10 January 2003

Vicki,

I was on my knees tracing a phone line, trying to get a dial tone so I could call someone to remind them how important it was to catch the World Service. I had to trace the jack to the wall, and in the process of taking it out and reinserting it, when I heard you say it was time for Speaker's Corner, the regular feature in which your listeners got to respond to stories. I leapt up and crashed into a wall. Too late! This could be it!

The segment started with an ironic view of the American effort to establish the Department of Homeland Security. It was a good piece. It was at twenty-six minutes past the hour as she continued to other letters from around the world. There was an emotional batch responding to the dispatch from Germany yesterday, espousing a peculiar historical revisionism in which the German people where not aggressors, but victims of war.

The letters began with a comment from a doctor from Pennsylvania who was irate as I was about the feature on the German reaction to the US buildup against Iraq. It was read by a staffer with one of those erudite Bush House voices. It made the comment sound more formal than the letter had, I suspect, since it started out by addressing Vicki directly, asking for a more evenhanded treatment of opinion. Then there was a comment by a feisty American lady, read again by the cultured tones of the BBC, who quibbled with the assertion of an American in Germany who would not give her name after her opinion against the war for fear of workplace retaliation. She said she said she was against the war and said so loudly and often and she was still employed.

Then Vicki noted that Vic Socotra, of Arlington, Virginia, had been in Germany at the end of the war. I blinked. That would make me in my eighties, at least three decades older than the way I felt this morning. Then a refined British voice read the words I had written yesterday: "I did the math. The burgher would have been ten in 1945, and thus would have had his kerchief and shirt as a member of the Hitler Youth."

Then it was done, and the cascade of the world's affairs resumed, my words just a small part of it. Vicki said she would pass the contact data for Bush House in a bit, and that they would read all their e-mail. I just had demonstrable proof of that. She reminded us of the top story of the hour, that the North Koreans had unilaterally abrogated their responsibility to the international nuclear nonproliferation treaty.

Carl Castle of NPR read the North American slant on the headlines at the next break, noting that North Korean diplomats has traveled to New Mexico to visit the newly elected Governor. Bill Richardson had been Ambassador to the United Nations before he was Secretary of Energy, and before joining the Executive Branch, a Congressman with a hobby in international affairs.

I remembered smoking a Cuban cigar with him on the plaza in front of the Presidential Guest Palace in Pyongyang in 1995. Our delegation was lodged there while we talked about the Agreed Framework with the regime and hoped to meet with The Dear Leader himself. I was carrying his bags and managing logistics. He looked at me in the darkness of the capital and said he might have to send me out that night through Panmunjon. I panicked, briefly, since I had no idea how I was pass through the Korean night to the Bridge of No Return. Bill is an extraordinary guy, and if anyone has the trust of the North it is him. The North Koreans awarded us little enamel lapel buttons with a picture of the Great Leader on them when we were about to climb on the rickety Air Koreo flight out. It was a signal honor, since the pins denote status in the DPRK ruling party and are not for sale at any price. But THAT is another story.

I sipped my coffee and smiled. Dawn was coming in Arlington. I got to be part of the BBC World Service. Is this a wonderful world, or what?

Thanks, Vicki!

Vic