24 January 2007
Time Travelers
My fellow Americans, we are all time travelers. It is not as romantic as one would think. We do it slowly enough that we do not notice, day to day. It is only when we confront an image from the past, or the mirror, that we realize that we have been dropped down in the future, alone.
The Presidents are a case in point. Mr. Bush doesn't look nearly as callow as he used to, and if he is haunted, he did a pretty good job of concealing it last night.
I finished a book as I watched the State of the Union Address. The President seemed pretty relaxed, and started graciously, with a nod to Madam Speaker, who had the equal grace not to whack him with her gavel. The Vice President has never seemed more Buddha-like. I am not sure he even blinked during the whole long address.
People rose and fell, and I prepared myself for the inevitable commentary that would come when it was over. It never reflects what I actually hear, since the Democratic Response, issued by former Republican Senator James Webb, was a exercise in time travel, having been written in the past and speaking to an unknown future, skipping the present altogether.
Additional commentary came from the Front Runners for the next election in two years, which reflects a desire to travel forward to a happy time when they each hold the power of the man who spoke.
It must be multiple universes, I mused, as I half-followed the characters in the book. Henry is the time traveler, and Clare is the woman who loves him, and waits as he plunges back and forth in time.
It is a chromosomal mal-adjustment that unhinges Henry in the temporal continuum, and he always arrives in some other place naked and alone. It is a little creepy, since he starts dropping in on Clare when she is only six, and he is a grown man, but the strength of the narrative gets you over that.
There are a lot of us who feel exactly the same way, at least about the naked and alone part. As the President spoke, the earthly remains of E. Howard Hunt were en route the mortuary. He was one of the last of the OSS crowd, one of Wild Bill Donovon's agents in the Big War, and a charter member of the old elite CIA that the Good Shepard guided through the heyday of the Cold War.
He wound up in the Plumbers Unit with G. Gordon Liddy, who I think is still with us, or at least appears to be.
Meanwhile, Security could take a little comfort in the locked-down capitol. We were all a little safer in the run-up to the Address, since eight members of the Black Liberation Army had been arrested in the pre-dawn hours. According to police sources, the eight had murdered a police officer in 1971, and waged a five-year battle against the cops and the FBI.
I time-traveled from college, where the Revolution seemed to be starting, and the blood rushed full and red in my veins. Not like the thin blue stuff I pump now. I heard Mr. Bush say, “This is not the fight we entered in Iraq, but it is the fight we are in.”
I puzzled over that, thinking I had heard it before. I put the book down on my lap. It was a déjà vu moment until I realized it was a paraphrase of Donald Rumsfeld, the architect of this war, who observed petulantly, “You go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you might want or wish to have."
I traveled back in time to think when he made that observation. Things must have seemed quite different from the podium that afternoon in the Pentagon, the very same podium I used to watch my boos speak from.
That was a different war, though it was in close to the same place.
It must be even stranger for the Vice President and the former Secretary. They must have memories of the same buildings and meetings with E. Howard Hunt, or at least seen him around the White House.
It is quite curious, this time travel thing. I looked up from the book and saw it was approaching Midnight. I won't tell you what happens to Henry and Clare, since you may read it in the future, but it was/will be a compelling story.
I took away the thought that the nature of time is an entirely mutable thing, and that perhaps we are all together again.
Sometime.
Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com