30 July 2006

Mothballs

Tomorrow is the end of the month. I realized it when I got a command from the Credit Union to change passwords, not that they had been compromised or anything, just a prudent act.

I complied, bubiously, and looking at the date of the transaction, realized that July is about in the dustbin and August is looming. And with August is college and football and fall, and I have not got ready for summer yet. I scrolled through the Times, as one is wont to do on a Sunday, and let New York's sesnibilities roll over me. They are very down on the war, and they say the division in the country is deeper about the matter than it was in Vietnam.

I find that hard to believe, having lived through that, but the Times can't be wrong, can they?

Money must be getting tight. I read that they are going to mothball the big undergound fort under Cheyenne Mountain. The 24-ton blast doors will close, and the North American Air Defense mission will transfer to more conventional buildings down on the plain.

I remember the first time I visited there, when the Russians still had the rockets pointed at us, and the blinking lights on the giant maps on the walls of the War Room. They reflected the status of the end of the world, graphically depicted, and earnest short-haired men monitoring it around the clock.

The air had an oppressive quality down under mountain, though it was fresh enough. Maybe it was the humidity of our breath, leaching minerals from the rock, or just the idea of all that mass above. But now the smell behind the blast doors is going to be camphor, and mothballs.

The fort is too expensive, they say, and there is no threat to justify it.

I am not sure about that, and certainly wish I had the luxury of something underground, just in case.

I did not have much energy by the time the week was over, and have not done a good job of recahring over the weekend. We need rain, and forced inactivity. The frantic travel was useful, I suppose, and the twelve hours in the humidity of a Florida summer was a diversion. But the motion dug a hole in my energy reserves from which I was completely unable to climb.

Couple that with the thick paper unpleasantness that the Internal Revenue Service mailed me, and the job uncertainty, it was a week that had altogether too much nuance and lack of substance.

I am confident that I will be vindicated on the taxes, after all, I have set the mechanisms of the implacable Veteran's Administration against the immutable will of the IRS- and I will simply have to let the matter play out. It is certainly not as if I have not paid enough taxes already.

That was the water cooler talk this week. No one knows what is going to happen to us in the business unit, and the options left to us are too personal for discussion there anyway. The new company may decide to mothball us, and that will mean some choices. So we turned to the election, which is safe enough, and the likelihood that the Democrats will seize at least the House in the elections this November.

The solid Republican voters are aroused. The agenda of cutting taxes for the rich has never quite got down to us. The very wealthy are now perceived to be paying little, and though corporate tax receipts are up, the rate at which they are taxed is way down.

The electorate might forgive them, even as the Party Base appears to be energized by highly symbolic and largely irrelevant social legislation, such as who can marry whom. The issues seem to have been brought out of storage, where they are preserved for times of need.

The Boss groused that he had to write a check for something close to $20 grand to the Feds in April.

That irritated him. He spent most of his life in the military, and that check represented the full measure of a couple months active duty pay. He is doing all right at the moment, but most of his useful working life, like mine, was spent like everyone else: check-to-check, and quiet desperation.

Then there is the War, and the growing rancor about it that the Times talked about. Three of us in the office are military retirees. I'm the sailor, the other two are Marines. We have a natural inclination to support those who are bearing the burden of the struggle, and an inclination to support the government that we served honorably and long.

The former will never waver, though the latter is wearing thin. The news this week, in the background of the rockets and airstrikes, was that more troops will be required to secure the immediate Baghdad area. Deployed units are being extended, and people with high-demand skills are in the hurry-up rotation. I heard an Army trauma surgeon had been to Theatre three times alrady, and just got notification that he was going back in December.

The tempo is killing some of them. If not literally, than figuratively. None of us are defeatists, and none of us are in favor of losing armed conflicts. The arguments about how we got to this point have no particular meaning in terms of where we must go.

The question is how we craft something that looks like victory, and move on. We are up to the knee in one Big Muddy, and the waters are rising elsewhere.

It does not seem fair, not to those who are charged with doing the fighting, and it is not fair to those who are paying for it. That is what is going to change the House this Fall.

I am not optimistic about that making anything better. In fact, the figurative bloodletting and hearings and legislative gridlock that will follow will just make the wait for the next general election that much more painful.

Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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