11 January 2006

Pottery Barn

I don't have anything burning off my fingertips this morning; goodness knows I should be concentrating on Judge Alito's confirmation, or the bird flu, or how to defeat improvised explosive devices. I can't do it, though. I am concentrated on the little things, and am prepared to let the larger world spin on as it will this morning.

I have always prided myself on not being the idiot who forgets to turn off the ringer on his cell phone in big meetings. I forgot yesterday, since I was on a conference call on the cell out in front of the Convention Center right up until the session started, I watched the buses go by, and the Tijuana Trolley and a long SFX Freight train with more than a hundred cars, some of them the two-deckers for moving livestock from the feed lots to the abattoirs.

Railroads used to have names, didn't they? When did they turn into letters?

I was a little agitated, since there was a big meeting back in Washington, and it was about cutting expenses to meet revenue expectations, and it seemed likely that some of the people I worked with be terminated. Not that they were not nice people. It was just business.

When I joined the company, I thought hey had turned the corner and were emerging into the broad sunlit uplands of prosperity. Business was good, increasing by nearly half in the two years I had been there. But it did not appear to be good enough, and some of the good work we had found was in Iraq, and there were some policy decisions that meant the Government was going to walk away form the Pottery Barn rule that Secretary Powell had mentioned when this all began.

It turned out not to be true, but it was a great sound byte: "You Break it, You Take it."

He said it in the context of the Iraq adventure, and the commitment to install a working government and restore the infrastructure that was destroyed in the Shock and Awe campaign, and in the war before that.

Pottery Barn rushed to the media and issued a statement that you could break whatever you wanted at their stores, and not have to pay for it. I was tempted, but refrained from taking them up on the offer.

I had a side-bar conversation with one of my colleagues who had been on the conference call afterwards. I watched the train go by. I said that some of what we had decided on the call was not going to happen, since it looked like some of the actions had been assigned to people who would not be working with us soon.

We agreed that it would only lead to more meetings, and whatever happened, it was entirely possible that we would not be working there to carry out our actions, either. Once these trains start rolling, there is no telling where they will go, but their momentum is inexorable.

So that is how I found myself as the idiot in the front row at the conference, listening to a learned panel of government officials and journalists blindly discuss the elephant of the future.

It is apparently a complex thing. One panelist concentrated on the technical end of the business, non-controversial information sharing strategies and exploitation of national sensors in support of ongoing combat operations. An earnest Marine Colonel talked about training, and the awesome quality of his young troops. An earnest officer talked about the threat from China, and the creeping influence of its economy in strategic regions, and the great strides they have made in their military formations.

He demanded a re-prioritization of our force structure to deal with the Taiwan Straits issue, and darkly warned that we would soon be in a position where the balance of power in Asia has tipped, and there will be nothing that can stop it, except investment now.

I nodded as he spoke, marveling that I have the opportunity to re-live the decade of the 1930s; watching a series of interlocked and perfectly logical policy decisions unfold that will inexorably deliver us to a place we do not want to go.

The Journalist finished the presentation by talking about the forbidden topic of religion. he has no government career to advance, so he was able to articulate what no one else on the panel could. He said the elephant was invisible, since we would not acknowledge the fact that we were actually in a war of religions, but only one side was comfortable with it.

He was on the verge of concluding his prepared remarks, saying that the American general who marched into a church in his full uniform and announced that his God was bigger than Osama's might be the only one who actually understood what was going on.

That is when my phone went off. I squirmed to get it from the clip on my belt, and punched a button to cut the transmission. I squashed my thumb on the button to change the ring tone, and could not make it before the caller dialed back. I felt the people around me lean away to ensure that they were not associated with my technical inadequacy.

My ring tone is derived from Rossini's opera The Barber of Seville . It has a pleasant sense of urgency most times, except when I am in a hushed crowd confronting an uncertain future.

When a moment passed and the gaze of the crowd left me, I scurried away from my seat and ducked into the hall. I took the phone and punched in "recent" and selected the first number. Then I hit "dial" and a moment later I was talking to a co-worker who had some of the actions from the conference call.

He told me he just wanted to update me on the big Washington meeting. He was going to go home and have a tall Scotch, since it looked very much like security was going to come and escort him down to the parking lot.

I clucked sympathetically, which is all one can do in situations like train wrecks. I asked him what his plans for the future were, and he said he didn't know, at least beyond the drive home, and the tall drink.

Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra