of those soldiers died horrible, gruesome deaths. My point is that scale doesn't necessarily add to substance. Men have been horrible to other men pretty much forever.

It will continue. There is no antidote, no way to prevent abominations of any sort. That's not to say that we shouldn't try. But even if we could prevent evil in one area, it's going to happen in another. In no way might we anticipate where the next awful thing will appear. Quite bluntly and, I will add, obviously, we do not have the capability to see the future. We only have the evidence of human failure, which points to continuing failure.

I think the problem, and I do look at it as a problem, is the furious rush of bad things which inundate our world. We hear about everything that happens almost instantaneously. It makes the world appear worse. Most of the time it's bad news because that sells, another curse which always is with us. The spigot ought to be turned off, if for no other reason that it isn't good for our collective or individual mental health. 

There will always be, as me Grandpa Joe might say, the next catastastroke. I rather believe the best we can do is do right in our own lives, help others when we can, and not fret too much about the rest. You weren't born to save the world. You were born, if I might co-opt Jordan Peterson, to clean your room. Seeing to yourself might just be the best way to fix the world.