O Washington
Jones, Arthur
O WASHINGTON Arthur Jones Save the Speaker How long will it take a tall, white-haired, seventy-one-year-old man with a big beer belly to run from the Speaker's Rooms in the Capitol down to the...
...Their cars and trucks are already being repossessed...
...Senate—as a total disarmament candidate...
...Married, divorced...
...Can FEMA save democracy...
...Teter's life tracks the historic quest for America's dreams, those of ideas and ideals...
...disarmament...
...Theodore Roosevelt was up Mount Tahawus while William McKinley was dying of gunshot wounds in Buffalo...
...He would be in Prairie Village, Kansas, addressing the local Complacency Society...
...Contradiction: The elevator never is on hand...
...And who among us would remove a sandbag to peep out, just because a fellow out there was shouting, "Hey, I'm George Bush...
...That was for 1979, and it cautioned, "The United States must continue planning to ensure the preservation of our democratic system of government...
...Senator wanted Teter's advice on the proposed sale of military transport planes to Egypt...
...That does not mean he will get the nomination, but it does mean he knows how to go about it...
...But they remember how George McGovern caught the fancy of Virginia Democrats as a promising candidate for President...
...Reboard car...
...Federal agencies, those rare ones with comprehensive emergency management, split into three when the siren blows...
...That's the Capitol Architect's responsibility...
...And so feel...
...Why don't they laugh when this fellow from the Loudoun County Democratic Committee gives his three-minute talk at party sessions in Alexandria, Fairfax, and Arlington...
...Contradiction: Might we not need to remove "our greater number of cars and trucks" on a snowy and dark January afternoon, much like the one that brought Washington to total standstill above and below the ground the day of the Air Florida 14th Street bridge crash and the simultaneous Metro subway accident...
...His is the version of American success that runs parallel to the Tantalus-like trail of corporate achievement...
...city from which, in an emergency, we may "use our greater number of cars and trucks" to escape...
...We're policy, not programs...
...Teter accepts the theory that Soviet expansionism is rooted in economic necessity and border insecurity...
...Recent Presidents have not excelled as defenders of democracy...
...It allows that enemy nuclear attack "warning time might be as little as five to fifteen minutes in some locations" and up to an hour in others...
...Chance has little to do with platforms...
...Afghanistan could be next...
...Get set, Tip...
...Aides reveal no clarification yet in missiles' direction...
...one minute, eighteen seconds if the elevator is on hand...
...If he does this, our intelligence will see it and we will have time to use our greater number of cars and trucks to get out of our cities by the time they do...
...Or have the Corps of Engineers tap Tip's trolleyline into the Metro so he can ride under the Potomac and hie away to Mount Weather...
...Vice Presidents should be permanently in residence at Mount Weather...
...Why is the West, over and over again, from Copernicus to Newton to Darwin to Freud, so willing to jeopardize its deepest beliefs for the sake of curiosity...
...Check for missile direction clarification...
...He accepted Einstein's dictum that since the splitting of the atom everything has changed except our mode of thinking...
...Recently elected Governor Charles Robb is a Democrat who ran on a White House platform, Reagan's White House...
...I hope I catch on before the April 17 and 19 mass meetings," said Teter wistfully, for it is at those statewide meetings that delegates to the June 4-6 Democratic State Convention are elected...
...Subway cars are run at fifteen mph but actually can achieve seventeen niph...
...He would win on a. He can lose on b. The Democratic state machine is losing very little sleep...
...Back to Capitol...
...Note any detonation noises in log...
...Their Iranian mother works for the United Nations in Bangkok...
...Repeat until exhausted or until all bombs miss...
...Simply idiotic...
...That action would both be an expression of the new way of thinking, and the shock treatment to try and jolt other nations and skeptics into a fundamentally new sense of reality...
...O democracy...
...Two of them, and riffed Federal employes even in northern Virginia and southern Maryland would be taken care of in the privacy of their own homes...
...Ready, Tip...
...Contradiction: A "reasonable" Soviet decision-maker might not nuke us...
...Eight minutes, twelve seconds already elapsed...
...The afternoon commute out of the Pentagon parking lot, let alone out of Washington, D.C., defies escape...
...If the Vice President dared to head back to Washington, virtually everyone would be dead...
...Contradiction: If you were George, and the voice outside Mount Weather's door said, "George, it's me, Tip," would you open it...
...the Vice President would have a genuine job: He would be shadow President...
...So security is paramount...
...Potential terrorists carrying nuclear devices have to start at area libraries with a readily available publication, We the People . . ., and go from there...
...Park's progress sounds the winner's bell in the American psyche quite as loudly as the tintinnabular tinkle of capitalist success: Yale, University of London, Chicago, Princeton...
