ARLINGTON, May 12, 2003- God it is early. I am not reaqdy to get sucked into the vortex of this week. I stayed up late last night, talking to my Mother on her day, and even a remarkably civil conversation with my ex, the first such I have had in a couple years. Her call had been sparked by the golf outing I had with our sons, and it was quite a tonic. Made me forget what is going to happen this week. My sons were lively and ironic and the younger had sworn me to secrecy. He didn’t want his mother to find out that he could really hit the ball or drain a thirty-foot putt. He was afraid he would be forced to play the sport more, and based on the volume level he selected on the radio in the car going over to the course it was pretty clear about the message he wanted to send.

The interesting thing is that both the boys seemed to like the snarling music of twenty years ago. For them, the 80’s are still alive and the return of Aerosmith this summer is an exciting prospect.

But this morning the roar and din of the world is beginning to tug at me. There are at least thirty dead in Chechnia, a truck loaded with explosives penetrated the security perimeter of an administration building that contained the local headquarters of the Federal Security Bureau, what we used to know as the KGB.

I listened to the World Service as I break eggs in a bowl. I have the New York Times up on the computer screen in an effort to get my arms around the real world. There will be many adventures this week, some of them real and I have to keep them straight. The BBC is on top of that one, reporting about exercise “Top Officials Two,” or what we call TopOff. Or T2, for short.

It starts this afternoon with a simulated radiological explosion in Seattle, a evolution which is intended to put the relationship between the Feds and the locals to the test. We shall see how it goes. But there is the real potential for some citizens to have failed to heed the advance PR and assume that some of the activity they are watching is real and respond accordingly. We call that the “War of the Worlds” scenario, after the pandemonium that followed Orson Welle’s classic radio program. It will get stranger, too. Wait till they announce the Plague outbreak in Chicago tomorrow! It was already getting strange on Friday when a passenger got off an airplane in Minneapolis with what could have been some scary tropical fever.

The eggs begin to congeal as Patrick Tyler and Edmund Andrews give me the scoop from Baghdad in the Times. The roar has sucked some people out of their jobs in Iraq. The Administration had confirmed that retired general Jay Garner, America’s Pasha, is out on his ass and Paul Bremmer, a former diplomat and counter-terror expert, has arrived in Basrah this morning to take over. He claims to be “delighted to be there.” Every one else associated with the interim civil administration is headed home, too. Barbara K. Bodine, Baghdad reconstruction chief, had been recalled to Foggy Bottom. So too is former ace communicator Margaret Tutwiler and the rest of the key staff. Things must be grim indeed, grim beyond the reports of violence and continued looting for such a wholesale coup to have occurred. The civil administration team didn’t last as long as the ground war did.

Tyler and Andrews quote an Administration official as saying “Unless we do something in the near future, it is likely to blow up in our face.” I note that I have attributed my quote properly and have consulted with legal counsel on source attribution and the integrity on my byline. I know where I am, and I checked from the balcony. I think the Times team was reporting from Baghdad.

Things are a little dicey for the Old Gray Lady this weekend. It is a historic low point in 152 years of reporting at the paper. Jayson Blair, a new national correspondent reportedly ”committed frequent acts of journalistic fraud,” including theft of material, “invented quotes” and failure to disclose his actual whereabouts. A rigorous internal investigation is underway, according to an investigation conducted by the paper. Jayson is 27. He wrote things that purported to be from Maryland, Texas and other states, when he was actually in New York. He violated the sacred byline integrity of the Paper of Record, the official First Draft of History.

And of course you know that the first report you hear is always wrong, but that is another matter altogether. I am more curious about nuance, the tale behind the news. I have no idea what this means, but here it is. Colin Powell made a bold fashion statement earlier this week, appearing at a press conference to announce his newest diplomatic shuttle to get the squabbling siblings to play nicely together. He stood behind the podium and his brilliant white shirt contrasted with his rich light cocoa complexion and there was a startlingly firm and forthright bow-tie at his throat, for all the world like a butterfly hovering over a field of fresh-fallen snow.

I had to look twice, since he looked just like one of the members of the Fruit of Islam, the security detail of the Nation of Islam. They are close-cropped, neatly dressed and tightly bow-tied. I saw a group of them outside their mosque over in NW DC a month or two ago while I was chasing an thoroughly unrelated story.

It was an interesting fashion statement, since I don’t think I have seen an effective bow tie in public life since Adlai Stevenson, and he would never be confused with anything except being a Princeton alumni. Except he came from Bloomington, Illinois, where his ancestors had been influential in local and national politics since the nineteenth century. His maternal great-grandfather had been a prominent Republican when that party was liberal and an early Lincoln supporter. So I suppose there is some internal consistency.

When I arced back through my main room from turning up the heat on breakfast I heard the radio talking about the Old Testament and the New Testament wings of the Republican Party. Maybe that is what connected things. Vicki Barker had already completed her review of global turmoil and signed off for the morning. I knew I had to get rolling, get the week started. I glanced through the rest of the Times on-line. Past Chechnia, and past the Secretary’s adventures with the Israelis and Palestinians, even below the plagiarism. One story struck me. It was from the Congo. A military unit was rotating from Kinshasa to the diamond town of Lubumbashi. The regular army is routinely used for security when they are waiting around for the next coup d’etat. The rear door of a Russian-built IL-76 cargo plane failed after they had achieved FL 33. The resulting vacuum sucked dozens of soldiers, wives and children into the freezing void while others survived by clinging to the aircraft as the pilots did what they must do in a catastrophic decompression event. They threw the control yoke forward, diving expeditiously down to 10,000 feet where humans can breath unassisted and returned to the airport.

If the passengers had been strapped into their seats nothing would have happened. But the Ukrainian firm that runs the contract airlines allows passengers to fill up the cargo area with their belongings.

So while there is promise for this week, as far as the unexpected excitement meter goes, I don’t think anything will match that. But I wonder what sort of contribution I might make with a snappy bow tie? It could the statement that puts us over the top, sucks us right out into the slipstream with General Garner.

If the Martians land anywhere in Northern Virginia I will let you know. I’m reporting to you from Arlington, I swear.

I have relied on reporting from Dan Barry, David Barstow, Jonathan D. Glater, Adam Liptak and Jacques Steinberg. Research support was provided by Alain Delaqu�ri�re and Carolyn Wilde, who claim to work for the Times and purport to be in New York.

Copyright 2003 Vic Socotra