For an excellent discussion of Idiot America, those who are bringing us "ID" as an alternative to evolution, the Iraq quagmire, and the deadly, flacid response to Katrina, read this from Esquire.

Dinosaurs wearing saddles. That pretty much sums it up.

(hat tip to Mike)

There has been one nightmare this year, one that I've had more than once. The last time was Halloween night. It is the dream of S coming home only to leave me for another woman, a woman he met in Afghanistan or somewhere between here and there. A woman named Stephanie.

The puzzling thing about this dream is that S is not a cheater and he is never around women. Truly. Afghan women are shrouded from view, hidden in their bedrooms, herded through streets by their uncles and fathers and husbands. They are ghosts. And S is in a Ranger unit. Women are not allowed to go to Ranger school. He works with men exclusively. Lives with men, eats with men, runs missions with men. My subconscious worry is irrational, but then it is a subconscious worry. Still I wake up from this dream disturbed and angry, angry that S has put me through this at all.

One of the things that first attracted us to each other was our shared sense of true loyalty. It still transcends everything. We rarely argue. I've only slept on the couch a couple of nights the past six years and that was in our first year of marriage when he decided to become a Chicago police officer and he was actually going to do it. He'd passed all the exams, gone through the background check, been interviewed by a couple of detectives, neither who were half as smart as S. He was unhappy with his job as a chemical engineer. He was desperate for a change. We worked out with cops and federal agents and firefighters, and they filled both of us with stories about "the job" and how it offered security, financial stability, and "excitement." Because of his military training, he didn't see any other options for himself except law enforcement, so he first applied to the DEA and the FBI. He passed all of the written exams and physical tests for both agencies easily and quickly. He wanted the DEA position because it involved travel (even if that travel was to war-torn Colombia) and because he thought their agents were smarter, more down-to-earth than the FBI agents he'd met. And then he told the truth about his past drug use and he was nixed. Later, one of the agents we'd met told him that no one ever tells the truth, but it was too late. S didn't bother with the FBI because they seemed like an agency dead-set on having only the most mediocre agents they could find. Our karate instructor, a gang crimes specialist with the CPD, convinced S that he should become a Chicago cop instead, and so he applied.

I wasn't bothered by the idea of S becoming a federal agent. In fact it sort of excited me. I had this vision of joining him later and the two of us hunting down serial rapists or Medellin drug runners. I was a fighter then. I trained all the time. I was confident in my body and like other amateur athletes, I had fantasies of testing myself beyond hard training sessions and little bare-knuckle karate tournaments. I even went so far as to send in the preliminary FBI application, though as soon as I got a letter back from them I realized how ridiculous it all was, especially since I was in my final year of my MFA program (yes, MFA and FBI...insanity), so I threw it out and stopped thinking about it. But S was desperate for change. When he decided to apply for CPD, I thought it was a fine idea, though deep inside it worried me. I wanted to be supportive, so I was. At first.

I'd known more cops than S. I was part of the "inner circle" of my gym. As the first female student of my gang crimes specialist instructor to get a black belt, I was afforded certain privileges. The day after my black belt exam, a five-hour ordeal that included a weight-lifting warm-up, 500 squats, a couple hundred push-ups (and not "girl" push-ups, thank you), a zillion sit-ups and standing basics, breaking boards, 22 kata (including three weapons), and 30 rounds of sparring against men (10 rounds each of bare-knuckle, full-contact karate, muay thai, and grappling), my teacher brought me into his office, a cramped space wallpapered with polaroids of dead and busted gangsters and cops holding confiscated guns and rifles, a giant bucket full of shanks and improvised weapons right next to the door, and he told me I was now part of the "inner circle" and that anywhere I went in the world I had people I could call on. It was so "godfather" it made me chuckle, though I knew he was being serious. "Roll with the dogs long enough you're bound to get fleas," he used to tell me, and I knew it was true just by seeing this gang crimes specialist act so much like a gangster. Our Christmas dinners were held at a local red sauce Italian place whose owner was famous for his garage filled with Ferraris, and my teacher would sit at the end of a long table there and hand out gifts and blessings to all of us who were lucky enough to be there, all the time sucking on a genuine Havana cigar. He was a capital-letter Gangster.

After becoming part of this "inner circle" suddenly I was included in conversations, conversations that over the years included more and more stories of "the street." Cops love to tell stories. They exaggerate. They probably lie. The stories expand with each telling, become mythic and too large, though usually they are based on truth. Many of the stories I heard scared the crap out of me. There were stories of housing project "sweeps," invasions to ostensibly look for drugs and felons. There were stories of finding decapitated bodies and bodies so decomposed they had literally become one with the chairs and carpets. There was a story of finding a dead man on the thirteenth floor of a highrise at Stateway Gardens housing project, and since the man was large and the elevators were broken, they threw him out the window. The funny part, I was told, was that there was a tree and the body got stuck in the tree so these cops, cops I knew and trained with, had to call the fire department to come and get the body unstuck so they could put it in the paddy wagon for the long drive to the morgue.

