| 18 May 2005 Applique I walked over to the Caucus Club from the Bus Station, headed for a Homeland Security luncheon with the outgoing Administrator of an Agency that had been extremely important until it was determined to be useless. It was the comfortable mid-Spring sort of day, cool, high clouds, and I had comfortable shoes on. It made walking a joy, just a hint of the humidity that will come and cloak us in sweat shortly. But for now, for this week, anyway, it is just delightfully pleasant. I can't say that is true elsewhere in town. Senator Frist is apparently about to melt down the Senate over a rules change on Judicial nominees. It is about the confirmation of a woman named Pricilla Owens, who is said to be either a nice person or a dangerous extremist. I don't know. Perhaps it is both, and perhaps there will be a compromise at the eleventh hour. That is how things normally work here, though the anniversary of the eruption of Mount Saint Helen's would provide a perfect analogy. They say the Senate Majority Leader has Presidential ambitions, and I imagine if he gets very far down that avenue I shall have to resolve to vote against him. It is a complex bit of business up there on the Hill and I am not paying as much attention to as I should. After all, there are going to be as many as three Supreme Court nominations determined under the new rules, if they are imposed on the Democrats. With the old Convention Center knocked flat, you could almost see the dome of the Capital from where I walked, just East of Chinatown. With the great flat boring bulk of the building gone, there were vistas that had never been seen before. The bulk of the new Convention Center glitters in the distance, and handsome new commercial palaces front the devastation on all sides. Turning the corner to head toward Pennsylvania Avenue , I discovered there was another row of buildings gone. Things are moving fast in town. You turn around one morning and something that looked substantial is just a deep pit, waiting for concrete. The architects are playing a sort of three-card Monte with the senses, and the developers are moving the cards. If you look down the streets, it would appear that some of the old buildings remain. They experimented on the technique on the Bus Station where I work. In front, you would think that the classic art modern terminal still had a transportation function. Not true, of course. The old waiting room under the heroic façade is just the lobby to the twelve-story modern building behind it. They have the process down to a science now. There is nothing in this part of Northwest DC that is original now. Walking toward the National Portrait Gallery, the old Patent Office, there are vistas that are exactly eighteen inches deep. One block has saved the front of the buildings on the corner with the Edwardian detail, and the homey feel of the old News stand. But it is just the skin that will be incorporated into what is coming. One piece of it, complete with lovely Romanesque arched windows, soars seven stories up, held in place but adamant girders of iron. It will look like there is some continuity there with the old town, but it would be a lie. It is just a bit of appliqué. As I rounded the corner near Ford's Theater, buses were disgorging throngs of identically-dressed students. I am surprised the historic building has not fallen into the great hole that has been dug around it. The scene of Mr. Lincoln's assassination is still authentic, sort of, as is the house across the street where he died. But everything else around here is new, just an inch from the property lines. Across the street, I saw the art of appliqué literally raised to new heights. There was a chunk of the façade of an old building that was held, suspended, in the vice-like grip of a steel frame. It must have been incredibly heavy, floating there, unconnected with the earth. That is the lengths they will go to for authenticity, regardless of how fake. The Caucus Club is fake, but pleasantly so. It recalls the rich wood or yesteryear, and I was just minutes ahead of the guest of honor. The Administrator used to be an Admiral, and it is not surprising that I thought he was a Coastie. The Coast Guard has all sorts of experience with this homeland security stuff, inspecting containers and stopping drunken yachters. The first Administrator of the Agency had been a Commandant of the Guard, so, like I said, I expected a man in a light blue shirt. Instead, he had rich black hair in a sort of pompadour, very unmilitary, and a nice dark Washington suit. It was not until I read the bio, waiting for the chopped salad, that I realized he was a retired Navy guy, and what is more, I might even have known him in an earlier life. It is a sign of the times that he is the longest-serving administrator of this new Agency. He was a little querulous about the publicity that is killing his organization. You probably read about the custom artwork at the Headquarters, and the award ceremony that cost a half-million bucks. That irritated the Admiral, since it happened a couple years ago and he said things have gotten much better lately. It is