White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Covering the White House, From Twilight to Dark

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Freedom of the press, in my view, has two parts. First there is the freedom to publish, to criticize and to petition. Then there is the critical issue of the freedom to gather the news — not just to report it but also to gather it.

Without the freedom to gather the news, the freedom to print it, broadcast it or comment on it becomes pyrrhic. The official line predominates.

Right now, the freedom to report the news at the White House is under attack and the public’s right know is being impinged. What you get: all the news that can be leaked.

Covering the news at the White House has gotten progressively harder since the days of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, the first administrations I covered.

The Trump administration has attacked the press, ridiculed it and is starving it of critical access. Now there is talk of doing away with the daily press briefing, honored and needed. It is where the government is asked what it is doing and ideally tells the people. It is America’s answer to the much admired “Question Time” in Britain’s House of Commons.

It has never been easy to cover the White House, and history is littered with the ways in which presidents sought to affect the way in which they were covered. Jack Kennedy, a darling to some reporters, so hated the coverage he was getting from The New York Herald Tribune that for a while he forbade it in the White House.

Lyndon Johnson worked over the press corps the way he worked over members of Congress: punishment and reward.

At The Washington Daily News, Wauhillau La Hay worried aloud — often in my presence — that the file from the Scripps-Howard Washington bureau (it was an afternoon newspaper owned by Scripps-Howard) would make it hard for her to cover the social side of the White House, her assignment.

Richard Nixon believed that the press was out to get him and his famous enemies list was real. Yet he ran a surprisingly open White House, as had Johnson.

Compared to what was to follow, it was wide open. Once a reporter got through the gate you were a free agent to roam much of the grounds and to visit the West Wing, if you had someone to see. More important, you got one-on-one interviews with principles without some minder from the press office sitting in and acting as a double agent, reporting back on both the journalist and the interviewee.

After your interview, you were sometimes invited into the office of another staffer. As often as not, they wanted to know what you knew as much as you wanted to know what they knew, even during Watergate.

The best information is the information you get face-to-face, one-on-one. That has become very difficult as time has rolled on. Personally, I found the George H.W. Bush open enough. I remember going over to see his chief of staff, John Sununu, without problem. I phoned him, got a time and went over. No press office involvement. Once, he asked me if I would like to write a speech for the president. I averred.

Excessive leaking is a symptom, a cry from within the belly of the beast that all is not well. At this point the leakers are patriots, not criminals.

In recent administrations, the only way for White House reporters to get into conversations with White House staffers has been to travel with the president overseas: a very expensive stab in the dark. A European trip can cost more than $20,000, and few news outlets can afford the gamble. Even if you are in the pool and sitting on Air Force One, nothing is guaranteed.

If, as has been suggested, the daily briefings stop, more leaks are inevitable. If you cannot seek the information directly, you have to try to get it otherwise. If the front door is closed, a ladder up to the window is the next step. At the same time, relationships become more devious. Like an illicit love affair, no public acknowledgment in public places.

If the right to gather the news is abridged, the whole concept of a free press is diminished. The diminishment is underway.

Government in the dark is the government of authoritarians; not the kind of government one expects from a nation that prohibits the “abridging” of the press in its Constitution. Shame.

 

For InsideSources

Photo: Richard M. Nixon press conference. General Services Administration. National Archives and Records Service. Office of Presidential Libraries. Office of Presidential Papers. (01/20/1969 – ca. 12/1974); President (1969-1974 : Nixon). White House Photo Office. (1969 – 1974)

Nuclear Booms in Asia as New Reactor Ideas Flourish in U.S.

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By Llewellyn King

The nuclear electric industry has sustained some mighty blows in the United States and Western Europe in recent years. It might be reeling, but it is not out and it is not going down for the count. Taken globally, things are good.

The need to curb carbon in the air, to service a growing world population and the surging cities are impelling nuclear forward. At the annual summit meeting of the U.S. Nuclear Infrastructure Council (NIC) in Washington, this future was laid out with passion: Nuclear power is experiencing a growth spurt but not in the United States and Western Europe, except for Britain.

Nuclear demand is high where air pollution is at its worst and where economic activity is fast and furious — in Asia generally, and in China and India in particular.

Vijay Sazawal, president of IAEC Consulting, told the NIC meeting that India would be adding two reactors a year to its nuclear fleet moving forward. China and India are building half of the 60 new reactors under construction worldwide, according to Andrew Paterson of Verdigris Capital Group, which studies nuclear.

