Coyote and that Snowden Thing
(Beef on Weck sandwiches flank an order of pommes frites with Buffalo brown gravy at Willow last night. Photo Socotra).
It was important- and I had to balance priorities, something I have never been particularly good at doing. It was the last Friday of the month, and you know that means the All-American Buffalo, New York, tribute menu was on the agenda at Willow. I didn’t want to miss it, any more than I would countenance missing the Last Friday at the pool.
That damn gate is going to clang shut on Monday evening, open briefly the next two weekends, and then the accursed green tarp is gong to cover up the lovely blue water until next Memorial Day.
Crap. It has been good lately.
The water was a little warmer than it has been the last week or so, but I had to watch the clock mounted on the brick wall on the west side of the pool. It had not occurred to me that it was actually the last Friday the pool will be open, and I felt the realization with a sharp pang.
Tracy O’Grady originally did up a whole menu of local Buffalo, NY, favorites- wild wings, wild wing dip,- but with the restaurant-week burnout, has trimmed it back to the centerpiece signature: the Shenandoah-raised, grass fed, hormone free steamer round of beef, thinly sliced and piled high on a Kate Jansen-baked Kemmelweck roll sprinkled with sea salt and fennel, and speared with three deep-fried olives and sided with caramelized onions, fresh sour cream and horseradish.
Tex the bartender kicked in some of The Pickle Guys horseradish pickled cucumbers and okra. Interesting taste when combined with the delicate Happy Hour White or even the Red. I stuck with the white, and it made me a better person.
Old Jim was not there- the vacation season took its toll on the usuals. Chanteuse Mary is at Denali, in Alaska. Jon-without, the Lovelies (Bea and Jamie) are preparing to return from the sun-drenched beaches of Costa Rica. John-with stumbled in to get two Beef-on-Wecks to take away and last him through the weekend.
Budget Buddy and me talked books and Snowden and the oath that I may (or may not) have signed to give one of those Agencies the right to pre-publication review of everything I write.
I snorted at the contention. “NSA is getting it all the same time everyone else is, I said, and besides, WTF.”
Anyway, the attraction of the sandwiches brought some folks out of the woodwork, even if the ranks of the regulars were a little slim. Coyote was there, and Brian and Marie-without-cast. I used to work with them, too, and Coyote is a member of the Arms Control Community, which hangs out at Foggy Bottom when not in Geneva, Switzerland.
I cleared my throat. “I was part of the arms distribution network, and was proud to be a witting agent of the Worlds Largest Distributor of MiG Parts. Boom!” I said, simulating the impact of an AIM-9L IR-seeking rocket.
Coyote smiled, and then started in on an analysis and he had an interesting take on who is representing us overseas.
“Like that Snowden creep,” he said with a curl to his lip. We had been talking about the latest eye-popping disclosures in the Post. “That stuff is just the tip of the ice burg. It is what happens when you amateurs running the show, not professionals like the Kremlin. The Wall may have fallen, but the KGB veterans are just as good at Human Intelligence as they ever were.”
(Coyote’s beef on weck.)
Coyote leaned over to speak in a low conspiratorial voice, which is when I noticed John-with, slightly in his cups, asking Tex for two Wecks, to go.
“Snowden passed two full-lifestyle Polygraphs,” I said. “What’s up with that?”
“You know as well as I do it is all voo-doo. I had to submit to two of those because of where I worked,” said my Budget Buddy.
Brian and Marie nodded in sympathy, and I said “I only had to pass the ones mandated by the Pentagon- you know, the Five Questions version. I still hated them. And by the way, I am never taking another one,” I declared. “And I have had my last background update. Fuck that.”
My Budget Buddy looked thoughtful. “I just completed my annual cyber security training. These days they include a big section on the “insider threat.” They told us what to look for and how to mitigate the risk from people who decided to steal stuff from inside. Snowden and Manning meet 85% of the warning signs, they said.”
“So why didn’t anyone take action?”
My pal shrugged. “Given Snowden’s unimpressive education credentials, I suspect he was tutored by someone. The cover story is too good to be true.”
“You mean he was targeted for recruitment and trained by the FSB?”
“I don’t know if it was chicken and egg or egg and chicken. I don’t think he was self-taught. I think he was tutored and helped. I would not be surprised if we find out the Russians were more involved in this and much earlier than when he got to Hawaii. ”
“Oh, crap. Things are beginning to add up.”
Coyote grimaced. “I suspected the Russians all along in the Snowden thing.”
“What do you mean?” I asked innocently.
Coyote hooked a thumb in the direction of John-with, who had cleverly wedged himself against the bar to avoid sliding down the vertical.
“Why do you think we drink so much? The American arms control community in both DC and Geneva is thoroughly in the Russian pocket.”
“Crap,” I said.
Coyote sighed. “Having lived the “Geneva experience” at the time Snow-job was there, I can tell you that even our own political appointees to the US Mission and the UN in Geneva are international socialists. It is beyond belief. They blame America first and view us as the Evil Empire who must be defeated.”
“That’s astounding,” I said.
“I saw it with my own eyes,” said Coyote, taking a sip of beer. “Whenever our people in Geneva go out, they always have lots of Russians along, and at the same time, they drag along all the single 20-somethings from the Mission–like Snow-job. The kids learned to hate America and love the Russians. Now, it is what American arms controllers do. They are the FSB’s best tool against America.”
“Disgusting,” I said.
“Not as much as who is representing us overseas. You should have seen it. When the Bush appointees left Geneva and Obama’s people came in, the US Mission there changed palpably. It became filled with women and exceptionally effeminate men. Snow-job fits that profile.”
