Pay Attention

It took over two years, but I reached a Settlement with my former agency after I received a substandard performance appraisal at the at the hands of a cadre of managers all a generation younger who, in my opinion, are mostly interested in maintaining their own positions rather than in advancing the interests of the agency. I complained about my bogus and unjustified rating, Satisfactory, now corrected to Fully Outstanding, and I was forced by the hostile work environment there to precipitously and prematurely involuntarily retire less than a year after that. The Settlement Agreement I agreed to mandates in part, in Section VIII d, that "...the FTC will ensure that all current FTC employees, who are or were managers within the Division of Financial Practices between August 2015 and the present, will complete EEO and diversity training, including training addressing age discrimination." That training is today, and I hope that my former managers are attentive, take notes, pay heed and act accordingly.

Worst to First

DC has plenty of free expansive memorials like the Washington Monument, dedicated walkways like the Tidal Basin and museums like the Smithsonian Portrait Gallery.  It has a permanent presidential portrait gallery with one or more painted picture of every past president except Obama (it's coming), so to get an image of the current and worst president by far already, you have to go to the Smithsonian gift shop and buy a postcard.

But on the west end of the third floor of the old converted Patent Office building, you can see plenty of images of the best president, Lincoln, including busts, a life mask and a cast of his hands.  In contrast to the current era of divisiveness fostered by the current White House occupant, Lincoln kept our nation together, ended the intractable problem of slavery, reinvented American liberty with his Gettysburg Address and showed a way to the future with his astonishing 2d Inaugural Address.

You can find a portrait of the worst president, until Trump, Dubya; his "W" moniker stood for Worst.  He had all the worst impulses of a miscreant schoolboy, flippant ("Bring 'em on!"), irreverent (Doin' a heckuva job, Brownie"), intellectually lazy (he depended on Cheney's viewpoint of the world) and totally unprepared, in his own way, for the demands of the office ("Mission accomplished!"), his unfunded tax cuts and endless wars has impoverished the country but in contrast to the abysmal "presidential" performance we've seen this year, Bush the Second now seems positively presidential in comparison.

But then you can pause in the marble hallways to linger over several likenesses of the Father of our Country.  Washington won a guerrilla war against the greatest power on Earth, gave up the mantle of military power voluntarily, took on the country's first presidency under its new constitution and established many important protocols for the office and then retired after two terms, setting yet another lasting standard for the peaceful transfer of power.

Make War No More

I went for a walk through the Hirshhorn Sculpture Garden on the Mall recently, reflecting on the increasingly bombastic war of words between our president and the dear leader of North Korea, two fat little men with delusions of grandeur and total lack of consciences.  I labeled this artwork Attempt at Decapitation.

Could words alone lead to devastating consequences?  This piece I named War with North Korea.

It happens in schoolyards, and these cunning megalomaniacs demonstrate the guile and silly word escalations of schoolchildren.  I called this statue The Battle.

The faux deity who has killed his half brother with a chemical agent and executed his uncle by shooting him with an antiaircraft gun, and the lazy grifter who has assaulted women, lambasted gold star families, disparaged war heroes, praised neo-Nazis, assailed the free press and displayed shocking ignorance and startling narcissism are two scorpions in a bottle with everyone in the world watching anxiously.  Meet The Victor.

Columbus day

it was a tranquil Columbus Day in Westover.  The weather was 80 degrees and sticky by noontime, when I had a Polynesian Pizza at the Lost Dog Cafe.

The Lost Dog was crowded and I watched many more people stream in for lunch.  It's at the west end of the Westover market area, but there's a new anchor point at the east end of the strip, the Italian Store.

It was packed with people ordering pizza or gourmet deli sandwiches, shopping for pasta or canned sauces or sitting at the multiple eating perches or tables to enjoy the store's fare.  It was like an Arlington happening inside this former 7-11 store.

This block-long commercial venue has its old standby mid block, Ayers Hardware Store, but has new aspirants for most successful venture such as the aforementioned Lost Dog and Italian Store, plus the Westover Beer Garden and Market with its local bands and the Sunday Farmer's market with its fresh produce and products.  It's a gem of a tiny commercial center, with a school, library, post office, drug store, hamburger place and an ice cream shop right there too.

Columbus Days

It's Columbus Day tomorrow.  My neighbors are citizens from South America originally, and there is no mistaking their loathing for the Christopher Columbus holiday, for introducing dominant Europeans to the "New World."

I remember the Columbus Day holiday, during the first few months of my divorce in 2001, when I took my boys to Columbus, Ohio, to visit my sister.  When I came back, and returned the boys within my allotted time, the most vulnerable boy, our youngest, was coaxed by his manipulating covert narcissistic (in my opinion) mother into complaining that he came back "tired" and couldn't do his homework.

She called the court-appointed "meditator" that night and this charlatan psychologist, Victor Ellon of Fairfax, who billed a four-hour session with her (!) on the day I took my kids off for my summer month with them, issued a late-night letter to the court suspending my visitation until a hearing two months later.  This forever ruined my relationship with my three children, the prevalent Mother Knows Best attitude of courts effectively ending my fatherhood.

Danny, you totally manipulated young man, now married, I hope you are well and that your achieving wife keeps you.  Hello Johnny, the young man whom my ex-wife said was the most like me, and I remember when you came over to cull my military book collection, and I practically never heard from you again after you took those books home.  And Jimmy, living nearby, loathing me and skating personally, maybe I'll see you tomorrow at noon.

Sputnik is overhead.

Sixty years ago today, I came home from kindergarten and my mother was at the stove in the kitchen of our house, making my lunch. I don't have a lot of memories from this period of my life but this image is locked in.

My mom told me that the Russians had put a sputnik into space and it was flying overhead even at that moment.  I had no idea what a sputnik was, or what the import of what she said was or even what it meant, but her tone, reflecting concern and momentousness, and the unusualness of her talking world events with me, a kindergartener, made this brief interaction forever frozen in time in my memory bank.

This started in lockstep the space race, because we were behind, for awhile, the Russkies, the supposed missile gap, the specter of hordes of Russian tanks sweeping over Western Europe and the Cold War, which we might still be in, after a brief pause for detente. This was the paranoid fifties, when we huddled under our schoolhouse desks with our arms covering our heads during nuclear attack drills.

In this period of mass murders and massive hurricanes, it seems like it was a quaint era back then.  My classroom five years later was on the 3d floor of a schoolhouse five miles from what would have been ground zero for a hydrogen bomb airburst over Manhattan; my wooden desk and flesh forearms would have saved my life in such an event for sure.