28 May 2009
 
WAR

(Red Wing with Octopus)

No, I am not talking about the War on I-94. That was settled reasonably enough with a deflected goal off a Red Wings skate and sent the Blackhawks back to Chi-Town in Game Five.
 
I feel a little guilty about caring. I mean, re-match of the Wings versus Penguins for the Stanley Cup is a big deal, in the small world of a winter sport being played at the beginning of a moist Washington summer.
 
There was even a controversy about that- the NBC people were deathly afraid that if the ‘Hawks had come back in Game Five, it would have screwed up the debut of Conan O’Brian as host of the Tonight Show, since the ratings for hockey are so crappy.
 
It is like the rest of the country doesn’t not understand the symbolism of the Detroit octopus thrown on the ice. It might even make them queasy. We have been doing it in the former Motor City since I was a year old, in 1952.
 
I guess you have to call it the former Motor City. Only Ford is still a private company, and the corporate headquarters are in Dearborn, after all, and in a couple weeks GM will join Chrysler in the Chapter 11 Penalty Box.
 
I’m sure it will all be fine, eventually. But as to the octopus fetish, back in the days of the Six Original Teams, the number of wins necessary to take the Cup was eight, the product of two best-of-seven series. Pete and Jerry Cusimano were brothers who had a stall in the bustling Eastern Market. Things used to bustle in Detroit, despite the Korean War and all that.
 
Actually, one of the reasons the town bustled back then was the Korean War, and the need for trucks and tanks and jeeps. Anyway, Cusimanos astutely noticed that the number of arms on the octopus equaled precisely the number of wins needed for the Wings to take the Cup, and sure enough, as the gray slimy thing was hurled from the stands at the old Olympia Rink, the Wings swept the Maple Leafs and les Canadiens to win it all.
 
They are still doing it at Joe Louis Arena, though there has been some bad ice in between. In 1995, 36 octopi landed on center ice, including a monster that weighed thirty pounds. Since the League has expanded far beyond any sensible business case, as witnessed by ratings poor enough to threaten The Tonight Show, it now requires sixteen games to win the Cup, and hence my determination to see it out, even if the payoffs go beyond the start of the next regular season.
 
Anyway, all that seafood on ice got me feeling guilty about restarting the Korean War. It would be enough to feed a whole village in the Hermit Kingdom. In addition to the nuclear barbeque on Memorial Day, the Northerners have launched six rockets at the Sea of Japan.
 
I have had to deal with those idiots almost as long as the ones in Tehran, since I arrived in Seoul in the early summer of 1980. We worried a lot about the specific terms of the Armistice, the Northern Limit Line (NLL) in the Yellow Sea and the Military Demarcation Line- Extended (MDL-X) in the SOJ. The fishing boats were always getting into trouble, skirting the line, and all along the DMZ there would be shooting incidents as soon as the weather got nice enough for patrolling.
 
With the monsoon rains done, this is the time of the year we called The Infiltration Season, when patrols of Northerners would come south and wander around for weeks at a time scaring farmers and shooting things up.
 
It was all in the context of the Armistice, since there never was a real peace treaty, nor an official end to the conflict.
 
So you can imagine that when I heard that the Combined Forces Command in Seoul had gone to Watch Condition Two, I felt awful about wasting my time watching the octopi sliding around on the ice. That is the step after “painfully alert” that rises to “really concerned,” That is the last step before WatchCon One, which translates to “Oh, Shit.”
 
The North has decreed they are no longer bound by the provisions of the 1953 Armistice, and that was the only thing that kept the chaos orderly.
 
In Seoul, we knew we were hostages to the outbreak of real hostilities. The North had artillery that bristled from the high ground north of the Imjin River, and the modern city rising around us at Yongsan Garrison had been flattened twice in the Police Action.

This isn’t exactly new- the North has previously called the armistice a “useless piece of paper” and declared that they no longer felt bound by it. But they have rarely used the threat of abandoning it altogether.
 
I am not sure how much more serious the rhetoric can get, and with the succession crisis near melt-down, and Dear Leader L’il Kim in such bad shape, health-wise, you can never tell when the street-theater diplomacy will turn into a real acting-out episode that will require an intervention.
 
That is why I think we should send the octopi to the North as a gesture of good will. Then we should pull out and let the Koreans sort out their own kettles of fish.
 
That is a big step, but it would acknowledge the reality that World War Two is really over, and the aftershocks are getting tiresome. There are 25,000 Americans in the line of fire, and I would argue that it is either time to make the North just shut up, or throw in the octopus.
 
I hate defeat, but the alternative is stark. The South no longer needs us to fight their war for them. The younger generation would like us to be gone. Maybe it is time.
 
Of course, that will impact our relations with Japan, since the Koreans are the only reason they put up with us. Times are changing, after all, and maybe we change along with them.
China has the ability to cripple North Korea by cutting off shipments of food, fuel, and luxury goods that the Dear Leader passes around to his loyalist old guard. I know they have to be getting pissed about the increasingly erratic hermits.
 
I know this, though, between hockey and Korea I would prefer to watch the Stanley Cup, and the President might consider flipping over from the NBA finals. That he prefers. I know he had not been planning on this for his early summer viewing, and the whole octopus thing is unsettling, I’ll grant you.
 
I don’t know about you, but I am about fed up with the Kims and their little socio-drama. It is tiresome. I wonder what the President is going to do when he realizes he has got another war on his hands? It is too late to just throw it back on the ice.

Copyright 2009 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com