A Sozzled Apprehension of Politics
Fred Reed

"Give them a whiff of grape," said Wellington, who understood

I am seated in front of the Optiplex, drinking Padre Kino red and garnering insight. The garnering is tough these days. Still, to this end nothing is so effective as cheap Mexican wine at thirty-nine cents a trainload.  My stepdaughter says “Google, lo sabe todo,” Google knows everything. Ah, but Padre Kino, the Great Purple Father, understandeth everything.

All right, the news. I should know better than to read it, but I don’t. First I encounter a sententious suit-and-tie federal civil-serpent from NSA saying the Edward Snowden has endangered the national security of the United States, eeeek. At this, I shuddered and began mentally designing a bomb shelter.  

But then I wondered how, precisely, are Americans now endangered? Is there a massed invasion fleet of Arab swordsmen poised to devastate North Carolina, and we need to read their tactical codes? I pictured Winston-Salem savaged by scimitar-wielding, hashish-smoking maniacs on weird double-humped camels. These be parlous times, methought.

Or are Yemeni nuclear forces readying a first strike? Maybe this was the problem. As delivery systems they could use FedEx and UPS.

Or maybe Snowden just embarrassed the children in the tree-house at Fort Meade, where everybody has a Captain America secret decoder ring.

“Ou sont les Neigeden  d’antan?” I thought poetically if not altogether coherently. Coherence is overrated anyway.

Next, I see that some wet-lipped psychopath piloting a drone has killed fifteen people at a Yemeni wedding. Drones seem to hit a lot of weddings.  These massacres, I suppose, are the result of letting little boys play Grand Theft Auto. I pictured an Air Force of trigger-happy eleven-year-olds in arrested development. However, I concede that targeting weddings does make military sense: I have been to many weddings, and they all looked like Al Quaeda convoys. It’s just how weddings are.

At the Five-Sided Wind Tunnel a thousand colonels, also in arrested development, will wonder why the war on Yemen goes the way of Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and so on. They will say it’s just like those rag-headed wogs to get upset over an occasional gutted bride. Give them a few bucks in compensation. They’ll get over it.

Excuse me while I get more Padre Kino. Some things require two-bottle understanding.

But why, it occurred to me, should we expect the Pentagon to win wars? It has nothing to gain by winning, and everything to lose. From a budgetary point of view, victory would be as bad as defeat. In either case, contracts would slow.

Anyway, Washington is riddled with incompetence at all levels. I have read that only thirty-seven percent of secretaries in the capital can touch type. The rest are hunt-and-peckers. I cannot vouch for this, though.

Clicking wildly about, I see that the UN, which means Washington, has waxed prissy (and perhaps polished it) because Uruguay has legalized marijuana. Why is this the UN’s business, I wonder unglobally. Anyway, José Mujica, president of Uruguay, responded that if Colorado and Washington state have legalized the insightful vegetable, how can Wasshington….

Oh, never mind.

I havem’t met José Mujica, but have walked past the President’s house in Montevideo. It was just a house. You know, the kind people live in. Unlike the Great Double-wide on Pennsylvania Avenue, it wasn’t barred, blocked, and Jersey-barriered. One had no sense that an emperor lived in it. I was told that presidents of Uruguay have simply walked to the grocery store all by themselves. What is the world coming to?

Actually the world is beginning to wobble strangely, or maybe it is just Mexico. I suspect though that the entire planet is encountering some sort of orbital difficulty. When this happens, further wine has a stabilizing effect. I will do my best.

I suspect that the problems dragging down America result from political inbreeding that may result in hemophilia, or at least presidents with twelve toes. First we had Bush I, a mediocrity. Then Bush II, for whom mediocrity would have been an achievement, like winning a marathon while hopping backward on one leg. There was talk of Jeb Bush as Bush III; together they would have constituted a topiary garden. We had Clinton I, who at least was intelligent, and almost had Clinton II, but instead we got Obama, whose only qualification was that he was black and read a teleprompter well. So Hillary became Secretary of State, for which her only qualifications were two terms as First Basilisk. We now have Kerry as SecState, whose only qualification is that he married a pickle heiress. They keep taking turns.

Next, I see that the FBI wants access to all telephone conversations to Stop Terrorism. We might be better off with terrorists to stop the FBI. What I can’t figure out, no matter how much Padre Kino I have as lubricant, is what they think they are doing. Is there a conscious plot to make the US into North Korea? Or just self-important minor-league dipsticks who find themselves miraculously at the controls of the amusement park? Maybe it doesn’t matter. Anyway, FBI guys always look like Mormon missionaries with carry permits.

The government seems to be becoming an enemy of the country. This is new. I mean, Yahoo and the gang talk about resorting to cryptography to keep Washington from reading our email, and now that we know that the government can turn on our web cams without or knowing it, there is talk of manufacturing little plastic covers for the lens. I thought the KGB was supposed to be the enemy.

Next, I check out Drudge, who is the national thermometer: a combination of grocery-rack tabloid, Bradley Manning, and the only free press left in America. Where else can you find headlines like, “Dwarves, Evicted from Posh Hotel, Honeymoon in Cardboard Box”? I swear there was one the other day about someone rescuing a shark that was choking on a moose.

But to serious matters, if anything can be more serious than a shark choking on a moose. Today there is a Drudgeline about a robot telemarketer who, or that, refuses to admit that she is a robot. See, she calls and asks for information and sounds like a real woman, which is scary. When a listener got suspicious and asked if she were real, “she replied enthusiastically that she was real, with a charming laugh.” She didn’t quite fool him, since she didn’t know what vegetable grows in a tomato garden.

Close, but no cigar. And getting closer. Soon we will be watched, listened to, read, fondled, X-rayed, and called by machines with enchanting laughs. Things are getting eerie, I tell you.

