#Revenge of the mask professional

One of Craig's first big headaches after being hired there in 1997 was completing the transition to a 'fax edition,' but lots of the old-time subscribers resisted - clinging to their addiction to the more handsomely printed hand-delivered edition. It was produced each day from political news scissor-clipped from papers around the country, pasted up, printed up and hand-delivered by noon to its many subscribers around Washington. One of a kind in those days, The Hotline was invented by a very down-to-earth and unassuming man named Doug Bailey. He was hired to be the editor of The Hotline, a low-tech but brilliantly conceived aggregator of political news from sources all over the country that was the precursor to today's ubiquitous array of political websites and blogs. Not long after that episode, Craig and I moved on to other jobs. We had a good laugh at our discovery, and pretended we had narrowly missed falling drunkenly into the snakepit of Washington insiderdom. 'The Mask!' He hurriedly pushed the bottle away as if were a relic from a forbidden tomb and told the bartender to take it back and return it to its place on the shelf immediately. The front of the bottle was carved in the shape of a face - the face of what looked to be a smiling Inca with half-closed eyes. It was a 90-proof Peruvian brandy called 'Inca Pisco.' Normally we would have asked for a taste, but Craig's eyes grew wide and a smile lit up his face as he brushed layers of dust from the bottle to study it more closely, as if he were a barstool archaeologist. We asked the bartender to hand it down so we could study it more closely. The bottle was a dull black, and seemed to be carved in a strange shape. It was an oddly shaped bottle positioned high on the top shelf, and almost at the center of the bar. The bartender took our money and ignored our political theorizing, but we didn't care.Дuring one such session, Craig happened to look up and notice a bottle we'd never seen before. Every once in awhile we'd order a beer, as Craig joked, just to settle our stomachs. We'd sit there and smoke Marlboro Lights and sample many of the delights from those glowing bottles. The bottles were lined up side-by-side and bottom-to-top on backlit, bleacher-like shelves that rose up toward the ceiling in six, maybe eight, or maybe even ten levels. The only audience for our proclamations was a gigantic collection of liquor bottles, which in my memory stood like spectators in a magnificent stadium stretching across the entire 25-foot length of the bar.

Our court was in session most often during Friday happy hours at an excellent bar on 17th Street called Boss Shepherd's, which got its name from a corrupt, 19th Century Washington political boss. I'm not even sure if the word 'snark' had been coined yet, but that's what we were practicing. But the World Wide Web was still a couple years away, and the concept of blogs trailed several more years behind that.

#Revenge of the mask professional

Had it been 2009 instead of 1991, Craig and I could have just started up a blog to vent our professional frustrations and publish our insane theories. So, we thought, oxygen-starved kids on commercial flights would be the final barrier of resistance in the relentless onslaught of The Mask. We even theorized that The Mask was extending its ominous reach from the confines of Washington into broader American society, as evidenced by regular warnings from airline flight attendants that adult passengers 'put the mask on yourselves' before coming to the aid of their own children in the event of an in-flight emergency. Anyway, no one was immune to the powers of The Mask nor exempt from our derision. 'Is he walking around with a sack of marbles in his pants?'). Bush or Ben Bradlee, the legendary Washington Post editor and pooh-bah of insider journalism, who was always publicly proclaiming his tough-guy desire to 'give my left nut' for one story after another ('How many of those can one guy have to give?' I always wondered. It didn't matter if you were President George H.W. In our minds, The Mask had the power to cast those who wore it into an eternal fog of self-importance, pomposity, pretentiousness, arrogance, insincerity and phoniness eradicating their common-sense, clouding their judgment, undermining their integrity and making them not worthy of further serious consideration or respect from regular, sane folks like us. So in our court of two judges, anyone who was adept at playing 'the Washington game' - be they powerful politician or famous journalist or merely a pretender in either profession - was guilty of having fallen under the spell of what we called The Mask.