My pal The Good Doctor probably smiled this morning with the news that Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, architect of the East Africa Embassy bombings, was shot dead at a checkpoint in Mogadishu.
It was local gendarmerie who settled his hash. Apparently the mastermind got lost, and this had nothing whatsoever with the CIA or JTF-Horn of Africa. The sorry asshole was just lost, as the words to the great Hymn goes, and now he was found.
See, the Doctor was getting a cup of coffee in the basement cafeteria of the US Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, when the truck bomb Fazul had dispatched detonated, killing a dozen Americans (including recently-revealed CIA officers Mike Shah and Mary Huckaby Hardy) and two hundred local Kenyan nationals. Many of them were Muslim, and most were students at a nearby school.
The Doctor was unhurt, though stunned, and his description of being pulled through the debris was intensely moving when I saw him, months afterward.
So, it has been a good season for the forces of Good, and a bad time to be an asshole.
Still, the randomness with which Mr. Mohammed passed from this vale of tears made me look at the list of things to do. I was able to scratch off a couple- “turn 60,” and “send Quarterly to lay-out people.”
Then there is the matter of Raven and Big Mama’s taxes- a lingering and looming issue- and “Last Will.” I decided to move that one up a couple notches, based on the news from Mog. You never can tell when you are going to run into a random checkpoint, you know?
Anyway, I was trying to list the amount of crap that needs to be disposed of, and in the process of so doing, realized that all my crap is exactly like Raven and Big Mama’s crap- mostly crap. The key would be to point out what actually has value, but I suppose that is all subjective.
The stuff that gets lost. Like the Japanese Naval sword that Raven’s boss Ed Anderson gave me when I was a kid. Would anyone know that LT Anderson had it presented to him by a defeated officer in the ruins of Okinawa? How do you tag this stuff so that the mute objects tell their story?
I don’t know the answer to tagging, though apparently the rest of the known world is moving on with it.
I mean, the very nature of cognition itself is changing. I have often bemoaned the fact that the evolution of the cell phone- which in and of itself has revolutionized human sexuality (as Rep. Weiner’s Weenergate has demonstrated) but has also rendered us unable to remember phone numbers (why would we have to?)
The Google search engine has eliminated my need to remember virtually anything, and Steve Jobs has just unveiled The Cloud, which will replace the hard drive on our Mac with all our data stored on multiple server farms, humming away in some evolved mass consciousness that will, I suspect, replace what we think of as our individuality.
Or something. Anyway, on the way to trying to think about that I stumbled on something that is possibly directly associated with looming future. Now that I am officially old, I have granted myself the privilege of letting things go. As an intelligence officer, I suffered from the inability to let anything pass without categorizing it and filing it.
It was a version of Obsessive-Compulsive behavior, I know, but useful professionally and handy for things like Trivial Pursuit. On retirement from The Profession, I discovered that I could let some things go without injury. One was the daily newspaper, which was a wrenching change and quite liberating. I can sample enough of the news in the e-distillation. Saves time. It is green, mostly.
Another is television. The downside is that I have absolutely no idea what is happening in popular culture. I mean, I literally did not know who Justin Beiber was, or why.
Another thing is Twitter, the technological shorthand communications universe that enabled the Arab Spring. I have an account, I was savvy enough for that, but don’t know how it is supposed to work.
Apparently no one else does, either. Rep. Weiner apparently opened up all his little pictures to world by failing to use the “#” key, or something.
I asked Elisabeth-with-an-S about it at Willow the other afternoon, since she is young enough to understand this stuff.
“Vic,” she said, tucking a lock of hair over her ear. “It is a way to add additional context and metadata to your tweets. They’re like tags on Flickr, only added inline to your post.”
“I have a Flickr account,” I said defensively. “I upload pictures to it but I don’t know how to tag them.”
“It is simple,” she said, polishing a tulip glass. “You create a hashtag simply by prefixing a word with the pound sign.” Then she did something curious: she put down the glass and crossed the index and middle fingers of both hands across one another. “Symbol: #hashtag,” she said. “The hashtag Mafia.”
“You mean people are telling each other that they live on Twitter?”
“The great thing about hashtags is that anyone can join the Mafia by using air hashtags.”
“Great,” I said with a sigh. “Now there is a whole new thing I have to forget.”
“Just don’t do it the way Weiner did.”
“It’s all in the cloud anyway,” I said, and all Elisabeth could do was make the “#” sign and smile.
Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com