Editor’s Note: Morning! I was wrestling with the topic of the tale this morning. I had several back-and-forth exchanges with old pals yesterday. For my part, I got over the events of last week as most of us have who have been to a war or three. The rising state of emotion about what was, in the context of the malevolent year of 2020, a fairly small event that included gunfire in the sacred halls of the United States Capitol. In conflict, you have to adjust. It is a bit disconcerting to see how much slower it is. So, the information flow pinned me quickly. Marlow is of the same school, and he turned his attention to applying our old professional methodology to look a little deeper into the events on The Hill. I think you will find it interesting. The other part of this introduction is a plea directed at comrades who served in Operation DESERT STORM. That event is coming up on an anniversary, and the Naval Intelligence Professionals are going to feature some of the stories about it this Spring. I was trapped in a Special Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF) for the duration of the war, no phones or cameras permitted, so I have recollections, but no pictures. In order to tell the stories, some images would be warmly welcomed. Contributing author Point Loma may have some, since he went to the show on a proud ship we shared, USS Midway (CV-41). Any others from shipmates who saw it on the ground, or in the air, are warmly encouraged to contribute. I can handle distribution on through this address or at the website, www.vicsocotra.com. In the meantime, standing recommendations remain. Avoid crowds. Stay alert. We are in for some big and exciting times.

– Vic

Early Morning January 11, 2021

Faces in the crowd,
Clothes on their backs,
Shoes on their feet

A friend spent the day after last week’s DC Capitol invasion combing the online crowd images. Compared to the demos of our youth (there were a bunch of them), a lot of the folks he spied were women — a huge change from our times. He also reported seeing beaucoup men in their 40s and 50s — not exactly a plugged-in, digiterati generation of demonstration types.

He asked, “Are we seeing the faces of folks who are being or feel like they’re being dealt out of the future?”

Something’s happened to radicalize them. It’s not just info silos or media bullshit. We ignore it and them at our peril.

I agreed with his line of thought. There are a lot of people in the working-class corners of our country who feel the nation is leaving them behind. They get derided by politicians for clinging to their guns and religion. They get derided for voting for the current president. Laughed at by every late-night TV talk show host. They see the impacts of climate change, not that it makes their day hotter or ground dryer, but that the chosen policies to combat it almost always mean they can’t log, mine, drill, ranch, or drive trucks. It will disproportionately matter when they are the ones forced to pay higher prices at the pumps, grocery store registers and utility bills, to make the sacrifices, when compared to big city types, government weenies, tech world wizards, professional class mavens, or upper middle to upper income wealthy. Those folks will still have their ability to fly commercial, drive their SUVs, pay in full for their kids’ way through college, fully fund their IRAs and 401Ks (most of these dispossessed would say WTF are those?), take multiple annual vacations and/or own second homes.

These DC mall demo folks see all of this and it scares them. That they are going to bear the cost burden (Truth: that’s where the real money is) of the nation’s changes. That fear is being fed and prayed upon from all sides by media and politicians as it always has been.

As my shipmate further said, this is not going away. It will get worse. And de-platforming Trump, condemning his supporters, forcing them underground is going to make it much more powerful a signal.

I recognize that this is like calling for greater understanding of Al Qaeda’s concerns a couple days after 9/11, but this is an urgent time for healing. Instead, we seem to be throwing gas on a fire by talking 25th Amendment or fast-tracked, banana republic style impeachment efforts.

Others who don’t see it that way say part of the “challenge” (notice how/why this 25-cent word is used) we face is to get folks to understand that life is not a zero-sum game. Someone else getting a promotion or winning the lottery does not take something away from another person. Ya da. Ya da. Ya da.

Baloney.

Almost 25 years ago after a 20 plus year hiatus, I got a motorcycle and started crossing America during my time off.

It was then I noticed a growing sadness in the middle of the land.

Rust-beltedness was metastasizing, spreading, and oozing everywhere from mid and small sized cities to rural outposts and all points in between the country’s coasts and borders.

Strangers would stop me at one pump stations to ask me what I was doing, where I had been, was going and so forth.

I had encountered this intense interest during my two-wheeling in the 60s and 70s in Europe and the US, but this was different. They were a mostly happy lot back in the day. Not so much now that time has passed.

Over this latter period, I heard these pump people express “grievances,” indirectly or directly when they found out I was living near DC. As time wore on these grievances morphed into openly expressed depression then anger and finally in the past 7-10 years rage. This was not a Trump thing nor a smartphone, web, or social media deal. This was not normal nor dismissible. It was real, visceral, and toxically explosive.

For them it was not some zero-sum game (a snooty phase that would elicit a WTF is that response). They’ve already lost and felt they had done so for good. Desperation like that is not still recognized and understood for what it is —

Dead-ender-ism.

This is “a,’ if not ‘the,’ foundation for spasmodic violence most on us have never seen in their lives unless they have served or lived in the third world. Been there. Done both.

We must deal with this dried out kindling and treat them as living, breathing, and sentient brothers and sisters or we shall, one and all, suffer the consequences.

It is there, and it is real. We cannot cancel enough, de-platform enough, or shame enough to make it go away.

On the other hand, these dispossessed must forgive their supposed enemies on the other side and reject their own well-earned rage.

Now some would counter my response just above by explaining the theory of capitalism includes a process called creative destruction. The idea here is that a new good idea will replace an old one and progress will be made.

Very true to a point, but as we have seen during the past many decades there has been for untold tens of millions no progress. Zip. Zero. Nada.

To these comfortable class tut-tuttering folks, I would say, “Run that do-loop forward a decade or two at most. Once many, if not most, of our currently insulated classes of tech, service, military, professional class jobs and neighborhoods are wiped out by the coming tsunami of automation, machine learning, AI and hardware and software robots, tell me what will result.”

Even the thicker minded of them would finally see that it won’t be pretty. Would these newly dispossessed classes be smart enough to know how to move around and attack our burgeoning surveillance state and personal data collection sensors and data analytics system? Bwahahahahaha.

They’ll say defensively that this all sounds so sci-fi. To which I respond, “So was what happened last week in DC, 20, 30, 40 years ago.”

Last week was just prologue from what some of my futurist friends told me.

In the end, I needed some hope, so I decided this past weekend to go back and look closely at the faces in the crowd. I downloaded and inspected at close quarters much of the imagery and video of the folks at the Capitol building. Stayed up almost all night.

My observation and analysis me indirect evidence that the bulk of these folks’ where-from’s and what-do-they-do’s. They aren’t bourgeoisie or radical provocateurs.

My photo and video examination of their clothing and especially their shoes revealed, at least to this old photo interpreter and analyst, a deeper, less evident truth about their source waters. Admittedly, it’s sort of an unmetric’d cultural anthropology approach/method. They are mostly out of work folks who drove their beaters to this demo, and (if from out of the area) slept in their cars or stayed six-to-a-room at a Red Roof Inn well outside the DC beltway.

I’ll leave it at that. Perhaps there are crowd control or IC/LEO analysts of these things who could weigh in here.

To end this on a humorous note, one compadre said this couldn’t have been a coup. He stated, “It is only a ‘coup’ if it come from the coup d’etat region of France. Otherwise, it’s just sparkling white terrorism.”

I am still wiping off my laptop’s screen and washing my laundry. Screen Shot 2021-01-11 at 10.56.00 AM.png

“Hooray for our side” — Buffalo Springfield, 1967

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