Dear Norm,
Nowadays, whenever I am suspicious of five and seven syllable phrases,
of my neighbors' explosive designs, of that clearly schizophrenic woman
bellowing into no cell phone there in the bus stop shelter by the park,
of those Ecuadoran gangsters slinging documentation from the corner,
of each sweating North African man reading Amharic on the lobby divan,
every clean-shaven Arab and bearded boy in vinegar cologne with puppets,
of vegetarians, environmentalists, conservatives, preservatives, vegans,
actors, artists, rock stars and communists, of the illiterate, the hazy, lazy
television-fed boosters and of the blue eyed suicide bomber students'
decade of omission from the news, of the white step-van idling outside,
Whenever I am suspicious, I do not sit down to draft and issue a report,
which is inefficient and, in aggregate, makes you the flooded bottleneck in
this most critical time of War, when all actionable intelligence must be
immediately identified and applied to our security
without inviting sluggish oversight or justice to abstract obstruction --
Instead, I simply pick up the phone and explain it all to my buddy abroad,
or, calling domestically to save money, to any subscriber to AT&T,
to be sure my information is most efficiently routed into your system.
So, no more notes from me, Norm; see the flagged transcripts of my calls.
You are better used investigating red-flagged items in the system
than certifying every paranoid American's inchoate suspicion:
We'll all feel more secure this way.
Don't feel bad, Norm. Voluntarily, it just wasn't working out;
we will still see each other often over the Echelon,
and, increasingly, in the court reports and the press.
And we'll always have Operation Tips, Norm!
It has been sweet, suspicion-pal; I'll miss you.
Semper Fi! Goodbye.
N. Formant