Go ahead, let your mind chew on that title for a minute. It’s the dirty little secret nobody told you about when they came to recruit you, playing on your patriotism and desire to server your country, whatever country that is.
Yes, this is a follow up to my burning a spy posts. Very few writers ever venture into this little niche of the dark world. I’m shocked when I see something, even lightly broaching the topic. To date I have seen two (2) television shows which dared to spend their viewer capital even mentioning this subject. Oddly enough, both of those shows regularly received the contents of critics colons for their reviews.
“Burn Notice,” or as many called it “Blowing Shit Up in Miami,” devoted an entire episode to this topic in its own light hearted massive catastrophe kind of way. Burt Reynolds played an aging Cold War spy too long out of the game to realize all of the rules have changed. Later in the episode we begin to realize he has dementia and is forgetting important chunks of his past, like the combination to his safe, his mother’s birthday as I recall. At one point I seem to remember Burt’s character uttering something like “you’d think the government would have a retirement home for spooks.”
“NCIS: Los Angeles” is the next show I remember seeing broach this subject. I cannot find the episode now that I search for it. A bunch of old legends created by a CIA analyst which were supposedly destroyed started showing up. The woman was retired but seemed to know Hetty. There was a scene with Hetty and the old woman talking where she said something like “there is no old age home for people like us. There is a rag over the mouth and a needle in the arm. We know too much. When our minds start to fail we pose too great a risk.” I remember the scene but not the exact lines. The episode aired a few years ago and might have been one of those “crossover” episodes where NCIS and NCIS: Los Angeles teams worked together.
While I’m encouraging writers to use this post as a writing prompt and explore the many different avenues such a story could take, I’m also hoping some younglings read this post and consider the reality. We live in a world where each and every one of us, if we live long enough, will face some form of dementia. Corporations will continue to muddy up the water and get Congress to block research funds if it appears even remotely possible their product is a contributing factor, let alone the root cause.
I remember when Ronald Regan was in office and there was a lot of chatter about aluminum being linked to Alzheimer’s disease. I saw a Tums commercial once which included a blurb at the end about another antacid being made from aluminum salt “and aluminum has been linked to Alzheimer’s.” The next time I saw that commercial the phrase I have in italics was removed. Yes children, corporations will continue to kill us for profit while using lobbyist dollars to keep the truth from coming out. Welcome to the corruption known as our government.
Let your story writing mind consider the realistic nightmare of trying to actually create a retirement home for spooks, spies and assets. Could you actually have low wage off-the-street workers changing the diapers or otherwise caring for people whose reflexes were still there even if their minds didn’t always know where they were? Certainly not! They would have to be highly trained in hand to hand combat themselves in case someone suddenly believed they were on an OP and were being held prisoner. Just how many people in the country do you think would be willing to go through that kind of training knowing they would never be deployed once they agreed to a “temporary” assignment at the retirement home?
As a culture we are very good at creating things, just not so good at thinking things through so we don’t have a mess to clean up. We created nuclear power plants to hide the fact we were creating nuclear warheads at a breakneck pace. Now we have many thousands of “spent” with no viable means of either disposal or recycling. We have even bigger idiots trying to bring back the hey day of nuclear power despite the fact nobody has figured out what to do with the waste. Tossing it into a hole in the ground is not a solution.
Likewise, we create trained killers, spies and all other manner of clandestine personnel without any graceful or human retirement plan, other than the one NCIS: Los Angeles was bold enough to record on film.
Critics be damned. Sometimes you have to create a wildly popular show just so you can sprinkle in the really big issues.