...The April caucuses will reveal which way Teter totters—deeper in, or all the way out...
...The President is already airborne...
...Team A stays put in the fallout shelter...
...The solution for the incumbent Vice President and anyone holding the office in the future is clear...
...The boys' interests run more to cross-country skiing than to cross-county campaigning...
...Which reduces the Soviets' impetus for military spending, which promotes their prosperity at home, which starts to reverse the war-preparations cycle, at least vis-a-vis Western Europe...
...And, says Teter, as the Nazi siege of Leningrad showed, the Russians are vulnerable...
...Most Washington workers live within ten miles of the office...
...Forty-two seconds arrive Dirksen...
...Yet the 1978 CIA report on Soviet civil defense (published as FEMA P&P-7, February 1981) states: "A reasonable Soviet decision-maker will in all likelihood evacuate his cities before striking U.S...
...At Senate side, quick crossover to Russell Senate Office Building car...
...Alexander "I'm in charge" Haig went into a blinky-eyed Peter Sellers routine on prime time...
...Board Dirksen Senate Office Building car...
...He stakes all on a Democratic Party nomination to have an impact on Congressional races across the country...
...For an independent to do it would mean only that a single-issue campaigner had squeaked in through a quirk...
...FEMA does not say how...
...Then, in the general election, McGovern pulled in only 31 per cent of the vote...
...Family life and campaign survival are living links with deficit financing, a bizarre and timely contradiction to boot-strap Reaganomics and the well-financed shoulder to the party wheel...
...He will not run as an independent...
...The same distance has been timed and tested by a short, balding, forty-five-year-old man with a small beer belly: two minutes, twenty-seven seconds by the back stairs...
...Arrive Rayburn...
...Their sole duty should be to read and reread the Federalist Papers...
...But the tenuous pinkie-hold on democracy goes from the President to the Vice President to the Speaker...
...The finger on the nuclear trigger follows its own line of succession, probably from the President to the Secretary of Defense to the Assistant Secretary to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff...
...We know that democracy needs someone in an emergency...
...That, philosophically, is where Teter trails off from the general run of the politically minded...
...Contradiction-Where to find a Vice President who could handle the Federalist Papers...
...His chance is uncompromisingly tied to the extent to which people believe a) that the nuclear threat is real, and b) that they can do something about it...
...He notices a nuclear detonation and wants to telephone the President but Prairie Villagers are conformists and the Civil Defense Citizens Handbook (reprinted 1980) states, "Don't Use the Telephone...
...Only collective suicide...
...Seven seconds...
...The reason for the test: No one will reveal what is supposed to happen to the Speaker in the event of a nuclear attack...
...Head for personal silo No...
...Let me in...
...Along the way this thesis led him to John Wheeler, the Grand Old Man of modern physics and black holes, who was writing that quantum mechanics forces us to take seriously the view that the observer is as essential to the creation of the universe as the universe is to the creation of the observer...
...Which puts us back where we started, with our own scenarios for the Speaker...
...Someone, rather, with the political savvy to know that to capture the nomination requires only 18,000 votes in a state with 3.4 million registered voters...
...Cross to Senate side...
...Team B heads to Mount Weather, the hollowed-out hill in Virginia, forty-seven miles from downtown Washington...
...A nuclear war would be a radical departure in our way of thinking...
...Speaker's spokesman Chris Matthews said, "I don't know if that's our information to give out...
...He meets with imams from the Black Muslim mosques...
...then Uzbekistan, Tadzhikistan and the rest...
...Around this same time a U.S...
...He decided it was not and deferred to the Architect of the Capitol, Elliott Carroll...
...Crossover can be improved...
...Not a dreamer, either, but a philosopher who, from his house on Mount Gilead in the Virginia piedmont, is taunted by what Mount Weather, there across a couple of gentle valleys, represents: collective suicide...
...Will it play in Virginia...
...So, he asks audiences, how can we get the radical change in thinking our predicament requires...
...Or one hits...
...Congress...
...That understanding provoked in Teter what he calls his "untenable hypothesis": That the observer creates the coincidences and chance in his own life...
...A political innocent...
...But what about Congress...
...Studebaker electric runabouts were used...
...Rip up the rails, bring back the Studebakers as subway-roadway-ready escape vehicles...
...The Capitol Engineer, another Carroll, Raymond, no relation to the Architect, is holding 11 per cent in reserve...
...One man who can see Mount Weather from his back porch also has his eye on a Congressional seat...
...Hence, his candidacy...
...Remember when Reagan was shot...
...The young woman who staffs the Capitol's first-floor souvenir stand said it no longer sells Capitol building maps "for security reasons...
...Iran, university adviser...
...Alternate scenarios...
