Linda Gasparello

Face Masks: What’s Good for Us Isn’t Good for the Geese

December 29, 2020 by Linda Gasparello 1 Comment

When I lived in Manhattan, I pursued an unusual pastime. I started it to avoid eye contact with Unification Church members who peddled flowers and their faith on many street corners in the 197os. If a Moonie (as a church member was known derisively) were to approach me, I’d cast my eyes down to the sidewalk, where I’d see things that would set my mind wandering.

In the winter months, I’d see lone gloves and mittens. On the curb in front of La Cote Basque on East 55^th Street, the luxe French restaurant where Truman Capote dined with the doyennes of New York’s social scene and dished on them in his unfinished novel, “Answered Prayers,” I saw a black leather glove with a gold metal “F” sewn on the cuff. I coveted such a Fendi pair, eyeing them at the glove counter at Bergdorf Goodman, but not buying them – they cost about a third of my Greenwich Village studio apartment rent in the late 1970s. On the sidewalk on Fifth Avenue, in front of an FAO Schwartz window, I saw a child’s mitten, expertly knit in a red-and-white Norwegian pattern that I never had the patience to follow. I wondered whether the child dropped the mitten after removing it to point excitedly to a toy in the window.

In the summer months, I’d see pairs of sunglasses and single sneakers on the sidewalks, things that had fallen out of stuffed weekenders. It wasn’t unusual for me to see pantyhose. Working women in Manhattan, in my time there, could wear a short-sleeved wrap dress – the one designed by Diane von Furstenberg was the working woman’s boilersuit — in the summer, but they’d better have put on pantyhose, or packed a pair in their pocketbooks or tote bags. The pantyhose would fall out of them and roll like tumbleweed along the avenues.

One summer morning on Perry Street, near where I lived, I saw a long, black zipper. It looked like a black snake had slithered out of a drain grate on the street and was warming itself on the asphalt, its white belly gleaming in the sun.

Now when I walk on a city sidewalk, I still look down, not to pursue my pastime but to preserve myself from tripping and falling on them. I sometimes see interesting litter, but mostly I see single-use and reusable face masks.

This fall, as I walked on the waterfront promenade along the Rondout Creek in Kingston, New York, I saw a single-use mask swirling in the wind with the fallen leaves. I grabbed the mask and deposited it in a trash can, worried that it would fall into the creek, ensnarling the waterfowl and the fish.

Mask of Doom: A face mask imperiling ducks on the Rondout Creek in Kingston, N.Y. Photo: Linda Gasparello

In the Covid-19 crisis, masks have been lifesavers. But masks, especially single-use, polypropylene surgical masks, have been killing marine wildlife and devastating ecosystems.

Billions of masks have been entering our oceans and washing onto our beaches when they are littered, when waste management systems are inadequate or nonexistent, or when these systems become overwhelmed due to increased volumes of waste.

A new report from OceansAsia, a Hong Kong-based marine conservation organization, estimates that 1.56 billion masks will have entered the oceans in 2020. This will result in an additional 4,680 to 6,240 metric tonnes of marine plastic pollution, says the report, entitled “Masks on the Beach: The impact of COVID-19 on Marine Plastic Pollution.”

Single-use masks are made from a variety of meltdown plastics and are difficult to recycle, due to both composition and risk of contamination and infection, the report points out. These masks will take as long as 450 years to break down, slowly turning into microplastics ingested by wildlife.

“Marine plastic pollution is devastating our oceans. Plastic pollution kills an estimated 100,000 marine mammals and turtles, over a million seabirds, and even greater numbers of fish, invertebrates, and other animals each year. It also negatively impacts fisheries and the tourism industry and costs the global economy an estimated $13 billion per year,” according to Gary Stokes, operations director of OceansAsia.

The report recommends that people wear reusable masks, and to dispose of all masks properly.

I hope everyone will wear them for the sake of their own and others’ health, and that I won’t see them lying on sidewalks on my strolls, or on beaches, where they are a sorry sight.

How Tortoise Rides Led to Hope for COVID-19 and Alzheimer’s

August 1, 2020 by Linda Gasparello Leave a Comment

A little boy was taken to the Staten Island (N.Y.) Zoo where he was enthralled to ride Jalopy, a Galapagos tortoise.

Jalopy became a favorite. But then one day the giant tortoise wasn’t there, and the little boy learned she had cancer and had been taken to Arizona for radiation treatment.

“I had never heard of radiation,” said Dr. James S. Welsh, professor of radiation oncology at Loyola University Medical Center in Maywood, Illinois. But his love of that tortoise was enough for him to devote his life to radiation therapy.

Now Welsh is in the vanguard of doctors who hope to save lives by using radiation as a therapy for patients with COVID-19 — and possibly as a therapy for Alzheimer’s, arthritis and other diseases where inflammation plays a role.

