Prairie Peace Park

Lobsters are big fans of 'Rare Visions and Roadside Revellations,' if you didn't know it.

This all started when I stopped to take a picture of this house, right off I-80, because it's just plain cool looking. While I was snapping this picture, the guy that runs the place (lives there?), came out and gave me a flyer, and I had to bring the girls back.



Some things that would improve the Peace Park experience: go when the weather is reasonable. It was in the mid 90's when we went, and that's too much for 27 acres of hilly trekking. Also, it's both smack up against I-80, and slopes towards the highway, so the roar of trucks and cars going by at 75mph is constant and deafening. Brace yourself.

You're supposed to go to the house for orientation first, and pay the $2 adult, $1 kid admission. But the old guy who had handed the flyer to me earlier in the day was nowhere to be seen, and what I took to be his car was still there. So was a minivan with a Harley Davidson decal in its rear window and a bumpers sticker that read 'End Worthlessness,' so we headed down into the park.

We were greeted by Don Iilly, and by an enormous and gentle black dog, which I took to be the mascot of the Peace Park. He walked up to the guest house with us, past flower planters made from the gas tanks off fighter jets.

"Do you know why the flowers are blooming so pretty," he asked Em.

"Because it's summer," she answered, which he had to admit was a good answer if not the symbolic one he was going for. He showed how he selectively plucks petals so the plant's energy can go towards the bud behind it. I don't think this works on all flowers, but a big part of what the Peace Park ephasizes is overpopulation. There is a bit of a gap in logic here, because a big war could really cut that population down to size. And I didn't ask if those flower petals were to symbolize the aborted babies that leave society's energy for the unconceived to come.

He has a turtle painted on the ground, with major population centers of the world on its legs represented by bricks with desk-bells mounted on them. He asked the girls to figure out where they fit, and I don't know if Mo could actually cut through the chaos of I-80 and autism all at once or if it was a luck guess but she immediately rang the New York bell, which was the closest choice (unless we're closer to Mexico City).

When Don turned me and my offspring loose, we walked down through the barrels made into an exibit of accelerating population doubling. A half barrel at 1 A.D., a full by 1650, a couple by 1830 (if memory serves) and so on. at the end of the trail, you can choose to keep world population stable at 9 billion or so, or go over to the projected umpteen billion represented by a huge cluster of red barrels. This Malthusian folk art is full of logical flaws. Industrialization leads to a reduction in birth rates that more than compensates for our longer lifespans. And yes, the U.S. does use a disproportionate amount of the natural resources, but that's just until India and China pass us in those areas. A strong argument could be made that the U.S. presently uses those resources very cleanly and efficiently by comparison. The farm crisis, which gets its own set of (very cool) folk sculptures is basically a crisis of finding people to eat all the food a smaller and smaller number of farmers can grow.



I'm not sure what the music staff has to do with the farm crisis except the artist that did these sculptures was using discarded farm implements. I guess more peaceful than turning ploughshares to swords. Plus, you can ride this one:



One of the more interesting displays was a set of model submarines and 32,000 little cones symbolizing the stockpile of nukes the U.S. accumulated during the Cold War. I personally believe that Levis and Coke did more to bring down the Berlin Wall than those 32,000 warheads, but I'm not as on the same page with guys like Don Lilly as that probably sounds. The Soviet Union was an expansionist power, very aggressive. Stalin was, if anything, deadlier than Hitler (and nearly as anti-Semitic). If it was justifiable to wage war on Germany to unseat Hitler, then there's no excuse for not continuing to Moscow. And in light of the Cultural Revolution and it's fallout, Bejing.



But the Cold War, I think when Ike warned of the Military Industrial Complex, he understood that as bad as the U.S.S.R. was (very), the combination of powerful industries that had tooled up for the second World War and a Congress with a vested interest in bringing home pork to every district was a recipe for excess.

The U.S.S.R. as a nuclear threat, I think, was inflated if not engineered to gain political support for obscene amounts of military spending. Korea and Vietnam were human sacrifices to this end, making the case that a Communist threat in Southeast Asia was the same as a Communist threat in Southern California.

For that matter, the present 'War on Terror' is remarkably similar. As bad as 9/11 was, the invasion of Iraq does not make sense. Saddam was a bad man, the U.N. corrupt, but subduing insurgents in Iraq seems unlikely when you consider the Union has not fully pacified the Confederacy. What it does do is use up munitions and place demands on recruitment of soldiers. Prior to the invasion, America already spent more on defense than the rest of the world combined. Occupying a country or two for the indefinite future is the Korea/Vietnam of this excuse of excessive military spending. And yeah, nuclear warheads as a 'deterrent' were ridiculous, but so is having a huge military to combat domestic terorists. It's like trying to swat mosquitos with earth haulers.




And after the folk art, we went into the maze. There's several there, mostly consisting of mown patterns in the grass. But the one made of privacy fence, that was a mistake to take Mo into. About the second dead-end and she panicked. Em went right through, but an already cranky Mo was inconsolable by the time Em got back to us and the three of us rediscovered the open air. Mo was in no mood for the power animals display and headed straight for the swings to cool her jets while Em went down into the grass maze of the U.S.

I did get a shot of them in front of the cool clay wall, sculped in Arizona and transfered to Nebraska by means that I didn't catch.



We went up to the house where Don showed the girls a video of further peace-movement propaganda. He gave the girls origami cranes that related to a Hiroshima survivor featured in the video. The other girl featured was one I vaguely remember. She wrote a letter to then Soviet Premier Andropov asking him to shame the United States for winning the arms race. Well, the Soviets couldn't pass up an opportunity like that! She was cute and articulate and in my view badly used. I understand the idealism, but it's unfair to criticize the U.S. for an arms race the Soviets gleefully participated in.

The creepy part, for me, came after they talked about how she'd gotten to ask Jesse Jackson and Michael Dukakis what they'd do different from Reagan. The after thought was that 'sadly' she and her father were killed in a plane crash.

Sadly? I'd say suspiciously! Between being used as a better-than-a-defector propaganda piece for the Soviets, the DNC obviously thought she would be a useful pawn in unseating Reagan. I'm not saying the American government had her offed, but she was playing a game she didn't understand with two superpowers, and too many parties who could cause a plane crash might have thought it convenient.

I know, planes crash all the time. People die all the time too, but when there's a motive, it's suspicious.

Anyway, there's much more to say, but it's late, I'm tired, and you've been reading too long if you're still with me. Don Lilly was incredibly generous, after all I'd done was make the 'suggested' donation of $4 for the three of us I got off the flyer, he came up with goodies from buttons to bumper stickers to a children's book by Kofi Anan's wife that Don signed to the girls. He gave us bottled water to cool our jets and took some of Mo's more disruptive moves in stride thanks to his special ed background.

The dog, incidentally, belonged to the pony-tailed biker type, who had stopped out of curiosity just like us. Don gave the enormous dog five bowls of water and run of the house and grounds until the dog's owner decided to go. As I said yesterday, I think a lot of Don's ideas are misguided, but his intentions are good. If you could subsitute him for every Idi Amin and Nicholai Ceaucesceu, you really wouldn't have any wars.