| 13 February 2006 The Unready The great city is not paralyzed by the remnants of the storm, though preudently, most of the schools are closed or opening late; the closer-in districts like Alexandria City and Arlington expect their administrative workers to be in on time, even if the children are summoned to appear a few hours late. They were ready for this contingency, and have responded in a responsible manner, even if it will inconvenience the harried parents who serve the government, or people like me, who serve them. It is important to be ready, and flexible. I am up listening to the radio to catch the portents of the coming day; the leaks of the internal documents on the Kristina debacle are hitting the press this morning, along with the unfortunate hunting accident which involved the Vice President. Thankfully, the Vice Presidential Medical Detail was ready for any contingency, and the lawyer who was shot is reported to be sitting up and chatting. It sounds like it was his fault, and I think he is a loyal friend to Mr. Cheney. Still, mischance with an officer of the court is always poblematic and Maureen Dowd will have a field day with this. There are others sitting up and chatting about the federal response to the hurricane that is not so amiable. There is leaked report to the news tha is scathing on Secretary Chertoff's response to the storm, saying it was late, ineffective, or did not happen at all. FEMA Chief Mike Brown is apparently not going quietly into his role as the fall-guy for the administration, and he has apparently abandoned his loyalty to the regime. Secretary Chertoff, for his part, calls Brown insubordinate. For all the turmoil in the bureaucracy. I believe we are more secure against the terrorists today than we were before they set up the Department of Homeland Security. But with loyalty being the premium for service in the Administration, I am not sure that the rest of the apparatus has made us any safer at all. Perhaps there are just too many balls in the air simultaneously. The heavens appear to be in an uproar, and threats to the public health are abroad and security bears constant monitoring. It was appropriate that the first whispers from the ether by my bedside were from Istanbul, via London, and were written by a Turkish man just my age. Which is to say, old enough to know better. His words described a city enduring the long sigh of despair after the collapse of the Ottomans, and the establishment of the new Capital at Ankara. The words of the Turk painted his city in black and white, and the languor of a two thousand year decline. In the days of his youth, he thought that the proud old city had never been so remote and isolated. Living as I do in a made-up city, I was sympathetic to his yearning. But of course, he was celebrating the history of another people and another city, since it was not until a Tuesday afternoon in 1453 that Sultan Mehmet the Conqueror entered the vanquished city. He rode to the Mother Church of Saint Sophia, and gazed in wonder at its soaring dome. He decided then and there to convert the Cathedral into his imperial mosque. The great Blue Mosque with its six soaring minarets was later built adjacent, and the bulk of the two great structures dominate the skyline of the First Coast of Asia Minor. For all the minarets, Hagia Sophia's dome still rises higher. In fairness, it should be remembered that the Cathedral was pillaged first by other Christians, rough men from the West whose presence was reluctantly accepted as a means of countering the rise of a new power to the East. That these men existed owed a great deal to the scourge of the Northmen, who pillaged France, and Britain and Ireland. As the Irish monks busily copied the documents that had been Rome, inadvertently saving the legacy of the West, the sea-scavengers stormed ashore, taking what glittered back to the smoky halls along the Vik. There lived in Britain a king of the Saxons. He presided over a kingdom that still preserved something of Roman times, a distant whisper. King Aethelred II is known to us now by his most unfortunate nickname: Ethelred the Unready. His long and ineffective reign was plagued by poor advice from his personal favorites, who were selected on the basis of loyalty, rather than talent. Like the Byzantines, he had no military or diplomatic answer to the depredations of the North, and so he levied a crushing series of taxes to buy off the marauders. The payoff was called The Danegeld. The relentless depredations of the Danish, coupled with their ever-escalating demands for more money, forced him to abandon his throne in 1013. He fled to Normandy for safety, but was later recalled to his old throne at the death of Sven Forkbeard in 1014. He died in London in 1016, fifty years before another wave of Northmen arrived from France. Those Normans were ready for the travel, and prepared to stay when they got there. I think that is the key to success. Be ready. Be determined. Don't confuse loyaty for talent. Don't think a bribe ever really works. Avoid shooting lawyers, unless you can get all of them. Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra |