Vic Socotra

15 August 2009

Loaded Words

(Loaded Words on a Belt Buckle)

I had hoped to wrap this string up this pleasant summer morning. The Ornamental Concrete Workers were up early, blasting off to their weekly golf outing, and the view from the balcony across the blue pool and into the greenery was so captivating that I drifted off in contemplation.

Things are going to be much different when the dust settles on this frantic activity. I talked to a pal over a frosty beverage at the Italian place, and he said he had actually read two 800-page pieces of legislation the last weekend to prepare a draft response from the Executive Office of the President to the Congress.

He said there were all sorts of extraordinary things in them.

Some included 180-degree turns from existing law, not all of which emanated from former President Bush’s people. My pal is not political, so he just pointed them out, in case anyone cares.

He was not sure that anyone does. We are too busy hurling loaded words at one another.

Everyone knows that change has already happened, and when the economic recovery arrives, the world will appear very different.

All this fits together in a strange way. The retrospective on Woodstock; the incessant navel-gazing of the Baby Boom; the decline of civility under the Alinsky rules of political conduct; the reason that Health Care Reform is in trouble; the nature of the stimulus package viewed and channeled through the lens of community activism.

We are talking past the great issues on this, none of us speaking directly to one another. I heard a very confident professor from Princeton on the radio, driving up to meet my pal last night.

I thought about Princeton, that bastion of privilege, and heard the distinguished academic sum up the resistance to health reform as simple racism.

Her co-panelists were stymied on how to respond rationally, without actually calling the Professor a single-issue imbecile. See the words on that stuff are loaded- the terms being covers for something else.

I prefer blunt talk, and words that are loaded with the nuance that one intends. One of the other voices on the panel responded timidly that we although we did not appear to have arrived in a post-racial society, it might be entirely possible that people were concerned about the imposition of socialism.

The Princeton Prof harrumphed on that one, and said that sexism and resentment of Chicanos was also part of it.

Unfortunately they ran out of time and I ran out of interest before she was in a position to say exactly how that might be the case. But I did find it curious that there are those among us who absolutely do not understand the power of loaded words- or at least the power of ones that do not belong to them.

I was able to exploit a peculiar loophole in Naval Regulations for more than two decades to sum up exactly what I thought about things.

As you may know, the services have their little peculiaties. You may not know that for most of the life of the Republic, Army Generals had no uniform regulations. If you wished to stride around like George Patton with two six-guns in a holster over your jodhpurs, that was your right.

In the Navy we were a little more regulated: we had definite standards for our shirts, trousers, shoes, caps, and appurtenances. There was one unique holiday in the regulations about one item- the belt buckle. The regs stated only that we should have one. I presume they thought that no one would decide on their own to not have a blank brass one; accordingly, we all did.

Check any group of sailors and you will see buckles with current and former ships, or occupational rate or commissioned status.

Those of us who visited the Philippines regularly had more lavish options. On my uniform, I wore an intricately detailed faux silver buckle hand-crafted to my specification from the Cavite Souvenirs # 3 stall in Olongapo City.

It had my name on the bottom edge, below a bold set of imaginary Air Intelligence Wings, the feathers all distinct and proud. Across the top were carved the words:

"Fuck Communism."

I wore it without incident most of my three decades in the Navy.

It was only at the end of my career that someone read it. I have no idea what the person who noticed it was looking at.

I had to retire that belt buckle not long before I had to retire, too, since people were starting to line up at my office in the Pentagon to see if it was true that I wore a buckle with some loaded words on it.

I replaced it with one that featured a carved Soviet Foxtrot diesel submarine, that had no indication whatsoever about whether I had an opinion on it.

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