Namazu

(Earthquakes and tsunamis are part of the Japanese psyche. Living as they do on islands floating on the grinding of the Pacific tectonic plates, both are common occurrences. Mystical explanations helped explain the apparently random and frightening events. This image shows the giant catfish, Namazu, whose wiggling tail causes earth tremors and giant waves. Namazu is mostly kept under control by the god Kashima. But when Kashima is tired or distracted, Namazu flicks his tail and rattles the earth.)

I may have more bile than I need this morning. It is quite a remarkable thing to have a once trusty appendage suddenly collapse on you. It defies all experience, suddenly looking up from the floor. But I think it will get better.

I hope so- t is remarkable to feel so good one moment and then be writhing in pain the next. There must be an explanation for it.  I am inclined to think it might have been the flicking of Namazu’s tail that catapulted me into this strange alternate reality.

You heard about the tornedo in Dexter, Michigan, last week. It was horrendous, though thank God no one died. My buddy Muhammed lives in Ann Abor, not far from the epicenter of the activity. He said: “We got good hail out of it.   Dexter had a lot of damage, probable F3 Tornados.  Weather is wild here!”

“It hit 75 and humid here today, what a contrast. Really awesome to see Nature at work! When the atmosphere, the ground (being mined and drilled), the thoughts of people are out of balance. Then, things get put back in balance.   The weather guy calls it physics.  Maybe it is.” He concluded with the observation that he thinks “it is Spirit at work.”

“As you know, it is easy to “dis” religion. But no one I have ever seen or talked to thinks about Science when a possible Tornado approaches,  people pray.  It works.  Let’s just say I was not standing on my front porch doing Physics problems 60 minutes ago.”

I completely agree- no atheists in the foxhole. But I was thinking the other day that hurricanes have diminished in number and intensity, even though our ability to track them has increased measurably. An early Spring here- with the usual attendant savagery of the change of season- is matched by a late and record-breaking winter in Alaska, and snows in Europe that range as far south as North Africa.

Is it La Nina? Sunspots or the lack of them? The regular precession of the wobbling earth?

I liked this explanation this morning, and I try on belief systems. As you know, the earth’s orbit around the sun is not quite circular. The closest approach of earth to the sun is called “perihelion,” and it now occurs in January, making northern hemisphere winters slightly milder. This change in timing of perihelion is known as the precession of the equinoxes, and occurs on a period of 22,000 years.

11,000 years ago, perihelion occurred in July, making the seasons more severe than today.

Add in the fact that our planet is not round. Our earthly hotel has an orbit that varies on cycles of 100,000 and 400,000 years, and this affects how important the timing of perihelion is to the relative strength of the seasons.

The combination of the 41,000 year tilt-cycle and a 22,000 year precession cycle affect the relative severity of summer and winter, and may control the growth and retreat of ice sheets. Cool summers in the northern hemisphere, where most of the earth’s land mass is located, appear to allow snow and ice to persist to the next winter, allowing the development of large ice sheets over hundreds to thousands of years.
Conversely, warmer summers shrink ice sheets by melting more ice than the amount accumulating during the winter.

That is the Milankovitch Theory, anyway, which was thought up by a Serbian scientist named Milutin Milankovitch back in 1920, which means he does not have a dog in the current argument about Anthropomorphic Global Warming, or its cousin, Catastrophic AGW.

The legion of things we do not understand about how climate and weather work- they are of course not the same- and whether the current theory on CO2 emissions is correct is something else. There are Greenhouse gases, of course. But what exactly is it they do? We have Dr. Mann’s hockey stick graphic. How does that work with everything else?

I listened to Dr. Michael Mann flacking his new book the other day on NPR, and he spent precious little time on anything like science. Apparently he solved all this stuff a long time ago, and he has moved on mostly to policy recommendations, something that the Ivory Tower has always prided itself on.

I am no “denier,” as the current vituperative discourse goes. Of course the climate is changing, and of course the greenhouse effect has been known for a long time. Look at the evidence: Global temperatures- to the extent that we have them without resorting to pine cones and buried logs from Siberia- have increased almost a full degree (Celsius) since 1840.

Dr. Mann says there is a tipping point, we may have hit it already, and urgent action is required. I got an idea of what that might be in the form of a thoughtful piece by a fellow named Gary Stix. He laid it out in the pages of Scientific American this morning. He is wrestling with some heavy stuff. He is calling for immediate and massive social change.

“Global prosperity now depends on our species’ success at a totally unfamiliar assignment: to “fit” our many billions of people on this small planet, with its finite resources and finite capacity to withstand pollution. The job will be very hard and will require sustained focus…

Behavioral economics and other forward-looking disciplines in the social sciences try to grapple with weighty questions. But they have never taken on a challenge of this scale, recruiting all seven billion of us to act in unison…. In principle, species-wide alteration in basic human behaviors would be a sine qua non, but that kind of pronouncement also profoundly strains credibility in the chaos of the political sphere….How do we create new institutions with enforcement powers way beyond the current mandate of the U.N.? Could we ensure against a malevolent dictator who might abuse the power of such organizations?”

Sounds like fun, but “Whoa,” I thought. “Of course not. The only inevitability in this warming or cooling globe is that the over-arching ego of the human species won’t change. The most powerful emotion is not that of reproduction, but to tell others what to do.

Oh, BTW, Gary is not a climate scientist, according to the home page of Scientific American. His job is to: “Commission, write, and edit features, news articles and Web blogs…. His area of coverage is neuroscience. He also has frequently been the issue or section editor for special issues or reports on topics ranging from nanotechnology to obesity.”

More help from another quarter- a neurological approach to AGW. Let’s get cracking, shall we?

Oh, yeah. What does the Milankovitch Theory say about future climate change? That good doctor claimed that orbital changes occur over thousands of years, and the climate system may also take thousands of years to respond to orbital forcing.

Is this urgent? Could it be that AGW actually fending off the next ice age? I dunno.

Dr. Mann and Gary Stix seem pretty worked up about it, and I guess I am, too. I am thinking that that pesky Namazu is working up for a quiver of his tail. Maybe we should all run to the other side of the tilted earth’s axis?

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Falling into Spring

(The Great House at Stratford Hall. A place out of time, falling forward into a future we cannot know. Yet. Photo Stratford.)

I did not fall out of bed with much enthusiasm, looking owlishly at the clock. I had to be on the Northern Neck by ten or so for the funeral, and I dressed accordingly: dark navy suit, white shirt, dark sweater vest and a black tie.

Yep. Somber. Quite a contrast to the magnificent way early Spring day that beckoned out there, with just wisps of fog left over from the nighttime conflict of temperatures. The Hubrismobile was cutting through that like a hot aerodynamic knife in short order.

Traffic was light but still irritating on the way south- it always is in I-95, regardless of the density or time of day. But not bad, and soon enough I was rolling through Fredericksburg, and off to the US-17 two-and-three-lane down to Tappahannock.

