ARLEX
(The Bureau of Navigation, predecessor of the Bureau of Personnel, in its salad days. Arlington National Cemetery is behind the building. The Pentagon is off the frame to the lower right. Photo USN.)
It will be Spring tomorrow, Dammit. It had better.
It is gray and chill and spritzing this morning, not much different than it was Sunday morning, which is when a long round-about journey to Federal Office Building #2 began. I should have gone down to the garage at the farm and sorted through some stuff, but they said there would be cold rain all through the day and they were right. So, I took a road trip south that I will get to tell you about, eventually, and maybe tomorrow.
The short story long, I was approaching the vast sprawl of the Washington-Boston megalopolis and hit grid lock south of Fredericksburg. The sign I was parked near told me helpfully that Alexandria was only 57 miles away.
Jesus, I thought. This is insane. It is a Sunday, for goodness sake.
As we crawled north, I noted more road construction and the increasing number of modern commercial structures along the highway. Things were popping up everywhere, and the Quantico complex was clearly burgeoning with new Federal work even as the budget battles threw a wrench into any sensible execution of the new programs. Approaching the Occoquan River overpass, the old border of civilization, I could sense the seething activity in the new magnetic center of the swelling Federal bureaucracy.
I normally return from the farm via the strategic choke point that is Interstate 66. Coming from the south, and trapped in the high occupancy lane, I realized I could only transition to the local roads just short of the entrance to Pentagon North Parking. I could navigate around the great sandstone bulk of the military headquarters of the known universe and head up Columbia Pike, or swing over onto the on ramp to Washington Boulevard.
I don’t get down this way as much as I did when I still had a Pentagon Badge, and access to the wonders of the refurbished five-sided Adult Care facility. Not to mention the convenience of the nearby Navy’s Quarters K Quick Mart, the preferred Network Television location for watching the burning Pentagon on 9/11, and the closest point of approach for civilians while the place was a crime scene. In more pleasant memories, Quarters K combined the three necessities of life: a Navy Federal Credit Union ATM machine, a modest but adequate supply of distilled spirits and high-octane petroleum distillates. There was a reason I had been meaning to get back here, though.
Quarters K is long gone and the site unrecognizable now. Brooding on the bluff above the former gas station and the Pentagon is the ecru-hued mass of the Navy Annex, more formally named Federal Office Building #2, or the ARLEX. The Air Force, bless them, has erected the three-pronged sculpture of triumph in the air on the point of the bluff, and the structure dominates the ridge line. Behind it is the vast ruin of the Navy Annex.
I take this all personally, since I used to work in the 8th wing of the vast temporary building that lasted seventy-four years. Our ground floor office was Code NMPC-4411, the Navy Military Personnel System’s Intelligence Assignments desk.
If you ever want to have the goggles taken off your view of life in the military, being a “detailer” for a small community of prima-donna officers, this was the place to do it. The immortal Millie Doyle was allegedly our secretary, but she had been on the job since Christ got his first orders, and I could still open the window behind my desk and puff a Marlboro at my desk. We were deep in the canyon, and high overhead there were seemingly fragile walkways between the wings. It was not a pretty place to work, and the parking was crappy, but it was my introduction to Washington, and it was, in its way, the heart of the Navy itself.
Now, it is entirely possible that I will be buried underneath it, since according to the provisions of the FY-2000 Defense Appropriations Bill, the Secretary of the Navy was directed to cease and desist operations in the building, clear the property and transfer title to the Secretary of the Army for the expansion of Arlington National Cemetery.
(Vic’s Annex. Photo Socotra, 17 March 2013.)
In its time since construction in 1940, the Annex has been a warehouse, the headquarters of the Marine Corps and the Navy Bureau of personnel. for fifty years, Selection Board Services had made the picks for every Naval officer promoted by Statutory Board.
It was a historic place, in its way, with a great view of the capital. That will stay, whether the frankly ugly building is there or not.
Contractors- not SeaBees- removed the cornerstone at the Annex on January 18th, and the great deconstruction began. When it is complete, the land will be restored to open green space for cemetery use.
I looked at the old security check point and sighed. My ships are all either museums or razor blades. My office buildings are not looking so good, either. Then I arrived home, and began the quite deliberate process of not thinking about anything in particular.
Road trips are good, and useful, and they permit s certain reflection. At least they so if you are not cursing the traffic down by the Occoquan River.
Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.comRenee Lasche Colorado springs
Run on the Bank
It is two days before the official start of Spring and it is snowing in DC. I was daydreaming about warm places and getting rid of this lingering winter. Then reality intruded.
The nice people on the BBC told me the number of dead pigs floating in the Huangpu river now exceeds 9,000. The river features Shanghai’s lovely art deco Colonial Bund on one side, with the science fiction architecture of China’s future on the other. It also provides the drinking water for the megalopolis.
I don’t know what to make of that, any more than I understand what is happening on the lovely island of Cyprus. Why do these mysteries swirl through a snowy Washington morning?
