The Weekly Screed (#697)

The first thing we do,
let’s kill all the spies
by David Benjamin

Americans tend to learn most of what we know about our  “intelligence” establishment by watching TV. For example, I consumed a whole season of “Homeland” and discovered that your typical CIA agent is a twitchy, bipolar insomniac with an itchy trigger finger and a streak of nymphomania (and that’s just the male agents!). While deciding to avoid “Homeland” thereafter — unless strapped naked to a chair by CIA agents in front of a TV in an ice-cold room with constantly flickering lights and Celine Dion on the PA system — I realized that this depiction of the espionage community was unrealistic.

Real intelligence-gathering is better depicted by Gibbs, Abby, Ducky, DiNozzo, McGee and the mousy blonde who took Ziva’s place. Weekly doses of “NCIS” not only convey the magnitude of America’s global spy network but the tensions among its myriad tentacles. Gibbs and the gang at the Navy Criminal Investigative Service have an almost cordial relationship with their Coast Guard counterparts, largely because chief Agent Borin is gorgeous and got her start as one of those supermodel assistant prosecutors on “Law and Order.” Relations are less cozy, however, with NCIS’s occasional allies at the FBI, largely because Agent Fornell (a re-tread from “Hill Street Blues”) is less cute and photogenic than anybody at ether CGIS or NCIS, including Director Vance.

As for the CIA, represented by that sinister bald guy suffering from head-to-toe five o’clock shadow, well, fuggedaboudit. These spooks the enemy. They actively work to foil and frustrate Gibbs while arbitrarily kidnapping or killing every witness whom Tony and McGee haven’t already holed up in a safe house.

Even worse, there’s Homeland Security, whose paranoid imbeciles are constantly horning in on the case, barging into Abby’s lab with Kevlar vests and subpoenas, abducting Ducky’s klieg-lit cadavers and causing Palmer’s fiancée to miscarry yet another baby.

Thanks to TV, the lesson is clear. America is overrun with “intelligence” bureaus, poaching one another’s turf and relocating witnesses to the point where, today, the entire population of Arizona are living under assumed names. Governor Jan Brewer is, in fact, former DCS CI George Kaplan. There are so many agents, special agents and secret agents nowadays that they’re overflowing from cop and spy shows into secular programming. On “The Good Wife,” there were NSA eavesdroppers who knew about Alicia and Will’s affair even before Kalinda.

Conservatives keep insisting that giant chunks of the government need to be either wiped out or turned over to private enterprise, saving enormous expense and creating efficiencies unseen since the administration of George III. They tend to target agencies like Housing & Urban Development, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Education Department — whose responsibilities would then devolve to landlords, strip miners and Michelle Rhee. Whee!

Not to mention putting Social Security in the hands of Citigroup and Lloyd Blankfein. And running the whole Postal Service out of a FedEx hub in Memphis.

Preposterous? Sure. But I share with conservatives the idea that we can shutter entire federal departments and suffer few consequences. “Intelligence,” whose IQ in the last decade has slipped below the core body-temp of a three-day floater pulled out of the Potomac, is my first candidate. While we can’t entirely mothball every investigator and spy in all those agencies sprawling all over the federal and military underground, we can scalpel this bloated stiff right down to the bone.

Here’s what we do.

We rent out a really big stadium. The one in Ann Arbor, where the Wolverines play football, holds more than 100,000. If you count standing room and add some bleachers on the field, we can probably fit all the agents, spooks, spies, torturers, “analysts,” shysters and gumshoes now collecting government salaries for — mostly — leaning over one another’s shoulders to peek into the computer screens that are tracking what you and I check out from the library and watch on Netflix.

Then, we tell them they’re being downsized. We explain that, from this stadium full of wannabe James Bonds and burned-out Jack Bauers, Uncle Sam’s going to keep 100 spies and 100 detectives — that’s it — all of them working for one boss with a really good mustache. Obviously, Tom Selleck.

We’ll pick the lucky 200 by staging a scavenger hunt. Each applicant has to go out and track down, for example, a dead body in Central Park, a legal alien working at McDonald’s, a Democrat in Colorado Springs, a virgin sophomore at the University of Wisconsin, a black policeman in Ferguson, Missouri, an abortion provider in Wichita, a child molester in Congress, an atheist in a foxhole, a Muslim in Oklahoma, an actual Socialist anywhere in America, a hedge-fund manager who pays taxes, a job in Detroit, a kid on a milk carton, a black welfare mother with a mink coat and a late-model Cadillac, Keyser Soze, Judge Crater, Amelia Earhart and the solution to the dilemma of the Kobayashi Maru.

Of course, some of these are booby traps. Despite its reputation, there hasn’t been a dead body in Central Park for years. And the only one who ever saw that mink-dripping welfare queen in her hot-pink Fleetwood was Ronald Reagan, and he only glimpsed her briefly because he and Knute Rockne were busy leading Luke Skywalker and the Big Red One across Omaha Beach on D-Day.

But the 200 who do the best will actually get to serve in a pared-down intelligence community free of infighting and capable, perhaps, of finding out about outfits like ISIS before Jon Stewart does.

The rest — the whole stadium full — will have to turn in their Dick Tracy watches and secret de-coder rings, let their hair grow out and apply for the night watchman job down at the candy factory.