Sharks on Pennsylvania Avenue

Typical was this morning's meeting at the Commerce Department. On the white board, the chair scrawled an agenda. The goal is to persuade a group of countries to agree to a set of principled actions. First, we had to agree amongst ourselves, US government agencies. Remember, that the units within my agency have yet to discuss and reach consensus. We plan on doing that tomorrow. But the interagency meeting was today. A little reverse engineering is in order, I suppose. At the table, we reached a plan on how to plan next. Cookies and chocolates greased the oily wheels of bureaucracy. And as I left, rounding the corner, balanced in mid-air, impaled on a steel shaft, the model of a hammerhead shark hangs at an entrance to the Hoover building, an homage to the aquarium which occupies the lower floor. Dali could not have made a better statement.