Both places were warm when I was there, and I enjoyed my only visits to both. I seriously doubt that I will be back to either, for deceased animal reasons and doubts on the integrity of the system in China, and certain financial apprehension about the Eurozone.
Certainly mysterious and bustling Shanghai is no longer on the priority list, not while what is floating down the river continues to do so.
Cyprus has a run on the banks this morning, and the ATMs are empty becuase people are tyring to get their money out.
The island has particularly poignant memories memories for me. It is a surreal and sunny little place. It has a heritage of Crusaders and Knights Templars and graceful architecture from the Venetian Empire. Then there are the Sovereign Base Areas (SBAs) which are still are still very British, and hence the supportive environment for the 60,000 Brit ExPat community.
(The interior of a Nicosea Car Dealership, untouched since 1974 in the buffer zone. Photo UN.)
There is a strange line of demarcation between the two communities, Greek and Turk, that marks the high (or low) watermark of the Turkish invasion in 1974, and there are still eerie parts of Nicosea which is split by the green line and in no-man’s land now.
It is very emotional on both sides of the Green Line. We were having a beer in a very pleasant cafe overlooking the ocean- and Syria, 90 miles away, and a Turkish Patrol boat with a very large National Ensign kept making runs off the beach to ensure that everyone knew the dispute was still very real.
The idea that the plucky Greek Cypriots managed to turn their island into an offshore banking haven and got overextended- like Ireland- is no surprise.
There is a run on the banks there this morning. The Cypriots are having their version of the Big Short, and the government announced that they were confiscating 10% of existing deposits in the banks.
Whoa. Run on the banks, and they government went after it for the same reason bank-robber Willie Sutton picked his targets. He famously replied to an interviewer, when asked why he stuck up financial institutions: “That is where the money is.”
There is a whole lot of foreign offshore money there, and that is why they reached out to grab it.
Is it going to start a wave of pressure against the tottering banking systems in the other vulnerable Eurozone economies? Maybe not. But this is the first time a central government has stepped in to confiscate the assets of the people.
They will be watching this in Washington, you better believe it. Since early in 2010, the U.S. Treasury and Labor departments jointly announced they were seeking public comment on changes to employer-sponsored 401(k) plans and individual retirement accounts that would centralize the private pension system under structures created and administered by the government.
Seriously. The departments earnestly assure us that sound central management will make everything fairer and all of us happier. These would be the same idiots who have done such a nice job of protecting the Social Security Trust Fund and Medicare.
Keep an eye on your wallet- this little experiment on a far-away and sunny island could be the template for things to come right here.
I was going to write you about the demolition of the Navy Annex this morning- it is pretty impressive, and the wonders of exotic Mineral, VA, where I motored yesterday from Refuge Farm in the rain. But we will have to get to that later this week.
Copyright 2013 Vic Soccotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Chores
Something complete! Damn, it has been a while. I attached the knotted bell-pull to the clapper on that chunk of heavy brass I have been dragging that bell around the world since 1968. Dad removed it from the fireplace mounting in a home we owned in suburban Detroit. It came to us in the purchase and we took it with us at the sale.
Based on the age of the home constructed on the ridge above the suburban course of the Rouge River, I assume it was a USN WWII-vintage bell.
Now, at last, it is proud and ready to signal the hour (or the alarm) as required, just as it was meant to.
That was the first chore done on arrival from the Imperial City.
I am on the farm this morning, the light coming up late due to the time change, and confronting more chores. I could see one unpleasant one coming. Went down around nine last night reading a science fiction epic about the end of an interstellar empire.
A pal recommended “Downbelow Station,” by a lady named C.J. Cherryh, and I bought it to cleanse my mental palate of the awful reality of Charlie LaDuff’s “American Autopsy,” his version of life- or the lack of it- in the Motor City.
Cherryh’s novel is a fine read- a Hugo winner in 1982- and about a highly vulnerable space station packed with realistic characters. And a war that will finish off an interstellar empire collapsing of its own weight. Sort of like now.
It was nice to be lost in a literary Space Epic. That was my bread-and-butter reading growing up- beyond Tolkiens Hobbit unvierse and off on rockets of imagination to Burrough’s Barsoom, Azimov’s Trantor and all the worlds between. Of all the writers, Robert Heinlein was my favorite- the futurist whose irony skewering the present was always compelling. I think I read everything of his, and some of it still resonates.
Life has been too busy of late for fiction, and of course fiction could never have predicted the surreal present in which we live.
And that, of course is where we are stuck. Here in the present, I still have not got the clock-radio down here calibrated to the rhythms of the 60-year old body- I woke to music and padded out to the kitchen to start the coffee, which I did successfully while looking over at the clock on the stove and realizing it was only 0215.