not going to be in time to save his job, or the Agency for that matter. He has about 58,000 Federal employees, and all but a couple thousand are the ones who go through your bag and pat you down at the airport. The Administrator did not have much time to eat, and I find that pretty entertaining. Part of the delicate art of tormenting our guests at these luncheons is to place a provocative question just as the guest is about to spear a morsel of food. Even though the Administrator is going to be useless as a contact in a hew weeks, I took exhaustive notes, and when it looked like the Administrator was just about to get a fork full of salad, I asked him about the matches. If you don't smoke, or don't travel much, you would probably be surprised at the intricacy of travel. We have all gotten pretty good at the indignity thing at the airport. I have learned to dress with a low magnetic signature, never handle documents after I have been in contact with explosives, and routinely divest myself of everything metallic except my fillings. I pride myself on my speed in slipping out my laptop computer, shrugging off my jacket, folding it on top of my shoes in a little train of plastic boxes, pushing it over the makeshift folding tables that serve in every airport as the staging grounds for the x-ray machine. So I took it in stride when they changed the rules on disposable lighters in mid-trip, tossing mine into the pile of them in front of the security check point. I also am careful to never have a one-way ticket, or any other flag on my itinerary that would have me dragged aside for special consideration. The Administrator said he had a call on the way over; a jet had identified a possible Al Qaida operative on a plane coming across the Atlantic based on the recently expanded terrorist threat list. “The list has been expanded from 4,000 names in 2001 to around 70,000. Most of them are correct. That has enabled us to divert jets with more precision.” Not that it had been easy. He had a funny anecdote during the salad course, laughing at the madness for which he was responsible. He said the famous CNN Correspondent Wolf Blitzer told him that he always got in trouble at the Orlando airport, since he often flew out of there on one-way tickets. He was getting used to being spread-eagled, and that the people always asked him how things were going in Atlanta , since they all knew him. He wondered at a system so idiotic that prominent citizens well-known to the system were still being spread-eagled. He said he was feeling irritated until he noticed that former Presidential candidate Al Gore was assuming the position next to him. That was my point in asking about the matches. Why do we consider everyone to pose the same level of risk? Disposable lighters were banned from the airliners. Not cigarettes, mind you, which remain improbably legal. Just the way to light them. But matches are still OK, at least for now. But not the expensive Zippo lighters that no one carries anymore. The Administrator welcomed the opportunity to clarify his department's position on that. “Al Qaida continues to consider explosive clothing to be a viable means of terror. Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, was just one attempt.” He actually got some of the salad on his fork, and he waved it for emphasis. “It took eight months of the interagency process, and negotiations with the lighter manufactures to determine that what we were really trying to get rid of was the hazardous material- the HAZMAT- and that empty lighters could be safely placed in check luggage. It was a struggle.” He seemed proud of the accomplishment, and went on to talk about the two Chechen women who had blown up airplanes last year using sheet explosives worn as an applique under the façade of their clothing. The stuff is undetectable with the existing technology, and that is what had prompted the enhanced pat-down searches around the bosom that infuriated the traveling female public. I nodded in sympathy. It had been a very intense period in the transportation safety business of late, and despite being wrong, insensitive and occasionally quite stupid, there had been a lot of fortitude in staying the course, treating everyone exactly the same. It is a democracy, after all. And that is why the Administrator is shopping his resume and returning to private life. The façade of security is what is important, and they are struggling to come up with the substance that will go behind the false-fronts, just like the Washington architectural community. The Administrator did not get much of his dessert, nor was he able to stay for coffee. He had people to see. He concluded by saying that the people at his Agency stood tall, and stood on the ramparts, and he was proud of them. Today, my only act of courage came in fashion. I was the only one in the room who had taken the fire axe to the wardrobe door and broken out the summer suits. The industry guys looked hot. I was cool in tan poplin, and feeling quite comfortable. The Administrator looks pretty relaxed himself, since he has been let go. Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra |