Vic Socotra

03 November 2008

Tattoo

I have discovered that the ride on the train from Manhattan is precisely the length of time it takes to make a cursory scan of the hard-copy Sunday edition of the New York Times.

It is a daunting mass of pulp material, and even subsidized by ad revenue, it cost $4 bucks. Of course, what can you buy for that anymore? A cup of coffee- white- at Mike’s Deli on the stroll over to Penn Station behind Madison Square Garden cost $2 and some change.

It was crisp and chill, good morning for the start of the Marathon down at the Staten Island end of the Verrazano Narrows Bridge. I was glad to not be on the course, shivering, particularly when I turned the corner at 5th and Broadway and ran into the micro-climate that sweeps the street at the base of the Empire State Building.

I looked up on instinct, marveling that I knew for sure I had looked down from the observation deck at least twice, and possibly more. Once for sure I stood there with my folks, and once for sure with my kids. There were other possibilities, though. I worked for a company out of Manhattan for a while, but unfortunately, that decade is pretty much lost to me except for some odd photos.

The building is undergoing reconstruction at the moment, no gigantic apes hanging from the upper stories. The breeze was not artificial and cut through my sweater. It took three blocks to get clear of it, and eventually wind up at the station.

Legendary Motor City rocker Bob Seger called New York a “friendly old ghost” he seemed to float right through. Saturday Night Live used to call it the most dangerous city in America, which is going a fairly far piece, but it is safer and much more civilized than it was then. I usually love the City, but if you are feverish and cannot drink and the thought of food is mildly revolting, it is definitely not one of the places you want to be.

I bought the Times to read on the train, and staggered under the weight of it. In the waiting area for the high-speed Acela train, I culled out the advertising material and the classified ads, which saved a couple pounds of weight, and read the real estate supplement that was bound as its own slick publication. There is a lot of nice property available these days at fire-sale prices. Some nice ones can be had for less than $20 million.

A lot of people are clearly taking a beating. Between the Ex, the real estate bubble, and the likely tax consequences of the new administration, I am personally looking at the biggest swing of assets and redistribution of resources in my life.

It is a couple hundred grand in the last two years, between legal battles and real estate slump. Since none of us know precisely what the answer will be until after tomorrow, it makes me a little edgy. Regardless of who gets elected it is really only a question of magnitude. When the Bush tax cuts expire, and if the cap on the FICA Social Security tax is lifted, the maximum tax bracket of 34% on ordinary income is going to jump dramatically.

With Medicare and the state and local folks, it is already a rule of thumb for me to estimate my take home pay by dividing my income in half. That is at rates that are well below historic levels of taxation under left of center governments. I have looked at it pretty hard, and there may be no way to get out of the hole, this side of the grave.

I got on the train and spread out my paper and read about tax policy. It reminded me of the motto I had engraved on my silver uniform belt buckle in the magical Philippine Islands, in a time far away. It was an intricate piece of work, and from a distance it seemed decorative. I wore it on my khakis from 1980-2000, until someone noticed what it said in the small letters across the top, over the silver winged-insignia of an Air Intelligence Officer.

The tiny words said "F**k Communism."

That in itself is a bit of a story. The original bumper sticker was apparently an act of Guerilla Theater, intended to shock and appall American sensibilities with the rudeness of the verb and the stigma of the noun.

A fellow named Paul Krassner thought it up in 1963 as sort of Lenny Bruce blow for absurdism and individual liberty. He thought he was making fun of the phobia about communists. Kurt Vonnegut called it “a miracle of compressed intelligence nearly as admirable for potent simplicity…as Einstein¹s e=mc2.”

Uncle Kurt said it this way: “To call an American a communist was like calling somebody a Jew in Nazi Germany. By having F**K and COMMUNISM fight it out in a single sentence, Krassner wasn't merely being funny as heck. He was demonstrating how preposterous it was for so many people to be responding to both words with such cockamamie Pavlovian fear and alarm.”

Naturally, it was also intended as a criticism of the Vietnam War, and the opposition to the expansion of communist regimes in SE Asia, which was supposed to be OK, and no big deal. It must have appalled Krassner no end when the military adopted it as an unofficial raison motto.

I had not thought about it in a long time, since it seemed to have become as quaint as nuclear weapons and the Cold War.

But it occurred to me that with election day coming up, and the population reeling from the fiscal disasters brought on us by disastrous Democratic policies on home-loans compounded by rapacious Republican de-regulation, we are going to elect a government that is going to have to finish me off. Having stolen my past, they seem pretty sanguine about taking the future, too.

I have been looking around for a good idea for a tattoo. While I was on active duty, I followed the conventional wisdom that said ink was for sailors, not officers. But the times have changed a lot. I am not going to be passing this way again, so what the hell.

I am not sure I can bring myself to have the words done in English, since I spend a lot of time shirtless at the pool, and the children should be protected. Perhaps in Cyrillic it would work. Bold Red. Maybe with the AI wings in the middle, prominent on my flesh so that when I am down at the unemployment line or the soup kitchen I can roll up my sleeve so the apparatchiks will see it and not know what it means:

"????????????????? ?????????."

I am still working on it- there are shorter Russian words for "fornicate," but I am headed in the right direction, I think.
Chinese.

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