Crap. I went back to bed and managed to get back down twice more- eventually rising at 0630, a triumph of sloth-dom. Moreover, I actually recall the Technicolor dream in which I had a handgun and a Kalashnikov on the Hill, props for some hearing or another, and the dream hinged on constantly misplacing them after becoming aware that the Hill was not the place to be in possession of firearms with high capacity magazines.
The dreamscape was a weird confluence of remembrance of working with the 105th Congress and the serio-comic events of today. Dreams are good, and I could feel some of the adrenaline of the last months leaking away.
But as the light came up I knew I had to get on with it. One of the reasons for going to bed when I did was the fact that that the cast iron stove was not drawing properly, and I knew I had put off cleaning it too long. Some minor smoke was all I could get it to produce, and gave up.
This morning was the removal of the singed logs, splitting out some kindling with an axe, remembering how intrinsically dangerous life in the country can be- one stick of kindling away from a lost finger or an axe in the foot.
Then sweeping the ashes through the grate and emptying the pan outside, hoping I would not trip and deposit the sooty debris at random in the farmhouse.
Then a run-around with the vacuum cleaner I couldn’t operate on the bad leg for the winter months. I can now, and I feel good about it. I can’t wait to throw the windows and door all open and let the fresh air sweep through.
There is much more to be done, many chores deferred. It has been too cold to work in the garage, but the workshop still needs to be set up, and to do that I need to consolidate the wreckage of the estate that fills the farm office and the bay next to the black truck.
The Bluesmobile needs to be ferried down to the farm at some point, while I could ride the bike into town and jump on the train to Union Station, I might be able to get a ride back north with the Russians.
There is a lot to do. I am absolutely delighted that I think I can do it all again. Just in time, my friends. Just in time.
It is amazing what a good vacuuming can do for the soul.
Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.comRenee Lasche Colorado springs
Driving Out the Snakes
(Willow took on a distinct Irish air last night. Photo Socotra.)
I have tried to get out of Your Nation’s Capital on Fridays the last couple weeks. The farm is a comforting destination, and the level of stress in every sector of life inside the Beltway makes weekend flight irresistible.
With the dysfunctional system gridlocked, the current show about budgets and guns and climate change and energy policy all are actually conversations in the early stage of the 2014 elections. The President will rule by decree until then, and we shall
I mentioned that it was Saint Patrick’s Day yesterday- actually, as some alert readers pointed out, the actual day to commemorate the man who drove the snakes from the Emerald Isle is the 17th.
I sniffed. I know these things. That is why we have a room full of wild-assertion checkers in the back room of Socotra House Publications. What I perhaps should have said was: “Willow is closed on Sunday.” So, Tracy O’Grady is having the celebration to observe the day on Friday- and Saturday, but I will be out of town.
It was a challenge to get there, between the office and the Bluesmobile. I spent a couple hours before the office surfing the web, baffled at trying to get the owner’s manual for the P-71 Cruiser online and connect with a likely battery outlet here in Arlington, and got lucky. The Fort Myer auto shop is actually a Firestone outlet and they had what I needed when I cracked the code.
I decided to get a Saturday chore out of the way at lunch, and dashed back to Big Pink in the Panzer, intending to pull the old battery, take it to the Fort and swap it out, and be back at my desk in a half hour.
Easier said than done. The hood was frozen and when I gently pried it open with the edge of the emergency shovel, the battery looked like it had not been changed since the car was new. There was corrosion on the mounting bolts and on the screws that hold the battery leads to the thing. Oily, I am in work-clothes. Crap. Plus, I needed tools, which were up in the unit. Crap .
It occurred to me as I lugged pliers, wrench and the ratchet set down the stairs (not a first, but unusual during the long recuperation) that I have not been able to do this sort of stuff in a year- almost to the day. I tucked my badge lanyard into my shirt, trying not to get grease on it, and went to work on the rusty screws.
The battery eventually came out with a groan and it was a heavy sucker, wedged close to a razor-sharp edge of interior sheet metal that drew blood and threatened to leach onto the Brooks Brothers shirt.
The rest was fairly easy- a jaunt to the Post gas station complex, a quick transaction with Wally, the enormous head-man there, and I was headed back to drop it in the police car.
When I was done, it actually started with a couple cranks, and I headed back to the office with grimy hands on the wheel.
The radio on my desk was alerting me to a missile build-up against the North Korean threat, new gun legislation and more budget nonsense. I sighed and turned it off at quitting time, picked up my back-pack and headed for freedom.
(Chris-the-Marine holds a very special bottle of Bud. Photo Socotra)
We had a good crowd with a lot of the old timers there: Big Jim was behind the bar, Long Hair Mike (it isn’t, not since the cancer) and Ray the Jarhead and John with and Jon-without, The Lovely Bea and her pal Jamie, Chanteuse Mary, her Michigan Sister and another. The company was fun. I still don’t know what anything means.
That was not the biggest deal, though. Old Jim was holding court to an engaged crowd, and decided to have a beer.
“I did not quit drinking,” he said with grave dignity. “Reports of that have been greatly exaggerated. I just thought I should loose a few pounds and take a break.”