Inflammation is present when the body’s immune system mobilizes to fight disease or injury. The problems come when the immune system, according to Welsh and other doctors I have interviewed, goes “haywire.”

Radiation can’t cure COVID-19, Welsh explained, but it can be used to reduce the acute inflammation, known as cytokine storm. This causes a flooding of the lungs and is what kills most COVID-19 patients.

Using very low doses of radiation to fight respiratory inflammation isn’t new: It was how viral pneumonia was treated more than 75 years ago, before the perfecting of a battery of drugs that took over.

Radiation was highly effective against viral pneumonia, with success rates recorded at 80 percent or better. Antibiotic drugs combined with growing public antipathy to radiation in all forms took it off the pneumonia therapy list.

But now it appears to be back-to-the-future time for radiation.

Welsh says that a patient about to enter acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), which kills many COVID-19 patients, can be treated with low-dose radiation to clear the lungs. Afterward, the patient can return to the ward to get treatment with antiviral drugs. No ICU, no ventilator, no long-term scarring of the lungs.

“Radiation could be used with a drug like remdesivir or another drug, like steroids. But it is my opinion that radiation will prove superior to dexamethasone or other steroid medicines,” Welsh said in an interview with me on “White House Chronicle,” the PBS television program.

A few clinical trials of low-dose radiation therapy for COVID-19 have begun in the United States and six other countries, including Canada and the United Kingdom.

“Although peer-reviewed results have yet to be published, preliminary data seem very encouraging, and certainly justify the siting of a proposed clinical trial here,” said Welsh, referring to the Hines VA Hospital in Chicago, where he is the chief of radiation therapy. He hopes to launch a clinical trial there in weeks.

The radiation doses for COVID-19 treatment are extremely low. Welsh is planning to use 0.5 gray in his trial, but others use more, 1 gray or even 1.5 grays. Those are above X-ray doses, but well below cancer doses. Brain cancer and lung cancer patients get doses of 60 grays, with up to 80 grays for prostate cancer, Welsh said.

This doesn’t mean that there isn’t opposition.

Much of the concern over radiation is associated with the linear, no-threshold (LNT) model that posits that all radiation will have detrimental health effects even at minuscule levels, like normal background. This theory has been contested violently for decades by nuclear scientists, but it remains an undermining orthodoxy.

“Most people and physicians are not familiar with the potential application as an anti-inflammatory in infectious disease,” Welsh said.

Nonetheless, he believes the future beckons. When I asked him about the use of radiation in other diseases where inflammation was a factor, particularly Alzheimer’s and arthritis, he responded, “A definitive ‘yes.’ ”

The beauty of radiation therapy, according Welsh and others, is that about half the hospitals in the country have radiology departments and staff. Treatments for COVID-19 patients could begin almost immediately.

As to Jalopy, she died in 1983 at the age of 77. She was so popular over the 46 years she lived at the zoo that a bronze sculpture of a Galapagos tortoise was erected as a memorial.

And you might say, her memory radiates hope for the future.

We’re All Screaming, and Some Are Cussing, for Ice Cream

July 4, 2020 by Linda Gasparello 1 Comment

You’ve heard of an ice cream social — an event in a home or elsewhere, using ice cream as its central theme, dating back to the 18th century in America.

Thomas Jefferson became the first president to serve ice cream at the White House in 1802. An epicure, Jefferson had his own personal recipe for vanilla ice cream.

Now, in the time of COVID-19 and President Trump, there are ice cream anti-socials.

These events feature meltdowns by customers in ice cream shops over having to wear face masks, having to stand six feet apart waiting in line — or even having fewer flavor choices on the menu. No Peanut Butter Caramel Cookie Dough? What’s America coming to? As Trump might tweet, “So terrible!”

The latest reported ice cream anti-socials in New England happened at Brickley’s, an ice cream shop with locations in Narragansett and Wakefield, R.I. In early May, one at Polar Cave Ice Cream Parlour in Mashpee, Mass., described by its owner as “insane,” made national news.

The Brickley’s events mirrored the one in Cape Cod in the rude, crude and socially unacceptable behavior of some customers.

Steve Brophy, who owns and operates Brickley’s with his wife, said in a June 22 Facebook post, “Over the last two weeks at both our locations, we have experienced on multiple occasions customers who will not wear their mask (asking us to show them the law) or are angry they can’t get exactly what they want due to the reduced menu. I, personally, had one man yell at me, ‘What’s your f—ing problem?’ because I had told him he needed to move his car which was blocking traffic. A few more expletives hurled toward me and I (for the first time in 26 years) told him to take his business elsewhere.

“Some of these customers are being verbally abusive to our young staff. That is unacceptable and will not be tolerated. I cannot ask our high school and college (age) staff to police the behavior of some who choose to ignore our rules.”

