This little tale is several yesterday’s ago, when I still traveled in the rivulets of turmoil created by the Agencies at Langley and the Pentagon. As opposed to yesterday, this seems like a day the goons are winning, sad after a day that started with such promise. I had a marvelous time at work, or at least a tolerable one, down at the Department, and it concluded with a miraculous glide through a golden afternoon. There were no bad people there in the sunshine, no thugs or goons. Only the joy of motion. But more about that in a minute, since the travel book manuscript is still hanging..

The goons in Rangoon were bright and chipper that morning, saying the Nobel Laureate wasn’t injured at all in clashes with demonstrators. But she has vanished once more into their steel grasp and while the International Community gasps, the goons do not appear to care. And Robert Mugubwe didn’t blink like I thought yesterday. Additional reporting from a nation adjacent to Zimbabwe indicates the streets of Harare are quiet and the silent strike is effective. But there isn’t any economy there anymore anyway, so what difference does it make?

The auctioneer who is liquidating the vast Oriental rug store down the road from our apartment is a sardonic fellow with one of those nasal British accents. Which is to say, it is not British at all. It is closer to an Australian drawl. But on closer examination it is not that, though it is much closer to the Antipodes than to Trafalgar Square.

My Auctioneer is from a farm near Buloway, in a place that was known for a few years as “Rhodesia.” He has been here for twenty-five years. The family left shortly after the Union Jack went back up the flagpole in Salisbury in order to provide a mechanism to hand the country over from Ian Smith’s white rebels to Robert Gabriel Mugubwe’s ZANU-PF. My auctioneer has friends who stayed, trying to build something in a new order, or maintain something of the old in it. They cannot leave now, since the currency and the land are worth nothing. Formerly rich or newly poor, everyone needs to get up early and queue at the bakery for bread.

My auctioneer gets a misty look in his eyes when he describes his former homeland. Then he told me about the money. A Zimbabwean dollar used to be just about on a par with our dollar. It is worth less than 18 c in what was then cents now, and headed south. He is happy he left that sad land when the going was good, and he is sad that it is gone. He is stateless now, his homeland taken by goons and his dialect of English will die with him and the family. Then he gets on with the rug trade.

The Deputy Secretary of Defense back then, Paul D. Wolfowitz, was looking across the Demilitarized Zone in Korea at those chipper goons to the North. He was one of the architects of the Iraq adventure, a deep and profound thinker. I saw him daily during the first Gulf war, and I enjoyed his ready dialogue with Secretary Cheney and Chairman Powell.

He was coy this morning, essentially saying that the Second Infantry Division would decamp from our forts at Camp Casey and Camp Smith and pull back across the Imjin River to someplace where the goons could not slaughter them in the first minutes of conflict. Everything and everyone up front has a target number on it and the North has the bulk of their artillery deep in caves, well within range, and multiple rocket launchers and a host of nastiness to unleash. We appear to be transitioning to a posture where the North will be required to run a war of deep strike if they are to get at us, and I applaud the initiative.

But when we pull out of Camp Casey after a half century confronting the war that always seems to be just around the corner, I think it will come home to me how the world has changed. It is not like we are going to abandon the Bridge of No Return and the Tree That Never Needs Trimming to the goons. We will just have someone else look after them for us. This is all supposed to posture our forces to conduct the sort of deep strike the North cannot mount, and so a defensive act will be perceived as an offensive one. I’m glad my time is done in the Land of the Morning Calm. I felt like I was driving away from the world of the goons as I left the headquarters early, just after five pm. I had places to go and people to see. One of the young PhD’s at the office had organized a group lesson, and as a demonstration of leadership, volunteered to participation. Or maybe I did it so I could leave early.

And calm is what I felt right here yesterday afternoon. I put the top down and the commute out of town wasn’t that bad. One idiot broke his Mercedes in the travel lane over by the Treasury Printing Plant and that was a hiccup. I was tempted to admonish him to buy American from the sanctity of my North American vehicle, but I know that these are all international cars now and my union rhetoric rings hollow. I crossed the 14th Street Bridge and bailed off onto Washington Boulevard and onto Columbia Pike. About a mile up is the Ski Shack, and the parking lot in the back is where the in-line skating lesson was to be conducted.

We bundled up but good. Knee, wrist and elbow pads. Brain bucket. And the skates, ah, the skates. They equipped me with a pair of size eleven Rollerblades with a progressive brake. There were five of us present, two novices, a couple retreads and one pro. Our instructors made it look effortless, floating around as we fumbled with straps and buckles. I stood, a little uncertainly, and then I realized I was free. The knees no longer have any cartilage, but there is no up-and-down thrusting. The motion is just like ice-skating, or like the long fluid motion of cross-country skiing. I was whizzing across the blacktop in minutes, and after an hour I was feeling that sweet linking motion of legs and arms working together, center of gravity forward, moving without effort. Gliding, connected to the land by wheels alone. I looked out to the end of the driveway where the traffic whizzed and realized I had found something that did not involve grinding my bones together.

Things were looking up. Then the phone on my belt rang and I fumbled to get my wrist protection off. It was the office, naturally, and they were conducting a routine test to ensure that even if the goons came over the horizon we would be in touch. I thanked them, put the phone back on the clip and glided off into the lowering light. Rain tomorrow, they say. Rain for a change.

Weather permitting, I am going to glide right out of here.

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