“Wait a minute. Snowden had a girlfriend, and I don’t mind if PFC Manning wants to be known as Chelsea. Actually, I support individual choice across the board, so long as I don’t have to pay for it.”
“I’m not sure what that means, either,” said Coyote. “But suffice it to say that both Manning and Snow-job had connections with the DC arms control think tanks.”
“So that is the Unifying Field Theory?” I asked. “That the Russians have turned the Arms Control Community?”
“Stock our side with ideologues who are prepared to believe we are wrong, and couple it with the determination of Putin’s guys to stop our missile defense initiative in Europe, which will make their strategic strike capability irrelevant, and there you are. Bingo. And Snowden, helped by the FSB, can beat the polygraph, ghost himself through all kinds of firewalls at the agencies and lift the crown jewels of the intelligence Community.”
“So you don’t think it is a coincidence?” asked my Budget Buddy.
“I think fucking not.” As if to punctuate the discussion, Luis showed up that very moment with Coyote’s Beef on Weck, and his scowl turned to a smile.
“Hell, apres nous, les déluge, you know?”
“Fucking A’,” I said.
Then I wondered if I should get a sandwich to go, just to get me through the rest of the long weekend, or if I should just get moving and jump in the pool before it closed tonight.
Not much time to go, you know?
Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303
The Guns of August
We are about to run out of cute literary asides to great works of the past as the future sweeps over us. Along with all the other scribblers about these great matters, I am looking for the next hackneyed line to use.
Old Jim had some words for me in that regard as we relaxed in the late summer sunlight at Willow yesterday. “Write, Goddamn it.”
“I still have two days,” I responded, sipping my white wine a little defensively.
“That is not what I meant. Lecture done. I am going to the can.” He grabbed his bulldog-headed cane and stomped off for the men’s room.
My old pal on my right grimaced. We try to stay in touch from our days in the Secret Squirrel world of the intelligence budget was avoiding any comment on the latest Snowden leaks. So the collision of the present and the past seemed to offer some safe ground.
“So,” I said, “Let me say this: Barbara Tuchman’s seminal work- is an amazing thing. It was published in 1962, or just about halfway between then and now.”
My pal nodded, and we went on to discuss other things. I wound up thinking about it again this morning, as I absorbed the news that the Brits were not going to get dragged into another WMD-related discretionary war.
Smart move. I commend “The Guns of August” to your attention, not because the title seems appropriate as we teeter on the edge of unilateral military action, but because it is a case study on how rational things can swiftly come off the rails and devolve into pure unmitigated horror.
We don’t know exactly what the President will do. Nor do I think he knows himself. He has a window of opportunity for action between the anniversary of Dr. King’s speech last Wednesday, and the G20 meeting in Russia that starts on 05 September.
As a former military planner, those sort of external factors are as real and relevant as the phase of the moon, but it makes my head spin.
The partisan positions are weirdly juxtaposed among the talking heads: the NY Times is in favor of military action, of all things, and the Hawks on the right are curiously Dovish about taking action. I guess it all makes sense if your core position is that everything your opponent does is wrong, every time, but that is not a way to run foreign policy. Much less a collision of civilizations.
I am inclined not to join in the fray, but not because I think the Administration is naïve in trying to spank Assad without really hurting him. The alternative is taking decisive military action that could yield results we do not want.
We are too close to it to step back and take a look at what is really going on, and some of it comes from the redrawn boundaries in the Middle East that came with the Peace that ended the Great War, and sundered the empire of the Ottomans.
David Brooks sometimes infuriates me as the NY Times pet conservative, but his column this morning (“One Big War”) touches on something profound. We are captive to our view of the nation-states as they were drawn after WWI, just as we were about the European fantasy of what exactly constitutes the borders of the land of the Tutsis and Hutus in Rwanda.
Brooks argues that the biggest threat to national security is: “…not chemical weapons in Syria. It’s not even, for the moment, an Iranian nuclear weapon. Instead, it’s the possibility of a wave of sectarian strife building across the Middle East.”
It is a good read this morning. I tend to agree that the struggle between Persian Shia and Arab Sunni is spilling out all over, renewing ancient grievances across the old Ottoman Caliphate. In addition to the slaughter in Syria, Iraq is sliding back into Shia-Sunni conflict now that we are not paying off the tribes.
Four IED attacks this morning in Shia neighborhoods. No Americans to moderate the violence.
Brooks says: “The Syrian civil conflict is both a proxy war and a combustion point for spreading waves of violence. This didn’t start out as a religious war. But both Sunni and Shiite power players are seizing on religious symbols and sowing sectarian passions that are rippling across the region. The Saudi and Iranian powers hover in the background fueling each side”.
The use of poison gas in Syria is horrendous, and based on leaked intercepts, appears to be an initiative of a local commander, not the Assad regime. It doesn’t matter. The real and explosive conflict is regional, unless something is done to contain it.
We Americans have policy options that range from ineffective, to terrible. The challenge is to do something to bolster credibility while not tipping the local conflict into something that spills across borders and brings on the apocalypse.
A pal with long experience in this stuff summed it up this way:
“From a US national security standpoint, WMD in the backward, roiling, strife-ridden, fanatic-ridden Islamic world is the central issue. More specifically, the issue lies with the fanatics and thugs who are willing to use WMD. We need to beware the confluence of the most hostile intent and the most dangerous weapons.”
Maybe this is the start of the Reformation of Islam. It would be about time for them to join the present and move on from living in the 8th century.
But that is not necessarily a good thing for those of us who are going to have to deal with it. If the genie is not stuffed back in the bottle, we are going to see something as ugly as the carnage that followed the echoes of the Guns of August.
