10 December 2003

Window Shopping

We killed a bunch of kids in Afghanistan yesterday, the second group of youngsters we inadvertently blew away in as many days. The wounded in the bombings at Mosul and Red Square have barely got the stitches in, and off we go again.

There is something abroad in the land. The Democrats barely won the mayoral election in San Francisco with a 16-1 advantage in registration. It was not the Republicans who made a run for it. It was the Greens, who have but 3% of the electorate on their party rolls. It wound up 53% to 47%, and I don't know what it means, except that Ralph Nader's share of the vote in the last Presidential election gave the victory to George W Bush. Had he received the Green vote, Al would not have had to worry about the hanging chads in south Florida.

Hell, we wouldn't even know what a hanging chad is.

The fire at The Station nightclub in Rhode Island, the one that killed over a hundred people, goes to trial this week. Jeeze, I still talk about that event as a case study in disaster response. It had just happened when I went down to the Department of Health and Human Services. It is all starting to slide back into history and then whammo!, here it is again. The dead past isn't very good about burying its dead, or maybe it is just the fact that we living that cannot stop digging them up again.

It is going to flood today. The radio murmurs that we will have an inch or two of rain on top of the crusted ice and the runs and creeks and storm drains around here won't be able to handle it. I need to remember a coat and an umbrella today, since I will be gadding about town. Homeland Security to the Company to the Agency and back to the Company again. At least part of the journey will be by public conveyance, and accordingly, I need to be prepared.

Hard to focus this morning and I need to get started. But the steam isn't there the way it was yesterday morning. Then I thought I was heading for an eight o'clock meeting at Homeland Security. Instead, I wound up at the guardshack watching one lady hand-writing parking passes for a work crew of immigrant workers. It is almost mind boggling that the institutions charged with our collective security has one lady in a plexiglass booth hand-writing parking passes. There is something very strange about it all.

At the watch center I have to wait for someone to open the door leaving the building since there is no buzzer and my visitors badge will not work in the card reader. Inside I have to surrender my driver’s license to prove who I am and get another badge and then wait for someone to walk out of the inner door.

My intentions were honorable. I was going to go wait with the laborers. I rose with the alarm, but I felt the fog of the Pinot Grigio they were pouring in the lobby last night at the Holiday Party. I am the newest owner here in the Building and there was some talk about that, between the yuppies and the blue-haired ladies. I talked to one of them who had worked for one of the development banks that rose from the Marshall Plan. She wasn't sold on the President's program in Iraq and I told her I wasn't that nuts about it myself.

But she seemed to think that people were being scooped up on the streets of Washington and flown in chains to Guantanamo. I explained that the whole thing was designed to be extra-territorial. No U.S. citizens were being held there. The only one we knew of, John Walker Lindh, already had his plea bargain and was embarked on his real life term right there at the Super Max prison in Colorado Springs. Justice was swift. It just wasn't swift for enemy combatants and it was not supposed to be.

I thought about the kids in Afghanistan this morning and the glib words sounded so Republican to my ears. It was easier when I was on active duty and I didn’t you didn't question, you just did what they told you. I am afraid they are going to ask me to serve on a Board or something and I suppose I will have to. Civic Duty and all that.

I left the Agency for a late lunch yesterday, which isn’t to say I was going to eat anything. I was going window shopping. The leadership was away at a conference and there was no one to account for my whereabouts. I was not responsible for anything more than my time. I reasoned that I could as easily be thinking about the detailed analysis of five-year programmatic guidance while looking at home furnishings at the Pottery Barn as in my cubical, and I was half excited about trying a new start. There is a new mall down the street from the Agency and I decided to slip out.

I walked down Wilson Boulevard with my badges swinging from my neck on their lanyard. There were holiday displays in the windows of the new buildings and water dripping from the brand new eaves where the ice was melting. I saw a co-worker coming back from his late lunch and asked him if he wanted to go the Pottery Barn and he said he had been hanging out at the bookstore. I walked briskly past the new Cheesecake Factory with its improbable minaret and Harry's Bar to the little upscale Mall across from the Fresh Fields supermarket. I looked up the cul de sac toward the Barnes and Noble and the Sonoma-Williams and the Crate and Barrel and the Pottery Barn.

I have enough books for now, though looked at them through the big plate glass windows. I almost went in, but realized I would wander around inside for hours. Instead, I went into the Pottery Barn. It was all rich wood fixtures and elegance and I lost myself there, thinking of possibilities. I wondered if canceling one of our satellite programs would provide the investment money to fix some short-term intelligence collection Take the mis-matched plates to the Good Will. Start over with nice white plates, a twenty-piece package of four dinner plates, salad plate, bowl and mug and maybe even splurge for a platter, serving bowl and covered creamer and sugar set.

There were big savings there, though I suppose I should wait until after the dust from the Holidays has settled. Half my mind was on the Future Years Defense Plan and half was on whether I wanted a blue stripe on the plates or just the plain white. For $1.2 billion we could fix the unattended sensor problem, and for $86 bucks I could get a discontinued series of bright yellow plates a little like the ones my ex-wife has.

I didn't buy anything, though I discovered the budget report had just about finished itself when I got back to the vault. Maybe I ought to open up a place on the mall, call it something like The Budget Vault and sell steeply discounted ideas on national defense. By the time I finally got home last night it was almost time for the Holiday Party that we cannot call Christmas. I was still in my suit and some of the older folks thought I might have dressed for the occasion.

When things began to thin out and the shrimp was gone, I took a group of revelers from the party down the hall to look at the first floor Condo I bought Monday. I realized, with other people in it, just how small the place was. A tiny box. Nice view, close to the pool. But a tiny box none-the-less. We roamed around the building for a while after that, looking at other units and seeing what people had done to fix them up.

The Leadership of the Ironworkers Union has quite a presence in the Building. They like the units because they are no-muss, no-fuss. They can pick up and leave for weeks at a time if necessary, and never worry about how the yard looks or whether the snow gets shoveled. Their Chief lobbyist gave me a good lead on a place to find the Plantation shutters I need so I can open the top and let some light in and still walk around the place naked as a jaybird. As a homeowner, it is only fair to the neighbors, even if they are Ironworkers.