Vic Socotra

16 August 2008

Golden Oldie

I lit a candle last night, not because the power to the main board at Big Pink failed, but because The King died this day in his bathroom at Graceland. It is my version of the "Candlelight Vigil," and drew very few Elvis fans to Tunnel 8.

In Memphis, of course, they lined up in the street in front of the mansion for a dignified single-file procession up a long, winding driveway to his grave in the small garden in back of the great house. The sporadic drizzle could not keep them away, and I flipped anxiously back and forth on the cable channels to watch the Swiss men’s team challenge the US in Beach Volleyball, the slow file of mourners, and then back to watch the astonishing seventh gold medal being won by Michael Phelps.

The Swiss? I was baffled. I didn’t think they had sand in Switzerland.

Elvis did, of course. He would have brought it back to Tennessee from the set of Blue Hawaii or one of those awful movies he made at the insistence of Col. Tom Parker. And naturally, the Navy has plenty of sand, though why it is located in Tennessee near Graceland is a bit of a stretch.

Of course, the association of Elvis with those of us of a “certain generation” goes back to Hound Dog and before. He is the most Golden of Oldies. But his post-mortem association with the Navy has something to do with Congressional districts and Base Reallocation and closure.

When I worked at the Bureau it was in Arlington, as God meant it when he founded the Bureau of Navigation. But off it went from the Navy Annex on the hill above the Pentagon fifteen years ago to the delta land in the mid-west, and that is how I came to be in the Jungle Room with some other dazed tourists.

I had completed my turn on a selection board, living in the BOQ at Naval Air Station Millington, which no longer has an airfield. We had decided the fates of a few dozen intelligence officers, and I had the nagging suspicion that I had made a mistake as I drove back to the airport with too much time on my hands.

Hence Graceland, and hence my homage to the departed King.

The Navy is still doing it. I got a picture in the mail from a pal who is still serving, and it showed some otherwise respectable naval officers doing the pilgrimage as part of the weeklong series of fan-club meetings, dances and Elvis-impersonator contests to commemorate the anniversary of his death.

The King passed away on Aug. 16, 1977. I was doing pushups on the Grinder at Pensacola. He was 42 and I was 25.

I thought about the coincidence as spent the day composing insightful blather about business opportunities, and answering inane chatter from my rowdy thirty-odd corporate partners on an opaque Indefinite Delivery, Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contract vehicle with one of the three-letter Government agencies that litter the landscape around Big PInk.

The government, as you may have noted in the course of your daily activities, is trying to digest the Supplemental that Congress passed too late in the year for the Executive Branch to do much with intelligently before the money turns into a pumpkin at the end of the fiscal year.

The contracts people at the Agency dumped eleven Requests for Proposal on the street all at once. Six are supposed to hit this weekend, and would have come out on Friday, when everyone else is ready for the beach, except I believe a mass denial-of-service attack took down their internet access.

Don’t be alarmed. The classified side of the house that defends our liberty is probably working just fine. It is fire-walled off from the ‘net that everyone else uses. But as to the part that wires the Agency to the rest of the world, all bets are off.

That is speculation on my part, but in the government I was responsible for trying to play traffic cop with our people who are authorized to conduct these sort of operations, and the Russians are not happy with us over the Polish missile emplacement and the specter of NATO enhancement into Georgia.

Anyhow, I have never received official Government Requests for Proposal via Yahoo, but that is the situation this weekend.

I've wasted the last two hours trying to figure out how long a hundredth of a second really is, which is the margin by which Michael Phelps achieved immortality, and whether the Georgians had really provoked the Russians into the invasion.
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Elvis served against the Red Menace, the last of the Good Rock Icons before they all started putting safety-pins in their ears and trying to overthrow the West.

If you are a little hazy on your Georgian geography, let me help you out. It can be a little confusing. Like you, I got a little bored during the melt-down of the empire. The Russian minorities in the former empire are part of the problem.

Think of it like the Germans did in the 1930s, when Hitler was on the rise. There were German minorities (some of them significant) in parts of middle Europe that had been lopped off from the other Germanies and divided by the Powers at Versailles.

Hitler found it convenient to lean on the patriotic feelings of the Rich to protect them, and "bring them home." Of course, the Russians learned some lessons from the war the followed. East Prussia, home of Bismark, no longer exists. There are no Germans there to ask for their province to be repatriated.

What was Prussia is now the Kaliningrad Oblast, with an ethnic German population of less than 2%.

Nothing like that happened in Georgia in the collapse, and there are ethnic Russians who were "left behind" when Georgia declared its independence. They are concentrated in a place called Abkhazia, which is on the western tip of Georgia, and which I new better as the name of a guided missile cruiser. South Ossetia is a province of Georgia, entirely within the recognized national boundaries of Georgia, and which happens to sit at the end of the two-lane Roki Tunnel.

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The Russians dug it in 1985, which was the last flowering of the old Soviet infrastructure. It bores under the Greater Caucasus Mountains, joining the North Ossetia-Alania Republic- with South Oessetia. The north is part of Russia proper, and the tunnel lets the Russians well into Georgia.

The tunnel is one of only a handful of routes that cross the North Caucasus Range, and it runs for nearly two miles under the granite. It is not something you would put a tank column through, unless you had to, and that means that the south end of the tunnel is a pretty significant thing.

When you consider that Stalin was a Georgian, after all, and made to sure to include his homeland as a vital part of what was Soviet Russia to ensure no one thought he was a foreigner.

The end of the Roki Tunnel is a grim little checkpoint, and it protects a little enclave of lawlessness the Russians have fond convenient. They smuggle some interesting things through the tunnel; counterfeit US hundred dollar bills, and enriched uranium. Stuff like that.

If you hear about the Georgian aggression that started this, it would be along the lines of the FBI conducting a raid in Miami. It is Georgian territory, which Russians all over it, issuing passports to their left-behind brethren, or anyone who wants to be.

This is clearly the start of something that means a lot of Mr. Putin, and it means a lot to the Georgians, too. I just thought you should know about it.

I have to get back to the commemoration of the King. Times may have changed, as they have for the Soviets, but some golden oldies are too important to leave in the past.

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