Have we gone mad? The signs on the ferry warn that thou shalt not emulate Henri Cartier-Bressonwithout consequence.

Meanwhile, the uptight Yankee security state in Boston over-reacted to capitalism's attempt for the next best thing. And I wonder if America isn't playing with a full deck.

This week hasn't much lent itself to publishing. Between the major paper for law school due this past Thursday and the fall I suffered on my mountain bike last night on an icy sidewalk, which resulted from traveling at a high rate of speed and paying too much attention to the drug deal going on across the street and not the hedge on my immediate left, I have just been preoccupied.

Luckily, the professor granted us an extension on the paper and I rode away with nothing more than a bruised knee and a busted yogurt (messy cleanup).

As the world spins along, with a few things worth noting have occurred.

Me as pseudo-journalist! Ken Dixon's Capitol View Column in Sunday's CT Post. Aldon Hynes' rapid response at MLN. And here's my "Slacker's Guide to the Galaxy."

Then conservative columnistDon Pesci gets into it. His column ran in the Waterbury Republican this weekend - yet the best part of this week's RA is the denial of global warming as a consequence of human activity.

And I must mention CTNewsjunkie for its consistent coverage, this time of State Rep. Art Feltman's presser on my arrest.

The Dadaist presser the nutty Boston terrorist suspects gave about the ads-cum-bombs was the highlight of the week for me.

Looking at any one of these events by itself, one might not be able to see a course, a plot. But looked at in a continuum, it seems simple to connect the dots and see where we are headed.

The police are an entrenched para-military force in our country, and in this post-9/11 landscape, that safety provided by armed men in uniforms is seeking to dominate our lives. Anything that is not remotely within the bounds of what people with badges judge to be normal is suspect and worthy of arrest.

From the girl in special education classes who wet herself from fear, to the two Beanpot admen merely trying to make a living to me, America is trying to incarcerate itself out of this fear of the abnormal.

It is a self-destructive paradox in a land where nothing is normal, but we are told to believe it is so. Just watch the Super Bowl tonite and realize a lot of money is being spent to tell us what we should aspire to.

This mass brainwashing and conditioning of our reptilian brain to fear the other - to wait in abject terror for the second coming of Jesus or Osama Bin Laden - is going to destroy us and our instinct for freedom.

The Boston terrorist scare highlights a much larger conflict: The unstoppable force of capitalism (Turner Broadcasting and its movie release) has now collided at full speed with the immovable object of Homeland Security.

When these competing urges of profit and protection meet, I don't like being on the battlefield, because the development of this conflict bodes bleakly for the future, like the dystopian vision of Harrison Bergeron.