14 July 2007

Friday the Thirteenth


The Great Pyramid at Giza, 1990

I don't know if what is lurking in the freezer is any good or not. I could not look, while the event was happening. Instead, I spent the fruits of the latest 22-hour electrical outage caused by a major transformer fire here at Big Pink wandering through a marvelous glossy history of The Great Pyramid and the infrastructure that Pharaoh Khufu caused to be thrown up on the plateau at Giza.   

Fascinating account, with enough ambiguity for grand historical revision and plenty of pictures to account for nuance, since that is most of what is left, aside from the great bulk of the mute piled stone.

Naturally, I should have been recounting the history of the Templars, and Grand Master Jacques De Molay's particularly bad Friday the 13th experience. That is one of the places we derive our tradition of bad luck on that day, since the King of France rounded up all the Kinghts of the Temple he would get his hands on, and eventually put them to the torch.

Instead, I was stuck in silence, contemplating the stones, and the civilization that put them atop one another. As darkness came on, and the candles were lit against the gloom, I put the book aside and peered out the window at the lights that still burned brightly across the street and the raucous noise of the kids who live in the party house whose voices bounced off the glossy brick flanks of the silent bulk of Big Pink.

Power failures make me pensive. The politics of the Navy still had me a little agitated, that and the shrieks of amusement at nothing that reverberated through windows, open to catch the bit of breeze.

The treatment of my former tribe of intelligence specialists was what started it, since that narrow topic so intensely focused my interest down through the years. The conversation had been over a nice halibut on a bed of mashed potatoes ran on to the topic of the bankruptcy of the entire political class.

Aircraft carriers and submarines are expensive toys, and at the moment of our national zenith they still cost dearly. I have my issues with the President over the conduct of the war, and how this has all come down the rapids of decision-making since the crucial road was chosen.

But that is nothing compared to what the so-called leaders of both major parties have done to us, and to the children for whom we are still responsible, regardless of the fact that they are now on their own.

I have had some unexpected expenses resulting from that delicate transition period of late, and was a little short. It was analogous to the feeling of the Congress fifteen years ago, as they spent the Peace Dividend of the Cold War without the knowledge of what was to come.

I have a prediction for the programmatic nuance, and in the darkness I remained galvanized by the story that started the week. I don't watch 60 minutes much any more, but I had finished the Sunday calls to the family and happened to still be in front of the television when Steve Kroft popped on with a story about the Comptroller General of the United States and his tale of doom.

Retiring from government service, I was a program-and-budget-geek, hardly the place I would have expected to wind at the end of a modestly successful career in the business of intrigue and power projection. From that came experience came a belief in the power of numbers.

I have seen great buildings rise from their inexorable march, from a concept in imagination to adamant concrete and steel, real as a pyramid, if less likely to endure. Consequently I believe in forecasts, and I know from bitter experience that it is the numbers that drive the policy, and not the other way around as one would like.

Steve looked into the camera with that craggy, once-boyish face and solemnly said: “When the stock market soars or plunges, everyone pays attention. But short-term results aren't that important to the man you're about to meet. David Walker thinks the biggest economic peril facing the nation is being ignored.”

I was mildly astonished that the story that the Comptroller General has been telling for nearly two years is so blunt and so honest. He says that with the first Baby Boom early retirements coming in February of 2008, our government's income, liabilities, and future obligations render our standard of living as unsustainable unless significant action is taken immediately.

Coming from the worst-case school of analysis, the “capabilities” branch rather than “intentions,” I know that all assumptions are mutable. With change, things change. Nothing is cut in stone, hewn from living rock and placed for the ages. We should remember that the ability to have aircraft carriers and submarines, heavy divisions and Stryker Brigades is purely discretionary.

We can have our gentle areas of disagreement on the subject of carbon and climate change, and you will indulge me if I tend toward lighting the bonfires of alarm rather than sitting in the darkness of complacency, as I was in the powerless building. I do believe resolutely that relatively small changes made now can mitigate the severity of the change that will happen over what is left of our lives.

But let is put that aside for the moment. I think the fiscal crisis looming in the Medicare/Medicade entitlements, quite apart from the troubled Social Security fund, is an imminent enough threat that will break the bank and end the empire.

This problem is entirely within our grasp to alter, yet we will not act before there is another administration and the problem deepens. Couple this with an equal inability to deal with immigration or anything else unpalatable, and the transfer of the industrial base overseas that saved the Free World in 1940, I feel the car of the roller coaster to be tipping over the last great hump.

It does not have to be like this.

Of course assumptions and forecasts can change. It was not so long ago that there was a modest surplus in the budget that could have been used to pay off the lingering debt of things past. Britain just liquidated a debt to Canada and the US from Lend-Lease days, after all.

The problem is what we are going to have to get through to be in a position to do something like that. Should be an interesting ride, don't you think?

I hope the kids are up to it.

Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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