It was swarm of data yesterday, dumped in lumps into a ripe August day warm-tinged with moisture under bright sun and clouds that danced gently over Big Pink’s placid pool. The Salts, some still wet from immersion, were arrayed in general loose order, some still in the java phase of the morning and others already moved on to something else.
It typified this time in a new month filled with assorted wonders. We were still wondering this morning after the first message in the queue. It was brief and dramatic, like some of the other stuff. It was simple: “Hey, we appreciate you people used to work the Current Intelligence desks at PACFLT at Pearl or the Joint Staff in the Pentagon. But for goodness sake, knock off the “alert” messages!”
That seemed to be about something that popped up yesterday about the impending next act in the continuing drama in the Middle East. Here was a synapse of the messaging stream:
That blasts, jumbled together that way, mirrored the memo from Management that framed the start of the morning.
Thermidor was the eleventh month in the then-new French Republican calendar. The month was named after the French word thermal, derived from the Greek word thermos ‘heat’. Thermidor was the second month of the summer quarter. It started July 19 or 20. It ended August 17 or 18. It follows Messidor (harvest, sort of weird) and precedes Fructidor (or ‘fruit,’ which we would consider messidor-ic and accounts for the sort of confusion shared across social epochs). It was imposed in 1793 and used for a dozen years. During the second of those it was sometimes called Fervidor. You recall the connotation with that word.”Fervid.”
You can see that all those led to disarray and confusion, since each element would be worth at least a swipe of discussion to provide some context to the turmoil. If we were doing a bulletin, it would be just that: ‘Trouble Coming With Understandable and Maybe Avoidable Action Possible!”
Bu that would not have brought us on this morning all the way from breaking-fast to luncheoning. Instead, we are thinking about a swim under clear bright skies. The messaging has depth and nuances deep as The Swamp from which they bubbled. If we attempted to identify the central one in simple terms, it is an old an ongoing struggle between large human ethnic and social groups.
Part of that- a blip on the scope- is a collision of Persia and other parts of a long contested-area. Participants are familiar but altered in power. They include Jerusalem, Rome and Athens. A newcomer- us- is temporarily jostling as a dominant but external power as old Russia struggles for redefinition and China rises as the empires of Europe collapse against resurgent populations from the East.
Simple, right? We happen to occupy some of the excitement in the struggle for internal power in the temporary great power, the one in which accuracy and “truth,” real or perceived, is irrelevant to the goal.
Normally we would attempt to distill the jumble into something that conveys this day in a process of weeks, And centuries,
We thought an introduction to the month of Thermodor would be a useful start. The Revolutionaries who upended the Monarchy of France had a trial run later attempted, in our confused times, by Cambodia’s Pol Pot with his notoroious “Year Zero” to commemorate the start of his reign of terror.
See? It is already too complicated to be either succinct or mildly amusing. A strand just this morning is one that could be misconstrued. Our election is naturally closer to us, right here, this week. One of the stories now stretching across the amazing compressed new cycles has some conflicting messaging high in entertainment value.
That is what we would expect in this merry month of Thermodor, you know? We are watching it while trying to keep our reaction somewhere in the middle where it used to be when we just called it “August,” after that old Roman fellow.
We even got started on the real and dramatic discussion about a new emoji-character to signify the thought process in the production meeting:
Back in 1962, it was called an “Interrobang.” We kind of like it for this edition of Thermodor, you know?
Copyright Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com