Author: Vic Socotra

Regime Change

(Demonstration in Tehran, 1953, opposing Operation AJAX. Photo Public Radio International). “I told you the other day that I was sent to London in May of 1950 from DC.” I nodded in agreement, and got out my pen and prepared to take notes. “I rented the flat, picked up our 1949 Mercury four-door sedan at […]

Binding Commitment

Editor’s Note: I stayed up late watching Monday Night Football, something fewer and fewer of us do these days for a variety of perfectly good reason, some of them akin to the reason we have a President-elect with orange hair. I talked at length about that with Liz-with-an-S at the bar last night. She was […]

Life and Island Times: Saturday Night on the Front Porch

Note: I wrote today’s piece way back in the early fall just before my “new” laptop developed a fatal hard drive fault. It took a long time to fix the computer and then chase down the old drive all over the country before recovering the data thereon. It was the opening day of the 2016 […]

Going Ashore

14 November 2016 Editor’s Note: It was a quiet enough weekend, though there did not appear to be enough of it. I did not take to the streets in protest, but just enjoyed the marvelous crisp air of autumn. If there were disturbances downtown over the results of the election, they did not spill over […]

Mid-way

Editor’s note: Mac would have been happy this morning, and I am trusting that somewhere he is. The Iowa Hawkeyes knocked off my Michigan Wolverines in a tiresome reprise of some games back in the 1980s. People are still rioting in the Pacific Northwest, though I honestly can’t imagine why. Maybe it is something else […]

Life and Island Times: Age of Style

Marlow’s Coastal Empire Election 2016 seems to have boiled down to who could encapsulate his/her message to the general public in vignettes as entertaining, as compelling with clearly dramatic highs and lows, and as briefly as possible. Once again, effective self-storytelling and self-selling were about the characters and not the story, policy substance, truth or […]

When I’m (92)

12 November 2016 Editor’s Note: Apparently there is still rioting over the refusal of some citizens to accept the results of the election. I vividly recall all the Republican pouring out into the street back in 2008 to protest, smash the windows protecting small businesses and vandalize automobiles….oh, wait. That never happened. Never mind. Whatever […]

Billie and Mac

Editor’s Note: It is Veterans Day, and one of contemplation. There have been two nights of protest in the streets about the election, some of them violent. I knew this wouldn’t be over, even with the results seemingly final. They were not interrupted by attacks, cyber or terrorist, and there few reports of anything but […]

Life and Island Times: Killer Clowns

PT Barnum said it long ago Voters, like suckers, born every minute, don-cha- no Primary candidates made us laugh, some made us cry These nominated clowns said the others gonna make us die   Supporters came arunnin’ when their clown’s circus came to town They stayed away from the tents of the opponent killer clown […]

Don’t Trust Anyone Under Thirty

Editor’s Note: We have to tiptoe around some of the things that Mac did during the more than a dozen years that composed the second part of his intelligence career. There had been some pretty strange things going on, at the behest of Presidents and others, and some whistles were being blown. Mac’s role was […]