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)