So, over to you, Mr. President. How are you going to stuff the genie?
Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303
After the Dream
I paid attention to the celebration of Dr. King’s Dream Speech down on the Mall yesterday. There was a light drizzle and gray skies that apparently held down attendance.
In the original, there were a quarter million people in the audience. For the anniversary, the only number I heard was 20,000. I can’t confirm it, since the National Park Service stopped issuing estimates of crowd size after the furor over the 1995 “Million-Man March” organized by Minister Louis Farrakan of the Nation of Islam.
The Park Service said there were less than an half million people on hand for the speeches, while Minister Farrakan was claiming a million and a half. There was a bitter legal battle and the Park Service decided to get out of the business of counting heads.
The closest I could get was a report from the Washington Post that said “But the light crowd disappointed the vendors, who cut their prices for rain ponchos. The crowd, a fraction of the quarter-million who massed 50 years ago, only gradually filled in around the reflecting pool.”
I assume the rain and the tight security that goes along with it had a chilling effect on attendance. I know I would have gone, even just to observe, even a couple decades ago. But now, the idea of getting patted down and scoped just to participate in a public event is just depressing.
The other thing the suppressed numbers was the lack of presence by anyone except Democrats. That is what you get when the organizer is the ever-entertaining Rev. Al Sharpton. Well, there was one Republican there- at least in proxy. Mr. Lincoln.
It is sort of weird how much has changed in a half century. After all, that poster child for the Freedom Riders, Bull Connor, was elected as a Democrat. Please, don’t get all hissy on me- I know the parties are curiously inverted from where they were fifty years ago, but the whole thing makes my head spin.
We started that decade long ago with some real Hope for Change. And then it went so profoundly off the rails. Jesus. Do you remember when it was completely normal to hear someone famous was executed?
Marylyn, JFK, JFK’s girlfriend, Martin, Bobby, George Freaking Wallace, and a near thing with a shot at Jerry Ford. It was insane.
Then we burned down most of the central cities in America, starting with Detroit and following with all the others after Dr. King’s assassination.
I still shudder when I think about it.
Yesterday, the President gave a great speech, not that I agreed with much in it, but the rhetoric was pretty good recycled progressive cant, and blessedly bereft of any new policy initiatives. Expanding the dream to all the various hyphenated-Americans is going to dilute the sense of injustice that was so compelling about Dr. King’s dream.
If we are all victims here, who the hell are we going to march against?
Plus, it was great to hear President Clinton again. I had forgotten how entertaining he was. For all his manifest weakness and failings, Mr. Clinton is a hell of a politician. Maybe my favorite moment in his address was when he thundered out this fantasy:
“A great democracy does not make it harder to vote than to buy an assault weapon,” thundered Mr. Clinton. “We must open those stubborn gates.”
Well, I would be happy if voting included a requirement for a photo ID, just like everything else in this great land, like buying a bottle of beer, or getting on an airplane or writing a check. The process mandated by Federal Law to purchase even a .22 caliber plinker includes a background check, which if applied to the Voting Rights Act would be considered an act of racist fascism.
In Mr. Clinton’s defense, there is a wrinkle in which no ID is required to buy a gun- the individual-to -individual sale. That is the famous “gun show loophole,” which actually has nothing to do with gun shows. Even at those events, Federal Firearms License holders must check a photo ID and do a background check at the gatherings.
Individuals may sell guns to other individuals anywhere, though someone had to produce photo ID somewhere along the way even with these. So I might agree with Mr. Clinton on a narrow point, but of course, applied to voting, the photo ID would indeed disenfranchise the dead, the dead-beat, the bogus, and the illegal.
The only people who did not have to produce photo IDs to buy guns were the Mexican Drug Cartels, but they got to deal direct with the Attorney General of the United States.
I don’t think they vote, but who would know?
Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303
Dreams
I don’t think the President is going to authorize the strikes on Syria today- he is speaking from the Lincoln Memorial, from the very place where one of my American heroes uttered the wards that ring down the decades.
(Stan Levison and Clarence Jones)
The prepared speech- done the night before by New York businessman Stan Levison and lawyer Clarence Jones- was a compilation of several previous efforts, including an address that harnessed the “dream” imagery and which electrified the crowd at Cobo Hall after the 125,000 person “Great March on Detroit” in June of 1963.
I remember feeling a little apprehensive about the march when it happened, that summer. I was between Baldwin Elementary School and starting seventh grade at Barnum Junior High. It seemed to be a time of change everywhere.
Little did I know the events of the next few months would be so seared into our collective memory- the lofty and emotional words of Doctor King being punctuated by the news on the public address system in seventh period Industrial Arts class with Mr. Collins that the President of the United States had been assassinated in Dallas.
The world seemed to have come unhinged. That was the start of something that is not over yet, nor is the cause for which Doctor King rose to address on this late-summer day fifty years ago.
I would publish it, but the speech is copyrighted, owned by Dr. King’s estate, and you have to pay to use it or face potential legal action.
Because the speech was broadcast to a large radio and television audience- of which I was just one of millions of recipients, there was controversy about the copyright status of the speech.
Obviously, the broadcast of the performance of the speech constituted “general publication” and thus is properly in the public domain, just as Mr. Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address was.
Of course, the written speech by Messrs.’ Levison and Jones are not the words Dr. King wove into legend. You can credit the magnificent gospel singer Mahalia Jackson for that part.
(Mahalia Jackson sings at the March on Washington, 1963. Photo AP)
Dr. King was well into the prepared remarks when Ms Jackson shouted out from the crowd: “Tell them about the dream, Martin!”
