Vic Socotra

13 September 2009

Graves

(Hoover Family marker in Congressional Cemetery, Washington, DC. Photo by Declan McCullagh.)

There is some curious activity here in this curious town. I listened to the news, unfocused as Sunday mornings are wont to be. I head nothing about demonstrations downtown. I was at the farm most of the day and National Public Radio coverage only gets down to Gainesville.

I heard nothing about the demonstration. I enjoy public displays, so long as I am not swamped in them, and went down as far as the Virginia hill overlooking the Mall on the chill day the President was inaugurated. It was a big crowd.

I just listened to the top-of-the-hour update at nine; NPR covered the Open, including the foot fault and kicked racket that hastened Serena William’s exit from the tournament. The impending retirement of the AF of L, CIO chairman got a mention, and there was a long and fairly comprehensive discussion of the Senate Chair who will replace Senator Kennedy as chairman of the Health, Labor, Education and Pensions Committee.

Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) is the guy, and I was interested to hear that the Health bill for which he will shortly take responsibility is the most conservative approach to reform, and hence the most likely to pass the Senate. That will also mean the most trouble with the House, but the commentator did not mention that.

I was pretty amazed that there was no mention at all about the demonstration downtown. I had to turn to the Washington Post to find an account of it. I gave up on the Post a while back, partly because of the sheer bulk of it and the way it piles up in the apartment, but also because of its relentless political agenda.

I do miss the Style section, though, and would subscribe it they could keep it to that. Anyway, the Post estimated that “tens of thousands” of people were in town to protest taxes and health care. It was sponsored by FreedomWorks, which is a conservative Astroturf umbrella organization like the progressive MoveOn.

This past August the right had significant success in stirring up real grass roots conservatives in the town hall meetings, and I was curious about the numbers game.

The Park Service used to estimate the size of crowds, and almost always found themselves in the crossfire between supporters and opponents of whatever the demonstration of the moment happened to be. The “Million Man March” was the tipping point, since the Rangers said it wasn’t, and got such flack for their estimate that they stopped issuing numbers altogether.

Later in the Post article, the description of the crowd changed to “huge” and “many tens of thousands.” I don’t know what that means, since a few “tens of dozens” of protestors railing against the World Bank is enough to tie the city in knots and have traffic advisories on the hour on all the news outlets.

I did find a traffic camera view of the crowd heading up Pennsylvania Avenue between 0830-1130, and it filled the entire street for a good chunk of the time.

I am no expert, except to say that I went to a lot of sold-out University of Michigan football games in my time, and that is a crowd of more than a hundred thousand. From what I could observe, that number would not be unrealistic for this event, and maybe larger.

So, the absence of any comment on the radio made me scratch my head. Of course, this is Washington, DC, and we can make all sorts of things disappear here. Your cash, of course. Your car, too, if you park in the wrong place for even a moment. During the drive back into town, for example, an earnest man on the radio was explaining the real way that health care costs had to be brought down.

See, we are all eating wrong. I am inclined to agree with him; there was a crisis in the global food supply years ago, and it was largely filled by the Green Revolution in agriculture and deliberate policies of the government. The government really can achieve things, when it puts its mind to it.

Anyway, the speakers point was that preventable, diet-related illness like Type II diabetes were skyrocketing in the American population, and would break the bank on any health care system. Accordingly, the solution was for the government to take a more active role in controlling our dietary habits. He suggested we issue vouchers for thirty or forty bucks a month to all food stamp recipients, which would increase access to wholesome foods and stimulate urban farmer’s markets.

If that didn’t work, he said, most intrusive methods would be necessary. He didn’t have any numbers to go along with his thesis, but he seemed to think that cost was no object in the prosecution of the greater public good.

As best I could figure, his argument seemed to revolve around high fructose corn syrup, and intellectually I am onboard with that. Still, I was confounded by the progressive idea that the government would jump right over the Second Amendment to the Constitution and take up a place at the nation’s breakfast table.

There are more extraordinary things happening, I suppose. That just seemed to be one of the more curious of the morning.

There is government and there is government. The District of Columbia can be forgiven if it cannot accomplish simple counting. Some things it does fairly well, and other things it does not do at all. Arlington cemetery lies on what was once the District, long ago, and it is a splendid place and you can find nearly all the graves and identify who is in them.

Senator Kennedy's marker is identical to his brother Robert's: a white oak cross and a marble white foot marker bearing his full name, year of birth and death.

Congressional Cemetery is a more accurate reflection of how things work. Founded as a private concern regardless of the name, the facility fell on hard times when the city was abandoned by the middle class. There were years in the 1980s when the grass was not cut and strange rites were practiced in the grand but lonely vaults overlooking the Anacostia River.

That is where J. Edgar Hoover is resting, along with many tens of dozens of other notables. The grass grew so long there that retired agents took up a contribution to erect an iron fence around the Director’s grave, and incidentally to keep the dogs from urinating on it.

I glanced at the folder that I had pulled from the briefcase. Other public facilities in the District didn’t fare as well as Congressional, which was saved by people who wanted a safe place to walk their dogs. The Potter’s Field where the indigent were buried, along with German saboteurs #276-281 had gone missing altogether.

That is a hard thing to happen, and that is why I was called in to consult on the case. The latter-day Arlington Nazis had placed their tablet of recognition on national park service land- not where Potter’s Field had been at all.

The problem was that the stone was an embarrassment to the warehouse people that have it now, and yet it is government property and on the official register. They are stuck with it until they can figure out what to do.

I made a note to put in the file. “Suggest the Park Service consider dumping the monument in the Anacostia River.”

I checked my time card for the case and marked off fifteen minutes for writing the note. Accurate records are very important. I thought that a watery disposition of the tombstone would be appropriate, since the submarines that delivered the original Nazis were in precisely the same situation.

U-202, which delivered the Long Island party met by Punchy Cullen, was sunk at 0030hrs on 2 June, 1943 south-east of Cape Farewell <http://uboat.net/maps/cape_farewell.htm> , Greenland, in position 56.12N, 39.52W, by depth charges and gunfire from the British sloop HMS Starling. Thirty of her crew got out, but eighteen are still onboard.

U-584, the one that delivered the Ponte Vedra Bund, was lost with all hands on 31 Oct, 1943, at 49.14N, 31.55W, hit by a FIDO homing torpedo launched by Navy Avenger torpedo bombers from the escort carrier USS Card.

They were both identified and hunted down by radio communications intercept, which was something the FBI had lost on the Nazi saboteurs, and why they were in such a rush to execute the Germans before people realized the much-vaunted G-Men had the case provided to them on a platter.

The one thing about Potter’s field was that it probably hadn’t moved anywhere. I scanned the satellite imagery on my computer’s digital light table. The DC Home for the Aged and Infirm was long gone. The only records of where their Potter’s Field had been were based on the location of District Boundary Stone SE-8.

That was the place to start, I decided, and zoomed in on the DC Auto Impound Lot, a sprawling complex with many dozens of hundreds of cars, swept up with grim efficiency by the only industry resident in the nation’s Capital besides the production of hot air.

The three T’s: Ticketing, Tagging and Towing. It is a growth industry.

I made a note to contact the prospective members of the Justice League of America and tell them to get their boots out, and get ready to deploy for the Anacostia shore. I marked another fifteen minutes for the time card. Life is good.

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