I was a little uncomfortable with attending the funeral- I had known the Admiral when he was at DIA at the end of his career and the middle of mine. Still, he had been retired a long time. Mac commented on it at Willow on Friday night, mentioning that Bob had been one of six Naval Academy Ensigns who had reported glumly to the Intelligence School at Anacostia, six more months of school after all their classmates were off training on sleek jets or dark ominous submarines.

He remembered Bob well, and he asked me to convey his respect and condolences to Marianne, the widow. The community was well represented: Jake and Ceclia and Tom and Claire and the Tolles and the Wiles. I looked for tips in the Visitation and the Mass that I might be able to use for Mom and Dad’s internment this summer. Good ideas are welcome when you are dealing with eternity.

I did not stay after the funeral for long, eager to be on the historic RT-3, the historic History Land Highway.

I have told you about it before, and won’t belabor the point, but these parts are the oldest English-settled fields in America, and you can occasionally see a building or a plantation as you whizz along that wonderful road.

I put the top down and my jacket in the trunk and luxuriated in the purple fuzz that garnished the fields, and the blossoms on the trees. The pick-up trucks, things for sale along the roadside and finally the silence of the woods. That is what I found when I veered off the main road to head back to Stratford, the one-time estate of Light Horse Harry Lee, the dashing Continental Army cavalry Commander and boyhood home of Robert E. Lee.

I took the boys through the place years ago, wanting to point out the cherubs on the cast iron fireplace that was the last thing little Bobbie saw after Harry ran the whole enterprise on the rocks and the family had to leave for more modest digs in Alexandria.

I did not want to tour the house again, but I was interested in motoring around the vast grounds that abut the Potomac was it broadens to join the Chesapeake Bay.

I had not seen the rolling tobacco road, or the view from the bluffs where the Lees had directly shipped the sotweed to England on their own ships, from their own long wharf.

(Reconstructed gristmill. The Miller was a slave. Photo Stratford.)

That was all gone, swept away in a massive hurricane more than a century ago. They rebuilt the gristmill, and cleared the old millpond. There was no one there. I snapped some acceptable pictures, and checked out the visitor’s center, and was on the road again, headed for the strip malls and traffic of Fredericksburg.

That is where things started to go wrong. Oh, the weather was good enough, and once the ten miles of congestion was behind, the road into Culpeper County across the now-placid killing fields of Chancellorsville and The Wilderness was inviting.

The farm was intact. I collected a week or two worth of trash from the mailbox and started to take the bags into the car. I was wearing sunglasses, prescription ones of course, and with arms full, and I quite missed the ottoman in the dimness of the room in front of the easy chair.

My left foot did not, of course, and I had one of those suspended-time moments as I went ass-over-tea-kettle. There was an excruciating pain in my left thigh and it was not done yet, since I knew that there was the coffee table coming.

It arrived a milli-second later, as did a glass candlestick and a souvenir Coors ashtray that had managed to stay in one piece since college. Well, it managed to stay that way until that very moment.

Have you experienced sharp stabbing pain lately? I must have been lost in it for a time. I was chanting the F-bomb as I slowly focused on something red in front of my eyes. It was the stub of a candle that had come out of the candlestick when it hit me on the head. Shards of the Coors ashtray were around my head.

The pain was enough to cause my diaphragm to quiver. The cursing helped, and in time the more intense pain diminished to a steady searing ache.

I gathered myself slowly together, and managed to turn on my belly and then, cautiously to all fours. It was a bit of a trick to get on the couch, but it seemed nothing was broken. I had contemplate, briefly, the idea that I might have a broken femur and be there on the floor and significantly screwed.

Not so. The pain seemed to ebb, and I wondered if I could walk. I got to the vertical and took some trial steps. It hurt, but I could move. I sat down again, and looked at the wreckage on the floor.  Some of it I could reach while seated, and other bits I could move with my still operative right leg.
I was more than a little rattled, and more than a little alarmed. Ibupropin and vodka seemed like the appropriate prophylaxes, and maybe finding that cane I brought back from Michigan.

It was in the course of the quest for those things that I asked too much of the left leg and it collapsed on me. More pain, more blasphemy as mantra. I had to figure out a way to get up again, and back to the couch. This was going to require some thought, I thought, and so it did.

Using the loveseat, I discovered I could gradually rise on the good leg, letting the pain from the other determine the angle of attack.

I went down again while trying to put some dinner together, and then I resolved to stay on the couch until the light came up and see if anything got better.

Sleep was slight and intermittent. The light came, and some farm vehicles came down the road. It was time to see if I could find that cane, and see if I could get myself back in the car and get north again.

I will let you know how that goes. In the meantime, I do recommend touring Stratford Hall, if you happen to be on the Northern Neck of Virginia.

The history of the place- I visited the slave burial ground yesterday- reinforces the notion that life can be painfully short and lacking in dignity. It is useful to have to put things in context if you are flat on the floor, and have only the ceiling to contemplate.

(The bluff above Light Horse Harry’s grist mill on the broad Potomac. Photo Stratford.)

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Staff Cars

We were talking about Guam and slowly lowering the levels of the liquids in the glasses in front of us. Mac had a golden Bell’s Lager, from Kalamazoo, Michigan, and I was working on a pale white wine from  South Africa that Kevin the Sommelier had picked out as the Happy hour loss-leader.

We may have been on Guam at the moment, but were headed somewhere else, I was pretty sure. Jasper the Best Bowler on that island was behind the bar with Liz-S.

“Where were we?” I asked owlishly. Mac was getting to the three-quarters mark on his first beer. “Your quarters there on Nimitz Hill?

“It was a two-story Quonset Hut.  It was a dun-colored building. Our room was at the end corner, closest to the HQ. We had in in-room head, Hal Leathers was my roommate, as I have told you before.

“Sounds civilized,” I remarked.

Mac smiled. “A bottle of Three Feathers whiskey was a couple bucks at the Wine Mess. Cigarettes were ten cents a pack.”

“What kind?”

“I smoked Camels  back then . When filters came in, I switched to Winstons.”

“Winston tastes good, like a cigarette should,” I said, quoting the old wheeze.

“It was sort of racy at the time. The ungrammatical clunker in the middle was supposed to broaden the appeal of the brand,” said Mac. It worked on me, anyway.” He wrinkled his brown.

“That would have been in the early ‘50s. 1954 maybe? Anyway, Winston vaulted to number two behind Pell Mells, and finally was the top brand in America by the 1960s.”

“I will never forget when the Marlboro Man died. I remember the folks smoked Pell Mells at one time, but Dad wound up as a Kent guy, but Mom liked Chesterfields. She used to send me up the block to Olsen’s Market to buy them for her.

“You quit in the early ‘70s, right?” Mac nodded. “And you still have COPD today.”

“Cautionary tale, Vic. Do what you want, but you ought to think about quitting yourself.”

“Yessir. Everyone tells me that. So, let’s see:  Nick Russell was your best pal on Guam?”

