Sound and Fury
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Sound and Fury The wind blew cold across the capital yesterday, bone chilling for those on foot. I was that, at least partly. I took the car down across the 14th Street Bridge and tucked it into the garage under the Bus Depot. Then I took a cab to the Hill, and through the metal detectors into the Capitol and up to the committee room in the attic, near the Dome, to provide some information that I thought was essential to the deliberations of the Congress. Then on foot, to the Metro, since there is a Blue Line stop close to the House side of the massive legislative complex. I thought I was in luck, as a train was waiting, but it was a chimera. The doors stayed open and a woman’s voice boomed and echoed through loudspeakers in the chamber. Something was wrong with one of the tracks, I could discern that by the third time the announcement was read. It is impossible to hear anything in the Metro stations, it is all inchoate furious sound, bouncing off the curves of the roof. I don’t know why they keep trying. Eventually the doors closed and the train lurched forward to L’Enfant Plaza, and I bailed out with perhaps half the commuters. You can transfer to the yellow line there, and I got on another train and rode it up to Gallery Place, where I jumped on the Red Line. I got off at Dupont Circle, and strode briskly down toward M Street where I had an appointment that went well. The cold breeze inserted icy fingers under my suit coat and blew my tie over my shoulder. The street people looked miserable, and workers wore big padded overalls that made them look like an army of Michelin Men. A FedEx delivery man walked by me, pushing a handcart filled with urgent envelops. He wore shorts and a grim look. I was doing basically the same thing he was doing, delivering words, only I had cut out the middleman. Eventually I found myself back at my desk at the Bus Depot, cold to the bone, looking at the long list of e-mil. The Company was very concerned about the appearance of the signature block on our collective electronic correspondence and wanted us to standardize. I wasted enough time trying to figure out how to comply with the Stalinists at Headquarters that I was nearly late for my next crisis. It was unscheduled, of course, which is the delightful nature of crisis, and it involved the fully scheduled briefing we were supposed to give at an undisclosed location in Virginia. I will spare you the details, but it involved a high-speed search for a FedEx Kinko’s copy center, tires smoking, and a process that is common today, but would have bewildered me only a few years ago. When we were assembled and badeged and waved through the next set of metal detectors, I had to leave the briefing midway to feed the parking meters outside the location, since there were multiple vehicles involved. Steve Canyon had parked at a one-hour meter, and though he still had a full minute remaining, had already been awarded a $40 ticket for having an expired inspection sticker on his windshield. The rest of the briefing went pretty well, and lasted long enough that the sun had lowered behind the new high-rise buildings and the cold wind had wrapped itself in a cloak of darkness. It was late enough that the first results of the elections in Palestine were playing on the radio. Hamas, the organization our government has designated a terrorist group, appeared to be trouncing Fatah, which used to be designated a terrorist group. It looked like Hamas was going to have an outright majority, and maybe a commanding one. I drove back up the boulevard after dropping the Doctor at the train. I switched the radio channels, listening to the commenators. I thought that it was precisely as if serving members of the whacko Real IRA, AKA the Óglaigh na hÉireann, had been directly elected to a majority in the Irish Parliament. It was mind boggling. Gunman to Foreign Minister without a pause, and firmly committed to Bobby Sand’s dictum that the “Only way to halt the oppressor is through an armed struggle.” This is the nature of democracy, and I wondered what the Adminsitration was going to say about that. I stepped on the accelerator and blew through a stoplight that was just going from yellow to red. I looked in the rear view to see if I had attracted a cop. I was lucky. None of Arlington’s finest caught me. I motored grimly toward Big Pink as the day died. What the hell did it mean, any of it? Faulkner was right when he quoted the Bard, I thought grimly. A tale full of sound and fury, told by me, and signifying exactly what you would think. Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra |
