Throwbacks

Three o’clock, wide-awake. There was a bit of work unfolded next to the computer and it nagged at me in the darkness. I gave up and padded out to the balcony to see if it was still raining. I found myself in the cloud- the rain faint, the night air impenetrable and completely saturated.

I peered into the gloom, and sleep banished, punched on the computer and wrote a paper about the Joint Requirements Oversight Council.

Yeah, it was that bad. Though bad as it was, it sufficed to take my mind off the three issues of the day. That damned anniversary is coming up, will the game be rained out tonight at Nationals Park, and what is the President going to propose to jump start the economy before the Packer’s Game Thursday night?

I know, it is a lot easier to not take this seriously here in Washington. Reality lies somewhere west of the Beltway, I’m afraid. Word at Willow from John-with-an-H is that there is another trillion floating around.
He said the package would be made up by extending the temporary reduction in the payroll tax, among others, and pumping federal dollars into road-building and other basic infrastructure projects. “It is a throw-back,” he said with scorn. “They will play to the teachers, too, like he did in Detroit with Jimmy Hoffa when the Teamsters declared War.”

“Yike,” I said. “That is a little intemperate, isn’t it?”

“Not as intemperate as those uniforms the Terps wore on Monday night,” he responded with hint of wounded indignity.

“There wasn’t much talk about the uniforms at the game. Maybe we were too far away to actually see them.”

“They look like that black-and-white guy on the original Star Trek series- you know- the mirror image guy. I heard on the news that there are 30 different color combinations, and that the Terp Captains get to make the call on what they wear on game day,” he said in wonder.

“I am OK with the flag of the Calverts- it is the most unique flag in the Union.”

“No question.” I said. “I think it is a cool banner. Goes right back to Colonial times.”

“Not everyone agrees with you about the uniforms, but I thought that, too, but it is not true,” said John-with. “The symbol of the Free State is actually relatively new.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, taking a sip of Happy Hour white from the tulip glass that Tink had just topped up. “The Free State refers to the Mason-Dixon line, right? Free to the north of it, slave to the South?”

“No. Vic, you should learn your history better. The Free State nick-name dates back to Prohibition. In 1923, Georgia Congressman William D. Upshaw denounced Maryland as a traitor to the Union for refusing to pass a State enforcement act against booze. The Baltimore Sun ran an editorial sayng they should secede and establish “The Maryland Free State.”

“Well I’ll be,” I said. “I have always supported those sorts of States Rights.”

“The flag is new, too. The current flag first was flown in 1880 at a parade marking the 150th anniversary of the founding of Baltimore. It also was flown October 25, 1888, at Gettysburg Battlefield for ceremonies dedicating monuments to Maryland regiments of the Army of the Potomac. Officially, it was not adopted as the State flag of The Free State until 1904.”

“Yeah, but and not applied to football jerseys and helmet until this year. But the sybols are old.”

“Oh, indeed they are,” said Old Jim, gesturing at Liz-S for another long-neck Budweiser. “The symbols are the coat of arms of the Calvert and Crossland families. “Calvert” is the family name of the Lords Baltimore who founded Maryland.”

“Yeah, and the whiskey,” I said. “Good stuff.”

Jim ignored me. “The Calvert colors- the jagged gold and black- appear in the first and fourth quarters of the flag. Crossland was the family of the mother of the first Lord Baltimore, George. Their arms featured red cross bottony quartered.” He put down his empty beer firmly with a ‘thunk’ on the solid mahogany.

“Cross Bottony?” I said. “What the hell is that?”

John-with looked smug. “”The term “Bottony” in heraldry refers to a symbol having a bud or button on the end. In the case of the Crossland arms, it is a kind of trefoil at the end of the cross, furnished with knobs, or buttons.”

“Cross buttony,” I said. “I’ll be damned.”

“You probably will,” growled Jim. “And you have seen nothing until you get a look at the bogus throw-back jerseys your Wolverines are going to wear when they play under the lights at the Big House for the first time this weekend.”

“Oh, crap. That’s right. I nearly forgot.”

“What is the Big House?” asked Liz-S.

“Michigan Stadium,” I said with a note of pride. “The largest stadium in the United States.”

“Oh bullshit,” said John-with. “My Trojans play in the largest stadium- the LA Coliseum. They had a crowd of 115,000 at a Red Sox exhibition game a couple years ago, and a Billy Graham crusade drew 130,000.”

“That is where you are wrong,” I said. “That was with people on the football field. The Big House holds the record for a football game. Last year against U-Conn we had 113,090 paid attendance, the largest crown ever to see an NCAA football game.”

“Yeah,” said Jim. “But the throwback Jersies are still as ugly as those Maryland outfits. And besides, they never wore anything like that, so what are they throwing back to?”

I had to bite my tongue and have another sip of wine. One of the throwback jerseys is already hanging in my closet.

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Fear the Turtle

Funny how just a few hours can carry you over such a great chasm. I dripped into the unit at Big Pink just about one this morning, the sweetness of the victory tempered by the bone-deep chill from the dank pervasive rain.

I shook the parka off the balcony and left it draped over an armchair to dry along with the sodden ball cap and the squishy running shoes. It had been a good day, all things considered; with an excellent outcome for new Terp’s coach Randy Edsall.

The nice thing about being an occasional fan is that the associated emotion is tempered. Of course, beating Miami is always a good thing, and bless the Turtles. I was wearing my red t-shirt to show solidiarity, the UnderArmor silky one with the words “Fear the Turtle!” in honor of the Terrapin mascot of the University of Maryland. I t was supposed to shower, on and off, through the course of the afternoon and the game, so I added the hat and my water-resistant parka.

I forgot that “water resistant” does not mean “waterproof,” but it is hard to account for all contingencies when it is still warm, and just out of the pool. Martin-the-Polish-Lifeguard was gone, and in his place was Alexi, a thin blonde young man who asked for my pool pass as I signed the roster at the table by the gate. I didn’t have it, of course, and there was a tense moment until he realized that nothing mattered much this late in the season.

I got a decent swim in, something that seemed incongruous in the chill of night. “Done,” I thought. The pool is now closed during the week and I have to figure out something else to do for fitness. Damn, the summer went by swiftly!

My outfit had seemed perfectly sensible in the late afternoon as we prepared for the magical Mystery Tour route that Jake takes across the District to get us to the parking lot at College Park where we tailgate. Shorts, we reasoned, were the way to go in the rain, since jeans would just get soaked. That was good, as far as it went, but with the rain the temperature plummeted.

It was a big crowd, the parking lot was packed. There were hundreds of tents erected, and satisfied owners looked out from cover as those of us without tried to manage drinks, food and umbrellas in the rain. The“Man Up!” gang was in place when Jake wheeled the alternate lifestyle Subaru into the slot next to them, and they insisted we do shots with them as we began to set up to cook the brats and the pulled brisket, open some beers and pour some drinks. We got everything done in good order, though the rain came in big bands that drenched everything, and caused the back gate of the little SUV to become a compressed buffet.

We slogged over to the stadium in time to be seated for the Terps to come on the field. The rain let up a bit, and we alternately shrugged off and pulled on the sodden outerwear.

There were two new coaches facing each other across the gridiron. Massive coach Ralph Friedgen has been consigned to the ash-heap, with Randy Edsall taking the helm. Miami was playing its initial game under Al Golden without eight suspended players, including quarterback Jacory Harris, linebacker Sean Spence, defensive linemen Marcus Forston and Adewale Ojomo. You know Miami. Those rascals.

So, we had to feel good about the odds. The biggest deal was the throw-back uniforms for the Turtles, which featured elements from the Calvert Family banner that serves as the Maryland state flag.

“I think they were inspired by a Deck of Cards, like the Jack of Diamonds,” said Satchel.

“I like the helmets, but it does have an certain jarring sensibility. Maybe that is the point.”

Satchel thought they were inspired by  the motley of court jesters, but thankfully it did not turn out that way on the field.

The first half was close, with Cameron Chism forcing a Miami fumble that converted to a TD to take the lead in at the half, up 20-14. We fled to the concourse at the half to get out of the rain, and returned to our seats to watch Miami rally and threaten to take the lead.

Terp’s kicker Nick Ferrara kicked a 32-yard field goal with 1:39 left to boost the Turtles into the lead, and then, during a last gaps surge, Miami threated, and Chism picked off a pass that should not have been thrown and romped 54 yards to seal the deal.

Turtles, 32-24 at the final.

We slogged back to the car, where we normally hold a post-game session until the parking lot clears out. The rain continued to fall, and we decided that desertion was the better part of valor.

I changed into sweats and a heavy long-sleeve shirt, and mixed the cocktail that we did not have in the parking lot. Tuesday morning already. School starts. The idiots in Congress are back. The topic of jobs and the economy are going to be the main event this week.

“Man,” I said to no one. “That was a summer.” I took a sip of the cold drink and shivered, looking out ar the rain coming down on the blacktop of Big Pink’s parking lot.

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

His Lordship

I am completely behind now, and won’t get to the story at all this morning, not that there is much left of it.

I wound up on perusing one of the climate pages and tumbled headlong into a vicious attack on Viscount Christopher Monckton’s views on the science pertaining to what has, sequentially, been known as Global Warming, Climate Change and lately, “Oceanic Acidification (OA).”

It is all part of the carbon thing we have heard so much about of late, though less as the economy battles the phenomenally expensive attempts to regulate release of the inert gas into the atmosphere.

The settled science appears to indicate that there has been both more and less of it in the air in the historical record, as there has been more and less ice at the poles. The specific unsettled question is whether we are confronting a crisis that man has created.

Increasingly, I have heard the BBC and NPR publicly wrestle with that question; to wit, is it appropriate to air the views of climate change skeptics as being a fairness issue. Both have concluded that since the science is settled on the matter, opposing views are irresponsible and incorrect, and therefore not required.

Accordingly, everything from the recent Virginia earthquake to Hurricane Irene have been ascribed to climate change. Both contentions are absurd, even as it would be absurd to contend that the climate is not changing. That is the one constant in a complex, constantly evolving system of systems.

I have touched this lightning rod before, and don’t want to do it again, but do so in the spirit of fun this morning.

I heard from a pal who commented tersely that: “the science is settled,” so I will allow others have their say and let you make up your own mind. No that you should have to make a decision; there are plenty of experts to tell you what to believe. The “scientific method” was once supposed to be about testing hypothesis. Now, it appears be about testing hypothesis against the Model, as it runs on the computer- a subtle but profound change.

The Model, in its twenty or so variants, is settled science, and not to be questioned.

There have been some questions lately about whether solar cycles and flux not in The Model may have an impact on climate. That, generally speaking, is what brought me around to Viscount Christopher Monckton is a piece of work.

The BBC has painted him as a “potty Peer,” and whether he is or not, he definitely is a legitimate British curiosity. He has had an intriguing career as a journalist, among other things, and an attempted member of the House of Lords, a position from which he was barred by the Labor government’s reform of eligibility to that traditionally hereditary body.

Not that he did not try. His elliptical justification is as much fun as the adventure on which he took me this morning.

Of late, his Lordship has joined the ranks of the climate change skeptics, and has traveled the world to decry the tyranny of the alleged cabal whose theory has caused such gnashing of teeth with former Vice President Albert Gore, a man whose alarmism matches his vast carbon footprint.

Anyway, if you want to sum things up in a nutshell, you can refer to the links below that caused me to miss writing a story this morning.

This is a rather startling response by Professor John Abraham of St. Thomas College to an address given by Viscount Monckton a couple years ago in Minnesota. It rather nicely sums up the case against his Lordship, and amounts to a fairly vicious attack on him. It is laced with sneering and hominum attacks, and is quite devastating. I include a link to it here, since you may want to check it out. It is long, a bit tedious, but here it is:

http://www.stthomas.edu/engineering/jpabraham/ <http://www.stthomas.edu/engineering/jpabraham/>

Lord Monckton responded, and reading what he wrote is what hung me up and destroyed the morning. This 84 page rebuttal seems to have demolished Abraham’s diatribe. I read the whole thing, dumbstruck.

http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/monckton-warm-abra-qq2.pdf

Now, neither of these gentlemen are credentialed paleo-climatologists, and neither, strictly speaking, are scientists. Dr. Abraham is an engineer, who apparently prefers being one, and Lord Monckton, well, we don’t know quite what to call him. But if you have a love for the English language as it used to be spoken, it is a most entertaining read.

