Editor’s Note: The Supremes are at it again. The last of their decisions for this term will curb the power of regulatory agencies as “unconstitutional.” There may be another one on the “Remain in Mexico” policy later this morning. This will provoke more discussion atop the decisions on the 1st, 2nd, 4th, 5th, 10th and 14th Amendments. Stand by for heavy roles. These are historic times, you know?

– Vic

Historic Times

(The bow of USS Forrestal, CV-59, at the pier in Mayport, Florida, November 1989. Married couples are saying another farewell before a voyage that will take the better part of a year to accomplish. And share a moment in history).

You know we are in one of them, right? That is the reason the Chairman is carrying the overhead for the Writer’s Section sleeping and scribbling. He is even adding Amanda’s stipend to try to protect his company and property from the privations of Lawfare in describing things that could cause trouble. Section-Lead DeMille had a sidebar discussion up the stairs to try to bound the issues that confuse what is historic and what is a normal pain in the butt. One matter we are not supposed to mention is resolution of a trial that has dragged on for years.

The Chairman told us not to get into it, since being noticed could result in a casual assignment to someone’s taxpayer-funded legal department to send a letter to someone else which could force the Chairman to send a note to someone he has to pay to answer it. And that is the gentle side of the inexorable forces in motion in this historic time. Someone could wind up in freaking shackles.

DeMille had to ask the pointed question: how does his Section continue to contribute mildly ironic commentary on the most historic moment in our time on this planet in that sort of environment? Supporting the good people who keep this astonishing enterprise moving in a good way while noting the issues that will come to painful decisions we will attempt to survive? How does one sort that out from other ones, relatively small, like the cost of a decent barbecue to celebrate a holiday we have celebrated for most of a century without irony? A joyful day that celebrates freedom?

That led in a round-about fashion to current prices of Bratwurst and ground beef, and an old manuscript the Chairman had in his seabag. It had been there for 32 years. It is written in his glib style in several formats. Some of it had been crafted on an actual typewriter, a device that harnessed mechanical linkages to cause type-balls on IBM Selectric machines, square things powered by electricity that occupied the top of desks. The clattering things translated motions of his fingers into ink-marks on actual paper stacked in piles known as ‘reams.’ Other parts of the story were composed on primitive digital programs in a variety of officially-approved formats, none necessarily compatible. And all the mass of them scanned at various times into a sometimes impenetrable mass.

DeMille asked the Chairman if we could play with it, since it was a time-capsule of the actual movement of vast global force. It revealed that the people living in those times were busy simply with respiration. What was the historic context to breathing? There was a thing called a “deployment,” which involved sending a giant ship across a vast ocean to steam earnestly in another smaller sea. Four thousand humans were required to make the thing work in an organized fashion, and the Chairman was simply a small part of one component of a single ship in a gigantic system of systems.

That led to other problems, since “history” is an arbitrary thing. If we take a history safely past, like the Victory Over World Communism, there are differences. You can look it up. Today’s account about the ‘history’ on November 9, 1989 reads like this: “The head of the East German Communist Party announced that citizens of the GDR could cross the border whenever they pleased. That night, ecstatic German crowds swarmed the wall. Some crossed freely into West Berlin, while others brought hammers and picks and began to chip away at the wall itself.”

That is history, with brief drama. For some of the other people living the history as it happened? Here is that day from the Chairman’s notebook on an aircraft carrier that will be in the midst of an end of a long war:

09 NOV:

Well, of course it is not the ninth. It’s the 10th; I think. We switched times again this morning while I was unconscious. We are now in ‘Alpha’ time, the next one east of Zulu. Spain is in Alpha time, and we will finally be operating in this zone for the next few months.

Unfortunately, our body clocks have been marching in the opposite direction. My body is mostly on Portland, Oregon, time. I left Mission Planning for the Comm Center at seven fifteen this morning after powering through the night. I got four outstanding hours of sleep before the phone calls started. It is now one in the afternoon and my eyes feel like they have nails driven through them into my brain. Flight ops are starting. We have a closed circuit (CCTV) brief going; two or three planning teams with Top Secret SPECAT shit laying around everywhere; the shredder is busted and we are screening the uncleared shredder repair expert who cannot look at the materials to be destroyed. I am scurrying between the vault and the planning tables and mostly I want to scream.”

That, my friends, is History. We will have some fun with it, and with a gentle nudge, try remind us all that is what is happening now in this moment in this time. The thing in common?

We still want to scream.

Copyright 2022 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com