“Yes, he was a Supply Corps Officer, like Dick Nixon. Interesting story about that- I was teaching at the Intelligence School at Anacostia, and Nixon had stayed in the reserves. It was a requirement that Reserve officers take correspondence courses. I got to grade Mr. Nixon’s when he was Vice President.”

“How were they?”

“Professional. I don’t remember much about them.”

“I don’t suppose failing him would have altered anything.”

“No,” I don’t suppose so.”

“So, when you came back from Guam, everyone was trying to get out as fast as possible. Your Boss Eddie Layton was back testifying. You worked for CAPT Frankel, right?” I flipped through a few pages of notes. “Wendy Furness was getting rid of everything at JICPOA, and then he came up to relieve me. That was about six months after the war ended. Did you still have the Frankenstein car with the borrowed engine?”

“No, I got rid of that heap when I went to Guam. CAPT Frankel just lived up Makalapa Drive, and he let me use the Staff Plymouth.”
“What was that like?”

“Great. The Navy could get tires and gas, so it was a deal. The Army also used the Plymouth, but they painted their cars olive drab. Navy mostly used them for the Flag motor pool, or Assistant Chief of Staff cars. The Navy  P11 Plymouth was mostly stock, with some chrome. Ours had an L-head 6 cylinder engine with a three speed transmission. It took a good foot on the clutch to prevent the car from “bucking” on the up-shift. “

“So what did you do at the office in those days? There obviously was no threat to worry about.”

“No, the war might have been over, but we had a ton of stuff to pack up, shred or get rid of.  That pretty much summed up the task.  Well, that and the odd party at the Junior Officer BOQ in Makalapa. I remember one we had with some Navy Nurses and we drank Grasshoppers. We all got pretty tight, and lost the car. My pal Nick had to drive everyone home. I honestly don’t know where the staff car wound up, but we found it the next day.”

“In 1978, some pilots from my first squadron borrowed a staff car on a port visit to Busan, Korea, and the NCIS was hunting the culprits across Asia. The ones who took the car got thrown in HACQ* by the Skipper and they missed one of the great port visits in history at Pattaya Beach, Thailand.” I beamed at the recollection.” I wound up in Bangkok with the advance detail of the Shore Patrol, which I got away from as soon as possible. Patpong Road was indeed a place to make a hard man humble.”

Mac did not recognize the reference to the song, but he got the drift.  “The staff car had suicide doors, by the way,” he said. “The rear door hinges were set behind the seat on the rear doors.

The door locks were forward.  We called them “suicide doors” since if they were opened while the car was moving they would swing open, sometimes pulling the passenger out of the seat and hurling them into the street. Not good if you are hauling the Admiral around.”

“I remember suicide doors on the old Lincoln Continentals,” I said. “You and Nick didn’t lose any nurses that night, did you?”

“Not that I am aware of,” said Mac, taking a sip of Bell’s.

“Did anyone get lucky?” I asked.

“Only you would ask, Vic.”

“Well, you weren’t married yet, and I need a chapter on Sex and the Single Officer in the War War II Years.”

“Not from me you don’t,” he said with a laugh. “There are some things a gentleman does not discuss even after all these years.”
“All right. So, after six months in peacetime Hawaii, were you restless?”

“You bet. I wanted to stay in the Navy; we had just won the biggest war in history; I had just made Lieutenant Commander. The Pacific Fleet could afford to be generous. If the right job was out there, so they cut me permissive TDY orders to go back to Washington and poke around and see what was possible. If I found something, the understanding was that I did not have to go back to Hawaii to formally detach.”

“But that gets us to a place we have been before, back at Main Navy in Washington and a chance encounter with Admiral Forrest Sherman that changed the course of your life.”

“Indeed it did.” Liz-S topped me off with some more South African white, and brought another Bell’s for the Admiral. He likes two, just two, and that suits him just fine. I just soak the stuff up, and I am pleased that the Bluesmobile does not have suicide doors, not that I can drive that well from the back seat.

* House arrest, confined to quarters.

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Freedom of Speech

It was a great day for weather and a mixed day for my personal interaction with the First Amendment. We had low eighties and sun in Arlington, and people were literally floating along the sidewalks with goofy grins, welcoming the coming warmth.

I had to take the Bluesmobile to the repair shop yesterday to have the air conditioning fixed- again. I have run the numbers, and recent winter voyage repairs have run into a few thousand dollars- or the equivalent of a fairly hefty new car payment.

We may be on a tipping point, automotively speaking, and I thought about it on the hike from garage up and over the hill to the West Falls Church Metro stop. It was a pure delight to be on foot in the sunshine, and though I had left my smokes on the driver’s seat of the police cruiser, otherwise it was hard to feature a better day.

As I walked through the Kiss N’ Ride lot I was ambushed and interviewed by a crew from a Polish TV network. They asked me about Goldman-Sachs and the dramatic resignation of that 33-year-old broker.

I said: “Those assholes were criminals and they should have been lynched. I said that long before the Occupy Crowd did.” Then I waved and walked away.

Later, back at the office, I was listening to the noted scientist Michael Mann, the guy who devised the “Hockey Stick” depiction of climate doom. He was so sanctimonious that I actually called my local NPR outlet.

I told the screener I just wanted to talk to the self-righteous jerk on the air. They hung up on me.

A mixed day for free speech, I thought, but so far we can say what we want at the Willow Bar.

Mac agreed to come out and enjoy the weather, and he was seated near the apex of the Amen Corner as I finished the dodge-em run crossing Fairfax Drive at rush hour.

“It was Nard Jones,” said Mac triumphantly. “LTJG Nard Jones.”

“Who was?” I said, hanging my briefcase by the handle from one of the little hooks positioned under the bar.

“The PAO who I worked for at the 13th Naval District. He was the spokesman for the commander, RADM Charles Freeman.”

“Oh, right,” I said, fishing out my pen and notebook. I flipped to the page where our last conversation had petered out.

“I lost a bet to Nard. I bet that Singapore would never fall to the Japs.”

“Did Nard ever collect?” I asked.

“No, the Gibraltar of the East did not surrender until the middle of February, 1942. I was already on the way to Pearl Harbor then. Nard was the son of the publisher of the Oregonian, so I doubt if he needed the money.”

“OK,” I said. “Let me warm up by going through your tours and see if we stumble across anything new.”

“Fine by me,” said Mac. “The surrender of Singapore was a stunner. We assumed that when the war came we would have a cake-walk over the Imperial forces. We significantly underestimated them. We talked about that at Elliott Carlson’s lecture about his book at the National Archives this afternoon.”
“Oh, that’s right,” I said. “How was it?”

“There were more than a hundred people there to listen and ask questions about Joe Rochefort, our Boss at Station HYPO.”

“That is a great turn-out,” I said. “Wish I had been able to make it.”
“Afterwards there was a book signing. Elliot and I both signed copies for people who bought the book.”

“Oh, yeah, you wrote the introduction, didn’t you?” Mac nodded. “The fall of Singapore was the largest capitulation in British history- 80,000 surrendered in the city after a battle that went on for just seven days.”

(Surrender at Singapore, 15 February 1942. Photo Imperial War Museum.)

“Damn,” I said.

“They joined 50,000 who had already surrendered in Malaysia. It was incredible.”
“How many survived the war?” I asked.

“They say the ones from Changi Jail did better than most. Overall, about 27% of Allied POWS died.”

I wrinkled my forehead, trying to do the math. “That amounts to something like 37,000 dead. Might have been better to fight it out.”
“Maybe. But like I said, we underestimated the Japanese. That did not last long.”
“I don’t imagine anyone asked the troops about it, did they?”
Mac shrugged. “There was not a great deal of freedom of speech in the ranks, and then, after the surrender there was none at all.”

I nodded in agreement and smiled at Liz-with-an-S and pointed in the general direction of my tulip glass as she passed, bringing Jon-no-H a replacement for his iced-tea and vodka.  “Ok,” I said. Now, let’s start with your tours after the war….
We went a long way down the road that day. Free to talk about whatever we wanted. I will have to catch up with you on the rest tomorrow.

(Jon-no-H’s raspberry vodka iced-tea. Photo Socotra.)

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Believers

 

(Science Project.)

 

I thank God that I am retired, and have the liberty to pursue my own delusions and not those of others. I got a request to comment on the Navy’s commitment to bio-fuels, demonstrated recently by a demonstration on a decommissioned Spruance-class destroyer, the ex-Paul F. Foster (EDD-964).

 

The ship is remarkable- it has been reconfigured to provide the Navy with an at-sea, remotely controlled, engineering test and evaluation platform without the risk to personnel or operational assets.

 

Foster received approximately 20,000 gallons of a 50-50 blend of an algae-derived, hydro-processed algal oil and petroleum F-76 from the Defense Fuel Supply Point at Naval Base Point Loma and steamed to Port Hueneme up the coast. 100% of propulsion power and 50 percent of service power came from the algal oil/F-76 fuel blend.

 

The demonstration was intended to showcase the viability of biofuels, and is one of the signature projects of Mr. Obama, who had a remarkable and surreal soliloquy on the concept as gas prices began to spike.

 

According to program sponsors: “The fuel burned just like the traditional fuel we have been burning for years. We could not tell the difference. The biggest success is that a Navy ship with engines identical to those in commissioned warships operated successfully on an overnight transit with the alternative fuel without a glitch in anything. Operationally, it was absolutely a success.”

 

There is the matter of cost, of course, and the stock of algal-derived fuel costs twice as much as the regular stuff, and takes 350 gallons of fresh water to produce a single gallon of fuel, and the bio-engineered strain of algae could escape and wipe out normal strains and destroy the eco-system, but those small matters aside, the project shows great promise.

 

I mentioned to my pal that I was not in the never-land side of the acquisition process when I was on active duty, but noted that those in uniform normally salute and move out when directed to do so by their civilian masters.

 

The orders- from both the Bush and Obama administrations- were to examine the uses of alternative fuels in Naval ships, Army combat vehicles and Air Force Jets.

 

President Bush famously opined that our energy needs could be met with weed grasses; President Obama is in the grip of a powerful hallucination that holds that algae can meet our energy sufficiency needs. He seems to have backed off corn-based biofuels, since the food diverted from what is necessary to feed a world population, and is grown with fossil-fuel intensive agricultural practices.

 

This latest demonstration indicates it is possible to operate naval ships on the blended product.

 

Previously, high performance jets have done the same. Why anyone in their right mind would want to do so when natural gas and domestic crude reserves are soaring due to new extraction technologies is frankly beyond me.

 

Corn-based Biofuels only make sense in the context of the Iowa Caucuses, and their criticality in the Presidential election cycle. Otherwise, it is a fun science project that leaves me with a sense of “so what.” Not cost efficient, heedless of better uses for crops, and important only to those who want green regardless of the lower performance of the product.

 

It is sort of curious, the mandate to accept things that do not make a great deal of objective sense. It comes from higher truths and value systems that seem incompatible with reality, as I understand it. The dichotomy is starting to make me a little dizzy.

 

There is a lot of that going around- maybe it is the increase of the trace gas Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere.

 

I got a dose of that in the from Afghanistan today. The controversy over the Koran appears to have much longer legs than the murders. As one Mullah was quoted in the NY Times this morning: “How can you compare the dishonoring of the Holy Koran with the martyrdom of innocent civilians? The whole goal of our life is religion.”

 

I don’t think our leaders understood what we were getting into at the beginning of this decade long adventure, nor the consequences of it on a much-deployed force. The empiric evidence contradicts the headlines: things are much better in terms of good order and discipline with a more mature cohort in the armed forces, and that atrocities that occur are much rarer than they could have been.

 

Maybe that makes them more horrifying and embarrassing when they occur at all.

 

I had not thought about that criminal loser Lt. William Calley in quite a while, though I did today as I marveled that the murders are causing less local controversy than the destruction of the Korans what were being used to pass handwritten notes between prisoners.

 

Still, it is all about perception, and the talking heads don’t have a clue as to the nature of the military culture. When my son got his commission, I realized what a hot-house the current edition of This Man’s Navy is- everyone at OCS appeared to be boosting up from the enlisted ranks, and it is very much a closed-loop system.

 

That is not what one would like in a force that is intended to protect the larger nation and its purported values, but that is the force that we have, if I can mangle the quote from Uncle Don Rumsfeld.

 

The Draft was a nasty bit of business, but one way or another, we were all in it. There was a sense of a shared obligation to the cohort that was subject to it, even if we chose to ignore it or flee altogether.

 

It might be a concept whose time has come round again- it could even be useful in reigning in the inclination for the casual deployment of an extremely lethal and pliant force.

 

I get the feeling, based on the very public squabbling of a plurality of the Red Right and the tone-deaf self-satisfied arrogance of the Blue Left that our social fabric is fraying.

 

Maybe it has always been like this and I was just fat dumb and happy.

 

Now, I am just fat and dumb.

 

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com

 

 

 

 

The Russians Are Coming

(Knox Henry, WW II Veteran, is notified he is the new mayor of Athens, TN. 1946. Photo AP)

I was shaking my head over the news this morning. Apparently the Taliban Wing of the Republican Party triumphed in the party primaries in two of our more eccentric States. More power to them; Mitt still took more delegates than Rick or Newt, so until I hear otherwise, I think he is the one to take on The One.

Should be an interesting summer and fall, but there is going to be a lot going on out in the country.

The Russians are coming. Boris and Natasha put a contract on the property next door to Refuge Farm. Natasha announced that the next steps are the inspections and the appraisal. That could only give her more leverage against the seller and work to their advantage. The current owner has had the place on the market for six months without a taker, so this is a great thing.

I am thrilled- it is going to be very cool to have people I know and trust on the other side of the fence rather than a renter with a meth lab.

Natasha sent me a note saying “I didn’t think she had been serious.”

I wrote back and said “the East is Red!” and that I was thinking about re-christening my place “Kaliningrad.”

She said she was going to tell Boris that an appropriate name for her dacha was going to be “Proportional Response.”

I remember it as what we called “analogous response,” which was a tit-for-tat bit of nuclear brinksmanship by the Reagan Administration against the Kremlin over intermediate-range missiles. It provided one of the strangest professional days of my life, and nuclear submarines in all sorts of unusual places. I mean, when you go to work contemplated first strike issues and the problem of unambiguous warning without proof by dual-phenomenology verification, you know you are in terra incognita.

I am wondering if this is the start of an arms race?

Speaking of which, I lost track of the big Spring gun show that features hundreds of dealers at the Dulles Expo Center out in the wilds of Fairfax (or Loudoun?) Counties. I went to a few over the last couple years, but it is the strangest place to visit in America, with the possible exception of Wyoming.

I have decided I don’t like going unless I have a requirement, which I think I completed with the little .22 automatic that enables me to practice without pouring beaucoup bucks into the larger (and much more expensive) ammunition. I may have to rethink that.

My agents report that the place was a madhouse: the vast lot was filled with cars and they could not get close enough to park without a major hike. The trek to the building revealed people putting purchases in the trunk, and turning around to go back in to make more purchases.

The Gun Show appeared to be a land-office business. Add to that a wonderful (but quite surreal) video clip I got from my Left Coast Girlfriend, who forwards some interesting things. This one is apparently a trailer for a Hollywood production about the “Battle of Athens,” an obscure but electrifying revolt against corruption conducted by WW II Vets who mobilized against electoral fraud:

http://voxvocispublicus.homestead.com/Battle-of-Athens.html <http://voxvocispublicus.homestead.com/Battle-of-Athens.html%C2%A0> ;

I was so intrigued by the events in the trailer that I did some research. There is commentary about the revolt in the national press by no less a luminary than Eleanor Roosevelt. There are also accounts of other insurrections, and a minute-by-minute account of the battle. You can find it yourself at this link:

http://constitution.org/mil/tn/batathen_press.htm <http://constitution.org/mil/tn/batathen_press.htm>

It is fascinating, though I am also not quite sure what to think about it. Certainly it has a strong Second Amendment flavor, and clear reference to the First, and the loud-and-clear message that sometimes armed rebellion is necessary to preserve liberty.

The dramatized version is not a bad depiction of the real and harrowing events down in McMinn County, Tennessee. Obviously the folks at the Dulles Expo Center would agree with them. I sided with the Vets, of course, against the corrupt and abusive local government.

Still, it strikes me that if the Occupy Whatever movement started to exercise their own Second Amendment Rights I would not be that happy about it. I had my sons at the range a few years ago and there were two guys who had gang-banger ink showing blazing away.

“Takes all kinds,” I explained. “The Constitution says so.” The boys looked at me with curiosity.

I dunno. Do you?

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Safety Catch

(Scene from Kandahar. Photo Gulf news.)

“… and the last thing I’ll stand for is ideas to get the better of me! I know that rubbish from 1918…, fraternity, equality, freedo, beauty and dignity! You gotta use the right bait to hook ’em. And then, you’re right in the middle of a parley and they say: Hands up! You’re disarmed…, you republican voting swine! — No, let ’em keep their good distance with their whole ideological kettle of fish…. I shoot with live ammunition! When I hear the word culture…, I release the safety on my Browning!”

SCHLAGETER: “What a thing to say!”
THIEMANN: “It hits the mark! You can be sure of that.”

SCHLAGETER: “You’ve got a hair trigger.”

—Hans Johst’s Nazi Drama “Schlageter.” Translated by Dr. Hans-Dieter Heinz, Stuttgart, 1984.

So, just when we thought it couldn’t get worse, it did. The American staff sergeant who calmly executed sixteen Afghan men, women and children is coming out of the mists of the rage that permitted him to slip the mental safety-catch that has been instilled in us by the strict social compact of our society.

Living and fighting in a society that is wired differently than ours, the 38-year-old married father-of-two sniper- think about that for a minute- went rogue.  They tell us he is from Washington State, or at least was assigned there, at Joint Base Lewis-McChord.

I have been sampling the reaction around the world via the BBC and my network of personal informants. From the professionals, the horrid story comes with a hint of the salacious- perhaps I am too sensitive to it, but I can hear the unstated message of prim superiority from the talking heads who never, ever would find themselves in such a place where such evil could happen.

The sergeant reportedly had three deployments to Iraq prior to arriving in Kandahar. Reportedly he suffered a brain trauma due to an roadside IED blast. The talking heads are back and forth about that.

In the Sergeant’s time in country before he transitioned from warrior to murderer, host Afghan nationals have turned weapons on ISAF troops and killed them. An American squad orchestrated a string of murders against civilians completely unrelated to the fight with the Taliban.

It is savagery unrelated to the causes of the war. It is Afghanistan. It is killing because that is what happens there, where the safety-catch of society has been abraded away by what is now the rule for everyone now of fighting age- more than a full generations of constant war. Every young man is wired to full auto.

Commentators all agree that more must be done to train soldiers; and that deployment of troops must be carefully thought out.

General S.L.A. Marshall made a turn on one of the commentaries. SLAM, as he was known, was the father of a really cute red-head classmate in high school. He was an icon of the people who tried to figure out how citizens who were sent to war actually behaved- a sort of bridge to the Greatest Generation whose work was being re-examined in the context of the increasingly unpopular conflict in South East Asia.

In his book “Men Against Fire,” he claimed that 75 percent of troops in the Second World War weren’t able to fire at the enemy. His money quote reverberates this way:

“The American (comes) from a civilization in which aggression, connected with the taking of life, is prohibited and unacceptable….The fear of aggression has been expressed to him so strongly and absorbed by him so deeply and pervasively — practically with his mother’s milk — that it is part of the normal man’s emotional make-up. This is his great handicap when he enters combat. It stays his trigger finger even though he is hardly conscious that it is a restraint upon him.”

SLAM was able to dine out for years on the perception that some sort of training was necessary to enable maximum Army lethality. The reality on the ground in Asia, though, did not bear out the conclusions of the WW II study: according to research in the field, everyone who had a weapon seemed perfectly capable of using it without compunction.

SLAM’s views are back with this slaughter, as we try to sort out the implications of one of the good guys going rogue.

They will try the Staff Sergeantfor murder. The Secretary of Defense has already said so. This is going to be much worse than the rampage of Major Hassan down at Fort Hood, though in the end the charges will be the same, and could result in the death penalty.

I was done with the spin. I turned back to clear off the email queue before going to the day job. I clicked on one from the Philippines, and more precisely, the Club Level of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Manila:

“Am sitting here with about a dozen G.I.’s talking about the impacts of the recent killings, the Marines pissing on the corpses and the Koran burning…we all know it is bad…but this is the team that is carrying the load. They are Great Americans…who absolutely LIVE for our collective national security…interesting with these Army types…they all have served multiple tours in CENTCOM.”

