THE WAY IT WENT DOWN: THE WEEKLY

You meet a lot of people in government in your life and you never know it. Middle managers. City planners. Bus route commissioners. Departmental accountants. You meet 'em in a line up at a diner or in a hardware store, and you never know the political lives those guys, hell, and women, live. The fights. The reports and paperwork and nightmares of bureaucracy woven to trap them over the last ninety years.

I'm one of those guys...but my pay grade was...higher than that. I've been schlepped to Camp David and to Kennebunkport. I've been all over this crazy damn planet, gathering up papers for the President like a secretary. Glorified secretary. I don't know. What?

Nah. No. My job was diplomacy of a sort. You wouldn't have heard of me. My job was to take the briefings and distill them down. For what? Ha. So that the President could UNDERSTAND them. There's so much that goes on in a government like ours. So much below the water line, you might say, that when you catch glimpses of such things, they seem independent and alive.  

I was like a decompression chamber for secrets.

My job was to summarize all those things that pop up into the weekly. What's that, you ask? Well, you ever wonder why President Obama, after eight years in office looked like he had spent EIGHTY years in office? Well, the weekly is why, I'll bet. The weekly summary. I'd get the files from the Joint Chiefs, and I'd put them together in a summary for the President. Threats. Intelligence finds. Problems.

Ha. No, it was never solutions. Whoever told you the government was about solutions was full of shit.

Not that I ever worked for President Obama, you understand. I was out before he came along, and I can only imagine what his guy saw and chose to omit. Because that was part of the job too, grabbing only the vital things and putting them in, and cutting all the other chaff out. Now, the guy that did it before me — and this is apocryphal so you understand — rumor has it he ignored a single CIA int brief on Iran and boom, hostage crisis. And if you don't think THAT had anything to do with Carter not landing the White House for a second term, I have a bridge to sell you.

This is just to say what went in was just as important as what was left out. I did my days. I did my best. Some things I cut came to pass. Other things sounded awful and never went anywhere. Two Presidents thanked me personally when it was done. One gave me a jar of jelly beans when I left (I'll let you guess who that was).

What's the worst thing I ever saw? Well...

I can't really talk too much about it. I mean, this was all classified. It's all classified still. But I'm an old man now. So, independent of that. Let me just... I'll tell a story. Ok?

Imagine everyone in the world was...on a clock. One clock. Everyone. Whether they see it or not, right? The clock ticks down and everyone in the world can feel it, kind of. And when it hits midnight, everyone goes insane. For a time at least. Mores slip. Bombings happen. Wars. Unprecedented violence. Destruction. And then, the clock keeps ticking and goes back to the top.

Everything calms. Order is restored. People can feel a semblance of reason settle into their lives. Countries become amicable. Violence slows. Like I said, you don't have to see the clock. It just happens. It's already in all of us.  

And this happens say, once every twenty one, twenty five years. It peaks sometime near there. The alarm in us blares and things fall apart. And we know it, but we don't tell anyone. To everyone else, to them, it's just individuals making choices which congeal into history.

But that's not what's happening at all and we know it. 

The earliest time this...clock struck that we know about was around 1925. Lots of people in the government noted it. Suicides. Deaths. Accidents. Sabotage. Violence. And it died down around 1930 or so. Then 1945 and we all know how that went. Then 1963 or so. And 1985. And so on, and so on.

And we know because we can see it, statistically in US armed forces suicides and incidences of mental health issues. We can track it. We can computer model it. Fuck. So much for my story. Well. In for a penny...

2025 is next up. Or 2026 or 7. We don't really know. But can't you feel it? Just listen to the news or look around and tell me, can't you feel that clock counting down? Can't you hear it? I can.

I saw this report from...I don't recall. A summary from a think tank or something, and I read it and just so you know, I could not make it go away. It just sat in my mind. Something outside of us was changing us. Our will was not free, not really. And I wrestled with this and I struggled and finally I talked to someone on the National Security Council to get his opinion and he said something even more terrifying:

"Gene," he said, "the President already knows. They've all known."

Buckle up.