06 July 2007

Ozymandias


You remember the poem by Percy Shelly. It was in all the anthologies of English literature back in the day, and it still might be, if it has not been lost in the multi-cultural tidal wave. It would be a shame if it has. It has a cool rhyme scheme, and has a tag-line that is one of the World's Hundred Best. You remember, I think; it is the one that goes: “Look on my works, O ye mighty, and Despair.”

I have always thought I would be one of the lesser travelers on that barren plain, looking up at the remnants of the mighty legs and the gigantic head with the cold curving lip. I think of Mr. Cheney's sneer of lasting contempt, since I do not think that anyone does it better.

I fell asleep reading a book called “Fiasco,” written by a man named Thomas Ricks. He published it a year ago, in July of 2006, which means that his information was current as of the year before that, in 2005.

In the spook business, one of the first things you do is check the information cut-off date on intelligence to judge where the information fits in the great mutable mosaic that we substitute for real understanding.

I have the book because it was a sensation at the time, and was one of the first authoritative accounts of the incompetence that went along with the invasion and occupation of Iraq. I viewed it as toxic. For all the distance I have put between me and the former career, there are things that remain outside my comfort zone, things I fully intend to get around to, in the fullness of time and context.

My son was in between watch rotations at the Pentagon and he stopped by to see me and get a free lunch. He looked at the newer releases on the makeshift bookshelf near the window over the pool, and asked if he could borrow “Fiasco.”

“I haven't read it,” I protested automatically, though there are plenty of books laying around that have had an equal level of inattention. He took another, but I was left with the obligation to confront the past, and then we looked at his pictures from a recent trip to India.

I was both gratified and humbled by what he saw on the trip, which was intended to bolster his cultural context for the peoples of South Asia. He has traveled there before, as have I, and I made a couple recommendations for odd things to see, if he had the chance.

He actually took me up on one of them, which was to visit the old imperial Durbar Grounds north of the old Civil Lines district of Old Delhi. I marveled at the pictures, since the place is mentioned in only a few of the guidebooks, and has little in the way of attractions. There are no restaurants, or hawkers or excitement. Only an empty baked plain of unfertile soil and scrub growth. And the statues, and the soaring oblesque, of course.

No one goes there. I had to provide directions to my driver, years ago, and as a certified tourist guide, he said he had never been. My son told me the same thing.

In the days of the Raj, the greats and near-greats of the empire were summoned periodically to the great plain. Lofty tent cities were established, and the uniforms blazed in scarlet, and elephants marched stately in solemn promenade from the capital. Hundreds of thousands of people were in attendance, lining the roads to see the spectacle.

The memorable was the event in 1903, sponsored by Lord Curzon, the Viceroy. It was the declaration of the coronation of King Edward VII as the first Emperor of India in 1903, at a time when the memory of the Great Mutiny was still fresh, and the feeling that the British grip on the subcontinent was more tenuous than it had appeared.

The reign of the King-Emperor was declared on the place where the plinth stands now, and the King-Emperor himself is standing nearby in a park that was established as a home for the public statues of the generals and statesmen of the Raj who suddenly were viewed as inappropriate after independence in 1948.

I wish I knew more about the how the memorial park came to be, since it is incomplete, and the scrub has grown up around the red sandstone plinths where dozens of statues had been intended to be placed. There are only a few that were completed, and skinny dogs rest on the base of the focal point, the immense figure of the Emperor himself that once stood under a Mogul-influence marble canopy on the Mall on the last great edifice of the empire, New Delhi itself.

I was impressed that my son took time to go find the old Durbar grounds, since it is not on the beaten track. And I was forced to pick up Fiasco and read it, as the night came on and the lights glimmered in the blue water of the swimming pool below my window at Big Pink.

I was forced to confront the last fifteen years of my professional life, and read about the Great Men who I served. The ambivalence of the first Gulf War's conclusion. The tension between Chairman Powell and Secretary Cheney. The militancy of Paul Wolfowitz, and the rescue of the Kurds in Operation PROVIDE COMFORT.

I remembered testifying to Congress about that, and being confronted by Al Gore in the Senate Hearing room.

It was an uncomfortable read, and I had to put it down before I was ready to sleep. This is not over, I thought, and information cut-off came before The Surge, and the resolution of new Commanders on the ground. There was great courage being displayed on the blasted plains of Iraq, and the chance that things would turn around.

But my part of the story was done, and cloaked in miscalculation and hubris.

I knew I would dream. I had a suspicion that it would be about monuments on a dusty plain, and perhaps the words of Shelly's poem would come to me in the twilight before nothingness came.

“I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

I had always pictured myself as one of the travelers, I suppose. As I went to bed, I realized it was something different. I was not a tourists. I had been something else, one of the workers who built the great statue in the first place, and who had taken a certain amount of pride in the construction of the lifeless thing.

Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com


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