04 June 2003

Midway

It is the anniversary of the Battle of Midway, the first Naval encounter fought entirely by airplanes between two fleets who never came within sight of one another. It was the beginning of the end for the Empire of the Sun, and at Stalingrad, Marshall von Paulus was about to surrender his 6th Army to the Communists. It is a great day to be alive, and remember.

I was going to write something this morning that was upbeat but images of what might come later this year disturbed me. Instead I turned to the e-mail and opened a note from a friend of a friend. She is a radio personality from a college town who claims to have an audience of at least six people. I thought of Vicki Barker and the world at her feet and smiled. You have to start somewhere. I the title and smiled "You're the Man" and clicked on it to read the words. My correspondent introduced herself and got to the point:

"I'm working on two things right now, 1) native rights and 2) wondering how the fuck to convince mainstream media to cover these issues. My friend thinks your current experiences with the tribes would be very helpful. He says you are willing to talk to me about your experiences….I'm not even sure what your position is with the government. We could talk by phone or do email, which ever you prefer. I'm easy that way. Also, we could speak off the record till we decide what you'd like to be quoted on."

I laughed and started to peck on the keyboard, thinking in the background about the whine of aircraft engines in a soft Pacific sky and with the words of the BBC in the background telling me what trouble Tony Blair was in because they could find no chemical weapons in Iraq. I sighed as I typed. If we did not find them there, I thought, they will certainly find us. I found my fingers dancing along. They typed:

"Hi! I'm not The Man, but I am one of the battalions of bureaucrats that have responsibility for a bunch of stuff.

Accordingly, I am in a bit of a straight jacket. Let me lay it out, how this all works as I understand it. This is not a tutorial, just a linked series of observations. As an active government official I am obligated to support the President as our Chief Executive. Talking in an official capacity means that I have to clear remarks, vette comments, file memos, carefully represent positions and policy and coordinate the inter-agency process. Government service is exactly that. I was a Naval officer for nearly 27 years, and that means saying a cheery "Aye Aye" and moving on with what the boss wants to do, whatever it is.

The alternative is always available. You can always quit. But while you are taking Uncle Sam's nickle, you owe him your time and loyalty.

There is an old rule that we follow assiduously when we deal with the Hill, but it is true on a broader level. "I support the President's Budget as submitted. Speaking as a private citizen, however, should additional funds be made available, I would submit that the following needs might be addressed....." It is what separates the professional from the personal. It is a fine line but it is one we walk.

And we don't always walk the line, sometimes we have to gyrate along it, believing several incompatible things simultaneously. It can be a tortured Kabuki dance in a tortured political process. But that is the way it is, and that is the way it is designed to work. Loyalty is everything in a political system and I operate at the junction between the political appointees and the career bureaucrats. So I watch my step and watch the backs of my friends as I hope they watch mine. When I need to blow off steam I write under a pen name and steer clear of the media, talking mostly with old friends or other wizened bureaucrats. I write about the world I live in, a sort of down-at-the-heels Samual Pepys. I try to retain a sense of wonder about the forces acting on the great engine of the government seem to be pushing us high and to the right.

Such forces are at work now in the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security. This is a classic example of how the government works and doesn't work. Remember, the Framers of this great nation were determined to ensure that the King did not ever return to this Continent. They made the budget the means of the elected Congress. They established an independent judiciary. They made the Chief Executive dependent on the Congress but able to trump it with the veto. They ensured the People could say what they wanted whenever they wanted in the First Amendment, and armed them in the Second to back it up. To guarantee that no single authority would rule unilaterally, they spread power in parts across the Federal level and included a phrase in the Constitution itself that said "all powers not specifically allocated to the Federal Government are reserved to the States and to the People, respectively."

So unless you are Franklin Roosevelt and have a seemingly bottomless depression on your hands or an ogre like Adolf Hitler, the normal way of things is compromise and accommodation. Secretary Tom Ridge is riding a tiger at the moment, captain of battalions of bureaucrats let out of their boxes and busy trying to reinvent the world.

Things have changed a lot since the Federalist Papers were written, and many of the freedoms they cherished have been usurped by a ravenous bureaucracy. The institutions have changed, first through a Manifest Destiny and the rush over the native peoples to the West and then a great Civil War to end the most abominable institution brought to this continent. The system changed to accommodate a global presence undreamed of by Jefferson and survived a great depression and global struggles against Fascism and Communism.

I came into the movie in the middle of the second reel and was a Cold Warrior for most of my time in service. But while we always kept an eye on the Commies, mostly we were dispatched to run around the world responding to crises on the seams between the Second and Third Worlds. My stint at fire-fighting included the Iranian Hostage Crisis and the Russo-Aghan war and North Korea and reporting the Falklands and responding to Soviet Submarines on the high seas and the Haitian migrants and Panama and Burma and Vietnam and The Gulf, part one, and Somalia and Croatia and Bosnia and terrorists and propaganda and finally Saddam again before I retired two weeks ago.

Now my attention is focused back on America. One of the portfolios I have deals with emergency response to terrorism, and that is where I intersect with the sovereign tribes and nations. Among other things, we establish policy for the way the Department showers money willy-nilly from the Treasury to the States. The Indian peoples have a unique relationship with Washington and are their own states within the States as you know. They ceded their external sovereignty and defense to Washington at the treaty table and entered into a compact with the Great White Father that ended their wars and began a long road through misery. But not extinction, at least not totally.

And as things happen, the Nations are back. I had a chance to attend the big budget meeting where the tribes came in and present their resource requirements to address substance abuse and diabetes and health care. The long litany of grievances in these sessions is restricted to health-related issues, but I was there because there is a real role for the tribes in homeland security and the war against terrorism. Some of them have border territories and are responsible for patrolling them against drug smugglers, the undocumented and are vulnerable to terrorist smuggling chem, bio and radiological weapons en route more interesting targets. The tribes are woefully unprepared and totally unresourced for the mission. But because of their symbiotic relationship with Washington, when they come to deal with the representatives of the government they are not bounded by reality, and are free to imagine solutions in an environment unconstrained by fiscal reality.

And of course they know that, too. The Tribes are no fools, and have been plying this game in good times and bad for a century. But they have the unquestioned moral high ground and people like me are trying to support good initiatives and maintain the lines of communications. The Secretary I work for is from a rural area and he understands what it is like to live there, far from the Beltway, and to be a Governor of a state that has many constituencies, some of them sovereign. We are now gazing up Independence Avenue at the new Department in the Government. We are trying to figure out what they are about, what their lane in the road is.

They think they own the road, that is the deal right now. The system will ultimately force everything back to the middle, back to the equilibrium that has worked since the Constitution was ratified. In the meantime I am waiting to see if Osama bin Ladin and his merry men can pull something of that will change that process. Another big strike and it just might happen.

In the meantime, stay in touch. Like I said, I'm not the man. I'm just one of them. And let's keep this on background, shall we?