Dr. King stopped delivering the script as prepared and launched into full Preacher Mode, and that is when the speech entered the small canon of the greatest public remarks in American history, his words soaring above the crowd.
I have often been to the steps of the Lincoln Memorial- we used to run that way from the Pentagon- but I felt the impact of the rich profundo of Dr. King’s rhetoric in the nave of the original Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, near the organ where his mother was shot down by a deranged gunman in 1974, six years after her son was shot down.
Few families, except perhaps the Kennedys, have given so much for their nation.
When Dr. King had given his speech for the ages, he folded the three typescript pages and was about to tuck them in his pocket. He thought so little of the text from which he had departed that when all-star basketball player George Raveling, who had volunteered to serve as security for the official party, approached him and asked for the paper, Dr. King handed it over.
(George Raveling and his Villanova coach Alex Severance (1959) – Instagram)
In later years, Raveling said it appeared the Dr. was going to say something, but he was approached by someone else and turned away. Raveling has had the speech all these years, and been offered millions for it.
He refuses to sell, and has decided it is the legacy of all African Americans, and will be his bequest to his kids, on the provision that they never offer it for sale.
So that is about what he thought about the significance of the words- they were there for all who could hear to listen and act. Dr. King did not file the address with the Registrar of Copyrights, but the family decided that the historic remarks constituted only “limited publication” and sued CBS, which had broadcast the full speech.
The courts ruled that the estate in fact retained the rights to the speech, and the parties settled.
I could excerpt the remarks, claiming “fair use,” but I do not have time this morning to get in a beef with the King Family. I probably will never be able to quote the whole address until the copyright expires after seventy years, in 2038.
That is well beyond what I expect to be allotted in my time on the planet, so unless someone turns that around, I will just have to accept what I cannot change.
Dr. King did not. He had a dream.
Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303
Restaurant Week
(Restaurant Week breaded scallops. All photos courtesy Willow Restaurant)
I would prefer to be writing an account of Restaurant Week at Willow. Tracy O’Grady has doubled down on the chance for broader exposure of her restaurant, and extended the special menu through next Saturday, and was open on Sunday, an unusual event.
Staff looked like they had been rode hard and put away wet when I ambled into the bar last night. I like to maintain a schedule- but it was clear that Tex and Jasper had not had a day off since Restaurant Week kicked off seven days before.
The deal with the promotion- most of the upper-crust establishments participate as an opportunity to get value-conscious diners to come out and experience the ambiance and taste on a prix fixe limited menu.
We were more curious about the matter of the coming last Friday of the month, in which the special Buffalo, New York, menu is celebrated. That is apparently still up in the air, according to Jasper, and the staff is longing for the last diner to depart this coming Saturday evening and let them all sleep in.
More specials appear to be almost more than they can bear.
(The award-winning Willow double burger, an entrée for Restaurant Week).
This is much more real than what is happening in the Eastern Med, as I mentioned to Old Jim at the apex of the Amen Corner. Chanteuse Mary, his long suffering bride, stopped in for a quick one before resuming packing for the trip to Alaska with her sister and John-with-an-H was already deep into his relationship with the happy hour white. I joined him resolutely. The Lovelies- Bea and Jamie- were with Jon-without in Costa Rica, enjoying some tropical end-of-summer fun and won’t be back.
“Did you see the picture of Jon-without on that massage table? I wonder about Facebook sometimes.”
“I stay away from social media,” said John-with. “There is nothing but trouble there.”
“Jon seemed to be enjoying himself, based on his smile,” I said. “But I don’t know if he was going to get the special.”
“I just want the Halibut Sliders back on the menu,” growled Jim. “And replace the cans with long neck bottles. I can’t wait for restaurant week to end. And get the amateurs out of here.”
(Heritage tomatoes and goat cheese salad).
Mary laughed. “I thought you were drinking a Diet Coke,” and pointed at the brightly colored can of Bud, which for some reason known only to ImBev was decorated like a baseball, with red stitching printed up the side of a white background.
“It is an outrage,” said Jim.
“Lot of outrages going on,” I said. “So, Assad used chemicals on his own people,” I said. “That crosses the Red Line the President mentioned a while back. Now the credibility of the United States is on the line.”
“We lost that a long time ago,” said John-with.
“Oh, you mean the coup-that-wasn’t a coup in Egypt?”
“The President hasn’t suspended aid yet, and you know the military depends on it. If we cut it off, it will destabilize the economy and the al Sisi regime.”
“What side are we on, anyway? Shouldn’t we be supporting the secularists against the Muslim Brotherhood?”
“They were popularly elected,” said Jim. “But they are assholes.”
“They were elected. Once. That is how it works,” said John-with.
“It is complex. We have managed to outsource the support to the opposition in Syria to the Turks, and the Erdogan government is in cahoots with the Islamic fundamentalists, who are being supported by the House of Saud and the Emirates.”
“With the Iranians supporting Assad, along with the Russians and the Chinese.”
“Yeah, and the latter two are on the Security Council and the chances they will support some sort of action against Assad is precisely zip-nada.”
“But somebody has got to do something, right? That creep can’t be allowed to gas his own people.”
“Unless it is all bogus and staged by the opposition.”
“How would they have gotten the weapons?” I mused. “I think it probably happened. But the Administration failed to act decisively when we could have shaped the opposition, but instead we let the Turkish Justice and Development Party do it. And now we have a choice between two different flavors of war criminals.”
“Welcome to the Arab Summer. And now, a day late and a dollar short, the President is going to have to do something- anything- to shore up credibility. You can bet Iran and North Korea are watching with interest.”
“Not to mention Israel,” I said. “Do you think we are going to outsource smacking the Iranian nukes to them?”