Then he ordered a Bud.
Happy real Saint Patrick’s Day (mañana). Gotta run. I have snakes to drive out.
Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Ides of March: Motor City Madness
“Go ahead and laugh at Detroit, Because you are laughing at yourself.”
– Reporter and Author Charlie LaDuff
It has been a big week in Detroit, city of my birth, and a place once described as the ‘Paris of the American Midwest.’ Go ahead and laugh, like Charlie LaDuff told you to.
My pal down South called to give me his book review of Charlie’s depressing book “American Autopsy.” He is a refugee from Detroit, a participant in the latter phase of the sloshing of migration that transformed the city twice. It first brought the people of the Deep South north to jobs and a better life, and then turned in which anyone with any sense got the hell out.
His Dad was a Detroit cop, and he went to DeLaSalle High school. The Gratiot/Conner area was his turf, just as the Cass Corridor was mine when I lived in the city after college.
I thought he would appreciate Charlie’s book since the opening vignette describes a stop to fill up the tank on the Near East Side that resulted in an attempted car-jack that was foiled only by the presence of a handgun left behind by someone else in the glove compartment.
I am sure the gun was illegal on several counts, but things like that do not appear to matter any more in a town without the rule of law.
My pal told me: “I read it in two nights. Tragic and sad. Such despair is overwhelming. I loved that city and it is dead.“
I am still reading it, but am almost done. I got the electronic version on my tablet and read in bits of downtime. I have a hard time taking it all in. But that is race and uni-party urban politics for you, isn’t it?
When I read that Dave Bing was elected with 14% voter turn-out, that told me a lot.
kwame-kilpatrick-court.jpg
(Former Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick. Photo Detroit Free Press).
The election of Pope Francis rightly crowded out the events of Monday in the Motor City, in which hip-hop former Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick was found guilty of 24 charges of racketeering, extortion, attempted extortion, bribery, mail fraud, wire fraud and filing false tax returns. His crony contractor Bobby Ferguson was convicted on most of the charges, and even Kwame’s father Bernard was nailed for tax evasion.
The tail of how this came to pass is done with a deft touch by Mr. Laduff. His romp through the grotesque ruins is by turns poignant, sad, and surreal.
The dead are prominent in the account. Gang-bangers, homeless and under-resourced firefighters are among the corpses in the city that gave birth to “mass production, the automobile, the cement road, the refrigerator, frozen peas, high paying blue-collar jobs, home ownership and credit on a mass scale.”
Entire swathes of the city have been allowed to go back to nature. Blocks of homes have crumbled as arson and the mining of metal fixtures have become industries unto themselves. Whole neighborhoods are gone, now giving “cover to deer, wild chickens and wolves. Pheasants can be seen gliding between the high windows of once-grand skyscrapers downtown” and trees grow on the soaring rooftops.
You may recall the slide show I published a while ago from a rented bus trip I organized in May of 2011. It is amazing to see what has become of a great city. This week the other shoe dropped. Michigan Governor Rick Snyder stepped in to appoint an Emergency Manager to see if he could forestall Michigan’s largest city from having to declare bankruptcy.
Kevyn Orr is the man on horseback. There had been some discussion of whether or not failed Presidential candidate Mitt Romney would return to the city of his birth and work his management magic on the dead husk of the city.
You can imagine how polarizing that would have been, and Synder had to tread carefully.
Kevyn is an outstanding pick, an example of “I’m from Washington, and I am here to help” that might actually work.
His day job is being a bankruptcy attorney at the law firm Jones Day in Washington, D.C. He is about to get sole and sweeping power to map the future of the city of roughly 700,000 residents, down from nearly 1.5 million before the great Detroit diaspora of which my pal and I are part.
Gov. Snyder said he picked Mr. Orr for his “interpersonal skills, legal and financial acumen and a 30-year track record of work on complex corporate restructuring efforts, including the 2009 bankruptcy of Chrysler Group LLC.” There is another factor in his selection, but we don’t talk about that in Detroit.
Too sensitive.
Kevyn is upbeat, and he said his turnaround work could be completed in as little as six months, if all the players pull together. Today is his first day on the job. He will have the ability to sell city assets, break municipal labor contracts and renegotiate terms with Detroit’s creditors. Elected leaders in Detroit could lose much of their power, but Mr. Orr said he would be willing to work with those who get on board with his turnaround plan.
Given Charlie LaDuff’s description of the Kleptocracy, I seriously doubt that, but you never know.
(Emergency manager Kevyn Orr. Photo Reuters)
Detroit’s government is $14 billion in unfunded debt obligation, which is (if I cancel enough zeros and divide correctly) $20 grand apiece for the remaining citizens. Through in the additional $57 grand we all share in the national debt, you can see that this is crashing down of its own weight.
At the other side of the bargaining table is the Teacher’s Union, The Service Employees International Union and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. I for one wish Kevyn Orr the best of luck.
