07 August 2008
Diminished Capacity
Ah, Thursday. It has an imperative all its own, though this day is ruled by what has been, and concluded, rather than as a launch pad into a desultory Friday and the weekend. What does one do on an August weekend, except pray for the sun, and count the diminishing number of summer days in which the Big Pink pool will be open.
It is clear this morning, and the humidity did not rise as they had said. We may pay for it later in the form of thunderstorm, but some of the stress from the constant bid-and-proposal work seems to have passed. The big deal is done, and ready for submission tomorrow, so all I have to do now is cart the boxes down to the car when they are delivered later today and drive them over to Bolling AFB tomorrow.
That is how small the world has become. Depending on the parking situation, it could mean a mile trudge from the Commissary parking lot dragging my little steel wheeled cart, to arrive with my shirt soaked and salesman's smile melting and forced.
There has been a lot of crap going on the wide world this week, and my reaction to it has been a little unsettling. It appears to be a diminishing capacity for wonder, and speculation. It is a bit alarming.
I mean, Solzhenitzyn's passing is worth a comment, you would think. His "One Day in the Life" was back when was electrifying, one of the first real grown-up books I read. The English translation did not happen until 1963, so it was unlikely that Mom's Time-Life trade edition of the book could have been around the house much before 1964 or 65, so I would have been in brown-brick Barnum Junior High School back in Birmingham, Michigan, a plump self-satisfied suburb of a prosperous Detroit.
I would be stretching the truth to claim that the dour lanky Russian had much to do with forming a world-view in suburban America. Still, to this day I recall the passages in which Ivan describes on of his fellow prisoners- a captured German whose fate is to never be released, never ever. His punishment, and that of his comrades, is eternal.
While the description of the number of days in Ivan's ten-year term, plus leap years, the German is stoically resigned to punishment unto death.
That sort of view of the Soviet Empire was grim enough, and the true believers in the evil of Communism took the narrative as a token, and undoubtedly contributed to the ideological fervor of the government in combating the North Vietnamese nationalist movement. The VC and the NVA came in the guise of the Red Menace, when it was actually less that, and more about the determination of the human spirit.
Both ours and theirs.
In the end, the diminished capacity of our will to resist brought about defeat. We were busy on something else, and the prospect of the Gulag seemed more real than ever as thousands were marched into re-education camps, or fled their country in small boats.
Odd that a diminished capability in one regard should lead to such focus and effort in another, isn’t it?
So I should have done something on that line, or, or even examined something as simple as the the numerology inherent in early August. My Dad’s birthday is 08-08, and this one will fall on 08-08-08. I am not Chinese, or at least not yet, and until a friend pointed it out, I honestly had not considered the capriciousness of the numbers.
It is patently unfair, the callous denial of those portentous prospective lottery numbers for those of us with numbers higher than “nine” in our significant dates- birthdays, anniversaries, that sort of thing. I suppose that is something else we can blame on the Arabs.
For example, the wedding anniversary was the 25th, which could not recur in anything memorable (except a shudder) in Arabic numerals, and the birthday was a solid “ten.” I can take some comfort in the fact that it is at least digital in one manifestation, being composed of one-and-zero, and hence celebrated endlessly in the transmission of this on the web. Maybe there is some cold comfort in the binary.
There was some other stuff I might have roused myself to note if I had not been so distracted. The re-issuing of an updated Executive Order- the legendary EO 12333- would have been cause for Socotra to swing into action, dissecting the arcane passages for signs and portents. They say it enhances the position of the DNI as Lord and Master of the community. Instead of galvanizing me, I find I have not even glanced at i t. Or the death and consolidation of the Counter-Intelligence Field Activity, which the Judge says was filled with crooks and swindlers. I have thought of it only as a potential source of contract revenue opportunities.
What is, is. Maybe it is a function of being focused on things small and near, or maybe it is just the growing distance between thinking I had anything to do with all of that nonsense.
I don't know. At the end of things, Solzhenitzyn wound up being a fan of Vladimir Puten, the ex-KGB Colonel, a veteran apparatchik of the system that had20imprisoned him. Therein lies a tale, and it may have some application to all of us. I don't know about that, and would have to immerse myself in the other great dissidents to find out about maintaining integrity and consistency in the face of pressure. I have never experienced that. The life and principles of Andrei Sakharov comes to mind.
He never diminished his commitment to the dignity of the individual, despite the implacable pressure of the State.
Of course, his legacy before speaking out is that of the Russian hydrogen bomb, so I guess one has to20wonder if it is where you begin or where you wind up that matters. I think it is the latter, since Solzhenitsyn wound up being a Russian nationalist anti-Semitic crank, though he changed the world on his way to getting there.
Copyright 2008 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com