Vic Socotra

13 March 2009

Ides of March

After the lawyer left the office suite I pensively worked on the rich brown Cohiba cigar. The rich blue smoke wafted past the tall book cases with the colorful spines protecting dead ideas. It moved, thinning, toward the moveable side panels to the big center sheet of glass. A gray circle, a bull’s-eye of sorts, marked where one of the migrating wildfowl had flown into it.

The bird had really been moving when he impacted the glass, and I was surprised it had not cracked. The impact startled me into forgetting something I should have remembered, though I have no idea what it might have been.

Maybe it was the press conference in Hong Kong- I love that town- where Chinese prime minister, Wen Jiabao, said he was "worried" about its holdings of US Treasuries. I guess I am in good company. I am scared about senseless. Wen wants assurances that his investment is safe.

I have been calling for that for weeks and haven’t got a return phone call.

The jackhammers rattled off hard concrete down in the parking lot. The Mexicans were wearing parkas. I knew I had to get out of Tunnel Eight if I was going to get any thinking done, and there was a lot of it to do.

The letter the lawyer had left behind was still on the desk. I centered it carefully on the green baize mat, and then looked at the calendar to see what mischief awaited me at the dog-end of the week. I tapped the long cylinder of gray ash from the end of the Cohiba and sipped the last of the morning’s pot of Dazbog coffee.

It was tepid and sweet, which is about as far from my mood as you can get.

It was growing cold. They told Julius Caesar to look out for the ides of March. This isn’t it, of course, but it is bearing down like a freight train, and will arrive with the rain they have forecast for Sunday.

The image of a fire, and a fine companion crossed my mind. I wish the lawyer had not brought up the matter of Sheila Bair, current chair of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Forbes magazine named her as the second most powerful woman in the world, Mrs. Clinton notwithstanding, ranked only behind German chancellor Angela Merkel.

Last I heard, she was happily married, though, and had a couple kids. But there is always, hope, I suppose. I remember an odd steamy moment with former Secretary of the Interior Department Norton that forever will stand in my mind. But that is a matter for another day. The medication the Dalmatian Doctor has me on has deadened the low-grade pain enough to think about other and more pleasant things.

I looked out the window and was only mildly surprised to see it snowing this far into the merry month of March. Television Weather-guesser Bob Ryan is Washington’s equivalent of a Roman soothsayer. On his command, we all race off to the store to stock up on staples at the faintest hint of ill tidings. It is said that the curl of his lip moves more milk, eggs and diapers off the shelves at the Safeway than the actual storm.

Shakespeare might have put the spin on the Ides of March, using it as the plot pivot to get Great Caesar up on the Rostrum where Brutus and the rest of the Senators put their knives into him.

The fact that the Roman calendar lingered down into the beginning of our times is curious enough. They did not have Microsoft Outlook, after all, and having more time of their hands than we do, followed a baffling system as complex as their mathematical system.

At least it is baffling to the last of us who grew up before it was possible to download a calendar app from your iPhone and didn’t have to think about it at all.

They say that Romulus, the first king of the city on the Seven Hills figured it out and set it down the scheme that would mark all the days of the Empire.

“Kalends” was the first of the month, when the bills are due. It is the basis for our word “calendar,” among other things. “Nones” was the 7th in March, May, July and October, although it falls on the 5th in the rest of them. I imagine they had a rhyme to help them keep it straight, like ours for remembering the number of days in the months:
“Thirty days hath September, April, June and November….”

But the Romans added a unique wrinkle. Maybe it was the lack of the Arabic numerals that make us modern. You know, the “I’s” and “V’s” and “L’s” and “C’s.” The unnamed-day s of the month were identified by counting backwards from the Kalends, Nones and Ides.

So, looking at the back of my name -plate on the desk- ARTOCOS CIV- I tried to calculate what day it really was. II Ides, MMIX, if the Romans had used the Common Era, which of course they did not. They believed in their exceptionalism even more boldly than today’s Americans.

They counted their years from the founding of Rome- “ab urbe condita,” (or a.u.c.) in the agreed year of 753 BCE, which would make this MMDCCLXXXII.

The effort made my head hurt. The Roman Senate must have had their problems with it, since they got rid of Romulus the same way their descendents got rid of Great Caesar in the last days of the Republic before they strapped on the Emperor.

I blew out blue smoke and stabbed the intercom button. “Mattie!” I growled.

“Yes, Vic?”

“End of the pay-period is on the Ides. Why don’t you take the rest of the day off and do something interesting.”

“Right away, Mr. Socotra.” She knew better than to ask, and if I was a little younger, I could have imagined a dozen really cool ways to get in trouble just before the Ides of March. None of them involved a plot against Caesar.

One good thing about Roman numerals was the ability to take large complex numbers and make them simple. For example, when you count up to a trillion dollars, which our Senate seems to be doing a lot these days, you use a lot of zeros. More of them than we have ever seen in one place, in fact.

It occurs to me that if we considered the debt we are piling up in the Roman system it might be a lot more manageable.

“M” is the symbol for 1,000. Larger numbers were indicated by putting a horizontal line over them, which meant to multiply the number by 1,000. Hence, you could describe the whole bailout package for the financial industry pretty simply, and in a way that people might find approachable.

Of course, the Romans never had a need for a number that high. The biggest they got was a million, which was an “M” with a line over it. Present usage has trillion indicated by “T” (Tera), so it already looks like a Roman numeral.

Here is a suggestion that might be useful- or at least as useful as anything else they are doing- we could adopt the Roman system for accounting for the debt. The whole shooting match, thus far, would only amount to TII. Even if it goes as badly as some suggest, it might get even shorter: TX, which apparently is where Mr. Bush got off to after he stopped having a taxpayer-provided helicopter.

“TX.” We ought to be able to handle something simple as that, you know?

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