As if what these boors said wasn’t enough, Brophy also said in the post: “Another customer, who could not get exactly what he wanted, told our staff member, ‘You are babies. Are you going to let Gina hold your hand all summer?’ and ‘I hope you go out of f—ing business.’ ”

By “Gina,” the customer was referring to Gina Raimondo, Rhode Island’s Democratic governor, who issued an order on May 8 requiring all residents over the age of two to wear face coverings or masks while in public settings, whether indoors or outdoors. It’s the law.

The simple pleasure of going out for an ice cream, an all-American summer activity, is being taken away from adults and children, who’ve been holed up during the pandemic, by foul-mouthed people, partisan or not.

If they want to signal their vileness, maybe an enterprising one of their lot should open an ice cream shop: no masks, flavors like COVID-19 Cookies and Cream, and all abuse-spewing patrons welcome.

These ice cream anti-social events are likely to happen all over the country, especially as the summer and the 2020 presidential campaigns heat up.

July is National Ice Cream Month. I propose, a chilling out, a time for Americans to reflect on the nice tradition of ice cream socials and going out for an ice cream.

Don’t be a jerk. Stop hurling expletives and politics at shop owners and staff: high school and college students who are trying to make a buck by scooping your ice cream, making your life a little sweeter.

Slim Pickings in Northern Supermarkets? Try Southern Recipes

March 24, 2020 by Linda Gasparello Leave a Comment

As I surveyed what remained on the shelves at the supermarket I frequent in Rhode Island, I was reminded of the saying, “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.”

Hurricane or coronavirus pandemic, Rhode Islanders — as befits their mostly Italian heritage and food preference — had cleared the shelves and frozen food cases of pasta (except that made with chickpeas), canned and jarred tomato sauce, and frozen pizza.

Expectedly all the standard frozen and canned foods (except the dreaded whole and sliced beets), milk, butter, eggs, tuna, soup, bread, cookies and snack food had been cleared out, too.

What to buy? I viewed the rejected food not as Italian-American Rhode Islander, but rather as a Virginia transplant to the state. And I found heaps to buy.

Many of the ingredients for classic Southern dishes were still on the shelves and the frozen food cases. Here are some ingredients I saw and some ideas for what to do with them:

— Shrimp and grits: Buy frozen wild or farmed shrimp and grits (look on the bottom shelves in the breakfast cereal aisle). Yo, Italian-Americans up North! If you like polenta, you’ll love grits. “I ga-ron-tee!” as the late Cajun chef and humorist Justin Wilson used to say.

— Okra: If you live in the North, it will be the only vegetable left in your supermarket’s frozen food case. Dip it in buttermilk, dredge it in a seasoned cornmeal-flour mixture and fry it until it reaches that beautiful golden brown. Okra tastes like eggplant: In fact, you can make parmigiana with it.

— Jarred pimentos: When life gives you pimentos, make pimento cheese. Southerners call it “pate du Sud” (Southern pate). It’s a dip, a spread, but mostly it’s chopped pimentos mixed with mayonnaise and cheddar cheese. As Jeremy, the bigger and funnier of the two Jeremys who used to fix things around our house in Virginia, said of pimento cheese, “Put that on top of your head and your tongue would beat your brains out trying to get to it.”

— Stone-ground cornmeal: Cornbread. Nuff said.

— Instant pistachio pudding: You could make Shut the Gate Salad, also known as Watergate Salad. I first ate this salad in college in Washington in the mid-1970s. This salad was never served at the Watergate Hotel, site of the June 17, 1972, break-in of Democratic Party headquarters during the Nixon Administration, and the origin of its name remains obscure.

“But the particular mix of ingredients that became the standard Watergate Salad likely originated with the Jell-O brand, which introduced a line of pistachio pudding mix in 1976. This was two years after President Richard Nixon resigned, and the Watergate scandal was still fresh in Americans’ minds. (A spokesperson for Kraft, which now owns Jell-O, once said pistachio mix was introduced in 1975),” NPR said in a “Weekend Edition Sunday” broadcast.

Salad in the South is often devoid of leafy green vegetables. The green food coloring in the pudding legitimizes eating this pudding, Cool Whip, crushed pineapple, toasted pecan and mini marshmallow concoction as a vegetable serving. (Sound of incredulous gasping in the North.)

The supermarket checkout lines were long, so I only picked a few items off the shelves, including the despised and rejected canned beets and chickpea pasta. And, yes, I was tempted to grab the makings for Watergate Salad: A little Southern comfort food in the time of COVID-19.

My husband says we should try barbecue sauce on the chickpea pasta.

The 1953 Iranian Coup that Keeps on Giving

January 16, 2020 by Linda Gasparello Leave a Comment

“Thinking well is wise; planning well, wiser; doing well is the wisest and best of all,” says an Iranian proverb. For decades the United States and Iran largely haven’t thought, planned or done well by each other.