I understand the need for gallows humor. I know it can cut through the horror, make it speakable, and often horrors need to be spoken of if only to get them out of our heads. But to me, the horror of this story was not the cops finding a dead man. These cops had found plenty. It was how disrespectful they had been of this dead man. They threw a man out a window as if he were a bag of garbage or moldy drywall. It made me nauseous with regret and left me with this gripping tingle in my stomach that I'd let myself become a part of something wicked and wrong, and that even if I enjoyed the workouts, even if I got a sort of high from teaching young women how to trust their bodies and defend themselves in dangerous situations, that all the good had been thrown out that Stateway Gardens window.

When I was told that story, I was working part-time at the Neighborhood Writing Alliance, the organization I would later direct and the one I am volunteering for now, and I was assisting two workshops in the vacinity of Stateway Gardens, one of the housing projects that lined State Street from 35th to 75th until the "transformation" of the past decade tore them all down. One of our workshops was held at a small library directly across the street from the highrises, the same highrises where that man lived, and I could see the bedraggled and half-dead trees that surrounded the buildings whenever I went to the workshop, and I could see the children who ran among them, circled them and climbed them. I knew women and men who lived at Stateway. I heard their stories of police abuse, of those "sweeps" and of cops pissing in their hallways, trashing their bedrooms, extorting money from their neighbors. And so when I was told that story of the man thrown out the window, I knew I could have known that man. He could have been a writer who stopped by the group or perhaps an audience member at one of our readings. He very well could have been the grandfather of one of the writers I knew, or an uncle to their kids. He was without a doubt their neighbor.

I couldn't get the image out of my mind, the image of that man in that tree and the dozens and dozens of children who lived there too, some of whom had to have seen that man in that tree, and their parents too, who also must have seen that man. I thought about what horror it must have been to witness this end-of-the-century lynching of a dead man. And I thought about how it was told with a "funny part."

There were stories about corruption floating around the city, as bands of crooked cops were caught on all sides of the city. One gang ran drugs from Nashville to the south side on their shifts. Another handcuffed west side residents while they robbed them, being so brazen as to do it all in uniform. Another gang stalked the immigrant bars in my neighborhood, shook down illegals for cash and then pooled the money for weekend gambling trips to Vegas. They managed that racket for a decade before the FBI finally caught them, and if I remember right, they only got caught because one of them told the story to the wrong person.

I was supportive of S changing careers. I knew he was miserable. I was even supportive of him becoming a cop, at least until he was about to get hired. Then suddenly I was scared to death that he would become a part of that world, turned into a capital-letter Gangster. It didn't seem escapable to me. Since he knew our teacher and he knew these other cops, how could he not end up working with them, and if he did, how could he not end up horribly tarnished and ruined by the experience? I talked to him about the hours and how crappy they were. I talked to him about the man in the tree and the corruption and how impossible it was to escape it, and how dangerous it was to try. He told me that he believed the only way to change something for the better was from the inside and that if more "good" people like him became cops the less corruption and wickedness there'd be. I told him that "good" people didn't stay good in that job. They got corrupted or they got out, or they got bored because the only jobs that didn't expose them to all that crap were the boring jobs. This was a couple of years before "Training Day," but I didn't need to point to a movie as an example. The examples were all around us. S just needed to see them.

When the projects started coming down, one cop I knew said they "weren't fun anymore," because now there were no more gun fights in the courtyards, no more sweeps and battles. I think my cynicism grew tenfold when he told me that. It was growing steadily while S was in the process of becoming a cop, and it grew so deep that I couldn't stand to sleep in the same bed as him anymore so I slept on the couch. Yes, I'd been supportive at first. Yes, it was a crazy turnabout to be against it, but it came out of this overwhelming fear of losing him and losing our nascient marriage. I didn't see us making it if he ended up throwing dead men out of windows, or even driving the bodies of those men to the morgue. He told me again and again how he'd "never do that" and I believed him, but I also knew that there would be times when he'd have no choice, when the job would demand that he abandon himself, and in doing, abandon me.

S decided not to become a cop. Perhaps because I slept on the couch, or perhaps because the thought of working with people like the cops we knew was just too much for him, or perhaps because he knew it would not be intellectually or spiritually fulfilling the way archaeology has become. For whatever reason, he chose to abandon the thought of that job instead of abandoning me and our marriage.

And so there it is. The crux of the nightmare. I'm not afraid of S abandoning me for "Stephanie." I'm afraid he will abandon me for the military. I feel this most accutely when I get an email from him like the one in Houston with the big gun, one that seems to be from a man I don't really know, a man who could be standing up in that window. I felt betrayed when he signed that contract a year and a half ago. I felt like he'd chosen his army buddies over me, because I knew he would get called up even if he was sure he wouldn't. I know he wishes upon wish now that he could go back in time and erase his signature from that contract. And I no longer feel betrayed, at least not during my waking life. Soon after he was called up, I decided that if I were to be angry at him over this, resent him, then we might as well not be married anymore. I decided our marriage was worth saving. I've only been in love twice in my life, and the first time was nothing like this. I know real love is rare and it's worth these months filled with worry and "Stephanie" nightmares. I know he won't abandon me for "Stephanie." It is just in those minutes before I wake up to the pitter-pat of my neighbor's footfalls, those minutes when I hover between my two selves, only halfway in this world, that I worry.