Oh who was I kidding

It's so hard to clean. I'd rather talk about the last book I read to completion — "Blowing My Cover," by Lindsay Moran.

Moran is a former CIA operative (don't call them agents) who apparently couldn't hack it, and it's not hard to see why. The job of spying seems insanely isolating because there's always an ulterior motive with agents. Although the training sounded pretty cool. I think I'd actually like to go through the POW situation and learn to drive spy-style. It sounds like it can really teach a person a lot about themselves.

Tragically, it also sounds like the CIA is picking people who can't hack it. People who are cold in their ability to relate to other people. People who can't hike their way out of a paper bag. People who don't do well in artificial situations that are supposed to test their ability to control their fear, their temper and their judgment.

Now this is going to come back to my spy pal Hugh. We had lunch together today and, because I'm nosy and he is so passionate about "the great game," the conversation turned naturally to contemporary politics and humint gathering and ideology driving foreign policy.

Before we left Thai Hut, he asked a random woman if he knew her from somewhere. He didn't. They had a short conversation about Portland, where she was from, and one time he was staying in Ocean Shores and ran into the anchor from KIRO.

"Did you see what I just did," Hugh said as we left the restaurant. "That was espionage."

Hugh is not your average bear. What he used to do for the CIA he now does for the Lions Club. Recruit, recruit, recruit. Make buddies, utilize information. Except Hugh means every bit of it because he is on the side of the angels, and I don't just mean in his mind. He is extraordinarily driven and there is not a selfish bone in his body. He has an idea about how he wants his community to be, and that is the community he works to create. It's amazing. He is truly a one in a million.

Well, here's where the CIA/Lions Club metaphor gets important in my mind. The game has changed for both organizations. One of the reasons Hugh was a good spy — and I get the feeling he was one of the most exceptional agents to come out of the company, working in a time when he was surrounded by exceptional agents — was because the game wasn't just a game. It was a driving passion. Who could possibly be passionate about Soviet-era Russia?

Well, today, the CIA isn't looking at Stalinism as the enemy. There is real passion, though, I would wager, a misguided, scary one, behind its current foe, Islamic fundamentalist terrorism.

The Lions Club is one that Hugh said he believes he has recruited more than 50 members for — that's members that stay at least a year and a day — since 1983. His ability to recruit has dropped like crazy. No one wants to be a part of that organization from my parents' organization. There are structural issues I can point to, like the fact that they work all the time, and there are aesthetic issues like they don't get their kicks from fraternal organizations with pins and minutes.

I'm forgetting what my point was in the connection. But there was one. And I think it had to do with a certain amount of "what does one do to make the organization function effectively?" for both organizations. They are just flat out dinosaurs. The game has changed on both of them because people don't have the same idea about community that they did even 22 years ago. Even among Islamic fundamentalists who are envisioning a return of the caliphate, they are not ignorant of the sort of means they expect to take — they use the internet, they make cross-ethnic bonds with similar ideologues. The organizations are now about the stability of the organizations more than they are about their mission. Sorry, Hugh, but even if the Lions do give all their money to programs, that's a method of charity, not the organization itself.

I guess the hope-bringing kicker to this story is that as Hugh and I were pulling back up at work he said he had no idea what the terms of the new "game" were for the CIA.

"Aw hell, I could figure it out," he said. "I can play any damn game they throw at me."