One deed in 1953 left a scarring legacy that has brought the two countries to the brink of war today: the coup d’état, orchestrated by U.S. and British intelligence agencies, that overthrew Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddegh (also spelled Mosaddeq) and restored power to the shah, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi.

The reformist premier had nationalized the British oil industry in Iran, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, created by Winston Churchill to fuel the British fleet when it switched from coal to oil. The shah had tried and failed to dismiss Mosaddegh and, after riots broke out, he fled the country.

The Churchill government enlisted the Eisenhower administration’s support for Mosaddegh’s ouster. Britain was motivated by its desire to regain control over the oil industry in Iran. Arguably, the United States was motivated more by the fear that Mosaddegh wouldn’t be able to stop the spread of communism in Iran than it was by the U.S. share of Iranian oil production after the coup.

“For many Iranians, the coup demonstrated the duplicity by the United States, which presented itself as a defender of freedom but did not hesitate to use underhanded methods to overthrow a democratically elected government to suit its own economic and strategic interests,” the Agence-France Presse reported.

The United States supported the shah — who many considered to be an imposed ruler — for a quarter of a century then abandoned him. His government was known for its autocracy, its focus on modernization and Westernization, and for its disregard for religious and democratic measures in Iran’s constitution.

On my first trip to Tehran, in December 1976, it was apparent that many Iranians — from liberal students to unskilled laborers — had reached a breaking point with the political corruption and the political oppression by the secret police (SAVAK) — preceded by the shah’s security forces, trained in 1953 by Maj. Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf Sr., the father of Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf Jr., who commanded coalition forces during the Gulf War.

The oil boom of the 1970s — from which the shah’s family was the foremost beneficiary — had produced accelerating inflation and an expanding gap between the rich and the poor. The government’s attempts to rein in inflation disproportionately affected the thousands of poor and unskilled men who flocked to Tehran and other cities to work in construction. Culturally and religiously conservative, many went on to form the core of the revolution’s demonstrators and “martyrs.”

In Tehran, on my first trip, I saw a few cars stuck in the open drains along street edges known as jubes. A friend there told me the cars belonged to “foreign workers who are unpopular, and get pushed into the jubes, too.”

Just a year later, Jimmy Carter, who visited Iran on New Year’s Eve, toasted the shah, “Iran, because of the great leadership of the Shah, is an island of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world. This is a great tribute to you, your Majesty, and to your leadership, and to the respect and the admiration and love which your people give to you.”

Iranians wouldn’t swallow Carter’s toast, which was so out of touch with what was going on in the country. Within days, they began the demonstrations that would end the shah’s rule.

James Schlesinger, who served as energy secretary in the Carter administration, told my husband Llewellyn King and me that he had strongly advised the president to tell the shah that if he wanted to hold on to his country, he should pay his army, not his air force. On Jan. 16, 1979, the shah piloted his “Shah’s Falcon” Boeing 727 jetliner from Tehran to Egypt for an extended “vacation,” setting the stage for his country’s Islamic Revolution a month later.

“When the Shah finally fell in 1979, memories of the U.S. intervention in 1953, which made possible the monarch’s subsequent, and increasingly unpopular, 25-year reign, intensified the anti-American character of the revolution in the minds of many Iranians,” Mark Gasiorowski and Malcolm Byrne wrote in their authoritative book “Mohammad Mosaddeq and the 1953 Coup in Iran.”

The 1953 coup’s legacy bore on later events, including the 1979-81 hostage crisis at the American Embassy in Tehran; the United States designating Iran a state sponsor of terrorism in 1984, unleashing severe sanctions; to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s speech in 2000, acknowledging the U.S. role in the Mosaddegh’s overthrow and “shortsighted” foreign policy in the region; and Iran’s nuclear enrichment program.

Whether President Donald Trump knows about the coup or not, it was involved in the airstrike that he ordered in Iraq on Jan. 3, killing Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, the commander of Iran’s Quds Force, a specialized unit in the Revolutionary Guards.

Uzbekistan Transforming Old Silk Road Cities to Smart Cities

September 2, 2019 by Linda Gasparello Leave a Comment

Photo: Tashkent City designs.

Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, is undergoing a transformation at a pace and scale almost comparable to Samarkand in 1370, when the Turco-Mongol ruler Timur, or, Tamerlane, as he is known in the West, made it his capital.

On the one hand, Tamerlane was a brutal conqueror who razed ancient cities to the ground and put entire populations to the sword. The empire he founded in 1370 and ruled until his death in 1405 (probably of a mid-winter cold, caught while on his way to change the Ming regime in China) stretched from Russia to India and from the Mediterranean Sea to Mongolia.

But on the other hand, Tamerlane was a brilliant constructor. One of his signature achievements was Samarkand, which he strove to make the most splendid city in Asia.