I wrote back immediately. The real implication of these killings has yet to emerge. The consequences of continuous war are repeated deployments. My friend said that the current deployments of our Carrier Strike Groups are averaging 8-9 months now, and when they return to home port they are expected to deploy again in as little as six months.

“This is nothing compared to what the ground pounders are enduring,” he wrote, and I checked. In the era of perpetual war, Army combat brigades have spent as few as 18 months in the States between deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. Many soldiers doubt civilians can understand the pressures they face, and they see a widening gap between life in the Army and what they call “the outside world.”

The wars have been consuming the tiny portion of the nation’s youth who wear the uniform for a decade. And yet horrors like this have been mercifully few.

“This is not the force for perpetual war,” I pecked. “But course, it may that only a force like the one we have will shoulder the Nation’s burden without complaint.”

They are the latest Greatest Generation, and I am very proud of them. But God, what have we ordered them to do?

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com <http://www.vicsocotra.com>

 

Closing Time

(Soviet Forces withdraw from Afghanistan, 1989. Photo courtesy BBC.)

Man, the word was depressing this morning. I have been doing a slow boil anyway since the revelations of the burning of some book at Bagram Air Base began to spread, and the subsequent murders of ISAF personnel by aggrieved Afghan soldiers.

It was intolerable, if regrettable. I mean, other books are burned in all sorts of places without causing public acts of slaughter, but we are supposed to ignore that and be more sensitive. That is one of the aspects of this struggle that is so frustrating. We are expected to ignore obvious things and believe the impossible.

Maybe that façade is cracking. In fact, there appears to be an outbreak of insensitivity, first with the Marines who appeared to be disrespecting the corpses of fighters who had only moments before been attempting to kill them.

This latest though is as horrific as it is unbelievable. The word this morning is that a US Army Sergeant left the confines of his Forward Operating Base and systematically killed sixteen Afghan civilians, nine of them children, and four of them girls under the age of six.

Investigations are in progress in the three villages in the Panjwai district of Kandahar Province where the savagery occurred. After going door-to-door, the NCO allegedly gathered most of the bodies together and attempted to burn them.

Sounds like the man snapped, though I am prepared to wait for the results of the investigation.

All the predicable stuff went along with the awful news, which somehow is much worse than a drone strike going awry with collateral damage. Maybe there is something truly evil about the intention to murder that adds to the revulsion.

President Hamid Karzai condemned the attacks. Both President Obama and SECDEF Panetta are apologizing, as they have about everything else in the last few months, but this is something that is so far beyond the pale that it calls into question everything we know about this war and what we have done to all the people involved.

First reports suggest the Sergeant was on his first deployment to Afghanistan, but has deployed to Iraq several times.

It makes me wonder if we are systematically breaking the force. This struggle is the longest in our nation’s history, though not the bloodiest. Perhaps the all-volunteer force is not the one that we should have ground up in the discretionary war in Iraq. Perhaps the more modest investment in blood and treasure in Afghanistan should have been more carefully examined; after all, I recall Mr. Rumsfeld proclaiming it was all over a decade ago.

During the Soviet occupation about a million Afghans lost their lives as the Red Army tried to impose control over a proud and fractious tribal population. The Red Army lost many times the people who have died in the ranks of the Americans- as many as 15,000 Soviet soldiers died in their decade-long episode of The Great Game.

Confronting a bleak landscape abroad and at home, Soviet authorities hailed their withdrawal from Afghanistan as a victory, not having much choice.

I suspect we are about on the brink of doing that, too. With the prospects of additional missions being dropped on a fragile force elsewhere, we might want to take a breather, wouldn’t you think?

I remember the consequences. It was 1989. I remember it well. I was on cruise, or getting ready to go, just as I was on cruise when the Russians went in for a short and decisive military operation that did not turn out that way. We were occupied with the Iranians and our hostages at our embassy. The Russians figured we were too distracted to do much, and they were right.

But then, a decade later, I remember the statement from then-Afghan President Sayid Mohammed Najibullah: “I express my appreciation to the people and government of the Soviet Union for all-round assistance and continued solidarity in defending Afghanistan.”

I don’t know if current President Hamid Karzai views things the same way, but I suspect there are those who are thinking that we should just declare victory now.

But of course, the civil war continued following the Soviet withdrawal. The lap-dog Najibullah government collapsed of its own weight in 1992 and provided a vacuum that helped breed the bacillus that caused 9/11, among other murderous outrages.

I wonder what is next? I think we are about at the end of this particular mountain road. Closing time, Gentlemen.

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

ERNIE (and Mac’s) WAR

This Spring Ahead nonsense with the clocks is kicking my butt. The computer is telling me it is past noon- and that is nonsense. Why do we not have the courage to leave the sun alone? Who is it in Congress that believe themselves as King Canute, waving not at the ocean in this case, but the hurtling blazing orb of Old Sol?

Vanity, vanity, thy name is Congress. Or something. I felt jet lagged right at the dinner table where the laptop lives.

I tried to look at my notes from the last session with Mac at Willow and they are not making much sense. Topically, the conversation veered from:
The Gruyere Cheese puffs, and the crackling Peking Duck pancakes, a nurses report from INOVA Fairfax that revealed nothing wrong, 50 miles covered in the champagne Jaguar, gall bladders, fried chicken done to perfection early in the last century, the obits of two men I did not know, the status of traffic on I-66 eastbound, and what the six fire trucks and twenty-five police cruisers were up to, Section 66 of the Arlington National Cemetery, and in-ground placement of urns therein, the deficiencies of the original Columbarium at the National Cemetery, the status of Katia’s job offer from outside the food, beverage and hospitality industry; whether the consolidation of the weather guessers, Cyrppies, Public Affairs and Intelligence Officers in the Corps of Information Dominance was ‘back to the future,’ since Mac had started as a special investigator who did PAO stuff at the Naval District in Seattle in 1941.

I was not making much progress on my happy hour white, since we were all over the map. “So you were really a Public Affairs officer before you were a codebreaker, right?”

Mac noded. “It was part of the Office of Naval Intelligence,” he said. “I guess they thought it was all information and pretty much the same thing.”

“Maybe they do again,” I said. I finally asked Mac about Chester Nimitz, the phlegmatic Texan who led the Navy’s drive west across the Pacific.

Mac was much more focused on this, and it was a little unusual, since the mythic figure of the Fleet Admiral normally was part of the backdrop to his war.

Mac furrowed his brow, attempting to distill the legend from the man. “Well,” he said slowly. “He took care of his Enlisted guys- the ones in the motor pool and the boat detail for the Flag Barge.” He went on to describe his conduit to the troops, who was a Mustang Lieutenant who had enormous impact on the staff and the way it worked.