On that hopeful note I will sign off. I need to do something to calm the planet, which seems to be lurching with greater abandon.

I am a keyboard mercenary with a disorganized past, has worked on staff for Army Times, The Washingtonian, Soldier of Fortune, Federal Computer Week, and The Washington Times.

I have been published in Playboy, Soldier of Fortune, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Harper's, National Review, Signal, Air&Space, and suchlike. He has worked as a police writer, technology editor, military specialist, and authority on mercenary soldiers. He is by all accounts as looney as a tune.

I was born in 1945 in Crumpler, West Virginia, a coal camp near Bluefield. My father was a mathematician then serving in the Pacific aboard the destroyer USS Franks, which he described as a wallowing and bovine antique with absolutely no women aboard, but the best the Navy had at the time.

My paternal grandfather was dean and professor of mathematics at Hampden-Sydney College, a small and (then, and perhaps now) quite good liberal arts school in southwest Virginia. My maternal grandfather was a doctor in Crumpler. (When someone got sick on the other side of the mountain, the miners would put my grandfather in a coal car and take him under the mountain. He had a fairly robust conception of a house call.) In general my family for many generations were among the most literate, the most productive, and the dullest people in the South. Presbyterians.

After the war I lived as a navy brat here and there--San Diego, Mississippi, the Virginia suburbs of Washington, Alabama, what have you, and briefly in Farmville, Virginia, while my father went on active duty for the Korean War as an artillery spotter. I was an absorptive and voracious reader, a terrible student, and had by age eleven an eye for elevation and windage with a BB gun that would have awed a missile engineer. I was also was a bit of a mad scientist. For example, I think I was ten when I discovered the formula for thermite in the Britannica at Athens College in Athens, Alabama, stole the ingredients from the college chemistry laboratory, and ignited a mound of perfectly adequate thermite in the prize frying pan of the mother of my friend Perry, whose father was the college president. The resulting six-inch hole in the frying pan was hard to explain.

I went to high school in King George County, Virginia, while living on Dahlgren Naval Weapons Laboratory (my father was always a weapons-development sort of mathematician, although civilian by this time), where I was the kid other kids weren't supposed to play with. My time was spent canoeing, shooting, drinking unwise but memorable amounts of beer with the local country boys, attempting to be a French rake with only indifferent success, and driving in a manner that, if you are a country boy, I don't have to describe, and if you aren't, you wouldn't believe anyway. I remember trying to explain to my father why his station wagon was upside down at three in the morning after flipping it at seventy on a hairpin turn that would have intimidated an Alpine goat.

As usual I was a woeful student--if my friend Butch and I hadn't found the mimeograph stencil for the senior Government exam in the school's Dempster Dumpster, I wouldn't have graduated--but was a National Merit Finalist, and in the 99th percentile on the SATs.

After two years at Hampden-Sydney, where I worked on a split major in chemistry and biology with an eye to oceanography, I decided I was bored. After spending the summer thumbing across the continent and down into Mexico, hopping freight trains up and down the eastern seaboard, and generally confusing myself with Jack Kerouac, I enlisted in the Marines, in the belief that it would be more interesting than stirring unpleasant glops in laboratories and pulling apart innocent frogs. It certainly was. On returning from Vietnam with a lot of stories, as well as a Purple Heart and more shrapnel in my eyes than I really wanted, I graduated from Hampden-Sydney with lousy grades and a bachelor-of-science degree with a major in history and a minor in computers. Really. My GREs were in the 99th percentile.

The years from 1970 to 1973 I spent in largely disreputable pursuits, a variety that has always come naturally to me. I wandered around Europe, Asia, and Mexico, and acquired the usual stock of implausible but true stories about odd back alleys and odder people.

When the 1973 war broke out in the Mid-East, I decided I ought to do something respectable, thought that journalism was, and told the editor of my home-town paper, "Hi! I want to be a war correspondent." This was a sufficiently damn-fool thing to do that he let me go, probably to see what would happen. Writing, it turned out, was the only thing I was good for. My clips from Israel were good enough that when I argued to the editors of Army Times that they needed my services to cover the war in Vietnam, they too let me do it.

I spent the last year of the war between Phnom Penh and Saigon, leaving each with the evacuation. Those were heady days in which I lived in slums that would have horrified a New York alley cat, but they appealed to the Steinbeck in me, of which there is a lot. After the fall of Saigon I returned to Asia, resumed residence for six months in my old haunts in Taipei, and studied Chinese while waiting for the next war, which didn't come. Returning overland, I took up a career of magazine free-lancing, a colorful route to starvation, with stints on various staffs interspersed. For a year I worked in Boulder, Colorado, on the staff of Soldier of Fortune magazine, half zoo and half asylum, with the intention of writing a book about it. Publishing houses said, yes, Fred, this is great stuff, but you are obviously making it up. I wasn't. Playboy eventually published it, making me extremely persona non grata at Soldier of Fortune.

Having gotten married somewhere along the way for reasons that escape me at the moment, though my wife was an extraordinary woman whodeserved better, I am now the happily divorced father of the World's Finest Daughters. Until recently I worked as, among other things, a law-enforcement columnist for the Washington Times. It allowed me to take trips to big cities and to ride around in police cars with the siren going woowoowoo and kick in doors of drug dealers. Recently I changed the column from law enforcement to technology, and now live in Mexico near Guadalajara, having found burros preferable to bureaucrats. My hobbies are wind surfing, scuba, listening to blues, swing-dancing in dirt bars, associating with colorful maniacs, weight-lifting, and people of the other sex. (Update: I married Violeta, my Spanish teacher, and, as so often happens with men, married up.) My principal accomplishment in life, aside from my children, is the discovery that it is possible to jitterbug to the Brandenburgs.

www.fredoneverything.net