“It’s not hard to see why the author of the ‘1001 Nights’ had Scheherazade spin her tales from a palace in Samarkand: the city was on the Silk Road, alive with people from different lands; it was a wonderland of Islamic architecture, and a great center of learning,” Srinath Perur wrote in the Guardian newspaper.

The Registan in Samarkand

But no place in Samarkand represents all three aspects as well as the Registan, the main square, three sides of which stand a blur-of-blue-tiled madrasas (Islamic colleges). In 1888 George Curzon, world traveler and future viceroy of India, called it “the noblest public square in the world.”

While most of the edifices seen around the square were built after Tamerlane’s death, they couldn’t have been built without his sacking Islamic brother cities (including Baghdad, Damascus and Khiva) and his sparing their artisans and craftsmen, who he brought back to Samarkand.

In 1399, just a year after reducing Delhi to rubble because he thought the Muslim sultan was too tolerant of his Hindu subjects, Tamerlane was back to building his sumptuous capital. A caravan of 90 captured elephants was employed to carry stones from quarries to erect a great mosque, according to Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo, an envoy the Spanish kingdom of Castile dispatched to Samarkand. The Europeans rather liked Tamerlane because roughed up their neighborhood bully, the Ottoman Turks.

Tamerlane returned from his military conquests — estimated to have wiped out five percent of the world’s population — with architectural inspiration and plunder that could finance his appetite for building in Samarkand and other cities.

One of his monuments bears the proverb, “If you want to know about us, examine our cities.”

That proverb could be driving Shavkat Mirziyoyev, who succeeded Islam Karimov as president in 2016. His smart city projects in Tashkent, Samarkand and Bukhara, so it seems, are aimed at rebranding Uzbekistan as a country interested in political reform, economic investment and good relations with the rest of the world.

Javlon Vakhabov, Uzbekistan’s youthful new ambassador in Washington, discussed one smart city project, Tashkent City, in some depth at a summit on smart cities and communities organized by Dentons, the world’s largest law firm.

Construction of Tashkent City, a $1.7-billion international business and financial hub in the heart of the capital, started in 2018. The design includes an industrial park, eight business centers, a shopping mall, restaurants and a cultural center, as well as residential apartments on a 173-acre site.

“The aim of this project,” according to the government, “is to create an architectural complex in the center of Tashkent, implemented by embedding the latest trends in world architecture and the application of environmentally-friendly and energy-saving, smart technologies.”

Vakhabov enthused that Tashkent City projects have already received millions of dollars in loans from the Asian Development Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and the World Bank.

But he added, “Uzbekistan is a 3,000-year-old country. We have four UNESCO World Heritage cities. We have 4,000 sites that are highly protected by UNESCO. We need to be sensitive to these historical sites and adapt them to smart cities.”

“A mass movement of people from the countryside to the cities has created stresses on the environment and infrastructure,” he said. Ultimately smart cities can alleviate those stresses, using information and communication technology to improve efficiency, sustainability and citizen welfare.

Meantime, smart city projects have been stressing out people. There have been news reports about protests and court cases in Tashkent over traditional housing demolitions and evictions.

“As for the resettlement of people living in houses built by their forefathers, we need to create more favorable conditions for people persuaded to move to other communities,” Vakhabov said reassuringly.

Linda Gasparello is producer and co-host of “White House Chronicle” on PBS. Her email is whchronicle@gmail.com.

When You Think You Have Seen It All, Try Fantastic Kazakhstan

June 12, 2019 by Linda Gasparello Leave a Comment

NUR-SULTAN, Kazakhstan — There is the Grand Canyon in Arizona. But there is also a grand one, the Charyn Canyon, in Kazakhstan, the vast Central Asian country with curious and wondrous sights that await intrepid tourists.

Sayasat Nurbek, who serves as a National Geographic goodwill ambassador in Kazakhstan, lists the Charyn Canyon, which stretches 56 miles along the Charyn River in the mountainous Southeast, as one of the country’s top sights.

Located near Almaty, Kazakhstan’s former capital, Nurbek describes the canyon as “very futuristic.”

For 12 million years, nature’s sculptors — wind, water and sand — have carved the canyon’s red sandstone to create formations of various shapes and sizes. These have been given names for the fantastic things that they resemble: castles, devils and ghosts.

Nurbek recommends that tourists start their travels in Almaty, the largest city in Kazakhstan with a population of 1.7 million. It is not only the country’s cultural and trading hub, but also the gateway to the region’s natural wonders, including a national park in the Trans-Ile Alatau mountains, which has 300 species of wildlife, including the snow leopard.

Medeu skating rink

Not far from Ile-Alatau National Park, in the Malaya Almatinka Valley, winter tourists can skate on the world’s largest outdoor ice-skating rink, Medeu, and schuss down slopes in Shymbulak, Central Asia’s top skiing resort.

At the Altyn-Emel National Park, also near Almaty, tourists can see the Terekty Petroglyphs and listen to the “singing dunes” — a low, vibrating sound made when the wind moves the sand.

“Almaty is a city where in 15 to 20 minutes, you can get to pristine mountains and lakes —- not like the Swiss or French Alps, where you must travel far from the cities to get to them,” says Nurbek, who has a master’s degree in geopolitics from the Sapienza University of Rome.

Shymkent, the third-largest city in Kazakhstan and an important place along the Great Silk Road, is well worth a stopover, Nurbek says.

“It’s a Southern city with a rich cultural and historical heritage. There is great food there, especially kebabs,” he says. You might even wash down your kebabs with kumis — a beverage made with fermented mare’s milk, popular across Central Asia.

In the Kazakh desert, about 93 miles northwest of Shymkent, lies an ancient center of the caravan trade: Turkestan. “It’s a spiritual capital,” says Nurbek.

The city, previously called Yasi, is known for the Mausoleum of Khoja Ahmed Yasawi, the Sufi philosopher and poet, which was built at the time of Timur (Tamerlane), from 1389 to 1405. The imposing, turquoise-domed mausoleum is partly unfinished, but its Persian master builders experimented with architectural and structural solutions later used in the construction of Samarkand, the capital of the Timurid Empire. UNESCO designated the exquisite mausoleum as a World Heritage Site in 2003.

The medieval mausoleum of Khoja Ahmed Yasavi in Turkistan, Kazakhstan. Photo: Dmitry Chulov / Shutterstock.com

After touring the South, Nurbek suggests going West to the Caspian, which is the largest lake in the world. Aktau, on the shores of the Caspian, is an inviting beach town.

“There is no other lake in the world that has seals or the strange fish that you will find in the Caspian. You can even collect sharks’ teeth on the beaches because it was once part of a larger sea,” he says.

Nurbek, an avowed “environmental enthusiast,” wants oil and gas exploration in the Caspian to be replaced with “massive caviar production. We would have the same revenues from caviar as from oil.”

There has been an increase in the number of oil fields and, consequently, spills. But, Nurbek says, “they are not catastrophic.” And the Caspian’s prized sturgeon population is growing due to more university-conducted research on the diseases affecting them, he claims.

As for the nascent environmental movement and green party in Kazakhstan, he wishes there were “more people pushing for the environment, more politicians too.”

From the Caspian, Nurbek says tourists should head to the capital city of Nur-Sultan, formerly Astana, in the north-central steppe. The capital was renamed in March to honor President Nursultan Nazarbayev, who abruptly resigned on March 19 after three decades in power.

Nazarbayev moved the capital from Almaty to Astana in 1997. He transformed it from a provincial town to the playground for the world’s leading architects, including Japan’s Kisho Kurokawa, who drew up the master plan for Astana, and Britain’s Norman Foster, who designed the glimmering glass Khan Shatyr shopping mall — the largest tent in the world — which has an indoor beach.

Kazakhstan is the world’s largest landlocked country and its ninth-largest country, about the size of Western Europe. Nurbek recommends that tourists take the country’s trains — a tradition from Soviet times.

“If you are out to experience the vastness of the country — the steppes, the mountains, the lakes — then take the train from Nur-Sultan,” he says, “You can make friends on it, share food, share stories, stop at the stations. You can make memories that will last forever.

As in 1986, A President Has Tainted Thanksgiving

November 22, 2018 by Linda Gasparello Leave a Comment

Thanksgiving was usually a happy time for the elegant British-American broadcaster Alistair Cooke, whose “Letter From America” series on BBC Radio 4 captivated his millions of listeners for over half a century.

Cooke summed up his talent as “associating something quite tiny with something big. In other words, just looking at the way humans behave.” Every week, in a calming and confiding tone, he would discuss topics ranging from intrigue in the corridors of power in Washington to the significance to Americans of serving cranberry sauce with turkey on Thanksgiving.

But Cooke, in his Nov. 28, 1986, broadcast, had an unhappy story to tell “on the most American of American festivals and the one least tarnished with marketing tinsel.”

Thanksgiving that year, for Cooke, was tarnished by the Iran-Contra Affair, a secret U.S. arms deal that traded missiles and other arms to free some Americans held hostage by terrorists in Lebanon, but also used funds from the arms deal to support armed conflict in Nicaragua. The deal and the ensuing political scandal threatened to bring down the presidency of Ronald Reagan.

“Really the events of the past week have come at us — come at him — with such a tumbling clatter that it would be pointless of me at this stage to try to arrange their chronology. When I first heard about the incredible — every other senator and congressman has been working the word ‘incredible’ overtime — transfer of $30 million by Israel through a Swiss bank to be passed on to the motley band of Nicaraguan democrats, mercenaries and the relics of dictator Somoza’s bully boys, whom the president insists on calling freedom fighters, I found myself verbally paralyzed — a very rare condition with me — and falling back time and again on ‘incredible,’ spoken like a tolling bell,” he said in his broadcast.

