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Crushed blossoms at the end of the summer: teach me
how to coax nectar from the bloom of another.

Burned rice on the stove again: what's to love
but my imperfections — you'll forgive me another.

Butter by a kettle always melts, warns the proverb.
Heated, greased, we slip one into the other.

When, inexplicably, you enter my prayers,
I hear messages from one god or another.

Me encanta cantar, cuando estoy sola, en el carro.
My mother tongue dissolves. I speak in another.

Heart-thief, enter the fields like a woman in love,
vase in one hand, shears in the other

From Dhaka Dust, copyright 2011 by Dilruba Ahmed. Reprinted with the permission of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org.

President Obama has spoken at two memorial services in just over a week — one for victims of the Boston Marathon attack and one for those who died in the chemical plant explosions in West, Texas. In both speeches, he focused on victims and survivors.

But other Democrats are using these events to talk about another subject: the role of government.

The day after the Boston explosions, while thousands of investigators were searching for evidence, retired Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts told MSNBC that while much was still unknown, he wanted to "talk about what we do know."

"Let's be thankful that we have spent a lot of tax money to build up the capacity to do this," he said, arguing that the police, FBI agents and others in Boston make a strong case for what is often derided as "big government."

"It's very fashionable these days for people in my former line of work to brag about how they cut government, reduced government," he added. "Well, I'm glad that they weren't as successful as they wanted to be."

Some liberals made a related argument when an explosion and fire killed a dozen people in Texas. They said government regulations exist to prevent those kinds of disasters from happening.

"The point is, government actually does something, and this makes it very concrete," says Dean Baker, who directs the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a left-leaning think tank in Washington. "It's the job of government inspectors to look into, certainly, fertilizer [factories] — we know these are dangerous places — to look at them and make sure that companies are following good safety procedures, so that you don't get explosions like that."

People who want smaller government say liberals are reaching the wrong conclusions from these events.

"We always have to be careful about trying to childproof the country," says James Carafano, a security expert at the conservative Heritage Foundation. "It's always bad to make public policy off a single tragedy — particularly when you're talking with chemical facilities. If your answer is, 'I never want to have a chemical fire or incident,' then you might as well not have a chemical industry."

And conservatives argue that while government regulations might prevent some disasters, they also impose a real burden on innocent people and businesses every day. Onkar Ghate with the Ayn Rand Institute says regulations add to overhead.

"They impose an enormous cost on companies and all individual Americans of the amount of paperwork and regulations that you have to go through when you're not doing anything wrong," Ghate says.

These disagreements about the role and size of government are as old as the country. They were a central issue in last year's presidential campaign. Republican Mitt Romney often said that if elected, he would unshackle American business by getting government out of the way.

Obama often says "the government is us" — the schools, roads and research centers that help the country thrive.

"As a nation, we've always come together through our government to help create the conditions where both workers and businesses can succeed," he said in Osawatomie, Kan., late in 2011.

This ideological split came into focus again this week as Congress revisited the spending cuts known as the sequester. Lawmakers created these cuts as part of an effort to shrink the government.

This week, people got upset when air traffic controller furloughs led to long flight delays.

So Congress undid that part of those cuts Friday. An earlier exception had been made for meat inspectors, as well.

"We have been fed a narrative or an argument or a story that the government can't do anything right," says Neera Tanden with the progressive Center for American Progress. "And what's been interesting about the sequester is that people are beginning to pay attention to the fact that there are ways in which the government has a positive role, and we don't like that role to be taken away."

Polls consistently show that people want less government spending. Polls also show that people don't want the government to cut back on specific services.

The tug of war between the parties is all about reconciling these two deeply held, mutually exclusive desires.

All of this may undermine Kon-Tiki's value as an educational tool, but there's no denying its status as a rousing and thoroughly enjoyable Old Hollywood-style adventure. Little time is wasted on exposition; the filmmakers efficiently use a brief prologue on an icy Norwegian pond to establish Heyerdahl's status as an innate adventurer before rushing through his fundraising difficulties in order to get to the meat of the story: six men and a parrot facing death and despair on the high seas.

