10 October 2008
The Sky Suspended
Dru Blair's "While the Giant Slept"
I bought a picture the other d ay. It is stupid, I know, since I don’t have enough wall to put it on. Once I had the Kazakh guys at K&H Framing mount the thing, They do really good work, and have framed just about everything I hold dear, including the big R. Crumb art print “Despair” hangs above my computer screen.
If you read underground comics back in the day, you might remember it. A woman sits staring into space in a red armchair, her black hair lacquered in a ‘50s hairdo. Her husband is staring out the window, wondering aloud if they should “see if there is anything good on….” And a cartoon balloon hangs above her hard-curled hair with the words “Why bother?”
That is not how I feel most of the time, but the opportunity to get the signed print and display it with an original copy of the comic book that somehow has followed me through the chaos of the last thirty-eight years was irresistible.
I could not replace "Despair" on the wall at home.It would not send the right message anywhere but here. I realized the only place to put the new picture was at the office, high over N. Glebe Road.
The new one was just right for the work environment. I got a cool black matt for it that has a brilliant crimson core, so that a blood-red line surrounds the placid blue of the harbor and complements the color of the meatball roundel painted on the after fuselage of LCDR Takahashi’s Aichi D3A1 Type 99 "Val" dive bomber.
Artist Dru Blair catches Takahashi in the moment at 7:55 AM, just as he has pitched the nose over to align with Hangar Six at the Naval Air Station on Ford Island in Pearl Harbor.
He has a slight starboard wing down attitude, which makes it appear that he is hanging in the sky, suspended. In the cockpit, his fingers must be reaching for the toggle that will swing the bomb rack loose, since he is about to drop like a stone.
He will line up on the hangar and hit the target successfully. The Japanese pilots are among the best in the world, and their proficiency in the art of dive-bombing gave them a fantastic "direct hit rate" of 82 percent during naval action in the Indian Ocean.
Takahashi missed a flair signal from his flight lead, and thus became the inadvertent first combatant at Pear Harbor. Other aircraft had shot up Wheeler Field a few minutes before, b ut the carnage that would occur on Battleship Row next to the island is what transformed the world.
In the picture, Takahashi lives in a world at peace, even as his hand reaches for the toggle. Everything is about to change. Everything.
I looked at the picture through the day, wondering if I should be doing something besides being a passive participant on a series of conference calls.
Nothing popped up on my alert screen, so I assumed things were perhaps settling down on Wall Street. Still, I heard of some unsettling events from the financial community, about people, not the market. Some very strange things had happened, not my business, and nothing for public comment.
But the people involved are- or were- in positions to know things about the future and it was too much for them to handle.
Late in the afternoon, something began to happen in the market what had been a relatively quiet day. At two-thirty I heated up some rice and ate a take-from-home salad. We had a long discussion about rescuing a kid who quit his job to work on one of our contracts based on a mis-communication. We could not put him to work for weeks, if ever, and the real message should have been to keep his current position.
Now he was out of a job and a paycheck, and I felt we had to do something. It was our fault that he was out of work. By the time we figured out something that worked in the context of the new company policy on overhead labor, there was an alert on the screen.
Despite the big rescue package and the confident talk from Washington, the market suddenly got the willies. I looked at the ticker. When the meeting started, the Dow was down just 140 points. At three, it had slumped a little, down 200.
At three, wave after wave of selling began to roll. At three-twenty the index was down 380 points. Ten minutes later, it was down 390 points. By 3:45, it was down 660.
At the close, it finished down 679 points, or 7.3 percent of total market value. It was below the 9,000-level for the first time in five years. As New York finished a b ad day, Tokyo started their own.
We are linked, after all, in a tight embrace that began with LCDR Takahashi hanging in the sky suspended over my old office on Ford Island.
Like that moment sixty-seven years ago, I think we are going to remember “time-before” and “time-after.”
We said that a few years ago about 9/11. Those images will never fade. They are too stark and too focused to forget.
There isn’t a good picture for what is happening now. General Motors has become a junk stock. The world is changing so profoundly that we won’t even be able to imagine that we lived the way we did.
Copyright 2008 Vic Socotra
Dow chart Copyright New York Times
While the Giant Slept Copyright Dru Blair
www.vicsocotra.com