I made a note to find a roster of the staff from 1945, and see if I could track down who the officer had been, since he showed up again as an agent of influence who secured the Junior Officer BOQ across from the HQ after the war- where the chapel is now. It was a rare name that Mac did not remember, or did after I was scribbling something else. I made a note to check it out and ask more questions.

Mac was still contemplating the Public Affairs question. “It was interesting to see who came forward to Guam. Like Ernie Pyle, the legendary war correspondent.”

“He was the most famous correspondent of the War- probably more than Edward R. Murrow. Did you ever meet him?”

“Oh yes. He was on Guam before the invasion. Ernie was shot by a Japanese machine gunner on Ie Shima, Okinawa.”

“There is quite a display for him in the Hall of Correspondents in the Pentagon, and I would stop and read the panel display when I spent more time than I wanted walking to and from press conferences with The Joint Staff. Ernie was known as the soldier’s correspondent, according to the display. Did you ever have drinks with him?”

That is the way of these conversations- I had no inkling whatsoever that in the course of this session we would stumble across the most iconic and tragic media figures of the war in Europe and the Pacific, two theaters whose paths seemed rarely to cross.

“Not true,” said Mac. “Don’t forget Admiral Sir Bruce Fraser, F-R-A-S-E-R. He came to the Pacific to command all British naval forces after commanding the group that sank the Nazi battleship Scharnhorst off Norway.”

“Point taken, Sir,” I said, and that led to a discussion of the wild four-day party that started on board Cagey Five, the battleship HMS King George V.

“But you actually met Ernie Pyle? That is incredible.”

The Admiral shrugged. “He was there, it was a small island. He had sort of prickly relations with the Navy, since he thought the sailors had it pretty cushy compared to the combat infantry of the ETO. He was a plain-spoken SOB and he wore his heart on his sleeve.”

“He might not have thought that if he saw the results of a running gunfight like the battle for the Slot,” I said indignantly. “I just read Neptune’s Fury, Jim Hornfischer’s account of the slaughter.”

Mac looked on with the cool perspective that only ten decades on the planet can give you, and know you are the last man standing from all the formations so long ago. “It is one thing to read about it and quite another to live it. Ernie had a point. He got bombed with our guys by the Army Air Corps at St. Lo, and was badly shaken. His heart was always with the riflemen of that war. In 1944, he wrote a column urging that soldiers in combat get “fight pay” just as airmen were paid “flight pay.”

Congress passed a law authorizing $10 a month extra pay for combat infantrymen. The legislation was called ‘The Ernie Pyle Bill.’ That was the mark of the depth of fondness the troops had for him.”

“Sounds like Bill Mauldin and his Willie and Joe cartoons.”

“Close enough,” said Mac. “And you can throw Andy Rooney in that group, too. Andy was one of the angry young men, then. Ernie was an old man, though- he was 45 when he was shot. I remember thinking about that at the time- I was still in my mid-twenties and he was old enough to be my father.”

“Do you recall how you heard about his death? Did you have to clear the dispatches or the pictures before they went back to CONUS?”

Mac shook his head. “Not that I recall. There was a picture I might have seen at the time, but it never was published. I think it was the middle of April in ’45. He went from Guam to Okinawa to cover the action. These days, you would say he was ‘imbedded’ with the 77th Infantry Division.”

“He took all the risks that the grunts did,” I said. “That is a commitment to the mission.”

“Yes, I think so. He was riding in a jeep with the CO on an infantry regiment and a couple other guys. Apparently hundreds of vehicles had driven the same road, but for whatever reason, a Japanese machine gun opened up on them. They stopped the jeep and everyone jumped into the ditch. Apparently Ernie raised his head to ask the Colonel if he was OK.”

“I think I heard he was killed by a sniper,” I said, stopping my scribbling.

“Nope, it was a Jap machine gun that had played possum, letting hundreds of other vehicles go by. Those were Ernie’s last words, though. He took a round in the temple, and was killed instantly right after he asked.”

“Maybe that is why the machine gunners waited, since they must have known that opening up would get them killed pretty quickly. That is a powerful argument for keeping your head down,” I said.

“Yes indeed. I am sure Ernie would have preferred for it to work out differently. They Army buried him with his helmet on with a bunch of the other combat dead. He was one of the few civilians to be awarded the Purple Heart.”

“Wait, I saw his grave at the Punchbowl in Honolulu!” I said.

“Ernie traveled a while after the war. They exhumed him from the grave in Ie Shima, and then buried him in the Army cemetery on Okinawa, and then finally they moved him to the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific where you saw him.”

“That is amazing,” I said. “He was the most-read correspondent of the war.”

Mac nodded and finished his Bell’s Lager. “He even impacted the Japanese. When Okinawa was returned to Japan’s control after the war, Ernie’s monument was one of only three American memorials allowed to remain in place.”

“Huh.” I fished around in my wallet, and the Admiral picked up the tab, which was modest since he drinks for free now at Willow.

We settled up with Liz-S and Jasper, the best bowler on Guam, went to find the Admiral’s walker, one of the ones with brakes and quick action movement. I walked back across Fairfax Drive with him until he turned off at the entrance to the Madison. I retrieved the Bluesmobile from the Bat Cave under the hotel and drove home.

Once I opened the mail, I poured a tall one and logged onto the ‘net. I checked out the Ernie Pyle Monument, in place for 67 years:

AT THIS SPOT
THE
77TH INFANTRY DIVISION
LOST A BUDDY
ERNIE PYLE
18 APRIL, 1945

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Mac’s No-Pink Slime No-Fry Veggie Eggplant Parmesan

I am working on notes from my Happy Hour at Willow with Mac the other day. There are so many threads contained in the scrawled words that talking about them only leads to more questions and more stories.

This harvest included some rumination on the love-styles of single servicemen and women overseas in the Greater War, a couple key obituaries, the genesis of the Red Hill Fuel complex at Pearl Harbor, where the papers are of the people who made this astonishing history, and some assorted recipes.

That is what got me going this morning. I am going to stop by the Commissary later, and I wanted to try to recreate one of Mac’s signature dishes, the No-Fry Veggie Eggplant Parmesan. Mac is indeed a man in full- when he was caring for his beloved wife Billie in the decade of her decline into the prison of Alzheimer’s, he took over the cooking at the house.

“What was your favorite recipe?” I asked on more than one occasion, and he brought the cookbook to which he had contributed the dish.

“No question- it was the eggplant parmesan.” He gestured at the rectangular wire-bound book on the bar in front of us. “I marked some other ones that I contributed to the book. The Gazpacho is good, and so is my tomato meat loaf. But the no-bake eggplant parmesan is my favorite, hands down.”

“I would like to try that out,” I said, “but I am off meat at the moment, particularly the ground stuff.”

“I don’t mind a bit of fat, now and again,” he said thoughtfully, popping a bit of Tracy O’Grady’s crackling duck skin in his mouth. “My Mother did fried chicken like nobodies business. Good Iowa farm food.”

