Editor’s Note: Marlow takes on the challenges of generational change in our new and strange world. There questions flying about how to respond to public health emergencies, changing norms in social behavior and even the nature of how our Constitutional Republic functions in these times when “crisis management” supersedes the old regular order. In older times, one of the targets of our analytic firepower was the Soviet Union. All our attempts at ‘understanding’ started with the recognition that our foe insisted all of their operations be concealed by what they called “maskirovka.”

It has nothing directly to do with facial coverings to avoid disease, though it is related. The literal meaning of the term is “disguise.”

It was a military doctrine developed at the start of the twentieth century. Maskirovka covered a broad range of measures for military deception, from camouflage to plausible denial-and-deception. In its way, it helped to frame conclusions with the assumption that anything easy to understand was a disguise for what was actually happening.

The Writer’s Section at Socotra House is therefore accustomed to that step in the analytic process, which was the attempt to understand and accurately interpret information. To a degree, maskirovka is universal and something we can find in most human interactions. But it has never been a step required just to understand the news. It is certainly helpful, though.

– Vic
Coastal Empire

Seaman Recruits

A dear friend — a fellow US Navy old salt and grandfather — is lying this morning in a local Cardiac ICU fighting for his life after heart valve replacement and bypass surgery yesterday. His medical team is throwing everything they have to keep him on this side of the veil. W and I sit here, talking with and supporting his wife, unable to visit him as local hospitals are slammed with plague patients.

Many times, he and I have talked about our grandkids — his still youngsters and mine college-graduate adults. We both marvel at how beyond lucky we’ve been to live much longer than deserved, given some of our preposterously bad life choices over many decades. Among the top gifts of our extended all-in “let-it-ride” win streak has been grandchildren:

We had a common enemy.

I, not he, taught mine exquisite cursing in many languages paying particular attention as to the proper phonetics, verbal emphasis, and body language of a well delivered explicative.

I delivered more BS per pound per day like when with my skull wreathed in thick blue Cuban tobacco smoke, I was accused “smoking” by GC #2, I corrected by rejoining, “No, I’m cigaring.”

We endlessly recycle old jokes — practical, surreal, and otherwise, stories with and without points, and to what seems to them just general weirdness. We secretly love it when they start riffing this type of stuff of their own creation, especially for me when mine did it to their parents at their Midwestern dinner table long after I had left to go back to my own cave back on the east coast. The ensuing long distance phone calls demanding answers were hilarious.

When we are on our game, we provoke much thought in them about the guile, problem solving prowess, and general mayhem of old people that hopefully somewhere in their still maturing lizard brains allow them to still leap off life’s crazy cliffs with deep waters below but to avoid jumping off high vista points into rocky canyons without a parachute and plans A, B and C.

I tried in these moments to slow life down a bit for them despite their sense that their personal Engine Order Telegraphs (EOTs) were at full “STOP” and to introduce them to the joys of thinking more deeply, of only for a moment, about things instead of just reacting. Occasionally even veering off into telling them big truths. Like life goes fast, really fast, and if you’re not careful it’s too late. Sorta a smoke ’em if you got ’em in the moment thing.

Now and then, as mine entered their mid-20s they gifted me with a flashback moment retelling of some old bit. These are precious, golden oldie, old-devil greatest hits. Hell, they were listening and thinking.

Now, to my friend in his Empire C-ICU, “Yo, Fred, time to move your EOT off its STOP position to AHEAD STANDARD.”

We still have much more to laugh about and teach our young Seaman Recruits.

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