We did a drive-by this afternoon of the National Reconnaissance Office HQ
in Chantilly, VA, to see what corporations who operate its technology were
in the neighborhood. Across the street was Lockheed Martin, Boeing,
and a gaggle of same-faced untitled buildings. Down Conference Dr was
the FBI's CALEA Implementation Office in a NYNEX marked structure
next to the building under consideration for Homeland Security HQ if the
Naval Station in NW Washington proves undesirably downclass.
NRO is a robin's egg blue collection of spanking new buildings, and nowhere in the neighborhood are any antennas and aerials and the usual detritus of high tech snooping like the NRO has at Buckley and Moffett AFBs in California
NAS, not AFB.
If you think you're protected against venality by the constitution and benevolent caretakers, you need to eyeball your 1040 and the other side of the tracks, ie, dont watch Iraq and North Korea. Best, visit the greater DC area and skip the yokel monuments serving as mini-me WTCs.
Why visit the greater D.C. area? I left in 1970, and even then the signs of imperialism were evident way beyond the Beltway. The Empire had long outgrown the Arlington-Bethesda-Chevy Chase-Alexandria-PG County zone, and was pushing out into redneck parts of Virginia and Maryland.
I was living just inside where the Beltway was to go when it was being built around 1962-63. It must have opened when I was in France in 1964, as by the time I returned to the D.C. area in 1965 it was already open and gridlocked.
Sterling, Vienna, Reston, Columbia, Potomac, Chantilly, and a dozen other suburban towns were already filling up with the detritus of empire when I left the area. My high school prom was held at the newly opened Tyson's Corner Shopping Center (presumably Tyson's I, as I understand there are now two of them nearby. I remember when this was where some of the fathers of the spooks I was in high school with, at Langley High School, just over the fence and through some woods from the "Department of Transportation Highway Testing Center," or somesuch, aka, CIA, was located. I lived in a house on Churchill Road, off of Old Dominion Drive, vacated by an agent posted suddenly to Teheran that summer of 1965 to help the Shah crush his opponents.
My mother used to run into Everett Dirksen ("a billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you're talking about real money") at the local grocery store, we had Birch Bayh address our class, my sister Trick-or-Treated at Bobby Kennedy's house, and one of my first female friends had a father who was a bigwig in the Cosmos Club.
I grew up realizing how sick the entire D.C. system is.
An entire community, 60 miles in diameter, devoted to the idea of stealing money from hardworking folks in Grand Forks and Tumwater and Boise and giving it to corrupt dicatators, inner city negro breeders, and defense contractors building weapons to be used to attack those who are not threats to U.S. security.
D.C. is a cancer which needs radiation therapy.
--Tim May "Extremism in the pursuit of liberty is no vice."--Barry Goldwater
