Vic Socotra

02 December 2009

Blue Moon

My son was just leaving as the President was coming on. I had cooked frantically when I got home to have a hot meal for him, and enough left-overs to take away for another one, deeper in the week.

This one was one of four chicken thighs with a faux Caribbean rub, salad, rice, green bean casserole topped by a slice of cherry pie a la mode that lingered as the last gasp of Thanksgiving past.

He knew what the President was going to say, and I think he was going to watch basketball or something. The moon, a day past full, was rising as he left.

This is an unusual month, since we will have two full lunar presentations, the last coming right before the New Year. Tradition has called the December moon the “cold” or “winter” one. The second full moon is called the “Blue Moon” due to its rarity, and to get things back on track with the three-moons-per quarter rythym.

We are trying to get back on track in the war that had gone so well and then so badly. I knew what Mr. Obama was going to say, but I was intent on seeing how he was going to say it.

I had been in the Pentagon on official business that morning, and in so doing I took in the atmosphere.

I am a skeptic about this Administration, just as I was of the last one. I find different things to fear in what they seem to be up to, so I was heartened by his performance. I have talked to people who have to deal with the Executive Office of the President, and they say the very intelligent but often inexperienced people there will worry an issue to death to get to what they think is the right answer.

As the endless meetings that led to this speech demonstrate, that can often be mistaken for indecision and timidity. I think they are learning, and will become more deliberate with the number of intense issues they have on their plates.

So often in the last year I have had to shake my head in disbelief at the wishful thinking that passes for public policy here. The global apology tour for America’s many sins was one of those things.

I imagine the thinking was that once it was done everyone would like us again, just as they never had, and now that the momentary flicker of hope that America was somehow going to change has passed, and that Blue Moon has sunk. Now we are back to the hard business of attempting to manage chaos with less and less ability to generate a unilateral solution to anything.

I feel bad for the Russians. They enemies I could understand, and still enjoy a vodka with at the end of the day. They are trying to reassert themselves as a great power, and they have enormous potential for mischief. But their population is declining in number and their frontiers are long. The bomb blasts on the thin rail line from Moscow to St. Petersburg show the enormous vulnerability to the terrorists created by the wars in Chechnya.

We have been lucky for a long time, but all that will come here, too. The Mad Major at Fort Hood is part of it, and the devout man who was cooking Ricin poison in the motels of Colorado to take to New York, and the kids from Minneapolis who are traveling to Somalia to enlist in the fight against the Oppressor.

See, I didn’t mention religion once in that whole paragraph, and don’t have to apologize for anything.

I was exhausted by the time I got home- it was one of those days. The Pentagon had been a fun trip away from the desk, and I saw some old pals who are doing well in the military-industrial complex. I watched a cool briefing, and scrambled to help a Danish ally who was puzzled by the comment that someone had to do the "sissy initiative."

I have no idea what he might have thought- his English is quite good, but the image of the phrase was both evocative and disturbing. I wrote it down for him and passed the note: "Senate Select Committee on Intelligence," I wrote. “SSCI, pronounced “sissy.” They hate to be called that!”

He shook his head in relief.

The weather was wonderful and it was fun walking through the vast old building. It is almost completely rebuilt now, a process that began with blasting in the basement when I was a Lieutenant Commander in a different world.

Now they are working on the last wedge to be gutted. I peered in one of the “A” Ring windows, and it is quite remarkable. All the old structures are gone, the walls and vaults and cipher locks of the old headquarters and the NSA detachment and cafeteria that served thousands of us.

Only the raw concrete and the great ramps leading to the gloom above remain. The emptiness will soon be filled up with spanking new vaults without a single rat, or at least the four-footed ones.

The old locating diagrams that were prominently posted at the end of each now-anonymous corridor used to be crisp geometric templates with a World War Two sort of flavor. Now the crisp lines are softened by the orange-colored blob of the D.O.C. Cook Remote Delivery Facility that thrusts out to the perimeter of North Parking.

Two great sandstone piers jut out from the South Parking side of the building to permit pedestrians to pass over the traffic lanes close to the building that were closed right after the attack.

It makes that side of the building look like an Egyptian temple of ancient age, and the diagrams now appear to show the Pentagon being ingested by The Blob.

The Ground Zero snack bar is much taller than the old green wooden structure, and it obscures the sight lines in the courtyard, and blocks the sun from the solid Adirondack chairs where we used to go sit and smoke when the stress got too be too much.

I suppose it is better than the old crumbling building where I worked, but it has lost a lot of character along the way. Or maybe it is that every generation feels that way at the end of their time, and sighs as they turn the running of the world over to someone else.

Shoot, I remember when Doc Cook was a guy, not a loading dock.

I sat down in my brown chair to watch the President talk about committing 30,000 kids to the war on the roof of the world.

I bet I looked just like those cadets as the cold moon climbed over both of our buildings. They had been in their places for long minutes waiting to serve as a backdrop for a Major Policy address, in the dimness of the vast hall, warm in their high-collared dress uniforms, up since 0500.

I could see the cameras catch the drooping eyelids. Like them, I was starting to doze as the Commander in Chief outlined their fate.

Copyright 2009 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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