...Lebanon, teacher...
...Two minutes, twenty-seven seconds down the stairs to the Capitol subway car...
...That's simply classified...
...At Princeton in 1973 he studied the psychological changes wrought by the scientific revolution of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries...
...If no clarification, continue to confuse enemy, reboard electric car...
...But do we have to have annihilation to produce the habits of mind that could have prevented it...
...Contradiction...
...FEMA has only once issued an annual report...
...Failed, reawakened...
...It was alien to Iran— as later events would show...
...They hide their telephones...
...Team C heads for an "undisclosed destination" somewhere in the "Federal nuclear relocation arc...
...He has no apprehensions about personal political suicide...
...George Bush was in Texas when Ronald Reagan was shot in Washington...
...What chance has he anyway...
...The Speaker's silo system...
...With any lead time at all, "the role of comprehensive emergency management in nuclear attack" has the President helicoptered to Andrews Air Force Base...
...D. Park Teter will discover in April whether he has the Democratic nomination in Virginia for the U.S...
...But Teter is not working a typical campaign anyway...
...He has no money and no job, drives a borrowed pick-up, and goes deeper into debt each time he fills the gas tank...
...The fate of democracy may hinge on the answer...
...Ground Zero will hold state seminars for him...
...Morocco and Afghanistan, Peace Corps...
...So the Speaker looms important in Washington because Vice Presidents are rarely present at the Critical Moment...
...The only peaceful act I can conceive of that would be as shocking as a nuclear war itself, would be for the world's greatest power to totally disarm itself regardless...
...3: Russell Building...
...With so much Soviet territory bordering the Third World, Afghanistan becomes understandable if not acceptable...
...Not that party pols wouldn't find quirks in Teter's campaign...
...Take FEMA document H-14...
...There is something categorically American about the high-foreheaded, balding, intense-at-times, forty-seven-year-old Ivy Leaguer with the sad eyes...
...FEMA publication CPB 2-5 reveals one twenty-five megaton bomb would do it all...
...There awaits Kneecap, the flying command center, under its permanent armed guard of soldiers instructed to shoot security violators...
...Dispassionate objectivity marks the West...
...It may be that the Capitol Architect's office doesn't like to divulge its evacuation plans for conventional reasons: Most nuclear "event" scenarios self-dissolve in their own contradictions...
...Sixty years ago, Capitol subways did not ride on rails but on a roadbed...
...By this time, FEMA publication CPG 16, July 1981, would not be much help: "Upon notice of a nuclear detonation, 1. Maintain information log on nuclear detonations, including time and direction...
...The Capitol Architect has a nicely paneled suite of offices, and a nicely sweetened word of wisdom: Capitol security...
...The pay phones are out...
...Hawks and doves agree on the premises from which those answers arise...
...He hopes for spin-offs from the Nuclear Freeze campaign in Richmond and the Tidewater...
...writer, teacher, editor, civil servant...
...His two sons, Darius, seventeen, and Cambyse, nineteen, Persian first names and an American last name, live with him...
...Undoubtedly one Soviet missile is marked Hunt the Speaker, much as thousands are told, Hunt the MX...
...Or hiding...
...Iran is transformed through an Islamic revolution...
...That security can begin with U.S...
...This mid-1970s request made Teter realize that both doves and hawks accepted the same smug analytical process that led to "yes" or "no" on such questions...
...His curiosity about scientific thought had been aroused in Iran, where there was none...
...The President would know where the Vice President was...
...And name the U.S...
...Unlike Western imperial powers, the Soviets have no oceans to retreat across, come the time to withdraw...
...So Teter determined to change the premises...
...A dreamer...
...Subway to Rayburn House Office Building—thirty-seven seconds...
...So did the $728 million 1982-budget all-encompassing Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA...
...Many Democrats trace the party's decline in Virginia from that point...
...He reasons that if a unilateral disarmament candidate steals the nomination in conservative Virginia as a Democrat, it would have to make news...
...Strategic Air Command regularly requires SAC commander to practice boarding SAC command plane, Looking Glass...
...The Vice President would probably be somewhere far removed from the Ultimate Military Commotion...
...Teter minds none of this...
...Bucolic...
...Then, the Defense Civil Preparedness Agency, Department of Defense, publication CPG 2-7, July 1978, illustrates fallout maps for the entire United States, using only a Spring day and a Fall day...
...O WASHINGTON Arthur Jones Save the Speaker How long will it take a tall, white-haired, seventy-one-year-old man with a big beer belly to run from the Speaker's Rooms in the Capitol down to the little electric subway cars in the basement...
...Teter questioned Western thought .Why is the West so passionately dispassionate...
...cities...
Vol. 46 • April 1982 • No. 4