It is Saint Patrick’s Day, and I may raise an after-breakfast toast to his success. I think Charlie LaDuff and my pal down south would join me.
Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com Renee Lasche Colorado springs
Vos Habere Papam
So, I am looking out the window of the office at the canyon below with the whizzing traffic on North Glebe and NPR broke the news out of Terry Gross’s show “Fresh Air” “White Smoke, White Smoke!”
It reminded me of the 1MC call on the loudspeaker back on the ship. I kept working on clearing the email queue as the story unfolded. You probably heard about it in near real time. Fourty minutes or so after the initial reports, the traditional words “Habemus Papam” were uttered- “We have a Pope!”
There were 150,000 people in St. Peter’s Square. It must have been electric when the crowd was aware that the ballots had been burned and the deal was done. Francis the First is the not the first non-European Holy Father, but you have to go back to the later part of the first milenium to find the other one, a former Cardinal from what we know now as Syria.
Interesting to have all that tradition dredged up, and Francis started breaking them immediately. He is from Argentina, of course, and failed to step up to place himself about the Cardinals who elected him, and later slipped out a side door.
That is what we had to do at Willow last night. The place was rented out in its entirity to the Computer Emergency Response Team from Carniegie Mellon University.
I was there because a shipmate was passing through town and I was busy enough that I completely forgot to check that there was any reason not to rendezvous at the Amen Corner.
I read the sign on the door and went in and saw Tracy O’Grady and the staff getting ready. They kindly allowed me to sit in the usual place and wait, and when Marlow showed up we had time to down a couple glasses of happy hour white. I admired his graying goatee and motorcycle jacket- since departing the Navy he has done some amazing things and had some adventures I envy.
The one I most admired was a four-corner trip around America from his home plate in Key West, all on two wheels. Florida to Maine, Maine to Washington State, down the Pacific Coast Higway to the San Ysidro Border crossing and then back east across Texas to Florida again. To see America like that, in helmet and on steel steed like a knight errant is something for the ages.
He wrote a soaring account of it that I think should be published in its own right, and maybe he will, if there is world enough, and time. I hope I get to help him on that.
The choices of where to go, now that we were exiled from Willow were varied. We could have gone to Uncle Julio’s next door, or down to the dive bar across from the Metro Station, but we had started on wine, so I suggested Gran Cru, a wine-and-fern bar in the courtyard behind The Madison where our pal used to live.
I think he occasisionally ventured out there while he was still ambulatory. Despite the short ditance, it was easier for him to take the elevator down to the underground garage and drive his champagne colored Jag across the street to Willow.
The closing of our usual watering hole increased the crowd at Gran Cru and the place was jammed. The wait staff is all Hispanic, and they seemed to be sharing in the general merriment over the selection of the Pontiff. What was even more surprising was that Old Jim and Chanteuse Mary were at the bar. Jim was conducting a meeting with a prospective author, a chipper young lady who apparently is interested in writing the great American Woman’s Novel.
We chatted it up with Mary, and moved over to a tall table in the corner to aoivd the crush at the bar.
“Hey, I heard Francis is a Jesuit,” I said. “First time one was selected for Pope. Aren’t they like the Marines?”
My pal nodded sagely. He was a superb analyst on active duty, and his mind is finely honed. “Yep. The Jesuits are considered the Special Operations Forces of the Catholic Church.”
“Amazing. We have the first Special Operator as the leader of more than a billion Catholics.”
“All true. He is a conservative, but extremely pious and modest in his ways, from what I can tell. Not at all like the rest of the Curia.”
“Sounds like Chuck Hagel confronting the Pentagon,” I said.
“You have been in Washington too long, Shipmate.”
“I think they need to adapt,” said Mary. “He is inheriting a mess.”
“I am glad they didn’t pick the American guy. That would have been too much to handle with everything else going on.”
“Why would you care?” asked Mary. “You are not a Catholic, are you?”
“No,” I said. “But it would be nice if at least one Western Institution was able to stand up to the relentless pressure of Islam,” I said. “I just hope things get better for the institution. Every day there seemed to be another scandal.”
“It appears that the Catholics are going to have a gung-ho Pontiff. Wait till the media starts dragging him over the coals about the politics of Argentina. Francis was definitely not one of the Liberation Theology guys.”
“The media is what it is. I don’t think Francis cares. He used to cook his own food when he was a Cardinal, and didn’t live in the church palace in Buenos Aires. This is going to be interesting.”
I took a sip of Gran Cru white. “He might not be my Pope, but God bless him.”
My pal nodded. “Vos Hebere Papam,” he said. “I wish him the best of luck.”
Some other stuff happened after that, including more wine and a fine repast of cheese fondue, ripe olives and roasted nuts. It seemed like a time to celebrate, even if he wasn’t ours.
Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com Renee Lasche Colorado springs
Falling Into Spring
How many dead swine does it take to fill a Chinese river? That and other issues occupied my limited attention span as I padded out to the lap-top way too early. I can’t quite get the hang of the Daylight Savings change. It must be creeping fogey-ism. Thousands of pigs, apparently. A horrid thought.
Glad we are not in Shanghai this morning to find out. I looked at the calendar to see what mischief awaits the day. It is a week out from Spring. I think we are going to make it. The turn of the season will bring the Ninja Mexicans back, and perhaps the scaffolds and guy wires that drape the balcony will finally go away that keep the little black-clad men from falling to the concrete pool deck below.
It is nice to see something that has a prospective end, rather than the antics downtown, which while endlessly fascinating feed a feeling of general foreboding. I scrolled through the astonishing variety of alarming things in the morning mail.
There was a three-way shootout between the cartels and the Mexican Marines, the military force least touched by the endemic corruption of the state. It is quite mind-boggling that a firefight that may have killed fifty combatants and a few bystanders occurred a stone’s throw from the border with Laredo, TX, and that the Marines also rescued more than a hundred kidnapped villagers.
Mind-boggling. Immigration reform, anyone?
North Korea abrogated the Armistice that has uneasily held since 1954, and shut down the hot-line. What’s up with that? Is all this just a new and improved version of the patented Pyongyang bluster, or is this ominously a prelude to something really nasty?
(Diplomat Dennis Rodman).
Another note inquired if famed rebounder and eccentric Dennis Rodman really was a transvestite, and if recent visit to the DPRK was conducted in drag, adding a note of the surreal to something already bizarre.
(The Handsomest Man Alive, according to The Onion).
Are the nukes that Kim Jong Un is so proud of really real? Or is this all just another North Korea stunt? John-with-an-H claimed at the bar that the experts can’t prove the tests were real.
Jeeze. Cool off, Vic.
An alert reader out west has noticed the drift in recent Socotra publications and suggested it might be time to get out of town.
With Spring’s arrival, it will be almost a year to the day since the wrenching fall that ripped up the leg and turned the year quite upside down. It is nice to be able to navigate on two legs again. It is startling to have something so elementary wrenched away. Time to concentrate on completing the recovery, and time is the commodity I crave.
Do you think it is it time for something completely different? It is hard to stay away from contemplating the train-wreck, when it is all entwined in the working day, and the topic of endless bemused discussion at the bar when the day is done.
I glanced over at the accusing clock. First conference call of the day in eight minutes. Then complete the weekly report and budget some time after work not for fun, but to deal with the taxes. If I can get the estate closed, then I guess I can move on from that.
I was looking around the office at what I will have to move out of there. Some art work, including the large signed pencil sketch of Neil Armstrong and the proto-electro-optical image from the Ranger Lunar Lander, a sly reference to what my Uncle achieved at Kodak, and turned around to view the earth in near real-time.
I took the files from the estate and sorted them. Then I trundled down the hall and feed them through the scanner to convert to portable document files and then the originals went into the secured trash. Felt good.
Willow felt good as well, having received a phone call that an out-of-town colleague was around and desirous of a crisp Happy Hour White, but it extended into waiting for my son to arrive for a couple beers to wash down a lamb slider and fish taco.
Then I got home and did not make a call I wanted to and did make one I didn’t. Sitting in the brown chair, I looked around the place, marveling at the crap I have amassed and which needs to get moved somehow to someplace else. The farm is quite full, though perhaps I can stack this all up in the garage if I can get the time to digest the estate debris that currently occupies it.
Maybe a lower cost place somewhere else? It would have to mean retirement. And perhaps have to take another haircut on the condo.
This is better than worrying about the nation. I guess all that will sort itself out all by itself.
Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Renee Lasche Colorado springs
RLP/Time
Vickie-the-Maid was getting her week together, and called to tell me to clean up the condo in preparation for her monthly ministry on Tuesday.
You know the drill: when the maids are coming, it is time to actually pick up and organize the books plopped on the wing of the armchair, open face down, the earbuds dropped in protest of Mayor Bloomberg on the dining table, the wad of clothing almost (but not quite) ready for the laundry, the stuff piled up for the next trip to the farm, the diminishing but still irritating pile of weekly magazines I cannot bring myself to read by the brown chair in the corner by the window with the streaks left from last months tepid cleaning.
I was done with Time Magazine a long time ago, and now, apparently Time is done with all of us. Henry Luce’s magnificent political magazine is no more. There is a wonderful column on by Maureen Dowd on what it was like to be inside the beast, back in the day, highly recommended for her usual acerbic treatment of life when the news was crafted on a weekly basis, not spun with each revolution of the news cycle.
That is Newsweek and Time gone in the space of a few months. How the world turns. Between the two, that accounted for most of the “in-depth” information we did not get from Uncle Walter Cronkeit.