Cooke, who was admired for taking the hysteria out of heated subjects, was outspoken on “Irangate,” just as he had been in the McCarthy era, which resulted in his telephone being tapped for two years.

“Two questions come up now, the answers to which will decide if the United States is to regain any credibility with its allies, with the Arab world, not to mention with any Soviet missions they have to deal with. One is the function and the respectability of the National Security Council — an institution set up only after the Second World War, which too often has quarreled with the secretaries of state and defense and, under this administration, evaded and deceived them, and possibly the president, himself.

“The other, more pressing, grave question turns on the honesty of the president, himself. How much did he really know and sanction of these incredible goings-on? It’s the same question whose stony answer brought down President Nixon, and we shan’t know the truth until the congressional hearings get underway. They have great powers to subpoena the highest officers of the administration and get at the truth, as we saw with the (Sam) Ervin Senate committee that probed into Watergate,” he said.

Reagan was hounded by the press, and there were three investigations into the scandal — one by the Tower Commission (led by Texas Senator John Tower), which Reagan himself appointed; congressional hearings in 1987, which were televised nationally; and an eight-year investigation, launched by Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh, in which 14 people were charged, including National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane and Vice Adm. John Poindexter, his successor in that position, and Lt. Col. Oliver North of the National Security Council.

Ending his broadcast, Cooke said “the sauce that really soured our appetite” for the turkey that Thanksgiving was “the knowledge that, for the moment, the United States has no declared foreign policy that either friends or enemies can believe in.”

If Cooke were alive — he died in March 2004, less than a month after he filed his last “Letter” — he would’ve been outspoken about what amounts to President Trump’s pardoning of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman for the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. This Thanksgiving, we would’ve heard him say gently and mellifluously that in Trump’s America, the incredible is true.

Photo: 25 November 1986. President Ronald Reagan with Caspar Weinberger, George Shultz, Ed Meese, and Don Regan discussing the President’s remarks on the Iran-Contra affair, Oval Office.

Postcards from Chicago: America’s Second City in Poetry and Paint

October 12, 2018 by Linda Gasparello 1 Comment

Long before my first trip to Chicago by plane, I traveled there by poetry and stories.

Carl Sandburg’s “Chicago” took me to the city as a teenager. The poem’s opening verse added to the foundational image of the city which my father, a Boston-based meat broker, built with his stories about the Chicago meatpacking industry:

Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders:

In 1914, when the poem was published, Sandburg was working in Chicago for Day Book, a newspaper which fashioned itself as a defender of the common people. In the poem he attacks the city’s immorality, which he wrote about in his newspaper articles:

They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen your painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.
And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it is true I have seen the gunman kill and go free to kill again.
And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the faces of women and children I have seen the marks of wanton hunger.

Despite its terrible side, Sandburg defends Chicago’s pride and industriousness:

And having answered so I turn once more to those who sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer and say to them:
Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.
Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job, here is a tall bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities;
Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage pitted against the wilderness,
Bareheaded,
Shoveling,
Wrecking,
Planning,
Building, breaking, rebuilding,

Like Sandburg, my father loved the vitality of Chicago, especially its laborers. He had some of the best times of his life in the city as a bartender, during a summer break from Cornell’s School of Hotel Administration, in one of the landmark hotels.

Some of the worse times in his life involved Chicago — like the time a truck carrying a load of meat byproducts that he sold to a dog food company overturned on an icy highway south of the city, spilling its contents.

In the dead of night, the Illinois state police notified my father about the accident. The next morning, he flew to Chicago and helped with the highway cleanup.

Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with white teeth,
Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has never lost a battle,
Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse, and under his ribs the heart of the people.
Laughing!

My father laughed about shoveling frozen animal lungs, spleens, livers and kidneys on that highway as rushing vehicles sprayed him with bloodied snow and ice. But his laughter about that awful work came years later.

A Magnificent Mile of Murals

Artist Marina Zuni’s enchanting mural of kissing deer on the campus of Chicago’s Columbia College.

On a recent trip to Chicago for a television shoot, my husband and I stayed at a hotel on South Michigan Avenue, amid the Columbia College campus. It was a lucky choice because I’m a muralista – a devoted follower of murals – and the campus buildings are resplendent with them.

Along the side of the building across from our hotel, there was a surrealist mural of a black chain-link fence turning into a swarm of bright orange-and-yellow butterflies. There were four fabulous murals on the walls of the building surrounding an outdoor parking lot on South Wabash Street: one, by artist Marina Zuni, depicts a buck and a doe kissing while submerged in an ice-blue lake in an enchanted forest. Another mural pays tribute to the comic strips that were born in Chicago, including “Brenda Star,” “Dick Tracy,” “Gasoline Alley,” “Moon Mullins” and “Little Orphan Annie.”

