02 June 2003

Cold Peace

They are giving away amusement park rides out in Sterling, Virginia. I took them up on it this weekend, daring the rain to come and spoil it. I needed to indulge myself, put the wide world aside for a moment since the landscape of the world appears to be shifting, slumping into a new paradigm. It is nothing like the old order, where the laws of physics seemed to apply to ordinary life among the nation-states. For every action there was an equal and opposite re-action. It kept everything in stasis. It isn't like that now. It is like the strange Spring weather we are having. Cold. Not particularly peaceful. Heck, Jerry Mathers, the Beaver of television is 55 years old today.

This morning they are already at it in Evian-les-Bains, the posh French resort where President Bush is talking to the Group of Eight, plus one, who opposed the war in Iraq. You have to admire W's style. He is not there to make up after the unpleasantness that surrounded the invasion of Iraq. There is some back and forth about body language and attitude but the resolute American appears to have spent the day yesterday ratcheting up the pressure on the next two target states- North Korea and Iran to suspend their nuclear weapons programs. Vicki Barker just told me as the World Service wrapped up the hour that a photo op had been staged in which the American President was magnanimous and said all the guys wanted a free Iraq after all.

He is going to spend less than 24 hours at the G-8 and is out of there for Egypt later today. He will skip the final summit session and blast through the Middle East, heading for Aqaba, Jordan, after his brief fling in the land of the Paraoes.

With the President gone and the demonstrators have carefully sequestered down the street there will be nothing to disturb those remaining as they discuss what the Press is now calling the Cold Peace. I stumbled across something else heartening, and that was that Zimbabwe's main opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai was released from jail. President-For-Life Robert Mugubwe had charged him with treason after he stole the Presidential election from him. Mugubwe apparently caved to mass street demonstrations in Harare, formerly is starting to show some cracks. That is the upside, in the meantime the SLORC Junta in Burma has been taken Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi back into "protective custody." So some are going and some are coming. I had a minor walk-on part in a previous release from house arrest of the indomitable daughter of General Aung San, and I wish her well. The SLORC, it was said, did not respond well to the carrot and stick approach we were trying. From my experience, sitting back, watching them, it was very clear that they did not like carrots and were not afraid of the stick.

So I don't know how they fit into the Cold Peace. After all, they do not have nuclear or biologic weapons. They are just unpleasant and brutal people who live in a wonderful land. On the upside, for us struggling writers there is a ray of hope. I saw in CNN that J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, is as rich as the Queen. Her net worth is supposed to be around $444 million, and I assume they did the conversion from pounds. But the key point is that she was once just a single mom who was reduced to applying for the Dole. Her life turned around after having and epiphany on the train from Manchester to London, fusing Kipling's Stalky and Company and the venerable Tom Brown's School Days and cloaking them in swords-and-sorcery. In her hands the fusion blossomed into a sensation. Richer than the Queen. Makes a poor scribbler happy with the idea that sometimes something breaks for one of us.

But none of that accounts for the passion of the weekend. That lay out in the fields and industrial parks northwest of Dulles International Airport. There is an auto-park there, a special economic zone for all the dealerships. At the very back of the park, where the wide boulevards end abruptly in warning barriers and bucolic fields, not yet developed. The BMW dealer I back there, but that is not why I was there. I was there because the bimmer people are selling the revamped Mini Cooper marque. I had been hearing about the car for more than a year, the publicity was huge, and the little bug-eyed car even stars in a movie, a re-make of The Italian Job, which the reviewers say is nothing more than 95 minutes of product placement for the bug-eyed little reincarnation of the 1960s Cooper micro-box. I remember Janet Forbush had one in High School, when dinosaurs ruled the planet and England still made cars. It was remarkably big inside and had tiny wheels and Cooper even made a thing they called the "Mini-Cooper S," for sport. It was legendary and it hurtled around curves with wide little tires way out on the corners of the car. It was reported to scream, and it raced, and it was still cute.

When it ran, because it was thoroughly English. "Electronics by Lucas" is what we used to say, shaking our heads when English cars wouldn't work. Now Ford has bought Jaguar and the electronics work just fine. And BMW has bought the rights to Cooper. They did the right thing. They made the little car cute, and they made it fast. I got in a small line and took my turn to drive. All I had to do was produce my diver's license and proof of insurance. I drove a regular mini first, equipped with a sunroof and a good stereo. Standard transmission. Stiff clutch.

They gave me a little map that outlined the test drive route and I nodded and then ignored the instructions. They told me to be gone ten minutes and I Fun. I did not notice how anemic it was until they gave me the keys to the "S" model. I almost didn't come back. It may be a cold Spring and a Cold Peace, but that is one hot little car. I was doing a handbrake turn out near the fields, using four lanes to turn the little screamer around before heading up through the gears, doing everything I would never do to my own vehicle, revving it toward the red-line on the tach.

Hot car, I hated to slow down and enter the dealership sedately. I hoped they didn't smell the rubber. I think I know what my next car will be, assuming I can stand the six month wait to get it.