Preparing for Vicky’s arrival is not dissimilar to the famous Room, Locker and Personnel (ELP) inspection from Aviation Officer Candidate School, only much less intimidating. Staff Sergeant Ronald C. Mace, USMC, was a real presence, much larger than life, rocking forward on his highly-polished low-quarter black shoes, getting ready to rip your face off.
Still, looking back on the process, I have to say that Vicky and SSGT Mace play a vital and parallel role in my life, along with Mr. Luce.
There is a bunch of other stuff to talk about this morning, but there being no really huge immediate and impending crisis this morning, I am just going to clean up the space that I occupy, so Vicky can get at the hard surfaces and really put a shine on things so that I can start the cycle of piling things up on them again.
I am sure there will be another crisis in the news cycle tomorrow. I have to say that I am starting to get crisis fatigue. I do yearn a bit for the days when the they only came once a week, and Henry Luce used to pick them out for us.
Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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Banners
(Sarah Palin. Image: Wikimedia Commons)
I wish you could see the banner next to the message screen on my laptop. It startled me when I dragged my butt out of bed this morning to discover that the clocks had moved on me- the aware ones, anyway. The dumb ones still were telling me I was where I had been yesterday, not progressing forward with the vanguard of time.
The banner ad caught my attention. I was so happy that the political stuff had gone away. I had grown weary during the endless campaign of seeing Michele, or Barack or Mitt gazing at me, 24 x 7. I sort of hoped it was one of those racy images of the former GOP governor that were Photoshopped during the McCain campaign, but no such luck.
Wait, maybe I can copy it and past it here:
I was interested. Do we have petitions against the exercise of free speech these days?
This particular Banner is sponsored by some folks who call themselves the DGA Action committee, and if they are alarmed at what the former governor of Alaska is saying, then there must be something up.
I have not heard from Ms Palin since the media trashed her so unmercifully, and I had never heard of the DGA at all. If the Democratic governors are concerned, the viral nature of this must be hitting a nerve.
I poked around and discovered that the DGA was founded in 1983 as an “an independent voluntary political organization organized to support Democratic governors and candidates across the nation.” They provide resources to help articulate and deliver messages consistent with progressive policies and candidates, and hold conferences and stuff.
They note that there are twenty Democratic governors, versus 30 for the GOP, though I think they are fudging a bit, since one of the ones they count is Lincoln Chafee, an independent in Rhode Island.
Maybe he caucuses with them, and though he considers himself more progressive. I don’t know. I did want to find out what Ms Palin is saying that got the Govs so out of sorts, so I looked.
This is what Ms Palin said on her Facebook page last week- the link is here. http://www.infowars.com/sarah-palin-feds-are-stockpiling-bullets-for-civil-unrest/
“Sarah Palin has warned that the federal government is “stockpiling bullets” in preparation for “civil unrest,” adding that America is “finished” if it cannot deal with its debt problem.”
The hot former Governor went on to remark, “If we are going to wet our proverbial pants over 0.3% in annual spending cuts when we’re running up trillion dollar annual deficits, then we’re done. Put a fork in us. We’re finished. We’re going to default eventually and that’s why the feds are stockpiling bullets in case of civil unrest.”
Well, heck, I thought. That is exactly why I am stockpiling stuff. It is only prudent. I mean, did you notice the purchase of 2,717 up-armored fighting vehicles by our friends at DHS? I drive past their fancy new campus at the former St. Eliabeth’s home for the Insane in DC all the time. It is huge, and almost co-located with DIA’s HQ at Bolling.
Now, I love a good conspiracy as much as the next American, but Hans Guderian only needed 2,000 panzers to take out France in 1940, so the number does give one pause.
And then there is all that body armor and the 7,000 fully automatic assault rifles required by the Department, and the weird targets featuring images of elderly people and pregnant women and the whole drone thing and that Army Field Manual about setting up detention camps (FM 3-39.40 Internment and Resettlement Operations) .
Whew. Thankfully, Secretary Napolitano had a minute to clarify things after released all those undocumented detainees in Arizona and Texas due to lack of funds. That was before the dread Sequestration, remember. Anyway, she had a functionary named Peggy Dixon come out and explain that the ammunition was “bought in bulk to save money and were for training purposes only.”
Except for maybe the 450 million rounds of hollow point bullets, which are not only more expensive but not customarily used for proficiency training. Anyway, I relaxed once Ms Dixon explained everything. I mean the wars are about over, and the Department is probably just laying in a stock and providing jobs before the tank production lines shut down.
I wish people would just relax, like I do down on the farm. What on earth could we have to fear from our own government of laws with the protection of the Constitution?
And it was a great farm day yesterday. My CAG LSO pal from our CVW-5 days in Japan stopped by with his lovely bride- they are looking for the place to flee from the city and were headed for Charlottesville to poke around but I convinced hem to stop here. Then, the Russians came over for dinner.
Temperatures soared almost to sixty the last time I remembered to look at the thermometer I hung on the tree by the front gate. The snow is dematerializing, and there was not a black helicopter in sight.
I am sorry I saved the big news to the end of this.
