Tipping-Point

The clock claims it is nearly eight, though my body knows better. I have reset the clocks and placed my biological system four hundred miles to the East. This tipping-point in the season, this momentary disorientation, is going to pay off in energy savings, and more efficient use of the daylight.

Or so they tell me.  I just feel I have been robbed.

When I traveled on a gray ship across the oceans, I had the opportunity to cross many time zones. It was the practice of the Navy to adjust the clocks forward in the nighttime, and take the loss out of the crew’s sleep, and add an hour, going West, during the working day. It was viewed as an opportunity.

I could not help but think of the sea. The wind is howling into the hip of Big Pink hard enough to squeeze the door tight against the jam, making the hardware creak in protest, like a hull twisting through heavy seas. This is not winter back again, but it is at least a smaller sibling, wailing in protest at the changing season.

Changing the clocks and being out of bed made a good start for the day. I had already banked an hour that I might get back in October, a sort of down payment on deferred sleep. I glanced at the Times, hoping that no one else of significance had passed away in the night. I am getting to the point that it is gratifying that I do not appear in the obituaries.

I saw that several people are complaining about the President’s Daily Brief, or PBD. It is the flagship publication of the Central Intelligence Agency. It is a newsletter not much different than the one I write for the Phone Company, only the articles are about what the Bad Guys are up to.

It is intended to shape the course of the President’s day.

His version has all sorts of cool stuff, including operational tid-bits of real spy stuff. The document is partly show business, after all, and you have to keep the customer’s attention.

The President’s brief is then carefully sanitized, and a version with many of the same articles, less the cool stuff, is circulated to the Senior Officials of the government, mostly at the Cabinet Secretary level, if their mission does not have much to do with National Security.

Everybody at CIA reads it on their computers on the secure system, so for them it is not such a big deal. But when I worked at Health and Human Services, the Secretary thought that the words ”For Your Eyes Only” meant that only he could read the glossy brochure. I tried to explain that at least four thousand people read it daily at Langley alone, but I don’t think I ever got the point across.

One of the complaints outlined in the WMD Commission report is that the PBD failed to accurately predict the future. It is a point well taken, I thought. We should do better at that. The term ”Current Intelligence” refers to something that happened fifteen minutes ago, and might be useful in making a prediction about the future. And maybe not.

Some of the articles are necessarily of this sort: ”Horses leave barn; open door blamed.”

But what breed of horses? That is where the intelligence gets all mixed up with the news. But it is much easier to look at the past. It already happened.

I tapped my fork into some scrambled eggs, thinking about what needed to be done on this gray day. There is the monthly newsletter to scribe for the office, outlining the antics of our legislators and Executive Branch for the Officers of the company. That is very much like current intelligence, except that what the Government has done will affect and mold the future, shaping the landscape of commerce.

I think it is a useful product, and I try to be helpful, pointing out that if a program has been zero-ed out in the budget, there is not much point in expending resources to save it. I try to find areas where there may be new funding available, and alert the business development people and the inventors to new possibilities.

If it isn’t actionable, or a cool show business aside to demonstrate how well connected the office is, what is the point?

The Cabinet Secretaries that read the PBD said they used it only as a defensive tool, to avoid looking like a moron when the President called and asked what their Department is doing about Tajikistan this morning. No one likes to look like a moron, or not know how to say “Tajikistan.”

So I will try to do what the CIA folks are attempting, and that is to peer into the future and predict the course of events. And the laundry, of course, since I need to travel, and some superficial cleaning, and a trip to the commissary, and a matter of real estate.

There is a problem with gazing into the mist. I cannot separate what might be happening to the Department of Defense or the Intelligence Community without realizing that there are personal implications in each sector. I try to collect a little information each day about decisions that affect the institutions we will be doing business with.

It is a cascade. The business that is done, or not done, will affect me, and by inference those I support, either in the size of the bonus or the end of the paycheck altogether. We have metrics in business, quarterly ones with dollar-signs. The Government is considerably more diffuse.

Scanning the media, talking on the phone, pounding the pavements, I am on the look-out for portents. I record witness on these curious times for my newsletter.

The portents tell me we are approaching one of Don Rumsfeld’s tipping-points. He describes them as times when the balance of some equation changes, subtly perhaps, and the course of events shift, channeled in a new direction. He was talking about the Iraqi elections.

I see a tipping point coming, and not just about that. I think that our energy policy is leading us to a tipping point, which could cause us to come in conflict with Hugo Chavez in Venezuela . I think the masterful strategic game the Chinese are playing on all the continents is contributing to a tipping point that could focus on Taiwan, but leave us suddenly in a new landscape, with China smiling inscrutably at us from south, and west and east.

I’m not a xenophobe, far from it. The Chinese are bidding against us to install their telephone systems in Falljua. They are bidding at loss-leader rates, just like the Wal-Mart, supported by their government to ensure that it is their networks that will be in place for the next fifty years.

It is hard for a private company that has to meet quarterly analyst expectations to compete with that. And so I wonder about the debt, and the debasement without comment of our once-mighty dollar.

These all have something to do with the PDB, and my little newsletter. But it also has something to do with me and you.

If we enter once more into an age of inflation, or some curious hybrid we once knew as ”stagflation,” what is the best strategy for personal survival?

It seems to me it is to secure a place to live in now-dollars at low interest rates. Lock them in, even if the 30-year note is more expensive. Pay as little as possible in now-dollars, since they will devalue over time. Splurge a little, but watch the interest rates. Act now. Times will not be this smooth again.

Accordingly, I have decided to put a contract on a two- bedroom, two- bath unit here in Big Pink. They are asking a hefty amount, twice what I paid for my first house in long-ago dollars. I am offering a hefty amount more, with an escalator clause which states that I will top any competing bid above that by $5,000, up to some unimaginable number.

I need to secure more space, financed in now-dollars, as a hedge against the future.

I looked at some other places to buy, notably in fashionable Mclean.

There is a building there that has more than a vague resemblance to Big Pink, though it is not built as strongly. The units there are more expensive, by a considerable factor, and of the three I saw, the most affordable, naturally had no garage. The building operates a lottery for the spaces, an event which has more than a passing resemblance to the one in Shirley Jackson’s play of the same name.

Normally someone has to die to open one up.

I posed the rhetorical question to my Realtor this way: “Why would I move twenty minutes further out in this traffic mess to pay more and have less?”

“More prestigious Zip Code. No MS-13 across the parking lot.”

I considered the argument, thinking I might have arrived at the tipping-point that would make me leave Big Pink. Then, miraculously, this unit came on the market. Only two units configured this way, two-and-two, have appeared in the last year. I need to expend now-dollars, harvest the interest write off, and prepare for the inflation that seems likely to come.

If only I could do it in Euros

My strategic goal has crystallized. I think I am fated to live on every floor of Big Pink. So far I have the first, second and fifth accounted for; the unit I am offering a contract on is on the fourth.

Four to go. 

And I understand there are a handful of three-bedroom units, a limited number of pink El Dorados, located on the ultimate east and west ends of the complex. One of them belonged to Speaker of the House Carl Albert, (D-OK), and it overlooks the monuments. If that one ever opens up, and I have enough then-dollars, I could buy it.

And put a brass plaque on the door, just for historical purposes. To show what it was like before the tipping-point.

Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com

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