Wednesday January 26, 2005, 8:18am
Wednesday January 26, 2005, 8:18am
Over the weekend two feet of howling snow swirled and blew and piled up then swirled some more. By any reasonable measure it was enough to abandon my Monday morning commute and work from home.
Arctic winds on Tuesday lifted the snow further into drifts. If the need had been greater I might have forged ahead. Instead I forged a series of sensible excuses about trains being late and would-be passengers standing at Ashland Station in a frozen hell.
In truth – I simply chickened out. Every now and again I still have the right in this country to chicken out.
Today, the weather predictions are less dire – ‘light snow’ until the afternoon, a little heavier later in the day. Along Pleasant Street I expected a thin dusting atop freshly-plowed sidewalk pavement. Reality was different matter. Instead, the north sidewalk was completely nonexistent, buried under a frozen palisade. The south sidewalk was plowed into a channel and refilled in four inches of loosely overthrown street snot.
Road crews make street snot by mixing snow with sand and salt and then plowing and re-plowing the same mixture over and over until it becomes a gray substance underfoot like walking barefoot through loose sand or finely sifted flour. It’s most often made during the bigger storms when highway departments are feeling besieged and decide to attack the problem with everything at their disposal – plowing and sanding and salting continuously until the storm is over and they’ve cleared the streets entirely. The City of Boston feels besieged after about two inches of snowfall and so they’re pretty good at making street snot. The Town of Ashland only makes it in major storms like the one this past weekend.
On my way to the station this morning I tried ducking in and out of driveway cutouts – walking in the road for better foot traction. Mostly I trudged ahead losing a half-step in the sidewalk goo for every full step I attempted.
The train is packed this morning – likely automobile commuters who’ve abandoned all hope of a downtown parking place. I suppose I could have chickened out one more day. I can do my work at home if the need arises. Yet given a realistic choice, I prefer the office – participating as a member of the engineering team. I could do this from anywhere on the planet. But I don’t feel the same sense of camaraderie when working alone. In the words of Woody Allen, 90% of life is just showing up.
Over the weekend the mystery of the Inauguration Day ‘terrorist cell’ panic fell into utter farce once the most basic facts came to light. One so-called ‘cell’ member was discovered in federal custody – having resided there for months on ordinary immigration charges and no other suspicions. The other three are alleged traffickers smuggling Chinese illegal aliens – smugglers themselves or perhaps those among the smuggled, and in either case far below threshold of a terrorist organization.
The FBI acknowledged how news of this so-called ‘terrorist cell’ arrived to them quite some time ago from an unreliable smuggler of lower rank who was clearly mouthing off to settle an old score. By Inauguration Day, the smuggler’s story was ancient news. Exact how this report was resurrected and repackaged into a matter of national security was a mystery to them.
Somehow among the thousands of dubious tips collected every month, this particular flotsam somehow floated to the top of the daily cesspool flowing out of Washington sending everyone into a terrorist tizzy – as though the memory of 9/11 were no longer enough to rally support for the president’s second term agenda.
Why this story and not something a little more believable? Here is the logic as far as makes any sense:
- The messenging machinery dared not reveal anything they knew about genuine threats or even anything remotely similar because that might undermine ongoing investigations.
- They also didn’t want to invent anything from scratch, because telling outright lies in Washington is still a good way to get into serious trouble.
So instead those responsible for the days message sifted through discounted interviews with unreliable sources until finding claims of a ‘terrorist cell’ from the mouth of a disgruntled Chinese smuggler thereby solving the political equation:
- There was no resemblance to any ongoing investigation and nothing of intelligence value would be compromised.
- Even still, the interview included all sorts of terrorism hot button statements with few embellishments required.
And so the claims of a pissed-off smuggler were packaged and released as the nation security threat of the day.
It is no surprise how this story came across as so completely ham-handed. It was a terrible choice – though probably the best choice they had. The government is investing all sorts of claims that can’t be discussed for reasons already enumerated, and so resurrecting a resolutely believable and truly non-threatening account was an impossible task.
In the end quality of the message didn’t matter. When it comes to power, it is the impact of the message that matters, not the accuracy. And the impact in this case was timely, on target, and soon to be forgotten.
Of course I am merely speculating, and as such, organizing a pattern in the looser facts at hand – connecting the dots, as it were to remove the impact and reveal obvious evidence of chicanery.
There are many sorts of information that can arrive from governments great and small – in reverse order of popularity among the powerful we have the true facts, then mistaken facts, invented facts, outright bullshit hashed up and mixed like street-snot.
Instead of facing up to reality, politicians most often change the subject. We very rarely witness the unvarnished truth in this, nor the overt lie. In most governmental leakage all levels of factuality are transmitted all at once in varying degrees of intensity. In the story from last week, there was at least one reliable fact (the parties were all of Chinese origin). There were some mistaken facts (they weren’t terrorists). The bit about making Boston the target could have been the smuggler’s idea or invented. The story was buffed and polished and then the street-snot arrived just in time for Inauguration Day.
I saw a joke aimed at Massachusetts.
Except for the apparent abuse of power, I still do.
It is not a new story.
The original goes something like this…
There was once a chicken who might not have been described as ‘little’ if not for being among the noticeably smaller chickens of the chicken coop. And as a smaller chicken, and chickens being chickens when it comes to matters of the pecking order, it was unlikely that Chicken Little would ever be pecking her way to a better position in life.
One day an acorn fell from an oak tree whacking the small chicken on her even smaller noggin, and somehow between the knocking on her noggin and the odd biochemistry of her pea-sized brain, Chicken Little decided that a small piece of the sky had just fallen. So off she ran like Paul Revere at midnight crying – “The sky is falling! The sky is falling!”
The other chickens listened and then listened some more, but no matter how much they listened they had no idea what to make of Chicken Little’s small bit of nonsense. Some pointed to the sky saying “the sky is the sky – full of air and rain and clouds – how can the sky itself fall?”
Other chickens pointed at the earth saying that if the sky had fallen “why is there no sky to be found lying anywhere on the ground?”
But Chicken Little persisted, and in the absence of any solid proof to the contrary, one by one the other chickens began to believe that a piece of the sky might just have fallen, and then believed some more until they convinced themselves to their very last feather that a piece had already done so.
A few days later as it happened, at about the same time when the farmer’s daughter was tossing cracked corn into the coop, Chicken Little was again struck atop her noggin by yet another falling acorn. And with this new knock from the sky rattling her pea-sized brain into action, and with all the other chickens about to have their lunch, Chicken Little came squawking through the coop to announce their impending doom.
This was no ploy at first, yet as soon as Chicken Little began to eat she noticed how the other hens –and even the roosters – were cowering in the shadows while she ate her fill and ate some more until she could not eat another kernel of corn.
And so over the next few weeks, just before feeding time, Chicken Little announced that yet another piece of the falling sky had come crashing to the earth. And from this she found she could have all the corn she ever wanted – and she ate and ate and ate!
After a while, Chicken Little saw that she no longer needed to terrorize the other chickens and stopped running with news of disaster. The other chickens had tried to work out why Chicken Little had become the rule of the roost. Yet chickens being made for pecking more than for thinking, they simply accepted the new order and got on with life.
This was a good thing, because by now Chicken Little had no desire to run anywhere, having fattened up quite nicely while all the other hens were growing a bit thin. Every so often she’d mention a crack she saw in the sky or a song bird singing about clouds falling like boulders. There was no need to run anymore. Whenever the other chickens got out of line she could make up anything on the spot to send them scurrying.
What a perfect life! Chicken Little was the rule of the roost indeed – that is – until one sleepy afternoon just before Independence Day, when the farmer’s wife appeared to make an inspection of Chicken Little’s hen house. Chicken Little though nothing of it. Then she heard grinding sounds from the farmer’s tool shed and once again hardly even noticed.
Later in the week and all the week thereafter and the week after that – the sky did not fall – except once in the form of the farmer’s freshly sharpened axe separating Chicken Little’s pea-brained noggin from the plumpest oven-roaster ever seen in that hen house.
After that day, and after briefly noticing the absence of Chicken Little, the other chickens returned to their old pecking order and the memory of Chicken Little and of the falling sky was soon forgotten.