John-with frowned. “It is a freaking mess.
I waved down the bar at Jasper. “Another happy Hour white, please. And the check. I may go home and actually watch the news.”
“Welcome to the Middle East. And have a nice day,” growled Jim. “I am going to have another beer.”
(Kate Jansen’s fabulous desert trifle.)
Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303
Mission Complete
The two letters- Mike and Charlie- are the code we used to enter in the itinerary portion of our travel claims, back when such things were actual pieces of paper. “MC” meant the journey was done, the activity complete, and the mission accomplished.
I did not have that feeling in the afternoon. I was stuck with a feeling of lassitude, looking at images of other peoples monuments to times gone by, and how the people of the present react to them. The water in the pool was chill; Doc said it was about 80 degrees, which would seem temperate in the air, but in the water, it is enough to start to cool the core body temperature, over time.
By the 61st minute of paddling around I was more than ready to have it over, and I shivered visibly in the minor breeze as the sun shone brightly on the pool deck. Seven more swimming days until it is over and I have to figure out some other therapeutic regimen. I squished in my flip-flops back to the unit and got out of the dank trunks and added a sweater to my t-shirt to try to get warm.
Shivering in August. Damn, I thought. Cool summer here. I sat down at the computer to check what might have come in while I was in the water, and saw a text from Mac’s son David. There was an attachment, and I clicked it open.
It was Mac’s birthday yesterday. I had forgotten- this would have marked his 94th year on the planet, and it was a wonderful day for a visit. It would have been a wonderful day to have a beer or a happy hour white at Willow, too.
David found that the people at Arlington Cemetery had placed the headstone on Mac’s grave. I was going to check on that when I go to put flowers on Dan and Vince’s graves on 9/11, but now I can just stop by. With all the rain, the new sod has grown in nicely, rich and green.
I remembered suddenly the panoply of our saying farewell to him. The assembled active duty formations of Officers and Enlisted intelligence Specialist marching with three Vice Admirals at their head to pay respect. The caisson of the Old Guard drawn by their stoic peaceful horses. The Navy band, and the honor guard who fired the 21 guns, and the cannon that signified the tribute to an officer of Flag rank. The piper in full kit, and the mournful sound of his keening reeds.
Mac is at rest with his beloved Billie, I thought at the time, but it was not over, not even close. Now, the grass is lush and the stone white and pristine.
Donald McCollister Showers
RADM US Navy
World War II
Vietnam
AUG 25 1919
OCT 19 2012
MAC
OPINTEL Pioneer
Midway Victory
Now the matter is done.
Mission Complete.
Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com <http://www.vicsocotra.com>
Twitter: @jayare303
Monumental
(The sprawling Soviet Military Cemetery in Treptow Park, in the former East Berlin).
Now that I have some discretionary time on my hands I find myself busier than ever. Paradox, I know, but I have heard that from folks not much older than I am. There are the little odds and ends that go along with the move, of course, but way too much time to accomplish anything.
A paradox.
The other thing is current affairs. There are some things happening that are just so wrong that it is impossible to read about them without feeling my level of bile
Rise.
I don’t want to drift off into diatribes against the decline of society- you know well enough the things that I view with repugnance without beating us both over the head with it. We will just have to do our best and keep moving.
So let’s not do rants this morning, OK?
There are some cool things happening. I am just back from brunch with my college roommate, his wife, his son and daughter-in-law, and their two kids- an infant and a precocious two-year-old who is a delight.
We were at the Silver Diner over in Clarendon, across the street from O’Sullivan’s Pub where LTJG Socotra threw his farewell party before shipping out overseas in a couple weeks. The thing started at nine in the evening, which is just about my bed time these days. But with some creative napping, I managed to make it and be polite for a couple hours, returning by cab just before midnight.
That was a feat, and I was proud of myself. It was another tectonic shift, seeing all the kids I met way back, when some of them were still in elementary school. Now they are almost thirty, some of them Moms and Dads, and thoroughly grown. Amazing and impressive to see how the years have passed. I am going to miss having my son around.
So, along with the decline of the West, and the affirmation that something is going to continue through the evidence of my eyes, how about something this morning that is neutral in topic?
Like the USSR? That is ancient evil, not like what is going on now.
When I was in Berlin a couple years ago I made a point of touring some of the inconvenient memorials with my German-speaking associate. We did STASI HQ, of course, very surreal, and then I suggested a visit to the Soviet Military Cemetery not far away.
As you can imagine, there are not a lot of Germans who frequent the place, which memorializes the exploits of their conquerors. That the place is maintained and not vandalized is a mark of maturity, or maybe even nostalgia for the days of the old GDR.
The buses of Russians still come, and there are those former Ossies who are nostalgic for the old satellite, but if you want a place to be alone in Berlin most of the time, the cemetery is the place. The centerpiece of the central vista is an enormous statue of a Soviet trooper, tenderly holding a young German girl in his strong arms. Style is Socialist Realist, of course, and the whole thing is so bizarre in theme, considering what happened to the women and girls of the former Reich when the Red Army took the German capital.
(Centerpiece of the Soviet cemetery in Treptow Park, East Berlin. It is impressive).
(Detail of the Soviet trooper comforting the German girl).
According to British historian Antony Beevor, at least 100,000 women are believed to have been raped in Berlin alone with an estimated 10,000 women dying in the aftermath. Beevor concluded that a million and a half women were sexually assaulted in the former East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia alone, and that the episode was the “greatest phenomenon of mass rape in history.”
Goodness, I was going to get somewhere else in this story. Sorry. It was an ugly conclusion to the most devastating conflict in history. So, the forbearance of the Germans to the permanent presence of the fallen enemy in their midst is sort of impressive. Perhaps they remember the crimes of their own too well to retaliate.
