Friday Musings

Note to self after swimming the PRT for the first time in 24 years: Dumb ass! What took you so long? That was so much easier than not-quite-sprinting, not-quite-jogging a mile and a half and ending at the finish line gasping for air, hands on thighs, wondering if you were going to hurl or not while the stars faded from in front of your eyes and your heart pounded in your chest like a frightened animal. Five hundred yards – is that it? I could have gone again.

I still don’t quite know what to think about the whole Scooter Libby thing. I’m sure that Valery Plame (Wilson) is a dedicated public servant, etc (even if she’s married to a partisan hack/punk with an over inflated sense of personal grandeur and bad hair, and by the way, what was he doing with himself before his wife recommended him to jaunt down to Niger and sip sweet tea?) and that it was probably not a good idea to go talk about her with the chattering class even if her significant other was running around shouting, “Stop the war, listen to me!” first in whispered asides and then when that proved inefficacious then at the top of his lungs. I’m also pretty sure, based on the indictment handed down today, that it wasn’t a crime, either. Or else he would have been charged for that, rather than lying to the grand jury, which is a chunder-headed thing to have done, if in fact it’s proven that that’s what he did.

Still, it feels a little bit like the whole Martha thing, wherein the original crime being researched was not compellingly found to have occurred, but that other, far lesser crimes were committed in the discovery of that fact which end up with the accused going to jail for something other than that which he (she) had originally been suspected of. I know from personal example (well, from family that are politically involved in any case) that once a federal prosecutor has you in his sights that your only choices end up being analogous to those offered by the shooter who asks where you might prefer the bullet: In the leg or in the arm?

It’s a rough game politics, all about winning and losing and serving the public interest at the off moment and not at all for the weak of heart. I guess we should all be glad that we’re little people.

Goldstein is all over this, by the way.

Can I be the first to make a suggestion? Can I concede that a lot of folks over at the Center for American Progress are still absolutely livid at the way their boy Bill was treated in his second term, and that we understand how very important it is to them to see somebody frog marched out of W’s White House, and what about Florida?

Having said that, would it be remotely possible for us to get the hell on with business once this is all settled hash, chips fall where they might? Whomever goes to jail (or doesn’t) and whomever wins the next mid-term or presidential elections? I mean it’s not like we haven’t got some serious issues to solve.

To wit – this Op-Ed by Peggy Noonan. She rather touches a nerve with me:

I think that a lot of people are carrying around in their heads, unarticulated and even in some cases unnoticed, a sense that the wheels are coming off the trolley and the trolley off the tracks. That in some deep and fundamental way things have broken down and can’t be fixed, or won’t be fixed any time soon. That our pollsters are preoccupied with “right track” and “wrong track” but missing the number of people who think the answer to “How are things going in America?” is “Off the tracks and hurtling forward, toward an unknown destination.”

I’m not talking about “Plamegate…” I’m not talking about “Miers.” I mean . . . the whole ball of wax. Everything. Cloning, nuts with nukes, epidemics; the growing knowledge that there’s no such thing as homeland security; the fact that we’re leaving our kids with a bill no one can pay. A sense of unreality in our courts so deep that they think they can seize grandma’s house to build a strip mall; our media institutions imploding–the spectacle of a great American newspaper, the New York Times, hurtling off its own tracks, as did CBS. The fear of parents that their children will wind up disturbed, and their souls actually imperiled, by the popular culture in which we are raising them… Great churches that have lost all sense of mission, and all authority. Do you have confidence in the CIA? The FBI? I didn’t think so…

I believe there’s a general and amorphous sense that things are broken and tough history is coming.

I’m getting some of that same vibe myself. Along with the feeling that we’ve got little time left for all this internecine screwing around that’s so occupied us over the last 5-10 years or so.

It’s quite possible that all of this is over-wrought, because it’s demonstrably true that the next generation has been going to hell for pretty much the last two thousand years and yet somehow we muddle through, but I think that Noonan has a point: There’s a fin-de-siecle feeling in the air, some class of get-it-while-the-getting’s-good and it’s not healthy. All of this noise inside the beltway is a part of it, like savage dogs tearing at the carcass of something greater than themselves.

Well, that was certainly a buzz kill.

Something I really like? I like the fact that my bike only comfortably goes about 80-90 mph. It wasn’t really built for speed. It’s big, and it’s torquey, and it’s powerful. It gets up and goes quickly, but it settles in right around 80 or so. So that’s where I drive it. Pretty much.

If I had one of the RS bikes, or a rice-rocket? Something that’d do 140 or so in a pinch? Something tells me I’d have to go ahead and see for myself. And who, at the end of the day, really needs to go 140, that isn’t about to rotate for takeoff?

Not me.

Other cool things?

Doing 45 in second gear.

Covering the tank off the line in first with your chest, to keep the front wheel in contact with the pavement.

Those things are cool too. I think.

Compassion fatigue.

It’s been a busy year, hasn’t it? Tsunamis in Southeast Asia. Hurricanes in the Gulf. Earthquakes in South and Southwest Asia. A lot of suffering. A lot of people hurt. We’ve had lots of opportunities to dig deep and help out, in whatever small way we can. And we all are probably ready to say that, hey: Enough. We’ve done our bit. Bother somebody else, kid. Gave at the office.

Way things are going right now, we’re many of us looking surreptitiously at the mattresses, and wondering how much green we could stuff in there, if it came right down to it. Maybe bury it in a glass jar in the back yard. Get it while it’s good, and hold on to it. Who knows what might happen next?

Except that frankly most of us are little people. The federal prosecutor isn’t ever going to come after us, and we’re probably never going to break through into the Forbes 500. We don’t have much to give, in the big picture. But neither do we have very much to lose by giving what we can. And there are so many of us. By giving a little bit as an when we can, we can make a difference. And FbL offers those of us who care about the soldiers (using that term broadly) who’ve gone overseas to fight for us and come back… badly hurt – she offers us a chance to help them out, make their lives more nearly normal. Like ours is.

We’re blessed, most of us. When you think about it. Spread it around a little, if you could. Do what you can, as and when you might. The wheel never stops turning.

Oh, yes, yes, I know: More Rhythms, please. And double quick!

I know I’ve fallen behind, and I’ll try to make it up, I promise. But time is tight these days, there’s so very much going on and we’re so close to the end. I do so want to get it right.

What’s that? You do understand that it will end soon, don’t you?

And what do you think will happen then?

Have a great weekend!