Cultural Creatives

Spent over two hours on the phone with my old buddy Tom tonight. He and I don't talk nearly often enough, but when we do the conversation rambles on at a breakneck pace for a frightfully long time, and tonight was no exception. Tom is an electrical engineer for Lucent (aka Alcatel aka Bell Labs) in New Jersey and he was an Army captain back in the days when I did my missile thing; he and I worked in the same building at HQ US EUCOM in Germany. In those days all of our computers were old command-line VAXs; we had to type phrases like "Copy A B" or "Rename X Y" if we wanted our infernal machines to do anything. I still remember Tom showing me a spare graphics display that he had set up to work on one of his projects. It ran some mysterious operating system and it had graphical "windows" on it so that you could run multiple functions on the same screen, and drag them all around with a mouse-like thingy, which was a device that our computers didn't have. I thought it was all pretty cool, but at the end of the day I was just as clueless as the rest of us were about what Tom was doing. Tom was (and is) one of the most brilliant engineers I ever met.

A few years back Tom took a sabbatical from Bell Labs / Lucent and went to work on a Brookings Institute fellowship for Bill Frist. In DC Tom helped to craft some of the legislation that Frist's internet steering committee (or whatever it was) was working on at the time. In his living room Tom still has a framed picture of the legislation that he wrote, now defunct, that was signed into law. Tom worked on all sorts of interesting stuff during his days with Frist; lots of policy wonk language and legislation. He calls himself a "classic Republican" but during our two-hour marathon we discovered that we weren't that far apart on much of anything. Maybe he and I are both what some are referring to fondly as "Cultural Creatives."

Tom and I talked about all sorts of stuff endlessly; we had lots of catching up to do, but the great thing about us is that it doesn't matter how long we go between phone calls, we reconnect instantly and then we take it from there. I was very anxious to hear Tom's opinion on the subject of net neutrality; he and I both think that the ridiculous legislation that the House just passed is preemptive and unnecessary. It's all about big business posturing, and it's just plain wrong. We can only hope that the Senate kills it, but alas, the reach of the telecommunications industry is a long one.

Tom's a bit worried that a recent round of mergers/acquisitions may force him into too-early retirement; in any event he's now in the sunset phase of his engineering career, and I think that maybe his professional path and mine are about to cross again in the brave new world of politics. If I ever get elected to anything, Tom's going to be the first guy I call. If I haven't already talked him into doing a campaign with me, that is.