Go, Feds!

April, as T.S. Eliot said, is the cruellest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring tourists from their sleepy middlewestern towns. With the city now inundated by sweatshirted dads, haggard moms and numerous wandering children, it is worth commenting upon the continuing phenomenon of the CIA and FBI hats. These black caps with white stitching (no doubt made by the baseball cap crafts-men, women and children of China) are hawked from makeshift souvenir stands near any tourist trap or Smithsonian museum. On the surface, wearing clothing in support of your national spy agency or federal investigatory bureau isn't any more or less strange than sporting a Packers cap or Georgetown Law sweatshirt (even if it does remind me of Michael Keaton's FBI agent in Out of Sight being asked if he has a shirt that says "undercover"). It's not as though by wearing the cap you imply that you work as a spy. Those who choose to wear, for instance, a fashionable Milwaukee Brewers cap may support the overall organizational goals, but are not actually members of the team (although frankly my grandmother could be their number five starter, so don't give up hope).

Still, one would think that the popularity of said caps would have diminished now that the shine has come off our national spy and investigative agencies. The CIA has been revealed as an inept bureaucracy of desk jockies eager to stove-pipe faulty intelligence to the administration. The FBI, once home to do-gooders Mulder, Scully and Clarice Starling, is apparently so out of it that they are still finding evidence from the Oklahoma City bombings ten years later(!). Apparently an anonymous tipster phoned in to tell them to do a full check at Terry Nichols's house. I guess if there are people who continue to harbor hope for the Brewers, then perhaps the good people of the Hoover Building and Langley could use a little love as well.