23 August 2007

Flat Top



I was headed for a drink with a pal last week over in Arlington's Ballston Canyon and I noticed the Flat Top grill was closed.

Things are a little unsettled over there, the most concrete example of the change in the housing market. They have taken the chain link fence down around the old Immigration and Naturalization Service Building that was the Naval Investigative Service before that.

Lines of Hispanic folks replaced furtive Navy Spooks; they were supposed to be replaced by a tower of well-heeled young condominium owners who would live a couple blocks from the Metro stop. The bottom dropped out of luxury condo sales and the builder folded his hand. Rather than tear down the existing structure, he elected to spackle the holes in the walls, throw on some paint, and lease it to Hillary Clinton's election campaign.

The Flat Top was kitty-corner from Hillary's digs, directly across from the hot dog cart by the Metro escalators.

I liked the name. I used to live on Flat-tops, since that is one of the archaic terms for aircraft carriers, and the food was Mongolian in theme, the stuff that is fired in heaps on a broad steel grill. The lay-out reminded me of a place in Taipei where you could pick your veggies, meat and spicy oils and watch the Taiwanese chefs cook it in front of you.

The Mongolians did their cooking in their steel conical helmets over coals, but there have been process improvements down through the years as there have in many things.

Restaurants have the live-span of mayflies, but this closure brought me up short. It was the closest watering hole to the place I used to work in Ballston, and I used the place as a sort of auxiliary office, and management took a picture of me and a group of friends one night, pinning it up in the service area so that the new bartenders would know to give us the executive pour.

You can understand why “flat top” was on my mind. I had one of the new state quarters, and being an obsessive idiot, I am collecting them. The West Virginia version of the quarter has been a problem; apparently they do not work in vending machines or parking meters.

The experts in Morgantown that designed it apparently had problems with the tape holding the two dimes and nickel together. The new version with the flat mountain is much more successful, and reflects what the mine owners have been doing to the topography of the Mountaineer State- giving the rugged hills a flat-top haircut to get the coal. They take the spoil and dump it down into the valleys where it chokes the streams and make the water run off through the chemicals and broken rock.

Apparently the Administration is going to issue a regulation tomorrow that will make flat-topping legal. They have been fighting about it in the courts for decades.

There are a lot of efficiencies in the process, and only the environmentalists really disagree. In the flat-top, no one is going to get trapped far underground, like the six miners in Utah. The company is going to try one last bore down to the level of the tunnels and then write them off as irrevocably entombed.

I can't imagine anyone going down in those shafts, but King Coal is the only industry in a lot of places. King Coal would prefer to flat-top the mountains and fill the vales between them, though even the underground shafts produce spoil, and it has to go somewhere.

Senator Byrd, D-VA, is King of the Senate Appropriators. He has an interesting position on the matter, as he does on many things. There is a place so remote in his native state that he managed to have it designated a “radio silence” zone, I'll have to leave the purpose for that to the imagination There is an alternate atomic clock in Martinsburg, though I am sure there could have been other places for it, and several parts of Washington that were not nailed down securely and carried away.

The Senator started his fight to allow the new mining technique years ago. In his support to flat-topping, he stands four-square with the miners, and the men who own the mines.

You would think there might be some inherent conflict in that, as there might be in the spectacular destruction wrought to the very fiber of his state, and the poisoning of its groundwater for generations.

The Senator stood outside the Capitol a couple years ago, surrounded by a thousand miners from the Mountain State. He pointed his finger down Pennsylvania Avenue and shouted: 'You at the other end of the avenue, hear these people! Coal turns on the lights in that Capitol. Coal turns on the lights in the White House. We are not going to back down.”

It happened to be President Clinton who was living down the avenue at the time, and he thought that the permanent destruction of the state was something that should be managed with caution.

It occurred to me as I walked past the shuttered Flat Top restaurant that fashions and food have a way of changing. Looking across the street to Hillary's campaign headquarters, I realized I could stop and ask about her position on the fashion of the hills.

Then I shook my head. What is the point? There are not going to be any straight answers there for several months, if ever, and the regulations are going to change tomorrow anyway.

Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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