To their credit, the filmmakers do attempt to dig a little deeper than just that, trying to convey the righteous obsession and complicated motivations of the explorer. Heyerdahl eventually finds his funding after appealing to the vanity of the Peruvian president, and the film exhibits an ongoing interest in explorers driven by quests both noble (for knowledge) and vain (for immortality). Heyerdahl himself is spurred on by a near-religious faith in the guessed-at methods of the ancient mariners, which that first-mate character writes off as an insane obsession.

The more meaningful character explorations never quite coalesce, alas, mostly because the filmmakers are more interested in — and far more skilled at — the high-tension thrills they're manufacturing. It's difficult to blame them, given that their take on the trip is probably far more entertaining than a more realistic one. As one magazine publisher, reluctant to engage in what he sees as sensationalism, tells Heyerdahl, "Doubtless the story of Norwegians drowning in the Pacific will sell a lot of magazines." What's true for magazines is also true for movie tickets.

On how writing a novel differs from writing a screenplay

"This particular novel, this was one of the greatest creative experiences I've had in my life, because there were no restrictions in terms of budget. When you're writing a screenplay, you have to think 'this scene can only go on for three pages, because we're not going to be able to afford the fourth page, or we're not going to be able to do this' — I think it's a thematic sequel, in a weird way, to The Goonies. People have been asking me for years to write a sequel to The Goonies, and I could never find a way to write a sequel, so that's what House of Secrets has become. So for all those people who love The Goonies, this is closest you're probably going to get to it.

"For me, I love writing it because I can stop — I can get into a Monty Python-esque sequence where two pirates are arguing over whether one of the pirates' tattoo is a dolphin or a shark. I wouldn't do that in a screenplay."

On whether movie technology is making it harder to dazzle children

"I think it is getting more difficult. We're in an interesting place right now because the latest 3-D technology that we're seeing is going to be applied to The Great Gatsby. Now how amazing is that? I guess you have to keep pushing the boundaries. So you know, the images that are in this book — and the first image that really struck me — years ago, when I was running down by Crissy Field down in San Francisco, I got to that point that listeners will remember sort of looks like the Vertigo shot, by the Golden Gate Bridge with Kim Novak and Jimmy Stewart. And I stopped and I'm looking around and I'm looking at these houses nearby that are dangerously close to the cliff and the ocean, and I thought, what if one of these houses slid off the side of the cliff and fell into the ocean and was floating? For whatever reason — I thought, that's an image I've never seen. I've never seen a house floating on the bay. And then it occurred to me how cool it would be to have a pirate ship attacking that house and the inhabitants of the house had to sort of race through the house as cannonballs were flying through the walls. And that image always stuck with me. And it's kind of the image you see at the front of the book, at this point. It's kind of come full circle."

On the plans for the second book in the series

"Ned [Vizzini] and I are 130 pages into Book 2, and it's incredibly fun. The concept for me of these characters, who look like they just escaped from the last episode of Game of Thrones, about to kill these kids, when suddenly a World War I fighter jet crashes directly over them and inadvertently saves their lives, and out steps a dashing 18-year-old fighter pilot. Being able to combine those two worlds in the second book and in, hopefully, a third book will enable us to bring other worlds into the House of Secrets series."

On why he's still working

"People say to me, 'Why don't you just stop already? You know, you've made a bunch of movies, they've been successful, why don't you retire and golf?' And for me, it's only the — I really feel like I have not accomplished what I want to accomplish. I really have not gone there yet. I don't feel like I've made a film that is as good as I want it to be. I always feel that, something has to be better. And for me, I much prefer dropping dead at a very old age — none of us want to drop dead at a young age — on a movie set. You know, I want to continue trying to do better work. I've seen Clint Eastwood do it over the years — he just keeps getting better and better, and he's someone I admire."

Read an excerpt of House of Secrets