Columbia College, which specializes in the arts and media, had an interesting birth. It was founded in 1890 as the Columbia School of Oratory by Mary A. Blood and Ida Morey Riley, both graduates of the Monroe Conservatory of Oratory, now Emerson College in Boston.

Anticipating a strong need for public speaking at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, which celebrated the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the Americas, the women were inspired to open their school in the exposition city, Chicago, and adopt the exposition’s name, according to a history of the college.

This Columbia College mural reflects Chicago’s important place in comic strip history.

Blood and Riley, who became the college’s first co-presidents, established a coeducational school that “should stand for high ideals, for the teaching of expression by methods truly educational, for the gospel of good cheer, and for the building of sterling good character.”

In 1904, when it was incorporated in Illinois, the college’s name was changed to the Columbia College of Expression. As radio broadcasting grew in the 1920s and 1930s, the college was advertised under different names, including the Columbia College of Speech and Drama, the Radio Institute of Columbia School of Speech and Drama, and the Columbia College of Speech, Drama, and Radio. It settled on Columbia College in 1944.

Photos: Linda Gasparello

Sanders Deserved What Burton and Taylor Got — Privacy

June 29, 2018 by Linda Gasparello Leave a Comment

Public accommodations can be a thorny matter. Historically, Virginia has had its problems, as have other states and nations.

In Marshall, Va., a little greasy spoon became notorious and its owners served time in prison because they refused to serve people of color. Very soon, the only people who frequented the joint were journalists who hoped to catch the owners in the act of violating the state’s public accommodations law.

In a bar in Baltimore, I watched the owner lie to a black man who wanted service. “This is a private club, but I could sell you something to go,” the owner said. It wasn’t a club; it was racism at work.

At a roadside restaurant in South Africa, before the fall of apartheid, my family and I and our African driver stopped for a bite. I was told that our driver couldn’t enter this humble establishment with me and my family and would have to eat in the car. We all ate in the car.

Obviously, there was no race dimension in the booting of White House press secretary Sarah Sanders from the Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Va., but there was the owner’s anger, fury and protest. It was a comment on actions of the administration Sanders defends daily. Lexington, located in the Shenandoah Valley, is a thoroughly Trump town — home to the Virginia Military Institute, Washington and Lee University, flag-bedecked houses, pickup trucks with NRA decals, and Fox on the box.

The restaurant owner, Stephanie Wilkinson, said Sanders didn’t meet the restaurant’s standards of kindness, compassion and cooperation and that’s why she kicked out Sanders. Clearly Wilkinson was vexed, as many are these days, with the profound national division over the treatment of immigrant children at the border and the constant defense of mendacity by Sanders.

While political speech deserves defense, I think one deserves to eat one’s vittles without victimization. Chowing down shouldn’t be an opportunity for others to speak up.

Customers who meet reasonable standards of behavior and dress shouldn’t be denied service or yelled at while exercising their right to patronize public places. I think it was wrong for protesters to attack Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen at a Mexican restaurant in Washington. Some privacy in public is an entitlement, even if the president behaves in outrageous ways with ad hominem attacks on allied leaders, schoolyard abuse of his detractors and a rabid-dog approach to public life.

There isn’t much for which I can claim the moral high ground, but when it comes to restaurants, I have credentials — top-drawer bona fides, as it were.

Back in 1962, I was employed by one of the London newspapers, notorious for intruding on peoples’ privacy. My assignment was to follow a couple of lovebirds around London. They were Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton and my job was to spend all day and much of the night at the famous Dorchester Hotel, where love was being committed.

Except that they never entered stage center.

Every day I made my way to the five-star hotel and sat around, had drinks (which the hotel provided free) and hoped to see them coming or leaving or, fond hope, kissing on the backstairs. No joy. Even hopes of asking the chambermaid about the bed were nobbled by hotel security.

Then one Sunday in Dulwich, a green and pleasant oasis in south London, my then wife, a brilliant journalist, Doreen King, and I went for our Sunday lunch, an English tradition, at a very nice pub. And there they were, my prey: Taylor and Burton as large as life having lunch. Not just having lunch, but at the next table.

My wife whispered, “Are you going to call the office and get a photographer? What questions have you got ready?”

I looked at the lovers at the next table. Never have I seen two people so in love, so happy with each other. My wife and I agreed silently to leave them alone.

I’d like to be able to say that Burton winked, but he didn’t. He had eyes only for Taylor.

To my mind, the lovely (Taylor and Burton) and the less so (Nielsen and Sanders) should be able to enjoy a private meal in public. I missed a scoop on this belief.

Photo Editorial credit: Michael Candelori / Shutterstock.com