(The Honorable, or formerly Honorable based on government service and Current Crime Wave victim Mike Gill. Photo USG).
Well here we are. We have beat the heck out of January and cast it aside. The clouds have parted with the dawn here at Big Pink, and there is some momentary clarity blazing bright white from the gibbous Moon passing in the heavens above.
There was a bit of unease in the circle this morning, and some snorts of disbelief in the decision to return to the west side of the Potomac. Yesterday’s news was stark and caused some determined Happy Hour behavior as a defense against social reality.
Here is the deal from Downtown, the one across the River: We first heard it on WTOP, and when we say “we” we mean Splash and his little radio, the one with the earphones he wears to avoid disturbing people doing actual work. He yanked the earbuds out after hearing the news. It was an account of a carjacking that critically wounded a former senior government official in the middle left another person dead in Washington, D.C., on Monday. In the middle of a working day.
The story unfolded in lurching updates through the afternoon. The fellow in the handsome portrait above is one of the first who was shot in the episode of violence. He was waiting in the family car to pick up his wife, who also works downtown. The assumption was that she would be safer leaving the building and walking the short distance to the waiting auto. She used to take the Metro until things got too weird down in the tunnels below our Capital City. They are apparetnly also weird on the streets now, even if the transportation is personal.
The image is of Mr Mike Gill, formerly the Honorable Mike Gill, who had been chief operating officer for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) during the previous presidency. His family informed the legacy broadcast media of his critical condition and sequestration in a hospital Tuesday after the carjacking. We hope he recovers health soon.
Police responded to the family version of the Gill shooting in a Tuesday press conference. They filled in the story with additional information: another victim was shot and killed in a separate incident that followed the Gill shooting. No one was identified in the second incident. It was part of a carjacking and firearms spree by the same suspect. The ‘cross-jurisdiction’ spree ended when the suspect was shot and killed by police in the first hours of Tuesday. It was easy to become confused, since the video clip of the New York gang of teens savagely beating two NYPD officers in the subway.
Our 933rd Carjacking? We do not have his name or any other information about the shooter, but he was part of a wave of violence that produced more than 900 incidents of grand theft (Auto) over the last reporting period. Not all of them involved use of firearms, though they likely formed part of most incidents. DC Mayor Muriel Bowser confirmed from the same podium the Police used that there were two subsequent shootings by the same suspect. She called the events an “unthinkable tragedy.”
We all have been thinking about this stuff since it started back in 2019 and “defunding” became a cause. We regret having to disagree with the Mayor, since we know she is trying to combat the wave of criminal conduct in cities across the nation. The Crime Thing is big this morning, not quite as big as The Border Catastrophe but they are related to one another. We may be witnessing something profound in our nation’s history, a turning point as huge as the popularization of the automobile itself. The Pandemic caused all manner of business and public service organizations to abandon their offices- towers and storefronts- and work from home.
With the Pandemic over, for the moment, the return to normalcy has not panned out as a return to the way things were. Some industry reports have office occupancy at only half of what it was in 2019. The adjustment to the virus has been both interesting and profound. Talk is that it may have been a dry run for another outbreak calculated to fortify the results of the next General Election looming later this year.
We use the word “fortify” in the spirit it was first used to describe the contribution of hundreds of millions of dollars to organizations in the States to purchase ads, change election procedures and sponsor rallies. We recall vaguely there was a limit to the amount of money any citizen could donate to campaigns.
We recall it was a relatively parsimonious amount, a bundle of a few thousand dollars. We just checked on Wiki, even though we have heard Wiki is controlled by one of the parties in the conflict. So, this may or may not be true: The limit for donations by individuals and (non-multi-candidate) PACs to National Party Committees (NPC) has risen to $41,300, while the limit for individual and Political Action Committees (PACs) giving to each of the additional national party committee accounts has increased to $123,900 per year. We could get by on that last number, even if the first one is how many of us live.
We have seen nothing like that so far. There is a rising chorus of interest not so much on the actual policy issues but the methodology of the electoral process to determine if one administration or another will protect us from the consequences of mass uncontrolled migration across what we used to know as the Southern Border.
The carjacking appears to be only a blip in the news. Mention of it has passed without comment since the first spurt about it, which is how things work now. We have established special public interest groups privileged with special laws not applicable to the population at large. Except for our leader DeMille, we are all depressingly pallid in complexion, but we are committed to whatever current lunacy has issued overnight on the other side of the Big River.
We had the flatscreen turned on, since the weekly business meeting looms jut before lunch and Dy drinking is discouraged by Management. In the same swirl of news, we saw that the Chinese have bought a lot of American farmland, and hundreds- or more- of natural born Chinese military-age men have crossed the Border. Some were questioned and released. Others were never seen, or ‘got away.’
Speculation is that these young men are the cadre from which another attack similar- but more deadly- than 9/11. That was unimaginable until it wasn’t. We had a session to think the unthinkable. The ones we thought of first would be the idea of attacks on our infrastructure, leaving us helpless. That includes the trappings of civilization as we used to know it.
The pundits on the broadcast media say that our current chaos at the Rio Grande is permitting formations of motivated young men to take positions on land owned by Beijing and reach out to sabotage our communications, energy, transportation network and potable water. That would slow down our usual routine at Big Pink, but that is the sort of world in which we now live.
The other stuff flying around blends into a malevolent swirl. We are poised at some sort of military response to the cloaked Iranian provocations (by proxy Shia player Houthis) in the strategic waters of the Red Sea that join the Mediterranean and Indian Oceans in the Red Sea.
We would be tempted to take up a position on all of this- there are issues in every direction and across the waves. Two wars are in progress now and maybe another underway with more than 150 attacks on US positions in Jordan, Iraq and Syria. Rockets from both directions in the southern Red Sea. It has even veterans a bit befuddled. Our (personal) energy may carry us forward to the artificial but quite real chaos as we get closer to who will claim the mantle of Leader of the Free World. You can understand our concern, since none of this makes any more sense than a soaring office tower half empty, dust gathering in vacant cubicles.
And down on the street? We adapt. We will not pull over to the curb if we have to drive across the Wilson Bridge to pick anything up. We will circle the block at a speed sufficient to keep the gunmen at bay and swoop in to pick up the passengers we want! Not the other ones….
Copyright 2024 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com