06 February 2008

Sticks and Stones


I stayed up too late last night, trying to figure out California.

As if anyone could.

Things in the dirt had erupted to alter the course of events in my little world, and I was having trouble coming to grips with it all. The dirt across the street at the George Schultz Foreign Service Training Center, also known as Arlington Hall Station, has joined the rest of the neighborhood in turning over the sticks and soil and stones to plant new buildings.

The workmen stopped abruptly when an ominous cylindrical object appeared in the maw of the backhoe. The workers freaked, and rightly. Labor ceased, and buildings were evacuated. Diplomats and Guardsmen proceed to their designated evacuation points. Explosive Ordnance Detachment personnel were summoned to the scene, and after careful consideration identified the thing.

It was a thirty-pound shell from a 4.2 inch Parrot rifle, fired sometime in the early 1860s, when Union forts ringed the fields where Big Pink now stands.

There was controversy, of course. Had there been an unknown earthwork on the site? Was it a training round fired from Fort Tillinghast to the east, or Fort Craig that once brooded over the approaches to the city on the Columbia Pike?

The shell was mute on the subject of its origins. It had rested peacefully under the feet of schoolgirls and Spooks and Diplomats despite its explosive potential, Eventually, the excitement died down as the shell was trundled away.

I had to ask one of the National Guard guys who was walking past Big Pink to his car what all the commotion was about. He gave me a crisp brief and almost saluted.

Driving past the scene, headed for the District, I felt relieved to have professionals on the job, and knew they would have things wrapped up before I got back from across the river.

I mentally laid out the list of people to see in the big building on Bolling Air Force Base as I crossed the axis of South Capitol Street, and passed abeam the great white dome. There is so much construction there now, trucks hauling away spoil from the new buildings rising in South West around the Navy Yard and the new stadium. I did not take the shorter route, thinking that the ramp to Martin Luther King Avenue and the Anacostia Freeway would be smoother even if a bit longer.

The surface streets are torn up by the trucks, the asphalt buckling under their heavy loads of earth and stone.

I flew down the ramp and merged crisply into the center lane to get around the traffic fighting to exit on Howard Road. I was looking at the rear-view to ensure I didn't get clipped and lost the scan on the road ahead for an instant. When my concentration returned, I noticed that the color of the road had changed from salt-bleached white concrete to rich red.

One of the big dump trucks had lost the load. It was not one of the stocky little trucks, but one of the long ones, designed to consolidate loads. I had the couple of seconds to contemplate what was about to happen, time compression. I could see blue lights and the truck ahead on the shoulder. A few vehicles pulled off the road, haphazardly, as though they had taken fire.

Rich red dirt and big rocks spread across three lanes for a hundred yards….

Then I was in it, braking with car alongside, the fine-tuned suspension of the Hubrismobile taking the shock and grinding of the spoil impacting beneath, the rattle of stone against the solid German undercarriage, and then a sickening deep thud as something hit amidships.

I glanced up to see if I had lost one of the windows, finger gripping the wheel, the numbers of the amount of the unpaid loan on this fine machine flickering through my forebrain. Then on the horn, of course, since I had no time to lower the window and gesture at the man standing next to his truck, talking to the cop.

Son of a bitch, I thought. Not a good week for the car. Maybe someone is trying to tell me something. Maybe I need a faster one.

By the time I had sorted out the business and ruefully surveyed the damage, it was time to contact the Vietnamese body shop and see what they could do to patch up the shrapnel damage.

It could have been worse. It could have been a live artillery round.

By the time I wrote the last memo for the record and made the last phone call of the day, the people on the radio were beginning to figure out for me. McCain is the presumptive Republican nominee, a 70-year-old man who will probably have a Baptist minister as his running mate, another white fellow. That is a leap of faith, but it is faith that undermined Mr. Romney, the handsome man whose appeal to women Republicans appears not to have been sufficient to sustain him.

There is more to come, and we get to vote next week. I am trying to pick the box to fill   that will confound the analysts.

I don't normally slice and dice things that way, but the flat-screen commentators had it all packaged for us by demographics for the Democrats. It is sort of creepy. The young are overwhelmingly in favor of the slim man from Illinois; Women are overwhelmingly in favor of Hillary; men are leaning the other way. Hispanics are ignoring the Kennedy endorsement and going for Hillary, with a racial pragmatism that would cause comment if it was not one of those things we don't talk about.

That gave Hillary the Golden State, where the Republican Governor's wife is going for the Democrat from Illinois. Maybe it was Jack Nicholson's last minute phone ads for Hillary that put her over the top.

So, at the end of the long day, the Clinton Machine is ahead, but only just; the Republicans had better do some fence mending soon, and prepare for what is to come.

Senator McCain, now that his road is clearing out and the rocks have been hurled, is going to have to deal with a different sort of dragon, whoever emerges from the struggle for the soul of the Democratic Party. I like the slim man from Illinois, because he has none of the baggage that the Clintons bring along, and I am unwilling to be part of the long national marriage counseling process.

But we shall see. I will be interested to see how Big Pink and Arlington turn out next week. We are still mostly Hispanic in this neighborhood, though I do not know how many are eligible to vote. That would suggest the edge for Hillary, if they voted, but our precinct appears to be overwhelmingly white, and split between yuppies and retirees.

Most of us are Democrats and associated with the government, either working for it or feasting upon its largess. I would think that we are going to go for Hillary, in the aggregate, which inclines me to vote for Change over Experience.

There will be a lot of sticks and stones hurled until they sort out which path they want to go down, and a lot of dirt turned over.

But that puts me into the demographic box that the commentators have been describing. I feel my options being limited. In the by-year elections I wrote in a candidate for the County Council, though I am not sure that the animated Warner Brothers character was actually eligible to serve.

It is about time to start taking this seriously.

Copyright 2008 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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