Brave New Year

Spartans
(Spartans QB Andrew Maxwell drops back to pass in the 17-16 squeaker win over the TCU Horned Toads. Photo Matt Kartozian/USA Today Sports.)

It was a good Saturday down at the farm. The skies cleared and the dusting of snow was gone. I shopped for local food at Croftburn Market, joined the local health club and felt pretty good about being in the country.

The Spartans won a squeaker over the Texas Christian University Horned Toads, and I lurched into Sunday tapping my toe as the afternoon games rolled on, settling the line-up for the playoffs. How did this season get so far so fast? That was the whole year- a blur.

By kickoff, the Redskins knew they had to win to make the playoffs. The Monsters of the Midway had vanquished Detroit in a smash-mouth game that brought back the memories of the old Black and Blue Division of the old NFL. That made victory the only way to the playoffs for the once-Deadskins. No wild card, and the hated Cowboys had to be beaten on the field.

I guess they did. The intense interest in the rallying ‘Skins (remember, they started 3-6) had caused the kickoff to be delayed until 8:05 PM at Fedex Field, and I was sleeping peacefully on the red sofa in the living room at Refuge Farm. I had to look it up in the morning, as I tried to deal with New Year’s Eve. Damn, this is an exciting team with some dynamic young men. A good weekend all around. Then I yawned.

It is customary to look backward on this last day of a year that was breathtaking in scope and amazing in trajectory. It featured every emotion possible in the human experience- and in Technicolor.

But you know what? It just makes me tired to think about it all.

I appreciate your forbearance through the process of death, an endless romance that traveled beyond the grave, the mundane details of closing out earthly affairs, the sale of real property, mountains of memories, wheelchairs, physical therapy and emotional elections.

We are standing on the edge of the budget cliff, which will arrive this week, and which we appear to be committed to leaping off in some bizarre Washington suicide pact.

On the up side, I did manage to fix that broken drawer in the antique folding table in the great room of the farm, and I can walk again, so I guess you have to agree that this was a great year.

I think I will take a page from the Congressional playbook: I am not going to worry about tomorrow until it happens. And then, I suppose, all the mysteries will be revealed.

Well, not all of them, of course. But I got a taste of some of what is to come on the OpEd pages of the venerable New York Times.

“As the nation teeters at the edge of fiscal chaos, observers are reaching the conclusion that the American system of government is broken. But almost no one blames the culprit: our insistence on obedience to the Constitution, with all its archaic, idiosyncratic and downright evil provisions…Our obsession with the Constitution has saddled us with a dysfunctional political system, kept us from debating the merits of divisive issues and inflamed our public discourse. Instead of arguing about what is to be done, we argue about what James Madison might have wanted done 225 years ago.”

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(Professor Louis Michael Seidman, noted scholar and windbag. Photo Georgetown University.)

The words are from a Georgetown professor who ought to know better. His name is Louis Michael Seidman, and he is something called the “Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Constitutional Law” at Georgetown. His legal training at the University of Chicago and his Juris Doctorate from that pesky old Harvard University, just like President Obama.

His credentials are impeccable, which goes to show you that idiots can come with great pedigrees. I am no scholar of the founding documents, though I keep a copy of the Declaration and the Constitution around for easy reference. They are much easier to understand than something like the Affordable Care Act.

As I read them, it appears clear that the overarching intent of those old dead white guys was to state plainly that our rights come from Divine Providence, not from the knuckleheads on either end of Pennsylvania Avenue. Then, to make sure that the knuckleheads got it, they called them out specifically in the Bill of Rights.

They cannot be taken away by Professor Seidman, or anyone else who isn’t God herself.

I had a terse exchange with an old shipmate about that. He reminded me we swore oaths to defend the Constitution, and that while we were retired from active service, it still applied. “Enemies foreign and domestic,” he pointedly reminded me.

So, without getting into this too far, I think it is going to be a hell of a 2013. Imagine it topping 2012! Damn!

At least the Spartans and the Skins won. That is something, anyway.

Happy New Year!

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Brownfields

“Brownfield sites are abandoned or underused industrial and commercial facilities available for re-use.”
– Wikipedia

How the hell did the entire cities of Flint and Detroit become brownfields sites?
-Socotra

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(From Top Left: Downtown skyline as seen from the a bridge over the Flint River on the campus of University of Michigan- Flint, GM Powertain and the Swartz Creek Golf Course, Longway Planetarium, Brownfields former site of Buick City, South Saginaw Street, and the Citizen’s Bank “Weather Ball.” Photo montage from Connor Coyne/Blueskiesfalling).

I have a list of things to accomplish down at The Farm. Nothing particularly taxing- I realize that things that require ladders and a sure and steady gait are going to have to wait. First chore is a trip to visit the aquatic center on the south end of town and see what the facility looks like, and go from there.

I was going to launch into a big story about the microcosm of the Michigan economic malady, captured in the demise of the once bustling city of Flint. I toyed with the idea of taking you on a visit to the Nation’s Gun Show at the Dulles Expo Center. The three day event apparently sold out most of the inventory in the first day of the show, and protestors are out front screaming.

I can’t do it. A pal is going out there this morning, and he will report back on what he sees.
I am going to stick by my guns, if I may be permitted the term, and finish off Flint. I have been passing through the town for business and pleasure for nearly fifty years. If anyone cares, the city was the birthplace of General Motors, the site of the Sit Down Strike of 1936-37, which resulted in the triumph of the UAW over the corporate bosses.

Flint- or really Davidsonville- was the boyhood home of documentary propagandist Michael Moore, who has a loopy sort of sense of humor that extends to the manufacture of artificial fact in the interest of higher truth. Moore’s family was a part of the blue-collar middle class of the General Motors workforce that then-constituted the bulk of the civic enterprise of the city. Like me, he was an actual UAW member and worked on the line.

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(Seal of the City of Flint. Motto: “Strong, Proud).

His first big splash was the 1989 mockumentary “Roger and Me,” in which he ambushed GM Chairman Roger Smith. The film provoked controversy, since Moore played fast and loose with the chronological record of what happened to his home town in the decade of the 1980s, when the auto industry started the nose-dive that is about to reach bottom seventy miles south in Detroit.
It was the whole chicken-and-egg thing and Michael put his big beefy embrace around GM as the evil villain.

Critics at the time said the documentary was a gonzo attack on capitalism, and Pauline Kael said she felt guilty about laughing at parts of it. Roger Ebert took an opposing view, saying that Moore’s manipulation of the timeline of Flint’s decay was justified on artistic grounds.

I certainly understand the chip on Moore’s shoulder about the whole thing. Flint is a disaster. The city described in “Roger and Me” had shed 30,000 jobs in GM’s downsizing. That naturally includes the ancillary businesses that supplied the behemoth- AC Sparkplugs, for one, and smaller firms like Flint Boxmakers, a corrugated paper business that made my pal Tom’s family wealthy for three generations.

Gone now. And the lost-jobs count is now 80,000. They were solid Union jobs that were shipped to Mexico or Canada, or replaced by non-union workers in Kentucky who build a better product.

By the 2000 census, the city had swindled to 124,000 residents. By 2010, the population slipped to just over a 100,000. A reverse migration, similar to the one that brought workers from the upper south to Michigan was draining away a vibrant middle class, leaving behind those who could not leave of their own volition.

I carry the same sort of chip that Moore does about the death of the system that made industrial Michigan the wonder of the world, and not one of its laughingstocks. I don’t have a great deal of sympathy for Roger Smith or the other idiots who drove the company into the ground, but I have to temper that with the suspicion that Union intransigence made the decline a suicide pact. They say now that GM is a pension and medical company that also manufactures a few cars.

I remember thinking at the time: this couldn’t be happening, can it? Damn, it isn’t right!

Capital does not care. It could make more money elsewhere and it did. Flint’s mayor and Roger Moore could wave they hands at Saginaw Bay and command the water not to rise all they wish. The great lakes will do what they do, rise or fall, without the assistance of man.

Flint first slipped into Emergency Manager country in 2002, and has rattled around in between democracy and state-imposed fiscal austerity ever since. The Emergency returned in 2011, and the UAW no longer was the primary adversary, since the plants were long gone. The gauntlet was picked up by public sector organized labor, the backbone of what is left of union power in a city that has imploded.

Oh well. I could rattle on about what happens when you obligate yourself to pay more in pensions and operating expenses than you take in, or the effect of single-party rule and the corruption that goes along with it. But in the end, at least at the civic level, the books have to be balanced.

In order to accommodate the declining tax base, Flint has got to come up with the money to raze vast swaths of abandoned homes and factories to tailor the cost of maintaining the infrastructure to those who remain. There is even a new term for the wasteland that remains afterwards: “Brownfields.”

I am just as outraged as Moore about that, but what can one do? There is nothing left to tax.

That is what is about to happen to Detroit. It has taken longer to get there, but of course the Motor City had much further to fall.

It is tempting to extrapolate the decline of these two linked American icons to something else, but our central government still has the ability to print its own money, and Mr. Bernanke at the Fed and Mr. Geithner at Treasury have committed to manufacturing a lot of it for the foreseeable future.

For good or ill, the USA is still in better shape than much of the rest of the world. Of course, when the tipping point is reached, it will make for interesting times, won’t it?

I wonder when that is going to be? Like Michael Moore, I may have my timelines confused, but at some point, the books are going to get balanced whether we like it or not.

Roger_and_me
(Theater poster for Moore’s mockumentary).

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

De Fault

Spirit of Detroit
(Spirit of Detroit. Photo 2011 Socotra)

I am not in denial. But I am equally not in De Nile, though it feels like an equally big and inexorable river pulling us toward some really big body of water. But hey, we are NOT going to talk about the cliff. I have never seen anything like this in my life, and I have been to the Michigan State Fair at its home on Woodward Avenue. a little short of the Detroit city limits at Eight Mile Road, of song and story.

I was going to look at the coverage of the press conference after the President jetted back from Hawaii and the Speaker drove his RV back from the Buckeye State puffing Marlboros and Majority Leader Reid crawled out from whatever Nevada rock he sleeps under. A friend watched it for me, and reported that no one looked very good.

I got a call text from Lovely Mary, Old Jim’s much better half, indicating it was the monthly special at Willow, and that the crowd was assembled at the Amen Corner to feast. I took a last look at the press conference before heading for the elevator, the garage and the Panzer in that general order.

The white wine was excellent. The companionship superb, and a couple hours frolicking at Willow’s long bar put the minor inconvenience of the commotion downtown on the back burner.

When I crawled out of bed, I had a queasy feeling, and it was not because of the white wine from the night before. It was the nagging thought that this cast of characters is finally actually joining hands. The problem is that it might be in preparation for jumping together into the Abyss. I would say “good riddance,” if there were not clear and stark implications for all the rest of us.

Oh well. I imagine we will just have to pick up the pieces they leave us when the crockery gets broken.

Anyway, to distract myself from the drama here in Neverland, I read a note from a good pal about local politics back in my home state of Michigan. With all the curfluffle here, I quite missed the Detroit sub-text to the ongoing crisis. I wish I had followed the election there with more granularity.

Last time the national media paid any attention to the Wolverine State was the huge commotion caused by passage of the Right To Work legislation by the lame-duck Republican legislature. Governor Rick Snyder quickly signed it and the press was agog that the majority did what majorities do.

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(Governor Rick Snyder of Michigan. Photo courtesy those chuckleheads at The Daily Kos)

It passed un-noticed by me that not all the Big Labor initiatives on the ballot last November failed. The most notable of those- along with re-election of Senator Debbie Stabenow- was repeal of the Emergency Manager provision of Michigan law that permits the Governor to appoint a city manager with sweeping powers untrammeled by elected local officials.

This is a big deal in the Wolverine State, since the crown jewel of global industry is just about to complete its majestic downward trajectory from Arsenal of Democracy to ragged and abject alms-seeker.

The Motor City is a proud, if gritty place, and carries the chip on its collective shoulders of all failed experiments in social justice. Anyway, the deal was that time has finally run out, the City Council and embattled Mayor Dave Bing are now just weeks away from default. Repeal of the Emergency Manager laws extended the remaining brief bit of self-government, since the previous 1990 legislation was much weaker.

Snyder’s new bill would preserve some fiscal authority for local officials, but grant Emergency Managers the ability to reject, modify or terminate labor union agreements. Collective bargaining could be suspended for up to five years if the city is in arrears According to the published a couple times a week Detroit News, the EM can act when a municipality or school district “defaults on debt payments, has a six-month-old overdue bill of at least $10,000, fails to make payroll for a week or if requested by the governing body or chief administrative officer.”

So, here we are. The Motor City should have reached that place in Mid-December. An emergency fund controlled by the governor has pushed the noodle slightly to the right, but the fund is dwindling since Detroit’s operating costs exceed tax receipts, and default is at best inevitable by the first quarter of 2013.

So, to avoid thinking too much about what is going to happen to all of us, I thought I would take a look at what is going to happen to Detroit. The motto of the Great State of Michigan is the Latin phrase: “”Si Quaeris Peninsulam Amoenam Circumspice,” or, in the vernacular, “If you seek a beautiful peninsula, look around you.”

If you want to know what is going to happen, take a look back with me at a slightly smaller but proud city just up the road.

We will take a look at Michael Moore’s hometown of Flint tomorrow.

Could be fun.

Motown
(A view of Downtown Detroit from the famous People Mover. Photo Socotra)

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

This is Nuts

Doc Boucher
(Photo of Doc Boucher, my orthodontist, and the suburban Detroit house where he shot his ex-wife and son to death. Photo AP Wire Service 1968.)

Well, we just about have this weird year in the bag now.  Stormin’ Norman Schwartzkopf left us yesterday, one of the many memorable characters who impacted my life in the course of living theirs, and I am sad to see him go. I have his signature around here someplace. I will have to try to find it.

Three and a wake-up and we will start a brave New Year filled with promise. I have several resolutions all ready to start ignoring immediately.

Some I won’t. For example, I found a cool aquatic center down in Culpeper, which should enable me to paddle my way to Memorial Day, when the Big Pink pool opens and we can take the show outside again. One thing I would like to do is stop yammering at you about the impossible things we are supposed to believe. I won’t bore you with the Cliff thing- the House is being dragged back here for some theatricals on Sunday, and we may or may not know something relevant before the disco ball comes down at Times Square.

Nor will I talk about gun control, though all sorts of people are interested in the proposed legislation that Senator Feinstein is talking about introducing. It has a bunch of really amazing provisions, and as I said, people are talking about it with some animation.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel has been quite vocal about his determination to impose more restrictive gun legislation. I am OK with that discussion- but I should note that he has armed guards for his kids on the way to and from school, and the private school they attend has armed guards. Senator Feinstein has a permit to carry a concealed weapon. Broadcaster David Gregory is in hot water for waving around a thirty-round clip on a DC Sunday talk show. That is illegal in the District, and the cops told him so, but he apparently answers to a higher authority than the rest of us.

Oh, his kids attend Sidwell Friends School with President Obama’s daughters.

I don’t have to tell you that Sidwell has armed guards, do I?
sidwell2
(The campus of the elite Sidwell Friends School in Washington, DC. Photo Sidwell Friends.)

I will wait with interest as the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body discusses rules for the rest of us that and see what they come up with. Whatever it is, I suspect it will have trouble in the House. Vice President Biden will lead the charge on this at the President’s direction, so literally anything is possible.

The ultimate problem with this is that everything associated with this continuing horror is already illegal. Thus, additional legislation ought to be devoted to identifying the people who are likely to do these awful things. The default value is that they are crazy, and the approach to keeping crazy people away from guns is one of the first things we ought to be talking about in this national dialogue.

