26 June 2003

On June 26, 1963, President John F. Kennedy visited West Berlin. While there he visited the Schoenburg town hall in the American Sector and uttered the words that framed the whole decade of Cold War, and presaged the robust commitment to democracy that became the adventure in Vietnam. He made his famous commitment to the people of the divided city: "Ich bin ein Berliner" ("I am a jelly-filled donut, covered with powdered sugar.")

They knew what he meant, really, but it highlights the perils of public speaking, particularly in languages that are not your own. I was going to give a speech to 680 health professionals this morning outside my native tongue in a terra incognita. That is why I am seated in this restaurant in suburban Chicago, looking for a floppy disc at the last minute, editing the stupid briefing I have been dispatched to give to the Illinois Bioterror Summit, a convocation of local health professionals and members of the first responder community. I was tasked to give a twenty minute speech my Boss decided at the last minute wasn't important enough for him to make. I was late for the airport before I even got into the shower

In order to be at Dulles for the first non-stop to Chicago I was awakened at 0359 by the blast of the alarm clock. United Flight 705 to O'Hare was a Boeing 777 scheduled to push-back from the gate at 0610 and I was going to be cutting it fine to make the airport all scrubbed up and ready to go.

Awful.

I showered and hoped I was organized. I took the bag with the laptop so I could make a stab at working in the day that would be spent sitting around waiting for something to move me. I slung my jacket over my arm and walked out of the building. Traffic on I-66 West out of Arlington was light, as you might expect at this hour. The window began to fog up from the effect of the air conditioning hitting the dampness in the air outside. I roared through the Virginia dampness in the tunnel cut by my headlights. I called her, not meaning to wake her up, but she had not gone back to bed and was looking out the door to the balcony. Looking down on Route 50 that had not yet begun to hiss with the morning rush. She told me as I pulled into the new parking structure at Dulles that Vicky Barker and the BBC were back on my local Public Radio station. I don't know what happened yesterday. Maybe a big benefactor came through and paid the phone bill down at NPR. It wasn't me. I was covering a speech to a cold-fish group of DoD lawyers assembled by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency in the morning, another of the speeches that my boss had accepted and then determined was not worth his time.

That was a long day, arriving late in the crisis cycle in the office and not packed and not prepared for the jaunt this morning. I left the office without comment at five, just a terse "Going to Chicago" to the Boss's secretary on my way by her to the door.

Now I was inserted into the sanitized transit environment. I notice everyone is just taking off their shoes and putting them through the x-ray machine. The knowledge had become common to frequent travelers that many shoes contain a slim metal shank down the middle of the sole which sets off the detectors. To avoid the delay associated with an intrusive wand search, we are now just stripping down to stocking feet and running our dress pumps through the machine unprompted. Another in the endless series of small indignities handed to us by the terrorists. No smoking, no laughing, no threatening movements.

I made it to the irritating mobile lounge that is the only way to get to the "C" Concourse in time to purchase a Washington Post that hadn't arrived just yet and hand my change back over the counter, a strange trip through a backward universe. They I went down to the Starbucks that had not yet opened. It was there that I encountered some narcissists from the West Coast, the kind that crowd to the front of the padlocked grill in front of the two employees that are there to open up. The Californians, or wannabees, are carefully blow-dried, checking profit statements on their laptops, announcing profits to the empty corridor, ordering cranberry scones to go with their hazelnut Vente double decaf lattes, and then hogging all the space at the fixings station to get their purchases just so.

Irritating. They were on my flight, of course, but it was not full and I did not have to interact with them. They were lucky. I spilled some of the Starbucks on my shirt as I tried to get comfortable in my seat. I was wearing a khaki summer suit, intending to look a little like Wilfred Brimley in Absence of Malice, the Paul Newman flick from the early eighties about a Miami liquor distributor wrongly accused by the Feds on racketeering charges. The Feds are off the reservation and Brimley, in his break-out role, plays a Department of Justice senior who comes down to Florida on a one-day trip to "take someone's ass home in a briefcase."

I made it through O'Hare. They do not subject you to mobile lounges there. Instead they have a tunnel carved under the field to the outlying terminals with moving walkways. Overhead are florescent lights that change color and pattern as you sweep along. It is very futuristic, pleasant but un-nerving, a little like the future I was going to go talk to the Bioterror Summit about.

I always wanted to be the Wilford Brimley kind of bureaucrat, but this wasn't the day for it. I had some laughs with the nice lady who greeted my at the baggage claim area as we drove across toll roads through an anonymous landscape drenched in rich sun. When we got to the anonymous hotel I met some wonderful people who had not awoken in the Eastern Daylight Standard Time, including one jolly fellow who told me in the line for coffee that he had only been awake for a half hour. I hadn't bothered to change my watch, thinking I would be home soon enough, but it kept fooling me.

Eventually I was on a dais with a State Senator and the State Health Director and some other worthies. They made some remarks and then I was on. I had a good time with it. I don't know how long I talked, though I don't think it was too much over twice the time I was allotted. They had started late, I observed, and so I was going to run a little long to make up for it. It was fun and I actually talked about program and budget priorities. I talked about the threat, and the fact that Osama bin Ladin had sent someone to O'Hare to find a nice large apartment building in Chicagoland equipped with gas lines to blow up.

I reminded them that all terrorism was local, and sometimes we couldn't tell al Qaida from Phil's Pocket Pets until the lab results were all done. I left them laughing and I left them sober by turns. And then I left, to go sit at O'Hare for a few hours waiting on a flight back to Washington. A day in Chicago in which the only thing that was unique or distinctive was a flash of the Marina near the Gold Coast apartment towers as the plane banked on final into the airport. Many of them are equipped with gas.

I didn't see anything at all of Washington coming back. It was a quick turnaround for the AirBus 310 jet we were assigned and someone had left both the Globe and the Star, the two tabloids everyone furtively looks at in the checkout lane and never buy. I had tremendous guilty pleasure in reading about celebrity tattoos, and the Osama-in-Drag party crasher at Windsor Castle who got to the microphone at Prince William's 21st birthday party. Very embarrassed security people in England, I will tell you. And more stories and banal quotes from people I have never heard of. The popular culture is getting away from me, like the catty story about what the BackStreet Boys look like these days, and which members are pudgy now or going bald. There were many pictorials of the Stars. You should see what Cher's ass looks like these days though a translucent cat-suit.

But in justice, I don't think she would want to see mine. Or Wilford Brimley's for that matter.

Copyright 2003 Vic Socotra