Paterson predicted world electricity demand will double by 2050 and that most of the demand would come from the megacities of Asia, Africa and Latin America. He said, “By 2030, China will have 15 megacities (10 million or more people) and 150 cities with more than 1 million people.”

Wind and solar energy, the other carbon-free electricity sources, also will grow dramatically but will be constrained by their land needs. Big cities are ill-suited to roof-mounted solar, and windmills require large acreages of open land not found near megacities.

In the United States, the shadow of the Westinghouse bankruptcy is passing over the nuclear community. How could a once-proud and dominant company get its sums so wrong that it has been forced into bankruptcy? The collapse of the company — which was building two plants with four reactors in South Carolina and Georgia, four reactors in China, and was engaged in projects in the United Kingdom and India — will be studied in business schools for generations to come. Bad management, not bad nuclear, has brought Westinghouse and its parent Toshiba to its knees.

But nuclear believers are undaunted. Nuclear advocates have a kind of religious commitment to their technology, to their science and to the engineering that turns the science into power plants.

I have been writing about nuclear since 1970, and I have featured it on my television program, “White House Chronicle,” for more than 20 years. I can attest that there is something special in the passion of nuclear people for nuclear power. They have fervor wrapped in a passion for kind of energy utopia. They believe in the great gift that nuclear offers a populous world: a huge volume of electricity.

The kernel here, the core belief, the holy grail of nuclear is wrapped up in “energy density”: how a small amount of nuclear material can produce a giant amount of electricity in a plant that has few moving parts, aside from the conventional steam turbine. As designs have evolved and plants have become “passive” in their safety systems, the things that can go wrong have been largely eliminated.

To understand energy density think this way: The average wind turbine you see along the highway turns out 2 megawatts of electricity when there is wind, a trifling amount compared to the 1,600 megawatts a new nuclear plant produces continuously — and probably will produce for 100 years before it is retired.

Asia, choking on air pollution and with huge growth, needs nuclear. America is not gasping for new generation: demand is static and there is a natural gas glut. Also, there is land aplenty for solar and wind to be installed.

But U.S. nuclear creativity, even genius, will not rest. The United States is on the frontier, pioneering a generation of wholly new reactor concepts, mostly for small modular reactors and even big new reactors, which may first be built in China and India but, like so much else, will be “thought up in America.”

At nuclear conclaves like the NIC meeting, there is sadness that the U.S. market is stagnant. But there is incandescent hope for the future.

Whoosh! The Electric Car Is Rolling into American Life

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U.S. transportation is about to get a mighty electric shock.

The days of the internal combustion engine are numbered. The electric car is about to do to the traditional gasoline and diesel car engine what the cell phone is doing to the copper-wire, landline telephone: shoulder it out of the way.

Andrew Paterson, a principal with the Verdigris Capital Group, told a conference in Washington on June 7, electric car sales will at least quadruple in the coming decade and then really begin to accelerate. This, he said, was part of a larger electric boom that would see the doubling of world electric demand, mostly in Asia, by the middle of the century.

Electric utilities in the United States stand to benefit from the switch from gasoline and diesel to electricity largely because they will be able to meet the new demand without adding new generation, according to the Electric Power Research Institute in Palo Alto, Calif. It believes most of the charging of electric vehicles will take place off-peak, at night and when there is less demand. At worst the new load will fall partly during the day, when there is a surplus of solar power.

Analysts say much depends on whether commercial and company parking facilities can be turned into charging stations as well. Maybe when the boom really picks up, even parking meters will become charging stations.

The change in transportation will have huge effects beyond the car infrastructure. Gradually, gas stations will become obsolete. Technicians who service cars with oil changes and tuning will be out of work.

Electric cars are fundamentally simpler than today’s vehicles — they will run for tens of thousands of miles without maintenance, and that will be confined to things like tires, brakes and lights. Cities will get cleaner and quieter.

Once upon a time, it was just environmentalists who loved electric cars. Now consumers are gooey over them. The proud owner of a Tesla Model S told me this week that he would never buy a conventional car again. He said his Tesla has it all — quiet, undreamed of acceleration and great luxury. And he has what it takes to go electric easily: a suburban home with a carport and a charging station in his office building in Washington.

Apartment dwellers and those without driveways or garages in townhouses will have to wait for technology to fix their charging needs. Manufacturers are striving for easier charging and longer-endurance batteries.

There are, by my count, less than a dozen dedicated charging companies that have sought to commercialize charging by wiring commercial garages and other places where cars sit. None has been very successful to date and there have been bankruptcies.

