Vic Socotra

18 July 2009

Uncle Walter

(Uncle Walter Removes His Glasses at the News of JFK's Death, 1963)

I mourn the passing this morning of Uncle Walter. I got the word on the evening news, which I rarely watch these days. It was not like it was, back in the day of print news and the golden age of broadcast news.

met him once, astonished to see those bristling eyebrows emerge form the elevator at a fine hotel near Kalorama downtown. Stunned, I stammered and thanked him for his service. I was in uniform for some reason I do not recall, and he smiled wisely, and thanked me for mine.

What impressed me the most was that he got the rank correct and everything. Uncle Walter always knew what he was talking about.

He was a classic liberal, as it turned out, and only shared his opinion about things a couple times in his career as a journalist. He was scrupulously fair in his nightly visit to our house.

The last time I had an encounter with him was through direct mail, and it was at his urging that I contributed to the Drug Policy Alliance, on the libertarian grounds that our current system of confiscatory punishment is wrong-headed, capricious and arbitrary.

I am no liberal, far from it. But I am a fairly good judge of what works and what doesn’t. Any “war” that has gone on for nearly thirty years and produced so few results ought to be judged on its merits.

It has not worked. It is time to try something else.

What is happening in Mexico and across the wide world is an American problem of demand, after all, and I agreed that we might want to try something else that does not line the pocket of the enforcement and smuggling communities while continuing to destroy the consumers.

Drugs are not a victimless crime. The distribution and sale of them kills and incarcerates thousands. It is time to try something else.

I have always had a libertarian streak in me, tinged with anarchy. What I do in the privacy of my home is not the concern of the Federales, unless it becomes a hazard to my neighbors, and we have created an institutional system that is precisely that.

When the SWAT team broke down the door of Cheye Calvo, mayor of DC suburb Berwyn Heights, after thirty pounds of marijuana was delivered to his home by a crooked FedEx driver. The cops shot his two black Labs and interrogated him and his wife as their dogs bled to death.

Turns out Hizzoner had no idea about the package, which was still outside, unopened and waiting for the real recipient to pick it up. The SWAT team was funded, in part, by the Federal government, which should come as no surprise, under the Edward Byrne Memorial Formula Grant Program, created under the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988 (Public Law 100-690).

It was renamed the Byrne Justice Assistance Grant (JAG) in 2004, and is now part of the stimulus bill package of 2009, only ten percent of which is expended. You know, the one that ended the recession.

In the Berwyn Heights case, the police claim that they followed procedures and no charges have been filed- and this, mind you, is in a case against a relatively high-profile white elected politician, not one of the legions of wrong addresses belonging to the disadvantaged.

It is things like this that reminds me that I would probably been on the wrong side of the War of Northern Aggression, like Great-Great Uncle Patrick, regardless of the monstrous crime of slavery.

It was a deal with the devil that brought the South into the United States along with its awful- and ultimately unbearable- burden of human chattel.

We have re-written the narrative of all that to distill things down to the simple story of virtue against evil in the culmination of a more perfect union.

I suppose it is well to leave it like that. My Great-Great Grandfather wore Union blue in front of the Rebel fortress of Vicksburg, so the family credentials of personal contribution to the Union victory are well established.

There is some nuance about the constitution and the notion of defense of one’s home that has to be left behind in the distillation of our history.

That is what was so curious about leaving the Blue of NoVa to visit the deep crimson of the Northern Neck of Virginia.

What I did not put in the Donk's tales- is the sense of loss and dread that came along with a visit to the white folks of Mathews, VA.

In the patriotic set of the program there were a couple of Confederate Anthems, sung by the Motley Brothers. "Will my soul go through the Southland?" plaintively goes the refrain of the dying Rebel prisoner in one of them.

Following that song, a pert young woman got up and launched into her song with a peroration about God and self-sufficiency that was not far away from a declaration of secession.

All white was the audience, and in the day, it would have produced one of the famous all-white juries to deliberate the legal proceedings attendant to the great changes in society. Now, it just seemed plaintive and lost, a society of hard-working patriotic people whose day in the sun is gone.

I was reminded of that, back up here safer and sound in the Blue County where I live. Digesting the news of the death of Uncle Walter, and the loss of the sepia-toned black-and-white world of my youth, I read about the only story that could top it.

That idiot savant Larry Summers, declared yesterday that overhauling the health care system will "rein in health care spending, which is by far the biggest factor in projections of unsustainable future budget deficits."

Mr. Summers dismissed the report of the Congressional Budget Office and the flat statement of the obvious from David Walker, former head of the GAO, who said that “You can’t cut by expanding coverage” to nearly fifty million uninsured citizens and other residents of this great nation.

Summers grandly informed the press that “We’ve rejected that view.”

The President himself felt obligated to call an impromptu press conference to say that it was no time to slow down, but rather accelerate passage of the bill that no one has read in its entirety.

Well, for what it is worth, I would suggest that there are many who would take the same view of him.

I have that Newsweek cover tacked up on the wall at the office. You will remember the one I am talking about, the one with the blue and red hands clinched below the declaration "We are all socialists now."

We are not, Ya’ll.

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