SPIES AND WHALES

--It’s a beautiful evening. Want to sit on the patio?
--You go ahead.
--What’s wrong?
--No, go on ahead, I’m fine. I just want to sit here.
--Come on, fess up. What’s wrong?
--“Fess up.” That’s an apt phrase. Eleven Russians were arrested for spying this week. The cold war ended twenty years ago, but they were ordered to maintain their deep-cover mole status anyway.
--I read about it. They were all posing as suburbanites.
--The FBI’s been tracking them for seven years. Seven years, Barbara.
--So what? You thought the Russkies just Fed-Xed all their spycams and shotgun mics back to Moscow? Their wigs and fake beards?
--Apparently, they never learned anything to pass along.
--Well, isn’t that a good thing?
--One of them tried to buy a cell phone. She gave her address as Fake Street. That’s how the crack FBI operatives nabbed her. The only reason the Bureau sprang into action is because one of the others bought a one-way ticket to Cyprus. You can’t invest seven years of taxpayers’ money on monitoring spies who haven’t done any actual spying without making an arrest.
--And this is why you won’t come outside to enjoy a nice summer evening in Michigan? What do I have to do, sweep the patio for bugs and cameras?
--What’s depressing is that “experts” think the spies were kept in place to the tune of millions of rubles just to uphold tradition.
--The spy tradition.
--Yes. Instead of change, tradition. And of course the logical extension is to conclude our own tradition also had to be maintained. Seven years of watching suburbanite spies who never gathered any info worth sending back. And the finance reform legislation has no teeth. Nothing will change in any significant way, so the tradition of Wall Street scams will continue. Just like the drill-baby-drill tradition in the Gulf.
--You really should come outside.
--I will. And after reading about spies, I made the mistake of turning on the TV. Just in time to see footage taken from a plane off the coast of Texas. The footage showed a pod of dolphins. Dead together in the dead sea. Their brains are as big as ours. They can recognize themselves in a mirror. They grasp abstractions. I couldn’t watch and turned it off.
--Then you came in here to be with your thoughts.
--Do you ever have a sense of an ending? Of things getting ready to be over?
--When I do, I go outside to watch evening light in the trees. I recommend it.
--You go on. I’ll be there soon.

Comments

  1. There is a blogger...'No New Is Good News -- the Reset Project' that is on a year hiatus from watching or reading news. Is this sticking one's head in the sand? I'm considering it.

    I guess if they spend their money for not-particularly-interesting spies, I guess we have to spend our money spying on 'em. Kind of a Mutually Assured....what?

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  2. I hadn't seen the dolphins; I don't think I could bear to see the dolphins.

    I do some posting at The Swash Zone, where there are some stronghearted liberals who are so bummed out, they can scarcely lift their fingers to the Qwerty. We each have to find some technique that lets us hang in and write on, talk on, try on.

    Courage, boys.

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  3. "Do you ever have a sense of an ending? Of things getting ready to be over?"

    Yes, I do. And I'm fighting it with all I've got, even while a part of my mind is trying to accept it.

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  4. The sense of an ending is getting stronger every day. It seems futile to fight the good fight some days. But that has been the way in the past, and others continued so that we could as well. Hang on. Our grandchildren (and everyone else's-as we are doing this for those outside our gene pool) depend upon it.
    But enjoy the evenings, that is the reward for all of the hard times.
    Dolphins.....that hurts.

    ReplyDelete

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