The culprit may be a change in mental health treatment. Back in the day, many of these seriously ill people would have been confined and cared for in a state institution. Starting in 1955, we were told to treat the mentally ill by getting them out of the institution, treating them with the then-new wonder drug Thorazine. The philosophy was that the patients should be treated with dignity, and be permitted their privacy.

You know what happens when we believe impossible things. Funding for the institutions was slashed as soon as the population thinned out. Many wound up on the streets, or in and out of prison. Here in Virginia, for example, we are 85% below the in-patient numbers of the 1950s- and it is pretty clear that there are more, not less, people who really need significant help.

And ought to be kept away from the means of harming themselves, or others.

Stop me if you have heard this one- my orthodontist when I was a young teen was a guy named Doctor Daniel Boucher (inset above). He was good at what he did. He removed four of my teeth and imprisoned my remaining ones in a stainless steel cage for a couple years. When I got hit in the face it gouged the soft tissues of the inside of my mouth- unpleasant, but I think everyone was satisfied with the ultimate result.

Timing is everything. I had finished the course of treatment and was at the point of ignoring my retainer. It was a good thing.

See, Doc Boucher was a big outdoorsman. He used to appear on Mort Neff’s wheezer of a show “Michigan Outdoors.” Doc would talk about guns and field use, and then one fine day, he shot his ex-wife and son to death.

He was pretty well off, and I assume his attorney was fighting for any angle he could find in an open-and-shut case. It was cold-blooded murder. No one ever made a case for what sparked it- it was not infidelity, since the Bouchers had divorced, and murder is as massive a case of abuse as it is possible to have. Doc’s defense was logical. He was nuts.

He won. Doc was sentenced to an indeterminate sentence at the Michigan Home for the Criminally Insane.

That is better time than a stint on lifer row at Jackson State Prison. But he  hit the jackpot. A Supreme Court ruling held that such ill-defined sentences were unconstitutional. The upshot, as you might imagine, was an orderly review of each case to ensure that “patients” were individually reviewed to protect society from mentally ill people with demonstrated violent records, and re-try them in criminal court as necessary.

Oh, horseshit. It did not happen that way. Some Constitutional thing about double jeopardy, apparently. Doc walked. His release was unconditional, and the emptying out of the Home was almost total.

I don’t think Doc was really insane- I think he had a smart lawyer.

I never heard of him committing another crime, but I don’t know what happened to him. Other residents of the Home were there because they didn’t have good lawyers, or were whack-jobs who on release migrated to the streets and shelters.

And the jails, of course. The “balloon theory” holds that if you press on one side of a balloon, it bulges out on another in a zero-sum universe. Jail is the other side of the mental institution balloon. It is ironic, since the Homes had been established to give dignity to the sick who were not criminal by intent.

But with the end of large-scale state mental institutions, the circle came full turn. Real and imaginary crimes were the justification for Law Enforcement to get them off the street for the protection of society or the individual.

Anyway, de-institutionalization was a freaking mistake. Our young shooter in Newtown was apparently being confronted with the possibility of being put away, but it is a tough process, and there are few beds available. His response to the threat posed by his mother was murder, and then mass murder and suicide. The little cretin should have been put away long before he got a chance to steal legal weapons.

And someone at the school should have been able to respond, just as they are capable of doing at The University of Chicago Lab School, where the Mayor’s kids go, or at Sidwell Friends.

Let’s talk about the real problem here, can we?

U Chic Lab
(University of Chicago Lab Schools. Photo UCLS).

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Men at Work

SECDEF

I swear I am checking the company e-mail and am totally focused on business matters. I took advantage of that laser-like focus when my eyes popped open at one-thirty and could not get back to sleep.

I listened to CBC 1 channel out of Edmonton on the iPad in bed, hoping something decent would happen. No joy on that, and I decided to clear off the email queue before trying to bludgeon my conscious mind back to dreamland.

Oil change for the Panzer, I thought. The guys at the Mercedes dealership should be back at work, even if the rest of us are simulating it. The lists started to float through my mind- the “things to do” that I never have time to get to during the normal times.

That eventually led to a mental dialogue about taxes for the estate, and the Socotra LLC that has not made a dime in three years. Then on to the taxes that are going to start next week. No one seems to have a clue about that, but I am sure it is going to be just fine even if the timekeepers have no idea what to take out of the first check of the new year.

How big a hit is it going to be? Rude awakening, I am sure. Then lI thought about current tax liabilities for Fiscal 2012, and the load to take to Good Will for the charitable donation that could go away. That and the mortgage interest deduction that normally results in the IRS sending me back a modest bit of the money they took. Crap.

That made my eyes wide, and then I considered the fact that the windows all have to be cracked open since the little men are going to paint the frames on Friday and management does not want the windows to stick. Not this morning, I thought, but it means for sure the little men are going to be back on the balcony and peering, Ninja-Like, into my windows.

Between the Ninjas, taxes, budget cliffs and Good Will, I gave up and wandered out to the dining room and turned on the computer. Secretary Panetta was waiting in my queue when I got to it. My pal John in Law Enforcement sent out a .pdf copy of the cheery note to his Department explaining what was going to happen when we leap off the cliff on January 2nd.

I have heard he was going to retire, and that may account for his generally cheery attitude. “A lot of you have been asking questions about a large reduction to our budget authority and how you are supposed to deal with it.” I know I am one of many, though I don’t have the Secretary’s email address to send him a note. I was relieved to discover his policy. He explained that everyone is going to get paid, and pay no attention to the $500 Billion bill that may have to be paid out of the current accounts ledger. “It doesn’t really have to be paid until September,” he wrote with an upbeat twist. “We will figure something out.”

He was going to quit the job anyway, so I suppose it is easy to be sanguine about it.

Anyway, I finished the half-cocktail that was sitting by my brown chair and yawned. I wondered if sleep might be possible, and remarkably, it was. When I woke again it was broad daylight and the sound of grinders filled the air. There were men at work out there.

This is what the process looks like from the balcony- moving closer…

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This is what it looks like when it happens to you…

I am not supposed to go out there but I did…

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Some minor structural damage. revealed…hope they patch it…

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It is an amazing process to keep a 1964 building in order, just like it is watching people tinker with the 236-year-old democracy. Nice to watch men at work.

Downright inspirational. I wonder if someone downtown could get with the same program?

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocota.com

At the Movies

Django-Unchained-wallpapers-1920x1200-4
(Lennie and Jamie exchange meaningful looks.)

It was a marvelous Christmas outing. I went to the movies with ENS Socotra.

This may not strike you as something unusual enough to talk about on the one-day hang-over holiday. There were some things that could not fit into the schedule that I really wanted to do, but ran out of airspeed and ideas all at the same time.

I don’t enjoy going to the movies by myself and it has been a while. I make mental notes to rent the ones that appear interesting when they are released digitally, but never seem to get around to it. I had forgotten how expensive it is to go to the walk-in, but this was a real treat.

My son’s preference was to see “Django Unchained,” an action film by celebrated director Quentin Tarantino, whose last effort I saw at the walk-in theater was “Reservoir Dogs.” I thought maybe some excitement and gratuitous violence was just right for the day, and readily agreed.

We trooped into darkened cinema 7 on the second level of the theatre complex, me being careful to keep my feet beneath me in the darkness. We were early and the crowd was fairly thin for the 1300 showing. I could not tell what were ads- there appeared to be a movie in progress, as we got comfortable with the bags of popcorn and tubs of beverage.

It occurred to me along the way that I should have brought a flask as I realized the “movie” was actually an ad for a video game. The minutes to show time ticked off with more ads, and then transitioned to no less than five trailers approved for audiences of all ages.

At length- and ominously I realized I really should have stopped at the Little Captain’s room on the way in, since we were seated in the middle of the row, dead center, and tumbling face forward down the stairs was not high on my list of mid-film adventures. I resolved to think of things other than roaring streams or waterfalls for the duration of the cinematic experience.

Sam-Jackson-Django-unchained-scowl
(The remarkable Samuel L. Jackson as the villainous Stephen.)

I had read mixed reviews about “Django Unchained,” but that is true with all Tarantino films. It was a Dynamite cast- Samuel L. Jackson, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jamie Foxx and Christoph Waltz with some supporting female actors who were quite good, including the lovely Kerry Washington as Django’s love interest Broomhilda. I can’t remember if she shot anyone, though I think all the men did.

This film was, by turns, intended to be an homage to the old Spaghetti Western genre, a historical hoax, a narrative of racial retribution, an exploration of ultra violence, and a bizarre attempt to rehabilitate an ethnic slur of such power that its very use could result in termination of employment almost anywhere outside the Regal 12 Cineplex complex.

Tarantino has been mining the pulp genre for years, and in Django he even gave screen credit to legendary Italian director Sergio Leone for this contributions to western civilization. His “Dollars” films really define a hallucinogenic view of an imaginary and hyper-violent America not a great deal different from the well-established Italian surrealism of his contemporary Federico Fellini, whose work I greatly admire.

You could paste the Fistful of Dollars Trilogy into Django without much trouble. In the originals, the hero enters the town ruled by outlaw gangs and ordinary social relations are non-existent. Much gunfire ensures. The Director is Italian, while the technical crew is euro-centric, with actors from the Continent and a few Hollywood stars on the way up or the way down.

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(Young Clint on the Plains of Spain.)

You recall just how powerful the young Clint Eastwood was in those films. Way more ruthless than the Rowdy Yates character he played in the TV oater “Rawhide.”

The soundtrack is critical to the whole enterprise, of course, and this was more homage, a bizarre selection of catchy tunes from several decades unrelated to the purported year in which it was taking place- 1858. You can see the artists who contributed the 24 tracks here.

It is a pretty amazing compendium. Tarantino is nothing if not eclectic in his tastes.

I can’t and won’t use any of the astonishing lines. Tarantino sprinkled them liberally through the screenplay, and the defense to the whole usage issue is the progressive artistic view is that repetitive use tends to rob the power from the word.

I seriously doubt that, but that is Quentin for you, and I am naturally a supporter of the First Amendment, Mr. Tarantino and Mark Twain, who gets dragged into the debate.

The movie itself was good for nearly three hours running time- enough for two features in a less indulgent world, and this experience was indulgence personified. I think Christoph Waltz perfect. He looked familiar, though I could swear I had never seen him before. The ENS told me he was a German who had played a Nazi offcer in Tarantino’s previous effort,“Inglourious Basterds.” He won an academy award for it, too.

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(Christoph Waltz as a Nazi SS officer.)

That is another of the films I let go by. I want it on the record that I am in favor of hitting Nazis with ball-bats, which I gathered was the plot, but I felt my tacit support was about all I really needed to do.

Did I mention that in addition to 111 uses of the racial epithet, there were something approaching 50 acts of murder in the film?

I did not know quite what to make of things. My favorite murder was….oh Hell, I am not going to be a spoiler. When we emerged, I was desperate to find a men’s room, and quite uncertain what to make of the whole thing, the line of people waiting to get in stretched all the way back out to the lobby and beyond.

“Christmas cabin fever,” I said as we emerged. “And this film is the perfect antidote to an overdose of Peace on Earth.”

“Get with it, Pops,” said my son. “It is just a movie.”

“And a good one,” I said. “I think.”

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Pilgrimage

fire full
(Christmas still life, with fire and Ivy League kindling. Photo Socotra).

I envied the Russians next door. They have made a new wood-burning stove in their dining room, and the cherry glow of the fire makes it the warm centerpiece of the whole house.

I should have had the chimney guy out to check mine, which was neatly swept and pristine, but who knows what sort of creosote build –up was in the pipes. On the verge of Christmas, though, there could be nothing more welcoming than a cheery fire, and I decided to see if it worked.

I had some decorative oak logs that I found at the Methodist Church yard sale- one of them had a carrying strap- and it was old, well seasoned wood that had graced the side of an Arlington hearth for a generation and which I thought would burn nicely.

I had no kindling, though, and I pondered what might suffice. The thin local Culpeper Clarion-Bugle sufficed to demonstrate that the flue could be opened, and the chimney had a nice draw with no smoke released into the Great Room. I needed more.

The downstairs closet was crammed with junk from the old apartment, and prominent in the wreckage was the binder with my Harvard course work. New beginnings, I thought, and began to feed the Xeroxed sheets and notes taken from the Socratic case study method in the JFK School of Government into the fire.

It worked like a charm, and had a pleasant symmetry: I turned the lights down and pulled on my bunny slippers and thought about the year past and the year to come, and all the strange changes. In the darkness, the ruddy glow drew me in, enveloping me in peace.

I remembered the reason for the season, played out in a rental car and driver that delivered is one chill winter day to Bethlehem, and Manger Square.  We were on the West Bank, which had been placed off limits to Naval personnel, but we figured, rightly or wrongly, that it was unlikely we would be returning, and to pass up the chance to see the birthplace of the Prince of Peace was worth the risk. It was a pilgrimage of sorts.

A low-level version of the Intifada was in progress at the moment, and a stone of the ancient walls of Jerusalem had been tossed through the passenger side window of the rental car while we walked on Temple Mount. Thinking people might have avoided the whole matter.

But we arrived later in the afternoon and gawked at the plaza and the entrance to the Church of the Nativity. It is one of the oldest Christian churches in the world, if not the oldest, and was erected by the Emperor Constantine and his mother Helena over the grotto where Jesus of Nazareth was born to Mary.

399px-Church_of_the_Nativity,_Bethlehem,_Palestine
(Church of the Nativity. Photo by Lewis Larsson, American Colony and used by permission).

I took a picture in the growing dusk of the Mosque of Omar, and we proceeded through the ancient Door of Humility. It has been bricked to a smaller size from its original Roman arch, reportedly so the Saracens could not ride into the nave on horseback.

Church of the Nativity
(The Door of Humility of the Church of the Nativity. Photo Ian and Wendy Sewell).

The Square was oddly abandoned, and there were only a few visitors to the grotto, located directly beneath the alter in the church above. Greek Orthodox priests swung their censors and the rich smell of incense evoked frankincense and myrrh, I gawked at the priest in his elaborate robe in the darkness, thinking of the Magi, and a moment of peace in a busy and violent place.

We made it back to the Ship without further incident, buying some trinkets from Palestinian shop keepers who were desperate for the business. It was clear that night, rolling across the West Bank of the Jordan River, and the stars were clear and bright above us.

I fed some more of my Harvard education into the fire, basking in the warmth it produced, and was happy the security light was turned off, and the only illumination was that of primal fire. “Peace on Earth,” I thought. Maybe we can do a better job of that Goodwill thing in the coming year.

Merry Christmas.

First Fire

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

The Jolly Old Elf

Santa-In-Sleigh
You might be thinking of a right jolly old elf these days- I know I have been, though possibly not the one you have. It was a magical morning. On impulse, I switched off the mercury vapor lamp atop the telephone pole in the side yard and let the darkness slowly dissipate naturally list an developing mist with the coming of dawn under the crystalline Culpeper sky.

I was relieved to be out of town. I missed some of the fun regarding the cliff we are in the process of flying off, without benefit of Donner and Blitzen. According to the Wall Street Journal article I was sent, I had sleep-walked through the surreal negotiations about the crisis. The story had been flagged by an astute reader with this as a highlight: “At one point, according to notes taken by a participant, Speaker Boehner told the President, “I put $800 billion [in tax revenue] on the table. What do I get for that?”

“You get nothing,” the President said. “I get that for free.”

Apparently the Speaker actually smokes at these meetings- in doors! Amazing. The reporter did not disclose exactly what anyone was smoking, but I have my suspicions.

It is on days like this, the Eve of the Eve, that I particularly like to be out of the Emerald City. I park the Panzer (implacable German efficiency) outside the gate to the farmhouse, walk in, pour a tall one, turn on the game, decide what flags to fly and start to decompress. It really is good. I can feel the anxiety start to bleed off. Refuge Farm is close enough to the city to go there when you need it and utterly away from it when you don’t.

Nice compromise, and I fully intend to work on that relative balance of time in the Brave New Year that is almost upon us.

In the meantime, there are some close-out items from the old year. The Gnome was waiting for me when the green-painted door swung open. I had managed to get the new, longer bolts inserted inside the iron of his iron legs, drilled out the platform to accommodate them, and got him thoroughly screwed in. I was done with the project, almost, an odyssey of restoration that had begun with discovering the little dwarf face up on the dirt of the crawl space in the house on the bluff above the bay.

I don’t want to get you going on another dwarf tale, but it has been quite an odyssey for the little fellow. He has been with our branch of the family since they broke up Grandma Socotra’s house when she passed years ago.

I recall seeing him there in the partial darkness during one of the endless series of visits when Raven and Big Mama were still in their house, mostly barricaded in the sanctuary of their back bedroom.

I felt guilty about taking him- that was the awkward time when removal of their things felt a lot like theft, not realizing that it was all going to be just more junk that had to find a home someplace or be discarded.

The panes of his lantern were long gone, and his paint chipped and his wiring the original 1905-vintage copper, the fabric skin of it long rotted away. He still had garden-dirt from New Jersey inside, a connection to the massive old house at 98 Sagiamore Road in Millburn.

I had grand plans for his refurbishment, but those fell away with the distractions of the last few years. In a rare moment of focus, I got the frame guy from K&S Art in Arlington to cut me new panes for the lantern. I purchased the paint to color them a festive mellow yellow, new cord and paint for his boots. And there the matter rested for the last two years.

You have followed with breathless attention as I actually re-wired the little fellow, painted his panes and restored his lantern. I wrestled with his base and mounting screws, a two-trip-to-Lowes project, and last week I got him just about complete, though the new mounting bolts protruded below the base and needed trimming.

The Dremel tool that would have knocked that off was in the closet in Oz, so with regret, I laid him flat on his back on the dining table and took off for the working week in The Big Clueless.

That was a matter of just a few minutes labor when I got back yesterday. The skies were clear, not cloudy as they were in the great city to the north. The sparks from the cutting wheel made a merry fountain of festive crimson in the afternoon sunlight. In a trice, my right jolly old dwarf was able to sand on his sturdy metal legs. I put him out front to greet the Russians, who were coming for dinner.

I am flying the American Flag at half-staff in memory of those who died in Sandy Hook, and for the general travails of the last twelve months. The full staff display will return with the Gadsden Flag flying in 2013.

Since I want to be respectful, my Jolly Old Elf is carrying his own in the meantime.

Merry Christmas!

Dwarf don
Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

The Year in Rear View

special edition_year review lg

I am not sorry I am a little emotional about this holiday, and I am not going to bludgeon you with another recap of the news. We are either way too engaged in the circus act, or we are blissfully unaware that the elephants and donkeys are passing by in chaotic review.

There have been big tragedies this year and some good things, very good things. I don’t know what to think about it all- I lived it, of course, but it was all such a blur that only scattered highlights remain. The Christmas letters that were stacked up in my in-basket accounted for the bight moments in the lives of families across the country.

I did not send cards this year, and have generally been trying to wean myself of the habit, but I confess I do like to get them. I resolved to make a list of those impetuous households and send them a real letter in a real envelope. Maybe after the holidays to say “thanks for the thoughts.”

I spent the afternoon cleaning up the office. It is year’s end, and the end of the old contract and the start of the new one. I had a gentle hint from my Boss that it was time to thin out the trash of the last five years of program management, and having a late meeting with the Other Russian, I was pinned down at the work location as my co-workers drifted off, one by one to do seasonal things.

Going through the documents was mechanical. I decided anything that dealt with the intricacies of a dead program could be safely discarded. I took down flow charts of proposals long past that were pinned to the walls. I added “January, 2013” to the row of calendars that I keep with each quarter of the coming year in a row.

Intermingled with the office stuff were the estate papers. One of the credenzas is full of the stuff- obituaries, bank and attorney statements, house and real estate expenses- you know the stuff. Amid the claim forms were short notes from the Dead, kept for no particular reason except that the shaky words on the papers came from a hand that is gone forever, except in memory.

It made me sort of blue in a general way. I should be on the road some place. Winter Storm Draco was sweeping across the Midwest, and I was thinking that every year for the last ten this season would have meant either begin stranded in an airport or slipping and sliding across the central plateau of Pennsylvania, or the arrow-straight plains of NE Ohio and SE Michigan, heading west then north.

Rolling toward the land of snow banks and dementia. It is a long drive: twelve and a half hours was my best time, but naturally much longer if you look down at the speedometer and realize you are only making good about twenty miles an hour and the wiper fluid was long gone and the windshield streaked with salt residue and road crud.

I am not doing it this year, because Mom and Dad left us in that magical amazing passing on the 3rd of January, so early early in this strange new year that is now so old.

Up North
(Alert Reader Rob Fickling posted the aftermath of Winter Storm Draco Up North in Michigan. Photo Fickling.)

I was traveling north on this very day a year past. Big Mama had misplaced the precise location of the Holiday, but that was fine. It made all the timing less critical. Raven was safe in his new home at the Bluffs. I was going to have a little ceremony with both, and watch an old movie or three with Big Mama in the hot-house apartment in the Potemkin Village assisted living facility.

I stayed for a week, and the last time I kissed them was on the 28th. They left on January 3rd, within hours of one another.

This year there is no compelling reason to be in Michigan. I looked out the window from the eighth-floor office. There was a brief fleeting flurry of white as the gray skies transitioned to black. I should be on the road, I thought, that awful snow-covered stretch across Pennsylvania, and the boring numbness of NE Ohio. I should be driving.

My son lives there now, not Up North, and he and his wife are making a home in the suburbs where I grew up. That is among the very good things in this year, that and recovering the ability to walk.

I feel good about it, all in all, since the big things I have cared about so much have been revealed to be what they are: smoke and bombast, signifying nothing. The small things are the largest. The love of family, and the ability to rise and stride out into a magical world.

As I turned off the lights in the office, I felt the tug of the road, and a sudden emptiness in the realization I did not know where I was going or the first time in a decade. I think it is going to be interesting to find out where the new road leads.

IMG_A06048_600

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com.

Cold Comfort

Juenker

“We all know what to do, we just don’t know how to get re-elected after we’ve done it.”

– Jean-Claude Juncker  ( “J-C” is 23rd and current Prime Minister of Luxemburg, who President Bush (43) once described as “a piece of work.” He is the longest-serving democratically-elected current head of any government in the world. Photo Richter Frank-Jurgen)

I think we survived the end of the world.

I have been awake since about 0124 to check. I woke after going down pretty early, the usual, but then after getting up to take care of one of the ravages of age, I found myself eyes wide open and picked up the iPad to see if I could read myself back to sleep.

I am most of the way through “State of Fear” by Michael Chrichton. While it is a thriller, it outlines the process by which a belief system has been perpetrated under a constantly changing series or rubrics. It started out as “Global Warming,” then got scarier as Anthropomorphic Global Warming (AGW), then Catastrophic AGW, and Ocean Acidification. Currently it is something called “Climate Change” and is blamed for anything that happens in the way of weather. The inconvenient truth is that it has not been warming for the last sixteen years despite the relentless tinkering with the historical record to make it seem so. Mother Nature is not cooperating.

This is a sensitive issue, of course. No one wants us to fry in our own juices, so it is important to keep thinking up newer and more frightening scenarios. That helps to keep our anxiety up and the money flowing to fund more surveys and generate bad public policy.

Here is the latest on that, just in case you have not seen it in the mainstream media. This is not produced by Big Oil, by the way, or the Second Hand Smoke lobby. It is the work of the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

IPCC-5-1

The colored bands represent the predictions for global warming as outlined in the First (FAR), Second (SAR), Third (TAR) and Fourth (AR-4) annual reports of the IPCC. It is sort of a big deal, this draft, since the black bands below represent the actual measured temperatures, not the ones cooked up in computer models. In shorthand, it means there is something wrong with the whole carbon dioxide theory.

This is the work of real scientists supporting the real United Nations, and it shows that if we are waiting for the end of the world, we can relax. I doubt that it will make it to the final report- after all, these things are intended to drive policy makers around the world to do all sorts of stuff that is apparently not really that important. But check it out for yourself. I am just happy that is nothing to worry about this morning. (Important caveat below*)

Despite the good news, the chart was not enough to put me back to sleep.

No dice. Didn’t happen.

So, I held off checking mail as long as I could, but wound up reading the NY Times in some detail. The “Plan B” disaster is what the paper was mostly concerned about. Speaker Boehner failed to rally his own troops, shrugged, lit up a Lucky, and sent his House home for the Holidays. So, I guess it is off the cliff we go. Damn, I had other plans for January- but oh well.

Down in the OpEd section, there was the usual irritating article by that pompous Paul Krugman, and then there was the counterpoint from the Time’s lap-dog in-house Republican.
For a conservative, David Brooks has always been a thoughtful guy- a token counterpoint to the implacable Krugman’s Keynesianism, but Brook’s analysis of the stupidity of the Cliff thing also cited this article:
http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/real-cliff_666593.html
Give it a read if you get a chance- of course it is Partisan, but like you I am deeply troubled by the failure of any of these elected morons to come to grips with the imperatives of the future.
We are counting on our grand kids to take up the burden imposed by the expansion of the entitlement portfolio and the “stimulus” that apparently has no end.
I am not going to get Paul Ryan on you. I am way beyond saying that “debt is bad,” or that we should balance the budget right now in the face of a soft and sagging economy.
By now you know how I feel about all that: this was unnecessary. We are digging our way in deeper and deeper and in the end, someone is going to have to pay for it. Higher taxes? Fine. Whatever.
We all know how we got here and there is no one that seems to have a reasonable approach to going anywhere else except off the cliff.
I am way beyond assigning blame, or saying one cast of clowns is better than the other, or worse, primly saying that people ought to take care of themselves. I am trying to find a scenario that will permit retirement and not having a lot of luck.
Ever sat down with an investment guy and asked what the smart money would do if you had any? They don’t have any answers either.
I really had a different agenda for January than the one we are likely to have. So relax and get a stiff morning eggnog. If no one here is worried about how the public’s business is being conducted, why should the rest of us?

At least it is not getting any warmer. That is sort of cold comfort, though, wouldn’t you agree?

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com ;

* Important note from the Daily Socotra Ombudsman: for goodness sake, this is no reason not to be prudent about energy use. Keep re-cycling. Stay fit. Don’t litter.