Recess

I opened up my copy of The Hill newspaper this morning to see what events were going to shape my week. I am very reactive in my planning, since there are so many things going on I have to cherry-pick activities.

I am still reeling a bit from the amount of legislation that was passed last week. It is going to take some time to shovel out the impact of the Energy and Transportation Bills. And imagine the Senate majority leader breaking with the Administration to support stem cell research. You would think that Senator Frist reads the polls and wants to be president some day!

The front page is normally dense with activities of consequence, but it wasn’t this morning. The headline, in bold, read:

Congress not in session . Summer recess .

That was pretty much it for the month. The recess should give the President the opportunity to appoint Mr. Josh Bolton to be Ambassador to the United Nations in what is called a Recess Appointment. That is a mechanism from the old days of the Republic when Congress wasn’t hanging around all the time. Now it is used to get people into jobs for which the Senate will not confirm them.

Mr. Clinton used the procedure to appoint arch-liberal Bill Lan Lee as assistant attorney general for civil rights. It drove the Republicans nuts, but the only alternative was to stay in session right through the dog days of August, and maybe cancellation of the summer softball league.

I wouldn’t normally look for sports in the pages of The Hill. The Post has that beat covered like a blanket. But with recess finally upon us, I checked the standings on the summer softball leagues. The Michigan Senate softball team will play the Antitrust division of the Justice Department on Wednesday. I hope Michigan upsets the first-place Trust-busters, and not just because I hail from the Wolverine State .

I know someone on the Senate team. He is a ringer, of course, an ace patroller in center field, good arm and great bat. He can go either direction, which is not one of those skills that are currently in demand on the Hill. So he is quite valuable. He is the son of an old pal who graduated from the old Alma Mater last year and came down here to join the Global War on Terror. There are a lot of opportunities in Washington to do that, or there were. Apparently the war is over and I hadn’t noticed a thing.

There have been rumblings about it for weeks. Someone finally figured out that “terror” is just a tactic, the logical continuation of a political process carried to a higher level. You can’t declare war on a manifestation of something else. It would be like saying we fought the Japanese over carrier aviation, or amphibious landings.

The name of what we are actually doing is still to be determined. They are floating trial balloons over the Potomac River from the State Department, whose softball team is in a slump.

The last balloon I saw had “struggle against extremism” printed on it, but I think that term is a little weak for this colossal enterprise. I wish “jihad” wasn’t already taken. So the new name is still a work in progress.

I don’t know if Karen Hughes is behind this or not. As you know, she was the influential former Presidential advisor who left town at the end of the Bush first term to go spend more time with her family in Texas .

She apparently had enough of them and is back now. She has the least noticed and possibly most important job in the State Department. She has a cool title, which was bestowed on her after a confirmation hearing that had no fireworks whatsoever. She is known as Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs.

She is doing something that I argued for at the beginning of the global struggle, or clash or cultures, or whatever it is just after 9/11. I was working someplace it is better not to talk about, and from there the best I could do was joust with the office of Public Affairs at the Pentagon, where one of Karen’s pals was Press Secretary.

Tory Clarke is a dynamic woman of fine intellect. When she was in the government, she wound up owning the portfolio for information. Unfortunately, her ascendancy in creating the public message on the justice of the war seemed to be due more to her relationship with Karen in the West Wing than anything else.

There gad been another office in the Pentagon established under a nice Air Force General named Pete Wordan. It was called it the Office of Strategic Influence, and they were going to do all manner of wonderful things there. But a combination of Tory’s jealous defense of her turf and the suspicion of the journalists made the office shut down abruptly, Secretary Rumsfeld denying its function. It sounded like propaganda, and that, of course, is wrong.

I thought then that a message that sets the tone for a pro-American battle with the ideology of radical Islam is far too significant to be buried in the Pentagon. It was one of those rare times when I was right. It just didn’t work.

The Administration hired Charolette Beers, a former Madison Avenue advertising exec to a senior position over at State. She was supposed to mount a slick campaign that would overcome beliefs so powerful that they persuaded young Muslims to fly airplanes into buildings.

She started with a series of full-page ads, just like she was advertising a product like Dove Soap that would make everyone want to take a shower.

