Eggs With That?

I am not going to say anything about the date and the day. I do not believe in numerology, per se, although the hotels in which I stayed on the Western Coast last week failed to have a thirteenth floor. Someone out there takes this seriously, or at least enough to delete an entire numerical sequence.

I do not know if I would have taken umbrage with being assigned to room 1313, or the one on the sixth floor with the number of the Beast.

I tend to think not, at least if the room was ready for an early check-in. There was nothing available in lovely Oakland , California , and I spent most of the day in the lobby of the Convention Center Marriott, talking on my cell phone until it died.

But I am prepared to admit that there could be something to the notion of Friday the Thirteenth. There are ominous signs out there in the wide world.

I find myself gripped by a sort of cognitive dissonance. It is the height of a war, and the Secretary of Defense is announcing a round of base closures. The Times this morning reports that Newt Gingrich and Hillary Clinton are a hot political item, and further down, we are apparently going to send a hostile Mr. Bolton to hound the United Nations.

Below the fold, there was the notation that India and China were forming a strategic alliance to finish off the West. The permafrost in the northern latitudes is melting in odd geometric patterns, leaving houses split in two and islands sinking into the sea.

I am pretty sure that the learned Physicist I talked to at the National Laboratory was right. He has a vision of the world beyond this one, and some ideas about energy that could make it happen. If there were bumper stickers for his vision, I would have affixed one to my rental car. He is the first sane person I have talked to in months. He knows that the competition for fossil fuel will break the tenuous bonds of global civility, and great nations will fall.

Unless, of course, something is done. The Physicist is trying to apply Science to the problem, get some of our best minds on the problem now, while there is still some time to act. He wants to convert the energy that falls on us from the sun into some chemical storage mechanism, without releasing more carbon dioxide. It sounds deceptively simple, like the Einstein equation we can all recite, though cannot comprehend.

If I had an agile brain, I would like to help unravel the mystery and wrest new truth from an uncaring universe. That is a cause there that could galvanize my being, a great crusade of research and vision and a world that works in keeping with the elegance of the Cosmos.

But as it is, I find that I am not bouncing back as rapidly from travel as I used to. I feel that I am at least a half stride off my best game, like a corner-back who has stayed in the league a season too long. I did not get an invitation to Rep. Delay’s Tribute Dinner this week, though I will attend a function at the restaurant owned by the lobbyist who got him in trouble. I think I am firmly mired on the “B” list, since I also did not the word on the private aircraft that flew into restricted airspace on Wednesday.

I think I was smoking at the time, looking at the deep pit the construction gangs have gouged out of the block across the street from the Bus Station.

It is an impressively vast hole in the earth, sidewalk to sidewalk, and will accommodate the automobiles of the hundreds of accountants who will occupy the new building when it is done rising from the abyss.

I went back to my desk, unaware of the helicopters and F-16s hurtling toward the little blundering Cessna. I heard that Mayor Williams found himself on the “B” list himself, looking out his office window and asking his staff why everyone was filing out of the White House.

Mrs. Reagan was visiting, and she was escorted to safety. I suppose there is some comfort in the fact that I am no lower in the notification chain than the elected mayor of Washington , DC .

Still a step behind, I arrived at Thursday with the uncomfortable realization that I had managed to get myself backed into a breakfast meeting at the National Press Club. I was a last minute invitee, but optimistic. The session was to be about Intelligence Reform, and one of those things that seemed like a good idea when the e-mail flashed on the screen. I wondered if there would be sweet rolls or a real breakfast. “A” list events have eggs, and sometimes sausage.

“B” list events are about people who once were, but are not now, and have tired sweet rolls and weak coffee.

Attending the breakfast was harder in execution than I anticipated. I left Big Pink too early and disorganized. At least the traffic going downtown was not as thick as it is when I try to travel at the normal time.

This was apparently an on-the-record session, an unusual event on a topic where non-attribution is the rule. Admiral John Poindexter was the featured speaker, and he was to be joined by Anonymous, the angry analyst who quit the CIA last year in disgust at the conduct of the War on Terror.

The Admiral is toxic in some circles after his phlegmatic testimony to Congress in the Iran-Contra Affair. The hounds had been in full cry, smelling another President Nixon-style resignation. The Admiral said that he had forgotten to mention the matter, that it was his fault, he was sorry, in an abstract way, and the Senate could certainly punish him if they wished, but he was the end of the accountability chain, and that was that.

After Watergate, Senate Democrats had expected him to rat out the President. But he didn’t. He just smiled and took full responsibility. The Senate made him retire, and they took away his third star in retaliation, but a technicality made it impossible for them to prosecute him. Oh, they hated him for that.

He was always a visionary, though, regardless of Iran-Contra, and he came back to government after 9/11 with some remarkable ideas. He headed the Defense Advanced R&D Agency program called “Total Information Awareness.” He thought he could employ computer power and sophisticated algorithms to search the sea of digital data and find anomalies that could unmask terror plots.

I was quite confident that he was right, though terror was clearly not the only thing that his program would reveal. The implications were a little creepy.

I was at Health and Human Services then, nearing retirement and bitter in my own way about how things were going. I thought that information from drugstores, stripped of personal information, could betray locations where people were purchasing medication long before they appeared at hospitals as emergency room patients. It could have provided a sort of early warning for emergencies.

But the Admiral’s efforts made the privacy lobby nervous, and he was dissuaded from continuing the effort. His last project made people crazy. It was his opinion that the government’s intelligence analysts had a dismal track record on understanding the world around them. They missed the fall of the Soviet Union , after all, and it was business and entrepreneurs who had the thing right. People with actual money at risk were much more motivated to come to accurate assessments.

Accordingly, the Admiral supported a project by which assessments were made through market forces. That meant, practically, that people used a computer as a sort of odds-maker, and could make money depending on how accurate their predictions were on a series of scenarios of interest to the Government.

When the Senate discovered that the Admiral was essentially running a bookmaking shop on issues like the survival of the State of Israel, they blew a morale outrage gasket. The Admiral is a private citizen again.

I thought I might ask him what it was like to save a Presidency, if I got a chance. It was warm enough on the walk over to the Press Building from the Bus Station to start to work up a glow of perspiration. I took the elevator up to the top, to what might have been the thirteenth floor but wasn’t.

I saw the Admiral in the dark paneled room where the breakfast was set up. He looked tanned an relaxed. But to get to him I had to first get my badge, and talk my way past an aggressively friendly young lady with a big smile. I thought I might cut to the chase and see if this was going to be worthwhile.

“Hi!” I said, putting on my best Washington grin. “Is this going to be a full breakfast, or just sweet rolls?”

“I think you will like it,” she said with an equally pert smile. “There are sweet rolls, of course, and plenty of juice and coffee.”

“Sounds great,” I said. “But are there eggs with it?”

“I think there is a sort of egg McMuffin thing,” she said. I looked at her, smiling, though my heart sank. This morning was going to be yesterday’s news, an aging defensive back a step behind the receiver. But at least I knew where I was, going in.

On the “B” list.

Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com

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