That isn’t true elsewhere. There have been tremendous rows over the relocation or removal of some Soviet memorials, like the one in Tallinn, Estonia that resulted in two days of rioting.
(The Soviet Monument in Budapest, near Parliament and aeross the square from the US Embassy).
In Budapest, the Hungarian government says the hammer-and-sickle-adorned monument downtown is protected by a treaty with Russia and isn’t going anywhere. Anti-government rioters attacked the memorial last year, scratching off a carving of Russian troops. Since then, it has been surrounded by two layers of iron fencing and patrolled by police.
Statues honoring Russian soldiers still stand in Belgrade, Vienna and Sofia.
The last has been subject to the most colorful protests. Last Wednesday, it was painted a bright and shocking pink in apparent anonymous commemoration of the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, which crushed the Prague Spring of 1968. The captions are the words: “Bulgaria Apologizes” and “Prague ’68.”
This isn’t the first time the monument has been given a new paint job, and it is my personal favorite. In 2011, unknown artists turned the soldiers into American pop culture icons including Captain America and Ronald McDonald. The monument is a permanent source of contention in Bulgaria, as it is elsewhere.
(The Joker, Santa Claus, Superman, Ronald McDonald, Captain America and Wonder Woman lead the charge in this 2011 op-art vandalism of the Soviet monument in Sophia.)
The Russian Government has expressed its displeasure with the latest disfacement, and the Bulgarian authorities have taken measures to scrub down the memorials and protect it with fences and increased security patrols as they have the monument in Budapest.
Monuments are funny things, when empires go away, aren’t they? I wonder how ours are going to do?
Ah, that felt better. Not a single polemic this morning. I think I will go for a swim.
Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303
WOH and WTF
As you know, The Daily strives to keep to the high road, and trying to unravel the nature of the games that pretty smart people have invented to keep electorate from taking to the street and rioting over the gross mismanagement of public affairs. It is getting harder and harder.
I could talk about the Consumer Price Index, or the unemployment numbers, or just about anything else the government tells us, to include what the DoJ or the IC is up to on any given day.
I was off on a Hillary Safari this morning, analyzing why she has not been unceremoniously dumped as the Democrat front-runner. I think it may have something to do with her gender (which is actually the wrong term, since that takes us into Chelsea Manning territory, and Mrs. Clinton is reportedly an authentic GG female).
The topic was leadership. Certainly women can lead modern industrial states decisively and with great talent- there is no question of that, whether you are speaking of Golda Meir, Margaret Thatcher or Indira Gandhi.
But as for Mrs. Clinton, in the long tortured annals of her public service the one time she actually had a time in which to demonstrate leadership- the night Ambassador Chris Stevens was murdered and one of her consulates was under attack for seven hours- she did not.
We don’t know where she was, any more than we know where the President was. She should be the subject of public ridicule- and perhaps not surprisingly, she is not. Beats me.
Of course, there is no question she can be decisive. Remember how she beat the police into Vince Foster’s office to remove his files that dealt with the various Clinton scandals? I still wonder where Vince shot himself. I am not sure it was at Fort Marcy, or even that he did the deed himself. But that was a long time ago and at this distance, what does it matter?
I heard that somewhere, and it has a certain ring.
There are other things that fill me with dread, and it is one of those things that is taboo to talk about. I should keep to the high road and ignore it, like the Mainstream Media, but this has been bugging me since NBC altered the 911 tapes of the Trayvon Martin shooting, and it did not get better after the verdict was revealed.
It actually looked like someone was deliberately stirring up trouble over an incident in which two lives were forever altered, one of them permanently.
At Willow last night, Old Jim was incensed about the shooting of Australian baseball player Chris Lane in Oklahoma. Jim has been a Democrat all his life, except for running for the Mayor’s office in DC as a Republican, which is a story unto itself. He declared himself without politics yesterday, and beyond understanding how the country has come to be what it is.
I had not heard much about the case, just that someone had been shot in Oklahoma, which is hardly unprecedented. Two youths were accused in the shooting, with a third driving the car used to chase down Mr. Lane so he could be shot in the back.
That is how the story was reported, anyway, originally without reference to the racial composition of the four involved: the dead white guy, the two African American teenage thugs, and the ambivalently ethnic kid who drove the car. As you know, the style guide for most American media dictates that the racial origin of figures in the news should not be reported unless it is directly relevant to the story.
In this case it seemed to be, which is why it was puzzling that it did not lead the story, once the history of James Edwards and Chancey Luna was revealed.
The tweets are pretty impressive.
Jim was nearly apoplectic. “Where are Jessie Jackson and Al Sharpton,” he sputtered. “Damn!” he quickly ordered another Bud to help him calm down, and I took a pensive sip of Happy Hour White.
I did some research and was not only saddened but appalled. Everything that is wrong in America writ large, and in racial relations specifically is summed up in the tweets and images collected by the Herald Sun of Australia, which is recommending that Aussie tourists stay the hell out of America.
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/selfies-of-the-accused-teen-thrillkillers-of-melbourne-baseballer-chris-lane/story-e6frf7jo-1226701238114 <http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/selfies-of-the-accused-teen-thrillkillers-of-melbourne-baseballer-chris-lane/story-e6frf7jo-1226701238114>
In looking for the text of the tweets- I stumbled on an apologist at MSNBC who tried to make this about guns and not racist thug-ism- but I will let the link above summarize what we have come to in this nation.
Hello there, fellow Peckerwoods and Crackers. According to Mr. Edwards, 90% of Caucasians fall into those categories, and we are evil.
He also boasted of whacking “woods” five times since the Zimmerman verdict, so as one of the prospective candidates, naturally I viewed the tweet with interest.
I puzzled through all that, and then was turning to something else when I was forwarded the story of Mr. Ayo Kimathi, the DHS Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) manager in charge of buying weapons and ammunition for the government.
It was sort of strange. With the permission of his supervisors, he also operates a website called “War on the Horizon,” which he explained was established to sell concert tickets and lecture videos.
The site is also home to commentary that slanders homosexuals and incidentally advocates the mass murder of “whites” and the “ethnic cleansing” of “Uncle Tom race traitors,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. As you know, the Center is famous for tracking white supremacist groups (of which there are many). President Obama is on his list of traitors, by the way.
Ayo Kimathi, who calls himself the “Irritated Genie,” told his supervisors that the website was set up to sell concert and lecture videos.
But the report from the reliably left-leaning SPLC showed the site’s content strayed far beyond concert promotion, warning about a coming race war.
On the site, Mr. Kimathi declares that, “in order for Black people to survive the 21st century, we are going to have to kill a lot of whites – more than our Christian hearts can possibly count.”
Goodness. In any other scenario, Mr. Kimathi would be on unpaid leave (unlike Louise Lerner of the IRS, who is getting paid) and on the way to dismissal. The leadership at ICE is reportedly looking into the matter.
Perhaps they will note that “Kimathi” was also a name in the news in the last century- Dedan Kimathi Waciuri was a leader of the Mau Mau revolt against the British colonial government in Kenya in the 1950s. Could that have been a tip-off?
Anyway, here we are in post racial America. How is it working out for you? WTF?
Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303
Let Me Get This Straight
Sorry- I am a little addled this morning. There are three trials nearing the endgame that all have implications for National Security to one degree or another- two of them are mirror images of one another: Major Hassan, who went over to the other side and killed his fellow unarmed soldiers, and Staff Sergeant Bales who went mad and began to kill civilians on his fourth combat deployment.
Both are tragic, in their way, since both could have been stopped, if anyone had the courage to buck the PC crowd who has characterized Major Hassan as a disgruntled worker, rather than an enemy combatant who conducted an act of terror. Sergeant Bales had seen too much, and his chain of command should have picked up on the fact that he was about to snap and got him some help.
Now they are both going to be convicted. Major Hassan wants to die as a jihadi. SSG Bales apparently wants to live, though he will never see the outside of the correctional barracks at Fort Leavenworth.
More curious is the PFC Bradley thing. There is a significant number of people who believe he was a whistle-blower or some nonsense. He got precisely what he deserves: his crime was the disclosure of a breathtaking number of classified cables to those at WikiLeaks to whom he knew were not entitled to the information.
The wrinkle on that this morning is the curious attachment photo he sent to his First Sergeant on his deployment to Iraq. He was wearing a blonde wig and make-up, and this morning, in a statement to the press, declared he was transgendered and wished to commence hormone therapy and be addressed with a feminine pronoun and the name “Chelsea.”
I am in favor of people being the gender they want to be, but I am opposed to paying for it from taxpayer accounts. I don’t know how his sentence to the Correctional Barracks at Fort Leavenworth is going to sort out with all that. I imagine it is just another challenge for today’s action military.
But I definitely think that if the First Sergeant had not thought that the then-Corporal Manning was trying the Klinger Strategy as the Jamie Farr’s character in M*A*S*H did, he might have saved us all a lot of trouble.
Ditto with the Major and the Staff Sergeant.
I think all three cases represent a certain delusional attitude on the part of some important institutions. The Justice Department for the bizarre assertion that Major Hassan’s murders are a case of “Workplace Violence.” That betrays a seriously flawed world view about Islam, and what the Major himself has been saying. I don’t expect this Administration to wake up to that anytime soon. Their track record on being seriously wrong about the nature of our enemies is too well established.
Staff Sergeant Bales is a classic case of combat fatigue that should have been identified before he snapped, and saved a good soldier and a lot of innocent people. The Army is in denial about what we have done to so many young people in multiple deployments in truly awful conditions.
And as to Chelsea- well, he did tell his chain of command. I don’t think that qualifies to mitigate the damage he did, but this is a totally separate issue. He should have been eased out as unsuitable for service. Oh well. Goes to show, I think, that even the best institutions can be run right into the dirt.
I have a copy of the picture that Chelsea sent his/her First Shirt, but I am not going to use it. You can find it easy enough elsewhere. Instead, I will close this with one from a gentler and less crazy time:
Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303
Get Something
I am sure you have heard the news. We lost one of the giants of modern American pulp letters, and these days, that is about as good as literature gets. Elmore Leonard, 87, has passed of consequences of a stroke.
Big Mama and Elmore had something in common, well beyond just being long-time residents of suburban Detroit.
Big Mama taught a variety of specialized English courses at Kenowa Hills High School, and when I look at the sad state of modern education in America, I am amazed at what she was able to get away with. She taught “Bible as Literature,” which would of course be crucified as a back-door means to get religion into the classroom, though critics would be wrong.
Big Mama thought her students ought to know something about where their culture came from. She taught a module on the modern Science Fiction genre, and one about mysteries, which is how popular fiction became a building block in my life. It is also how Elmore Leonard became our family’s favorite pulp author, and why his death yesterday, at the same age as Big Mama, connected me back to her passing.
And that of Detroit, BTW, and there is some amazing crap happening as the Arsenal of Democracy stumbles through Chapter 9 bankruptcy. I will stay away from that topic today, though there are echoes of it elsewhere. In point of fact, Elmore got out of the city before it passed away and he died in Bloomfield Hills, the Oakland County suburb across Maple Road from the town where I grew up. So, it is a matter of local pride I feel this morning, along with an appreciation of a great writer.