The huge story is that the toilet that had been sitting in proud isolation on the field across from my front fence is gone.
I sort of miss it and wonder where it went. Stockpile against the ravages of the new low-flo models?
None of the new environmentally-friendly things seem to work, from washers and dryers to dishwashers. Who are they supposed to be friendly to, actually?
Everyone seems to be stockpiling something these days. Nothing to worry about. The banners tell us so.
Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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Game Over
You know, we go back and forth about the issues that really seem important in The Daily. Just this morning I looked at the picture of the pissant current dictator of the DPRK- hell, I will insert it here to show the quality of this surreal Virginia morning as the light is coming up at the farm:
How do they get hats like that? Do you recall seeing the pictures of the decorations on the old men of the North’s Stalinist army that go from top of the lapel to below the Sam Brown Belt? Oh well. This little man talks about nuking me in my house. Weird.
It is easy to think that these things are important, like the Bill of Rights used to be.
I had one of my old shipmates start me out with a note this morning that addressed some really amazing things. He noted that Mayor Bloomberg has triumphed over cigarettes and the 32-oz soft beverage, and with a glossy new campaign against earphones the kids wear, the millennium is at hand in the Big Apple.
My pal pointed out that the social issues may be vanquished, but there is something else happening in New York City:
“According to officials <http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2013/03/07/officials-80-percent-of-recent-nyc-high-school-graduates-cannot-read/> from City University of New York, a full 80% of high school graduates in New York City can’t read when they graduate. And that’s for the students who graduate. New York City has the lowest graduation rate <http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/NY-GRADUATION-RATES-TRAGIC-FOR-BLACK-HISPANIC-BOYS-171043271.html> for minority male students in the nation, with only 37% graduating.”
That struck me as being as inconvenient a fact as the one that Al Gore’s physical appearance seems to induce Global Cooling. But my pal went on to point out that according to the Educational Trust-West, “…just one in twenty kindergardeners in some ethnic minorities will graduate from a four-year California college. Overall, a whopping 40% <http://minnesota.cbslocal.com/2011/01/25/study-more-college-students-need-remedial-classes/> of high school students entering public colleges across the country require at least one remedial class in reading, writing or math.”
That about stopped me in my tracks, and helped me focus on something that is- I think- profound. You know me. I get curious and agitated and about the things that seem important right now. The Nanny State, Mayor Bloomberg and his ilk, and that oddity we know as the modern Two Party System, being composed either of dolts or idiots, take your pick.
Then it came to me in a wave. We are chumps. The battle was over a long time ago. The people in charge do not (at the moment) have the resources to come and get me. They are content to take a little longer view, and will allow entropy to take care of that. It is funny. You and I did right by our kids, we taught them critical thinking, scraped and sacrificed to get them ahead in life, all on the modest but honorable pay we earned doing the mundane things we all did. Solid but not handsome, we did the right thing.
Meanwhile, members of our Boomer demographic cohort went about destroying the very fabric of our society.
They succeeded.
The war for our society is lost. The underclass is permanent now, and rising in an inexorable number. Citizens who cannot read cannot possibly contribute anything meaningful to our future except the expectation- quite justified- that society will take care of them. The blatantly obvious issue is that the government will not do it very well, which is the essence of the whole problem.
Beyond the creation of a major class of citizens who are functionally illiterate, take an issue, any issue. Nukes, for example. The North Korean ranting this morning about incinerating us is a case in point. We are unilaterally disarming, the nuclear stockpile disintegrating even as whack jobs are permitted to build their arsenals in Pyongyang and Tehran. How could this be happening? Where are the prudent people who take this stuff seriously?
Pick another issue that is transparently criminal. Wall Street has the game rigged. They are the Masters of the Universe that Tom Wolfe wrote about in Bonfire of the Vanities. We may be allowed to live out our lives on our terms, but the bastards have ensured that what is to come for our children- and theirs will be bleaker and less free. As a bonus, we may also share it in the gray days of our dotage. It will be run by Marxists who do not even know what the word means.
Not to bring you a downer this morning, I really didn’t intend to do that, I just had one of those minor revelations like the great Liberal Daniel Patrick Moynihan revealed in his 1965 paper on what was coming with the disintegration of the African American family. I think he knew that everyone else would follow right along, and we have. The time for reasoned civic discussion about whether this is what we wanted is long past. Game over.
I was up early this morning- I recognize the above sounds a little fevered. I am stressed out by life in the City and the collective madness of a system that is….well, it is exactly what those who control it want it to be.
They want more. It appears they are going to get it.
I prefer this view, since it appears we have no real choice in the larger world but to accept what we have done to ourselves, and what we have lost forever:
Thus was it ever so, I suppose, the wisdom of age breeds a certain petulance against the impertinence of a future that has its own inexorable imperative. Life is good enough down on the farm- as long as I can hold on to it.
“O tempore! O Mores!”
– Cicero, First Oration against the Catalines
Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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