Her first big effort cost $15 million dollars. It was called the “Shared Values Initiative.” Local wags began to call it the “Happy Muslims Campaign” for its antiseptic profiles of Muslims living in the U.S. What it actually did was provoke outrage across the Muslim world at the idea of the Infidel telling them about their faith. The government was forced to pull the ads, and well intentioned or not, she was laughed out of town.

I had proposed in a series of memos that we need the establishment of an institution like the Office of War Information during WWII. It reported to the President, and the various departments of the day were expected to toe the information line it established. Hollywood and radio, too.

Maybe it was propaganda, and maybe it was just a disciplined approach to information in a desperate time.

In one of my memos, I recommended a subtle and coordinated strategy to empower women as a means of de-fanging the angry young men. I still believe in the concept, but I don’t know if anything like that can work in the internet age, and thankfully I had no influence with anyone who counted. My co-workers were only able to laugh me only as far as the 14th Street Bridge and I came back, not requiring confirmation or a recess appointment.

I wish Karen a lot of luck. If she is to be successful, she will have to be tough, determined and low-profile. And she will require an awful lot of support.

So, with nothing of consequence on the calendar except dealing with the Royal Succession in Saudi Arabia , I was at a decision point. I checked the phone for messages and no one called for advice. I would have told them that King Fahd had only been a figurehead since his stroke a decade ago, and Prince Bandar had returned to the Kingdom after twenty years here in Washington to be the heir-in-waiting to the former Crown Prince, now King, Abdullah.

Fahd had a pretty good run for a man who started as one of 44 children of a minor Bedouin royal. His alliance with Washington while establishing the virulent Wahhabi sect of Islam as the state religion of the Kingdom was a masterstroke.

Or a mistake so vast that it might overwhelm our world.

But like I said, no one called to see what I thought. The recess meant that most people with any sense would be on vacation, and there was no urgency in getting to the office. There would be no one of any influence to talk to. I decided to use my part of the recess to concentrate on the summer softball league, do laundry ,and go into work late.

I did not put on a tie. Instead, I put on my swim trunks and my flip-flops to maximize the amount of clothes I could get in the machines. I even stripped the Murphy Bed and put in the sheets. I decided to go all out, a real struggle against dirt. The tokens are expensive, after all, and I like to be efficient.

I poured soap over the white and colored loads. It is good soap, or I have been told it is. I remember it from an informative ad campaign I saw one time. Then I realized I was wearing my salmon-colored tank-top. It is about the same color as the bricks on Big Pink’s massive walls, and is my favorite to wear to the pool. I took it off, thinking I only had twenty feet to get back to my place. Less than that, really, if I went straight out the access door to the pool and dove in the water.

I threw it on top of the other dirty clothes and aligned the tokens just right so the lever would shut with authority. The water started to gush into the machines, and I turned and left the laundry room.

There is never anyone in the hall. But of course, Ann was right outside with her replacement dog.

“Hi,” I said, feeling a little under-dressed. At Big Pink we have our standards. You are expected to wear shoes and a top inside the building, male or female, and certainly if you are going to the lobby to check the mail. But I figured that being so close to my unit, and having spent enough time in the sun this season, I was almost dressed.

Ann didn’t seem critical, and I think she liked my color. She really is a sweet lady who puts all her love into her dogs since her husband died. She looked at me and said “The laundry rooms always cause some interesting behavior. Not on the first floor, of course,” she said primly.

I nodded in agreement, somewhat chagrined at being caught in marginally interesting behavior.

“Up on the Sixth Floor, it is different. You know the people up there. There was a man who washed everything he had. He was quite adamant it. When he finished loading the washer, he realized that the clothes he was wearing were going to be dirty after everything else was clean.”

“I know the feeling, Ann.” I knew what was coming. I have dreams about it sometimes.

“So he did the logical thing. He took off all his clothes and threw them into the washer, and stalked out of the laundry room as naked as a jay bird. He didn’t care who he met on the way back. Poor Mrs. Rodgers.”

I nodded in sympathy. “Poor thing. Imagine her shock.” I patted the replacement dog on its curly white head. Then I scuttled back to my unit to find a shirt to get dirty while my laundry soaked.

Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com

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