Our Earth continues its wobble into the season of warmth. In between passing showers here in Virginia’s Piedmont, the news lapped at the greening property line. There is renewed trouble in Minneapolis, another indication of seasonal changing temperatures. This one is interesting only in its horrific banality that sweeps all before it.
Up North, a young mixed-race man was driving a car with expired tags in a suburb close-in to Minneapolis. The car belonged to his Mother, a white woman raising him alone. Duration of that familial arrangement is unknown. The story is that the young man had an outstanding warrant for waving around a pistol last year and had failed to appear at a scheduled hearing last week. After being stopped by police for the tag violation, the young man initially complied with officer instructions to exit his car.
The usual confusion intensified, since there may have been a passenger in the vehicle. Then a white male officer botched the handcuffing process. The young man attempted to re-enter the car and drive away. That is where things got even more confused. A senior woman officer, race unspecified, stepped around her partner and attempted to deploy a Taser stun-device to subdue the young man. For some reason, she had drawn her service weapon instead of the Taser. A single shot was fired. The vehicle departed, but the young man was hit and he died shortly thereafter.
You could write the rest of it yourself without further information. The predictable events then occurred. Adding to emotion, so is the George Floyd trial just across town. This event will add to the stress on those who were selected for the juror panel, but this was never about the trial. It is just about the verdict.
So, restless with the flood of information and social unrest, I went back to sorting my scattered affairs through the years. I ran across this one, only fifteen years in the past. I had to laugh. We thought we had problems then! Here are the musings of a younger white male I used to know. He was brash and proud and was not afraid to let you know it. I have not known him in a while:
02 September 2006
Tune Inn
I was sitting at one of the dark wood booths of the Tune Inn, a strange little dive on Capitol Hill that is stuck in the time-warp of the 1950s. The cheap dark paneling there is battered and some of the men at the bar appear to live there.
The Inn used to be on the frontier of civilization. It was the last safe-house between official Washington and the Anacostia River. There were the islands of safety at the Marine Barracks at 8th and I, and the sprawl of the Navy Yard along the river, but those were walled bastions against the residents of the projects and disintegrating row houses.
The long slide after the riots appears to be over, and now you can walk safely from the Inn to Eastern Market, and across Pennsylvania Ave down to the barracks now. There is a Starbucks where there was a crack-house not so long ago.
If someone had told me to invest in waterfront property on the Anacostia River a decade earlier, I would have considered them insane. Now, I am not sure how long a dive like this can hold on in the new District, which is awash in cash from the security supplemental appropriations that Congress passed with such abandon after 9/11.
I was nursing a beer and waiting for Boats and his pal Chop to show. They were both Coast Guard-experienced and we wanted to talk about how to defeat the potential delivery of weapons of mass destruction from the sea. As backdrop, the Inn is not a micro-brewery. It is a basic Budweiser bar and a good place to hang out after I have business with the Staffers on the Intel Committees in the lairs on the Hill. Or do some work with the anonymous analysts at the Congressional Research Service (CRS) in their long gray building across from the Library of Congress.
I have an associate in CRS. He is not a friend. That would be going too far. But Ron is one of those pivot points in the Government that is not represented on the “How a Bill Becomes Law” line-and-block chart.
He is the guy the Congress goes to when they have a question about what the sea services are requesting in the budget. What Ron says in his official reports can influence hundreds of millions of dollars, and that is why I am nice to Ron. Really nice.
I am long gone from the ranks of the earnest-faced uniformed guys. I had started edging to the door a decade before I took off the uniform for the last time, slowly fading into the Spook interagency woodwork. Along the way I met people like Ron and learned how to press some of the smaller levers in the vast enigmatic system.
When I finally pulled the plug on government service it was an anti-climax. I think it took about a week to get over being an 0-6 and settle into being a Parkway Patriot with one of the rapacious companies that shaves the edges off the Government’s 10% profit structure and rewards its leadership lavishly.
Most of the rest of us former government employees just turn our hats around. We show up at the same desk, doing the same job as contractors. The money that flowed into the Agencies after 9/11 permitted the establishment of a whole shadow workforce, officially off the books for pension and benefit purposes.
That was a good thing, for us, anyway. I tried it and it did not work. I had to do what I had always done, floating in and out of the big buildings on the goodwill of my former comrades. To use a polite phrase, I was in the business of attempting to make things happen.
I have a little list of things. I have a line on a patent that can make moldable fiberglass bulletproof. Light in weight, the material is one of those things that will change the world. I’m thinking beyond radar domes. Ship superstructures, perhaps, certainly door and body panels for the new combat vehicles. It is going to be worth billions over time.
The people that own the patent don’t fully understand what they have, which makes the marketing a challenge. I steer a course between the people who know what it can do, and want to steal the intellectual property, and those that don’t know and are willing to let people like me steer the product over the reef and into safe harbor.
If I play my cards right, this is going to pay for the double-wide trailer down in Culpeper County and I can let this town go straight to the reward it has earned. In the meantime, traveling from office to office, I got engaged in the political struggle from the Tune Inn, which is what this town is actually about.
– Vic
It is strange to look back on it. Our current problems are much more intrusive and at least partially imaginary. The old system I could see from the Tune Inn has changed in this brief time. Reforms instituted to address some old abuses spawned even bigger ones. The size of them is so vast that they have the real potential to make the freest, most prosperous society in recent human history pull the plug on itself.
In microcosm, I later found the place in the country where it is peaceful. We wear masks in the infrequent situations where someone might care. Most of us follow the same CDC guidelines that have always minimized the effect of other nasty diseases. Otherwise, there has been no public unrest. If a local law enforcement officer sees fit to flash the lights, we pull over, using turn signals. We ensure our hands are placed visibly on the steering wheel, and do not resist lawful commands. I am OK with that. I have no idea why resisting arrest is considered a reasonable course of action against people with guns. Or Tasers, for that matter.
People seem to think there is a necessary part of upbringing that may have been lost with the destruction of the old family structure. I don’t recall having The Talk with my old man long ago, but it was pretty clear what his view was. “Don’t screw around with people with guns.” I have tried to follow that as a matter of relatively minimal social discipline. If provoked, the Cop has a gun, and things can happen. So avoid provocation if you can.
Oh well. 2006 seemed pretty strange at the time. But that is just one of America’s things. I am always impressed by our ability to make strange things seem perfectly normal. It is a sort of a clean sweep of everything.
Copyright 2021 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com