If you have already made up your mind on the settled science end of this, I wouldn’t pay it any mind.

I have to be getting on with things. We are tailgating tonight at College Park for the FLA-MD football game with Jake. I am cooking the brats, sautéing the onions and peppers, making the cole slaw and setting out the packages of hoagie rolls, condiments and a big bottle of vodka.

The weather for the game is going to change- rain, they say. I need to swim before I get wet. And change is about the only thing I can believe in these days, with all apologies to the bumper sticker.

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Summer Reading

I went down early last night- the combination of the Saturday at the office, the birthday party for the 89-year-old former Clandestine Agent, who looks like butter would not melt in her mouth, and the subsequent hour-long swim in the cool blue waters left me drained.

I got up to the raucous Indy rock from the station out West I stream on the laptop. I discovered I could stream things on the iPad, too, which also mimics the Kindle I got only about eight months ago to be ready for the pool season that is now slipping away from us.

I must be slacking. A buddy out West was already up and at ‘em, working on his morning post that always challenges me. He sent a book review of a fantasy series he is reading at the moment. He is a voracious reader, now that he is retired, and I wish I could keep up with him.

The subject of his review was a novel by a guy named S.M. Stirling, a prolific Canadian author who is hanging his hat in New Mexico these days. I was immediately entranced- there was a long profile of artist Georgia O’Keefe on the radio yesterday, and I slipped into a reverie of mesas sculpted in the shapes of erotic flowers, and stark bleached cow skulls.

It would be nice to have a yurt out there at The Ghost Ranch- better, a little adobe house and a view of the sunset. But that is “Plan B,” or D or Z.

My pal told me he has pre-ordered the latest of Stirling’s “Change” series, which is predicated on a mystical event that renders modern technology unworkable. Against this plot device, the stories are generally conflict-driven and filled with bravura. From what I could discern from Wikipedia, he “describes societies with cultural values significantly different from modern western views.”

I can see why that would appeal to my buddy. Certainly, I am tired of writing about standing on a precipice of our own making, so I it must be liberating to imagine a profound change on society imposed from some external source, like the postulated Aliens I have been reading about who are going to wipe us out for polluting the atmosphere with carbon dioxide.

That is the appeal of the Rapture series, I imagine, the vastly popular series of novels I manage to ignore. I do credit it with a clever plot device, that harnesses the internal reinforcement of the fundamentalist Christian doctrine that permits the authors to explore the degradation of society while deploring the whole sorry mess.

The pool season is ending and I am awash in books. All the bookcases are full, and they continue to come in. I just got a copy of “Women and Desire,” by Polly Eisendreth, and a matched pair of tomes called “The Female Brain,” and “The Male Brain,” by Dr. Louann Brizendine that focus on neural development of the sexes.

“Gender,” of course, is not the proper word, though we appear to be stuck with it. Either term is now fraught with a political agenda, just like the shrill debate about the weather. I never paid much attention to that sort of stuff as a parent, and having two sons, I only had the one female to deal with.

Which is turns out was not well, but never mind. It has been a relatively tranquil decade on the home front, though the tumult of the larger world has been intense. There has been way too much work and way too little time to either create things or sit still long enough to enjoy a book right through.

I wonder, too, at the impact of technology on the fully developed brain. Male, in my case, responding to the rapid-fire cascade of information processing required by the way we do business and social networking. The way I work- and it is a curious sort of work- is swapping bits of information with defined and undefined networks, packaging and repackaging the bits; adding some, redacting others, building assemblies of information and shipping them off into the ether.

I sit most of the day in a large cluttered office with the walls ringed by workstations.

Originally, it was a team space, and is set up to accommodate a couple other workers in a team environment that was handy when we were in the early stages of producing proposals to the Task Orders issued for competition by the government. The brain development book, by the way, provided some excellent insight into the way the Virginia Contracting Authority is acting at the moment, but I digress. That was the reason for the Saturday spent at the office, which had that dreamy feeling of vague doom.

Anyway, the orientation of my workspace has me facing a computer screen placed against the window. I have a little clock radio tuned to National Public Radio when I am not on a conference call, since the corporate Network Nazis are infuriated by the use of company bandwidth to stream audio as I do at home. Accordingly, my attention is focused most of the time on the results of my flying fingers and glowing screen that people will appear suddenly at my side and startle the crap out of me.

I wonder about that sort of focus, and why I feel so tired at the end of the day.

We have been so long in this technical world- I remember well the Wang word-processors in my first early foray into the world of rapid information dissemination at the Fleet Ocean Surveillance Information Faciiy on Oahu in 1981. It seemed a little like science fiction.

At this long distance, I can’t tell if I always had a touch of Attention Deficit Disorder or not. It is interesting though to see what skills have atrophied; I write, physically write, very little and my cursive script has become wild and erratic. I rarely write a check anymore, preferring to process through the internet teller, setting up automatic distributions and recurring one-time payments to initially avoid the monthly labor of paper bills, rolls of stamps and balancing a physical checkbook.

Now, I pick up a pen to write checks for the miscellaneous bills that come in for the maintenance of the parents estate that I find myself rusty, my penmanship childish or reduced to sloppy Navy-style block letters.

With the summer so close to being gone, I have to sort out what to do with all the books. They are stacked on the end-table by my chair, loaded on my iPod in audio version, and a large wicker basket is full of paperbacks by the desk.

What the hell, I thought. I toggled over to Amazon and bought Stirling’s “Dies the Fire,” the start of the Change series. I had the option of having it shipped wireless to my Kindle device, and I took advantage of it, simply by clicking a button.

Amazon shipped it direct to the Kindle and the iPad, and with the rapid application of technology, I have taken the reader completely out of the process.

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
WWW.vicsocotra.com

RUSSIAN POTATO SALAD

I am way behind this morning. Impossibly so; I got up at the usual time this morning, but decided to go back to bed- I had made the mistake of attempting to watch The Dark Knight on DVD and predictable happened there in the brown chair near the door: I came to consciousness around 0200 with the movie still dragging on.

It was vaguely interesting as I re-integrated to the world, and I must say the last complete performance by actor Heath Leger was entertaining in a profoundly unsettling way. Chaos is what he was after, and we have enough for my taste these days without seeing it in the living room.

I started stumbling around again around seven with some excellent Dazbog Russian-blend coffee and some Michigan unrefined raw honey from Pond Hill Farms to sweeten it into a meal and plowed through the 48 emails that piled up since I put the movie on.

There is a lot out stuff going on out there. We talked about the  unemployment
numbers last night at Willow. They are troubling, and I have no idea what the President is going to talk about next week to deal with it. If he suggests another gigantic stimulus program to shower jobs on the grateful taxpayers at their expense, I doubt if he will get the recalcitrant House to go along with him. Anything else is tinkering on the margins.

There are not enough “green jobs” on the planet to fix the current mess, even if that strategy worked. Which is doesn’t. Someone suggested a trillion dollar infrastructure building campaign, and once you have gone as far down the trillion dollar road as we have, I suppose you could argue that might be the way to go.

Still, the luster is off the Keynesian blossom, and the old adage that when you find yourself in a deep hole you ought to first stop digging. The thicket of regulations with which the Administration is so enamored might be contributing to the malaise, don’t you think?

They are closing a coal-fired power plant on the waterfront in Alexandria, a signal victory for environmentalists and NIMBYs who have moved in over the years. I salute their efforts- it will be cleaner and more pleasant for those who have enough money to live there. I must have missed part of the press release in which the activists explained what was coming on line on the power grid to make up for the loss of electrical generation.

I heard some illuminating commentary yesterday in the car that suggested there was exactly zip-squat that could be done in the way of options. The fact that the economy grew zero jobs in the last month- a first in sixty years of record keeping- the unemployment numbers are the most daunting thing the President and the country are confronting.

But I remain an optimist. I think it is too soon to write America off. Our position between the seas and the troubling but vibrant infusion of Mexico and Meso-America will make us look at lot more like Brazil than the WASPish establishment that is painted in our history books. We will be a vibrant people, and if I have grandchildren and they speak Spanglish, well, so what?

My son’s experience with Gunnery Sergeant Ishmael Bamba, USMC, gave me hope about the future. The Gunny is one squared-away Marine, and he happens to have been born in the Cote D’Ivoire.

Anyway, the real heart of the problem this morning is the Government, and I am not talking about intrusive regulation or economic ineptitude. The contracting authority issued the answers to the questions we had on the solicitation for the big contract I have been managing for the company for nearly four years. We did several hundred million dollars on it, so not bad, and if we win a spot on the new vehicle I am good for employment through the recession.

If we don’t, well…I was looking at house trailers and alternative ways of living yesterday. Maybe a yurt.

Anyway, the answers the Government provided to the questions were quirky, did not explain intent, created more problems to solve, and concluded with the admonition that she wasn’t taking any more clarifications or calls and there would be no extensions.

Hence, the War Room recommences at 1000 this morning, and my understanding is that we will sacrifice some small animal and examine the entrails for portents.

The upside is that Labor Day is the last great opportunity to grill out, and the goat may be useful in that regard. I am not going to tell you about marinades or techniques for grilling, since it behooves me to look interested. Or start looking for house trailers in earnest. In that event, I will be probably doing more grilling than I expect.

But it did occur to me that you might be looking for something on the side to compliment what comes in from the barbeque.

This came from my favorite cousin, who is a fine cook and woman who enjoys travel.

“Kartofenyi Salat po-Russki,” she says- Russian Potato Salad- comes form Moscow. It would go well with goat, if you have one left over from trying to figure out what the Government really wants. The original version of the salad was invented in the 1860s by Lucien Olivier, chef of the Hermitage restaurant, one of Moscow’s most celebrated restaurants. Olivier’s salad was immensely popular with Hermitage regulars, and quickly became the restaurant’s signature dish. “The exact recipe—particularly that of the dressing—was a jealously guarded secret,” said my cousin, “but it is known that the salad contained grouse, veal tongue, caviar, lettuce, crayfish tails, capers and smoked duck, although it is possible that the recipe was varied seasonally.”

It is the end of the season, so that is completely up to you.

Ingredients:

Salad:
One-quarter cup mayonnaise
One teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
Two teaspoons ketchup
One tablespoon lemon juice
One half teaspoon horseradish (optional)
One pound small white potatoes, peeled, cooked and sliced
Six green onions, sliced
One tablespoon fresh dill, chopped
Two tablespoons gherkins, diced
Six radishes, sliced
Salt and pepper to taste
Fresh dill for garnish

Directions:
Salad:
Mix together mayonnaise, Worcestershire sauce, ketchup, lemon juice
and horseradish in a medium bowl. Add potatoes, onions, chopped dill,
pickles, and radishes, tossing to coat with dressing. Add salt and
pepper to taste. Garnish with fresh dill.

Makes 4 servings.

You have to provide your own goat.

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Freedom

 

“The Libyan people cannot kneel, cannot surrender; we are not women,” –

–      –  Madcap Despot Muhammar Qaddafy in an audio recording broadcast on al-Rai, a
Syrian national public media outlet.

Muhammar Qaddafy is hanging on to his freedom, at the moment, anyway, and his thug buddies in the Assad Administration are continuing to provide an outlet for his rants. The latest was curious; granted he is a committed believer in the Patriarchy, but his casual disparagement of half of the citizens of his bedraggled country- not to mention the globe- seems curious for a guy who kept a footlocker of portrait pics of former National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice.

Maybe it is also the casual way he stripped his people- all of them- of the liberties that ought to be the birthright of humankind.

I was thinking about that as I sipped a stiff vodka with Adam-the-Polish-Lifeguard. The Rules have slipped away at the pool deck, just as they have in Tripoli. I got my swim in, a full hour, and felt the chill of the night air on my wet skin. I went back upstairs and got some clothes on and returned with a thermos of pre-mixed V&Ts.

I don’t know how many rule violations I was contravening, and did not care. Neither did Adam, as he sipped from the red plastic cup I brought down for him. His last swimmer of the evening- the Malaysian guy from the 7th floor- was paddling slowly up and down the length of the pool, his body a dark bulk silhouetted by the bright pool light in the blue water.

I was relaxing at the lifeguard station- another violation- and we recapped the memorable and existential moments of Adam’s summer in America, and his sadness at leaving our little family. He is headed for Miami today, and then back to eastern Poland to resume his life.

The end of he season means the rules are dead, too, to be re-created with passion again in the spring as the various factions and constituencies of the pool deck attempt to organize our aquatic society in the image they desire.

I smoked openly. There was no one around to care, and Adam did not. We talked about his country and ours, and embraced when it was time for the padlock to go on the gate, and for our time together to end.

We documented the Swimmers with whom Adam spent most of his time this season in group photos: me, the irritating little Creole, the son of a Ukrainian Nazi, the Argentine, the original Clandestine Service Officer, the Doc, the Restaurateur and the Professor.

None of us, except the Creole, had tried to enforce their will on anyone else. I padded up the 50 steps to the fourth floor and looked out at the darkness from the balcony as Adam peddled away into the wide world. Before we parted, he showed me a photo of himself from his laptop taken in front of a massive public Soviet-era building in Lublin.

“Kay Gee Bee,” he said, drawing out the consonants for the acronym of the Committee for State Security. “I stop only briefly for picture.”

Apparently the memory of oppression is a lasting one, even for young people who could not possibly remember a time when the state security apparatus ran roughshod over the freedom of the people.

Accordingly, I was struck this morning by Timothy Egan’s piece in the electronic pages of the NY Times.

You know by now I have an uneasy relationship with the Gray Lady of Manhattan, but despite its manifold failings and gaping blind-spots, it serves as the touchstone of the rightly maligned Mainstream Media.

What set Timothy off to search for two fingers of whiskey, neat, was the coming Ken Burns series on Prohibition that will air on the other mother lode of modern morality, National Public Television.”

I did not watch Mr. Burn’s series on Baseball, which is something I may or may not get around to on DVD or whatever media might exist when I get to it. His latest project is on the Great Experiment in social engineering that somehow nagged to jam an intrusive government into the most private of places.

It gave rise to both organized and disorganized crime, of course, and amended the Constitution to abrogate the basic liberties contained in the Bill of Rights. With the passing of the 18th Amendment, the prohibitionists took away the right to make on of the most fundamental choices: what a citizen might put in their own body.

How that all came to happen in the Land of the Free is quite a story, and it has a compelling echo in what is going on today.  In fact, I would offer that that it is difficult to even use that phrase without air quotes. I mean, we have been stripped of so much in the interest of security that they must call them the whirling Founders now.

Timothy has a certain progressive sensibility, and I acknowledge the legitimacy of his concerns about the militant right and the implacable Tea Party tyrants: the fight against gay marriage, women’s choice, even the end of direct election of the US Senate. These all appear to be clear violations of our liberty, impositions directly on our freedom.

Interestingly, he does not address the petty tyrants of the TSA, the DEA, the IRS, the FDA, the EPA and the litany of three-letter agencies that want to outlaw foods, take away guns or unilaterally reduce carbon footprints regardless of the impact on society.

In the case of the ATF, the Bureau is actually arming the Narco-terrorists with automatic weapons, and permitting them to import cocaine in exchange for information on other Cartels.

It is amazing. Purely amazing.

When we were getting ready for the big trip to Detroit we explored the impact of Prohibition on the wide-open rip-roaring Motor City. I will be interested to see what Mr. Burns does with his documentary of the times.

It is hard to believe what happened, but we have gone so much further than that now.  As Timothy notes, “…the urge to dictate the private actions of citizens is a character trait that has never left the American gene pool.”

That urge is rising, all around us. I think I need a drink.

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Labor Day

The President is back from vacation, and focused on the urgent need to create jobs and grow our economy. I heard that he welcomes the opportunity to address a Joint Session of Congress next week. They say he is going to “challenge our nation’s leaders to start focusing 100 percent of their attention on doing whatever they can to help the American people.”

There was some controversy about the timing, since he first summoned the Joint Session to coincide to the minute with a Republican Presidential debate. I dunno. I am tired of the endless Campaign already, big black buses and the side-show in the Republican tent. I don’t know about you.

I assume the President (who is having his problems) is talking to Congress (which is having its problems). Speaker Boehner responded with a predictably political demurral, and now the Big Address about jobs and out future goes head to head with the Packers game.

I don’t know who the real target might be. Maybe he will speak over the heads of the recalcitrant legislators to us, the unwashed American People, or whoever it is that creates real jobs. Heck, I have a small business; maybe I should think about taking on a couple helpers.

I did not sleep in this morning, since I have to work, and happy to do so. I am taking the liberty of gushing to you a bit before I leap in the shower at seven-thirty to be at the Agency at Joint Base Bolling-Anacostia with a couple passengers by 0915 to deliver a Task Order proposal and meet with a Government Official.

I looked at the calendar (or rather, the digits on the system toolbar, and registered surprise). It is in fact September 1, and though Labor Day is late this year, it is still right around the corner.

I am screwed- we will all be working the weekend celebrating Work, and it is good to have it. My pal Charlie wrote yesterday about all the construction I saw walking to work, and said “If you really want to see the recession in Arlington go to afac.org – we provided groceries to 1498 families in need last week.”

He does good works for a living, and despite the artificial flush of construction here, I guess we still have our problems.

That is my line of work. Problems. The proposal on the re-compete on the Big Contract I manage is due to the government on the 12th, unless it is delayed. Better than even chances on that. Hope to find out more about that by tomorrow if they bother to answer the questions.

Worse, the season really changes as the pool closes here at my building Sunday night, when I plan to be grilling with Jake and a crew at College Park at the Terps game, which is the real mark of Fall.

The “Man Up!” crew will probably be alongside, dispensing shots of hard liquor, and the women in attendance will still be in shorts and tank tops, so that is the official start of the tail-gate season, which will end in bitter dark wintry blasts.

Missing the pool closing would break my ten-year streak of “first in and last out,” of the Big Pink Pool, since they padlock the enclosure then for the week-days. But no!

Thankfully, we will have some underemployed Americans on the pool deck for the two weekends after that, but Tuesday marks the beginning of the end for real summer, when the crystal clear waters beckon after a glass or two of Happy Hour White at the bar near my office where we hang out after work.

Some gentle readers have enquired about how things are going up there, and I have been a bit of denial about the whole thing, what with the constant demands of year-end task orders and the Big Proposal.

Suzanne from the Friendship Center called yesterday to express concern about a couple items.

Big Mama: The enhanced personal care is going fairly well, she is more accepting of it, anyway, and the anti-cradle cap (severe dandruff) shampoo appears to be making some progress in loosening the skin on her scalp. That is the good news; the bad news is that she is getting less engaged in what is going on around her, from what they have observed.

Lovely Rita turns on the Turner Classic Movie Channel for her, which is the only channel she likes in the afternoon. The upside is that she is holding her weight and appears to be eating, even if less interested in what is going on around her.

She also only answers the phone periodically.

As to Raven: he sleeps. There is also a rash of some kind on his back. Suzanne recommended a generic hydrocortisone cream to try to knock it back, and I called IV and had them add a tube to the weekly shopping list from Glenn’s. Suzanne described him as “frail.” No change, I think.

I called Big Mama right after and she knew me, and although I have noticed things getting a little more loopy than earlier this year, she seemed fine. She handed me off to Raven and I got a couple half-relevant responses to my line of bright banter. Status quo on that front.

I told Big Mama I would be coming up after the Big Proposal is submitted to the government, currently due on the 12th of September. That could change based on the earthquake/hurricane/plague of locusts here in the National Capital Region, but that is the working plan. It will be a fairly brief visit, with the intent to follow up on Annook’s last visit and keep things moving out of the garage and Dad’s office toward some other place.

I don’t expect things to really be put back in the box here until October, and we will be well on the way to the long cold season by then, and some real chills in Michigan. I volunteered to take Thanksgiving up there; my sister will have Christmas, and Brother Spike chimed in that he would try to fill in between.

So, a lot going on and no apparent answers. It is all in the command of someone else, which is no comfort, but they say “a change is as good as a vacation,” so who knows. I am just happy to have a job to work over Labor Day.

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com