04 March 2007
A Certain Chill
I have been in and out of consciousness for the last eighteen hours or so. I don't get sick often, but when I do, it is a doozy.
I got the trial run-through for death two years ago. It was everything right up to the last rattle, and it was quite a revelation about how the end of things will come; mild ague transitioning rapidly to something much worse, unable to think or breath until there is nothing at all.
This was not nearly so bad, but still a crusher. I would tell you with glee all the symptoms, but that would rapidly carry us into the land of “too much information,” and if it was bad here, I can only imagine the effect it would have on you.
I can't really tell the difference between flu and food poisoning anymore. The symptoms are the same: the profound ache, the refusal of the body to do what it is supposed to do, working in fact in reverse. The peanut butter industry was tagging with poisoning American citizens last month, and before that it was the lettuce and spinach concerns.
I wish I could narrow it down to those vectors, but there is something else going on, and as you well know, it is not only the food chain that is responsible for sudden illness. Violent illness, in fact.
There is a lot of that going around. I was reading a profoundly sad book the other day. It was by Anna Politkovskaya, the astute Russian journalist. She called her litany of stories from a failing democracy “Putin's Russia,” and it was a sickening litany of banal horrors. The stories from Chechnya, the abused soldiers and endemic corruption were hard to bear, and one really got me.
The only native Chechnyan who had risen to be Captain First Rank in the Russian Navy had retired, and returned home to help the legally-constituted and democratically-elected government. , was tortured by the security goons into confessing non-existent crimes.
I could see it as me. What was worse was the knowledge with each word that Anna ended her life slumped in the corner of the elevator of her Moscow apartment building. Two shots, as I understand it, the gun dropped casually on the floor next to her.
Alexander Litvinenko, a former colonel in the Russian secret service and a fierce critic of President Vladimir Putin, was seriously ill under armed guard at a London hospital last night.
Pavel Litvinenko, the former Federal Security Bureau officer fell ill after meeting a contact at Itsu, a sushi restaurant in Piccadilly. The contact claimed to have information on the murder of Politkovskaya. Litvenenko was a fierce critic of President Putin, and he apparently paid the price for it.
I was asked by some international media folks at the time whether I thought the President was responsible for his death, and I think I responded with caution, saying that whether Mr. Putin was directly responsible, it was clear that things were beginning to happen in a systematic way to people who did not like the new authoritarian Kremlin, flush with oil money and dreams of renewed empire.
I hope I was circumspect, since things are becoming a little disquieting. A guy named Paul Joyal was shot in his driveway last week and seriously wounded. He lived in a quiet, middle-class neighborhood in Prince George's County, not the sort of place where there is a lot of street crime. Paul was a noted critic of Moscow, which seems like the way a lot of obituaries start these days. He was a vice president at a local consulting firm, but his passion was Russia, and his credentials were service in the Senate intelligence Committee, and as a Federal law enforcement officer.
That is not to say that the only enemies a man can have are Russian. He was on the Prince George's County Law Enforcement Task Force as well as Gov. Martin O'Malley's public safety transition team, so other thugs could have been interested in him. But the timing is curious.
Paul had been to the Spy Museum downtown to have a meeting with former KGB Major General Oleg Kalugin, and was walking up Lackawanna Street when he was accosted by two men, and then shot twice.
He was also a frequent commentator on counter-terrorism and intelligence matters. Four days before he was shot, he appeared on "Dateline," and was critical of President Putin, and linked the Kremlin to radioactive tea served in London. It is enough to put a positive chill in commentary, which is what Anna Politkovskaya said in her book. You don't have to kill a lot of people to get a lot more to shut up.
For the record, I just want everyone to know that I think Mr. Putin is doing a fine job. Whatever I got over the weekend, poisoning or the flu, I don't want anything more at the moment.
Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com