Inside the Beltway

Off the Record

The rules for this two-week orientation are that everything the speakers say is “off the record.” In my previous job the speaker would say, “Put down your pens; take no notes on this.” However, not here, so I didn’t. Many rules change when you move inside the beltway. I just can’t wait until I am told that “this is on deep background.”

One of the speakers, not a politico, spoke of having to work with the undead. The speaker is a civil servant who saw much of their work life through the prism of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Another off the record talk detailed how to tunnel through the natural barriers between the departments and agencies. This appears to have many of the attributes of electron tunneling in atomic physics. For one thing, it is a quantum effect, thus generally not obvious to those who live in the so-called real world of Newtonian rules. Also, in the quantum world, Schrödinger and his friends referred to the tunneling effect as an evanescent effect. This is not unlike life inside the Beltway where such events are energized by affinities between individuals; say, one in an executive office and the other on a Congressional staff, and where the quantum effect lasts only as long as the two people remain in place. Inside the Beltway individuals don’t stay in their orbital long, hopping from job to job like neutrons in an atomic reactor.

In general, one can consider an atomic nucleus a metaphor for the space inside the Beltway, rules become quantum, difficult to see clearly, and mostly inferrable only by their effects, not by the initiating interactions themselves. It has occurred to me that one outcome of building the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), that huge atomic accelerator under Switzerland that is still on the blink, is that the world may finally see how such quantum events take place; thus, it’s failure to get going may be sabotage from the bureaucrats of the world. I hope this is Dan Brown's next book.