re: #304 Cato the Elder

Back in my ban-the-bomb protester days, we used to visit the Pentagon en masse. With permits and advance notice, of course. But still - we’d show up with a hundred people, including funny-looking Buddhist monks from Hiroshima and Nagasaki banging on loud-ass drums, and go into the building and stage all kinds of actions. I thought I was entering the Belly of the Beast, first time, and fully expected to be arrested and beaten into a pulp.

The men and women there were nothing but professional and polite. They honored our right of freedom of speech and assembly as though we were on the town common in Boston. Some even came up to us and said they agreed about the danger of installing Pershing II intermediate-range missiles in Germany with a launch-to-impact time of four (or was it six?) minutes to Moscow.

It takes a special kind of asshole - with a gun - to get shot at the Pentagon. And I’ll bet you dollars to Chinese doughnuts they didn’t fire until he actually pointed the damn thing at someone.

Hats off to our professional men and women at the Pentagon!

Was that you out there with all the damn banging? Long before the airliner I pulled my first temporary duty there. Your expression “Belly of the Beast” was exactly what I felt as the train pulled up. It delivered me straight past light security into—a bloody shopping mall. That’s what the underground access was.