“I bet. That isn’t what is going on these days, I’m afraid.” I shook my head sadly. “I got a note from an astute and acerbic friend of mine who retired out west, Admiral. He is one of us, and now that he is retired, he likes to roll grenades into things he thinks are ridiculous.”

“There is enough of that around,” said Mac. Old Jim and the usual suspects were making room for Jim’s lovely wife Mary and one of her pals.

“My out-west pal was a brilliant analyst when I first worked with him thirty years ago, Mac. We have been partners in crime on several occasions since then, but he is retired now, and has the luxury to take up topics as he feels like it. He launched an assault on the school lunch program this morning. You won’t believe what is in it.”

“Probably not, but you are going to tell me anyway, aren’t you?”

“Yes sir, I am.” I put down my pen and took a sip of happy Hour White that Elisabeth-with-an-S kept at precisely the right level. “You know the Administration is pushing a “healthy-food” initiative for America’s youth due to the outbreak of obesity and Type Two diabetes?”

“Oh yes. Goodness, it is quite astonishing what has happened since I was younger. We all used to be skinny, and if we got chicken on Sunday that was a good thing. During the Depression we went back to a barter economy when the banks were closed.”

“I remember your telling me that. Well, beef has gotten much more expensive lately, and there has been some new products introduced to make the “Dollar Menu” possible at the fast food restaurants. They call it Pink Slime.”

“That doesn’t sound very appetizing.”

(Pink Slime, ready for blending.)

“It is sickening. I saw a picture of some- and it was being used at MacDonald’s and Burger King until a few months ago, and my pal pointed out that research indicates it is present in 70% of the ground beef at the supermarket.”

“I thought that is why Teddy Roosevelt got the Pure Food and Drug act passed,” said Mac. “That was a good thing.”

“Well, the Agriculture Department just announced they are going to issue a contract for seven million pounds of “Pink Slime” for its school lunch program. That is 3,500 tons of the stuff.”

“What is it?” asked Mac, taking a sip of Bell’s lager.

“The term Pink Slime refers to a ground-up blend of beef scraps, connective tissue, and other trimmings, treated with ammonium hydroxide to kill food-borne pathogens like salmonella and E. coli.”

“That sounds awful.”

“It is. I did some research and saw a picture of it. The resulting product has a shocking pink appearance and a mouth feel described as more like Jell-O than hamburger. Suffice it to say the stuff is so gross that McDonald’s and Burger King swore off using it in January, the same month the Ag Department announced it was part of a nutritious meal.”

“Are you saying the Democrats are responsible?” asked Mac.

“Oh no, it is exactly as bipartisan an example of greed as everything else is. The lady who heads Beef Products, Inc., the company that makes the crap came out of the W Administration, though she might have been a Clinton hold-over. She calls the Slime ”Lean Beef Trimmings.”

“It is anything but that, from what you say,” said Mac, looking a bit troubled. “We had to eat some awful stuff in the mess on Guam. It was all C-rations.”

“Yeah, everything in a can. For Pink Slime, the objection is that since it is all connective tissue, it isn’t meat at all. Plus, they put ammonium hydroxide into the food stream, and even that doesn’t necessarily kill the E. coli and salmonella.”

“How can they conceive of having that on the school lunch menu? It sounds like the scheme the Reagan Administration had to classify catsup as a vegetable.”

“That was more convoluted than the stupidity it sounds like,” I said with dignity. “I had a chance to work on the interface between Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration just after 9/11. We were worried about food chain security at the time and terrorists, but it was pretty interesting about who has jurisdiction over what.”
“We have a system of divided government,” said Mac. “Not always by intent.”

“Yeah. As best I could determine, Ag had everything from the open-face sandwich on down, and FD had everything processed from the closed-face sandwich on up.”

Mac looked puzzled for a moment. “So this Pink Slime, processed and put into a hamburger is still Agriculture?”

“Ag and Congress,” I said. “The ketchup as vegetable scheme came out of a big budget cut directed by Congress to the subsidized school lunch program. Then as now, local school districts could receive reimbursement for each lunch served provided it met minimum standards. So guess what? The minimum is the minimum.”

“So the kids get Pink Slime even if the fast food restaurants are cutting it out?”

“Yes, Sir.” I took a deep swallow of wine to get ahead of Liz-S but I was not successful. She appeared as if by magic with a fresh bottle of Pinot Grigio and topped up my glass.

She had been listening in and added some commentary. As you know, she is a licensed attorney trying to crack into the Public Health Policy racket here in D. “When we send our kids to school,” she said, “We expect that they won’t be eating the kind of fatty, salty, sugary foods that the Government wants to try to keep them from eating at home.”

“You know what?” I said. “Liz-S is right. Pink Slime is available only for institutional sale. Kids will not be eating it at home.”

“That is just one of the reasons I used to cook,” said Mac. “It is fun, and relaxing. And you know what is on the plate when you are done.”

I nodded in agreement, and then we got off on talking about the relative quality of the mess hall food on Guam in 1945 (the Seabee Mess was quite good) and where the Plymouth Staff car wound up after that legendary party with the gallons of Grasshoppers and the Navy Nurses at the Makalapa Junior Officer BOQ in 1946.

And that is how I came to be copying a thoroughly meatless and nutritious recipe this morning in preparation for a trip to the store.

You might want to check out a no-meat version of Mac’s No-Fry Eggplant Parmesan. It is quite delicious, and has no slime whatsoever.

For a more in-depth look at Pink Slime, and how it came to be, check out: Jaimie Oliver’s ‘Food Revolution’. http://www.jamieoliver.com/

Mac’s No-Fry Eggplant Parmesan Recipe
Ingredients
• 2 lbs (about 2 large) eggplants (about three pounds)
• 1 16-oz can jar vegetarian spaghetti sauce
• 3 large eggs, lightly beaten
• 1 16 oz. package of fresh grated mozzarella cheese
• 1/2 cup grated high quality Parmesan cheese
• 1 ½ cups matzah meal
Method
Note: One of the the tricks to Eggplant Parmesan is to drain the eggplant slices of excess moisture first- ed.
Peel eggplants, cut into ½-inch slices. Dip in egg and dredge in matzah meal. Place in a single layer on a lightly greased (extra virgin olive oil- and don’t forget the fabulous new flavored oils you can get from places like www.ahloveoilandvinegar.com <http://www.ahlove> )

Bake at 400 degrees for twenty minutes. Turn eggplant slices and bake an additional 15 minutes. Layer one third of eggplant slices ins a lightly greased 13x9x2 baking dish. Tope with one-third of each of mozzarella cheese and spaghetti sauce; repeat layers twice. Sprinkle with Parmesan cheese and bake uncovered at 325 degrees for thirty minutes or until thoroughly heated.

Yeild: 8 servings.

Mac notes: “I have used egg substitute rather than fresh eggs and both approaches work well. An easy and delightful dish!”

(Serving suggestion: try this with garden salad and garlic bread.)

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com