I Walked by the State Department Yesterday (Part II)

(continued from "I Walked by the State Department Yesterday (Part I)" posted 12.6.4)

I remember the shiny wide halls of marble-like material, the elevators with de-select buttons (don't find too many of them no more), and the oh-so-important shiny shoes gliding in lockstep.

Overseas, at least, many of our supposed 'diplomats' are actually in the employ of the intelligence community.  I have wondered about my father in that regard, given his behavior, but I have determined he was an actual F.S.O. (Foreign Service Officer).

He made ambassador, if that's any indication.

But, just as a Naval officer, which he was, might bring home the anger he can't express at work, which he did, so might a U.S. diplomat apply what he learns on the job on the homefront.  Treating his own family in ways the U.S. treats other nations, such as Iraq and Afghanistan.

So there's your wasted life.

Now a friend, a musician, a highly talented and intelligent person I know has fallen into their fold; never likely to return.  His first posting to the poorest of the world's nations, known for its unstable violence, was hard enough for me.  Knowing what faces him in a Foreign Service career is even harder.

I was on my way to a movie about the Italian mafia, in what the lecturer dubbed the "anti-Mafia martyr" genre.  She was asked after her talk if she was including in her definition of 'mafia' the broader behavior found in numerous groups worldwide--gaining what they want by force.

You can't drive past the State Department on 'C' Street anymore.  Guards at either end.  Kicking so many beehives overseas we have to protect ourselves from the backlash at home.

Oddly, the 'man of peace' turns out to the the four-star general who's stepping down as Secretary of State, Colin Powell.  At the time of his appointment I wondered at the paradox, a military man becoming our chief diplomat.  Not since George C. Marshall, another Nobel Peace Prize winner (1953), had we seen such a thing.  But George C. Marshall was a truly great man, and Colin Powell?

Now we see the hand the State Department plays so clearly.  We see it in Iraq.

What is this diplomatic corps anymore if the diplomats within wish not to go out into the field for fear of their lives.  Billion dollar fortresses now replace out humble diplomatic outposts.  Manned by geeks without uniform or military training.  Sitting ducks in our foreign wars.

We've kicked so many beehives over there we need to give them billion-dollar fortresses to live and work in.

Now I know where my life went.

I Walked by the State Department Yesterday (Part I)

My father's employer throughout most of his life stands almost monumentally.  The feeling I had was an eerie one, reminiscent of a life gone bad.  My father's and mine all at once.

I wasn't even sure I could walk past the front of the building, Washington, D.C. having been turned into an armed camp in recent years.  Cement blockade pieces guarded the sidewalk, together with an actual guard.

The way we've been kicking bee hives overseas we have to put up the netting back at home.  How much of the blame lays at these portals?

The sign said the street was closed for a while, but that could have been the side street.  I pressed on, encouraged by a woman I saw coming up the sidewalk the other way.  The guard regarded me suspiciously, as would be his wont, perhaps wondering when I might whip something weapon-like out from under the coat I draped over my arm.

Passing the side entrance I had an Ayn Rand Fountainhead experience--architect Howard Roark's "battle against the tradition-worshipping establishment." As in "individualism versus collectivism, not in politics, but in man's soul; the psychological motivations and the basic premises that produce the character of an individualist or a collectivist."

Something spewing, or feared to be so, from that 40s and 50s era, something Rand captures or alerts us to, but something more, too.  Something about the actual architecture of the building, industrial yet forward-looking, and the way it blurred my vision, made me feel the movement and the threat it posed.

More has emanated from that building than just the force of good or bad architectural design.  Conspiracy theories abound regarding the geeks at State running the world.

Joe McCarthy's McCarthyism, his "Red Scare", his witch hunt pinned Communists purported to be working from the halls of the State Department.

Perhaps our best known diplomat, our best known shaper of foreign policy, Henry Kissinger, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973, now viewed by many as a war criminal, ruled from the State Department.  And the White House as he combined his position with that of National Security Advisor, the better to avoid impediments to his impulse.

Since then Madeleine Albright discovered somehow during her term as the first woman Secretary of State that she was Jewish . . quelle surprise.  Anyone in the know knows she knew it all along.  Even she stands accused of war crimes.

(to be continued)