Serpent Mound.  Near Brush Creek, Adams County, Ohio, circa 1960s.

When my brother scanned my dad's 35 mm slides he kept the mounting frame which gives every image a black border and all the connotations thereof, so I've been cropping it off.  Then last night I met a guy who grew up in Findlay, Ohio, and he was talking about how he used to blame Ohio for the way his life turned out, and we agreed that although it wasn't fair to Ohio to do that, it was certainly understandable, given how bad growing up is when you're a sensitive youth with an artistic flair and a taste for the dramatic and you love to read and there you are, surrounded by barbarians.  No wonder you're tempted, looking back, to mourn those painful years, when among worse indignities, gym class felt like being trapped in a pen full of scalded hogs.  

Not only that, but let us remember Warren G. Harding was Ohio's Lieutenant Governor in 1904, which alone should tell you something about where things were headed, except who could have imagined at the age of twelve, writing social studies reports on President Harding's scandal-ridden years, that all that would pale in comparison to the crimes perpetrated by the recently ousted regime?  Tempest in a Teapot Dome, relatively speaking, if you know what I mean. 

But let us take a broader, more far-reaching perspective.  An aerial view of time and history, if you will. 

The Serpent Mound is the largest effigy mound in the world, built by a great civilization which occupied what is now Ohio and the Midwest -- a mighty people who long ago disappeared, leaving behind this mute earthen monument.  You see?  There's a precedent for a great society rising to power and being destroyed in the very place, on the very ground, where our nation currently and (given recent economic news) precariously sits. 

Why did the Mound Builder Empire collapse?  Well, doubtless for the same reasons great empires are always inevitably wiped out: by war, greed, unbridled ambition, and the ruthless suppression of the laboring class by a corrupt, evil, corporate ruling elite.

You'd think we would have learned by now, wouldn't you. 

My optimistic friend Jack says the pendulum always swings back, however, and that good always returns.  Look, he says, at how Obama is fighting the forces of darkness.  Look at how Obama will keep us from perishing. 

I do hope you are right, Jack.  I do hope so.