I came to appreciate the singular genius of Mr. Leonard through the 40-odd novels published through all of my reading life. You know the ones that turned into movies- maybe “Get Shorty” is the most famous, but he popped back into my consciousness last year when a good pal tipped me off to some great television in the form of the FX Channel series “Justified,” which was based on Elmore’s story “Fire in the Hole.”
So rarely does a print character ever become so well personified by a living actor: Raylan Givens, as portrayed by actor Tim Olyphant, is so mischievously appealing that I defy anyone not to get sucked right into Harlan County, Kentucky, where the show is set.
With a major connection to Detroit, and the mob, of course.
But of course, the magic came from the dialogue penned by Elmore.
I was going to lead you on a merry chase somewhere else this morning, and may get to it in a minute. In the meantime, before we salute a Great American and wish him to rest in peace, I thought it was worth passing along his “Ten Rules for Writing,” which he listed for USA Today back in 2007. Here they are, just in case you have forgotten:
1. Never open a book with weather.
2. Avoid prologues.
3. Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.
4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said.”
5. Keep your exclamation points under control.
6. Never use the words “suddenly” or “all hell broke loose.”
7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
9. Don’t go into great detail describing places and things.
10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.
In my mind, Elmore nailed it. Along with the classic misdirection of Mark Twain and the modern brevity of Stephen Crane, that is the basis for the American narrative.
That is just the prologue to the other story, which is just one of the reasons we need Elmore more now than ever. “It was a dark and stormy night, when suddenly, he breathed heavily, all hell broke loose!”
It is way beyond even the wildest of his stories, but he might provide the dialogue that would be appropriate to the crime- and crime it is, let there be no doubt.
There is a story going around that there is no gold in Fort Knox. It is all gone. Elmore would have loved telling you the tale. I am sure he knew about it before the stroke that finally took his life. You may remember it, too, though it just blipped on the Mainstream Media.
The Germans informed us that they wanted their gold back. The Federal Reserve hemmed and hawed a bit, and then said they could have it , but it would take seven years.
Queer story, don’t you think? It doesn’t meet the common sense test, does it. In fact, it almost seems as if Mr. Bernanke was thinking he had to go somewhere and score the metal, just as if the real stuff the Germans had stored with us might have….you know…been used for something else.
They say that the German Gold is 80 feet underground, with the holdings of other nations, under the Manhattan branch of the Fed. Everything is fine. Don’t be alarmed. What could happen to something in Manhattan, after all.
Here is how it came to pass: during Great Hate II, the Federal Reserve convinced many countries worldwide to secure their holdings within the United States for safety. As a result, the Fed has received over 7,000 tons of the precious metal. Almost all of it is foreign-owned, and that is where things get strange.
(The US Bullion Depository at Fort Knox, KY, not far from Harlan County. Photo US Army.)
FDR grabbed the gold held by US citizens in 1933. We are all uncomfortably aware of the sort of unconstitutional things our Government can do in the name of a crisis. Mr. Roosevelt made it a serious crime to hold onto what had been legal tender. He had it all trucked, not to Manhattan, but to the impregnable Fort Knox in Kentucky that opened for business in 1937.
The Fort is coincidentally just up the road from Elmore Leonard’s version of Harlan County.
There have been stories going around that there is no gold there anymore- that it was mysteriously trucked away during the Nixon Administration, and the implication that there is nothing golden tucked away in the nation’s piggy bank except what may- or may not be- under the Fed in Manhattan.
You would think that would be easy to ascertain, wouldn’t you? The Treasury audited itself for holdings last year and assured us “everything is fine.”
But they did not audit all the gold it holds, nor did it issue a report on the paper trail on all the obligations associated with the little heavy bars of yellow metal. It could be that the physical gold is there, but that the leveraged paper that covers it has been so oversold that a run on the bank would produce chaos.
(This gold is in a Swiss vault. There has not been a detailed inventory of US gold holdings in nearly 60 years. Wonder why? Me too.)
Germany has been getting nervous over all those Greeks and Spanish and Portuguese who live in the European basement, and decided to repatriate the gold it owned from the United States. The Federal Reserve informed Mrs. Merkel that repatriation wasn’t possible until 2020. That is curious- and despite pressure from the insistent Germans- the Fed would only open one out of nine rooms to the Germans and refused to allow them inside, only allowing them to look and not touch the inventory.
BTW, this is Germany’s property. It would be very much like me driving over to Navy Federal Credit Union and demanding my money and having them tell me “Well, we’ll show you a little bit of it…but you can’t touch it or have any of it. For seven years.”
This has led to concerns that perhaps all isn’t as it appears.
Many are wondering if the gold exists at all, or whether in the name of the Crisis, the Fed used it as collateral on other deals. The way the Federal Reserve is behaving about the Germany request for repatriation has left many people in the international community feeling uneasy.
Me? I am not uneasy at all. Since the Government has demonstrated the propensity to lie about nearly everything, from the real numbers on inflation and unemployment to real crimes and misdemeanors, I would suggest that only Elmore Leonard could write the dialogue for what is going to come next.
He would not do it in passive voice, like the scapegoat State Department flunkies who were just restored to their jobs they “lost” over Benghazi. “Mistake were made,” I think the line goes.
Leonard would not have put up with dialogue like that. He would have said it better. “Get somebody. For Christ sake. Get somebody.”
I am not going to hold my breath, now that he is gone.
(Best fiction author in Bloomfield Hills, MI, and maybe more. Photo NY Times.)
Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303