As always with new ways of doing things, there is hesitance and a hope that someone else will lead the way. I believe that the moment entrepreneurs find a way of making money from cars in commercial parking lots and other away-from-home sites, there will be a boom in offering charging and the switch to electric will be accelerated. Charging will become big business.

But questions do abound for long-distance driving. Soon 300 miles will be the electric vehicle standard, but it will not get you from Chicago to Los Angeles, or even Washington to Boston.

The speed of technological evolution is the unknown, but it will control the accelerator in the race to electricity. Better batteries, faster charging and more public confidence in the duration of each charge will all control the rate of change.

When it comes to heavy vehicles that travel great distances, like intercity buses and trucks, the conversion to electricity, though yearned for, may be a lot slower. Until smart highways offer charging through induction, using electromagnetic fields, diesel will still rule.

The earliest cars were electric and were thought then to be the future — clean and quiet. But lead-acid batteries could not hack it. Stubbornly Harrods, the famous department store, used electric delivery vehicles around London until the 1960s; maybe because these sedate, quiet, liveried road queens exuded classiness.

Like all revolutions, there will be winners: those who find out how to make money out of battery charging and those who make electricity. And losers: oil companies, gas stations, service departments of dealerships and the long-dreamed-of hydrogen car.

Incontrovertibly, the air in cities will be a winner — a big, big winner.

Trump’s Foreign Policy — Punish Friends, Reward Enemies

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The Great Rift Valley extends from Syria down through east Africa to Mozambique. It is a huge depression with volcanic action, lakes and steep-sided gorges. Think of the Grand Canyon and start multiplying.

When contemplating President Donald Trump’s foreign policy, I think of the Great Rift Valley: the largest gash in the Earth’s surface.

The president, in the incoherence of his foreign policy, is creating great gashes between traditional allies that will leave scars down through history. He also appears to be set on empowering our putative enemies, Russia and China.

Many of us White House watchers think it is quite possible that some of those around the president had questionable relations with the Russians both during the campaign and after the election. Their motivation remains unclear. Also unclear is why Trump is so pro-Russian.

Russia’s motivation is known: It wants the United States to lift the sanctions imposed after Russia invaded Crimea and started a surrogate war in eastern Ukraine.

It is also clear that Russia has an interest in destabilizing Europe, whether it is by manipulating its energy supply or interfering in its elections, as it tried to do most recently in France. Russia has a policy and it is hostile to European and North American interests from the Arctic to the Balkan states.

Trump could end the whole Russian business very quickly by finding out — if he doesn’t already know — who in his immediate circle did what, why and when. He could tell us himself of his involvement.

China is another Trumpian riddle. He campaigned against China for job snatching, currency manipulation, the trade deficit and its incursions into the South China Sea.

In a classic East meets West scenario, Trump, the self-styled dealmaker, was going to sit opposite Chinese President Xi Jinping and negotiate. But when they met at the White House, all points of contention evaporated; even freedom-of-navigation operations by U.S. warships in international waters near contested reefs in the South China Sea were curtailed. Either there was no negotiation, or Trump folded.

There is a Potemkin village quality to Trump’s claims to have opened opportunities for U.S. firms in China. China has not abridged its local participation laws, so U.S. companies doing business there still have to have a Chinese partner, which must have equity control. It is a system the Chinese use to steal U.S. expertise and technology. As to Trump’s claim of Chinese currency manipulation, it has disappeared — maybe it was a dubious issue all along.

If all of this is in the hope that China might stop North Korea building nuclear weapons and delivery systems for them. Well, that has been a vain hope of other presidents. China has no interest in curbing Kim Jong-un for its own reasons and because of the leverage, paradoxically, it gives China with the United States.

But what history might judge as the more egregious Trumpian folly in Asia is his abandonment of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a carefully crafted deal to keep the economies of United States and 11 other Pacific nations growing without China, which would not have been a partner. Now the gap left by the United States is being filled by China, as are other gaps. Europe, deeply disturbed by U.S. softness to Russia, climate change policies, protectionist rhetoric, and vitiation of past practices and agreements, is looking reluctantly to China for stability in a crumbling world order.

The goals of Trump’s foreign policy are obtuse, subject to stimuli known only to him — examples include his unexplained enthusiasm for Saudi Arabia, and his complete hostility to everything done by President Barack Obama, including the Cuba opening. The results, though, are not in doubt: gladness in Moscow and Beijing and sadness and confusion in London, Paris, Berlin and among our friends worldwide.

So far Trump’s exploits are not only capricious, but also very dangerous, slamming those countries that share U.S. values and encouraging those who oppose our interests. These rifts will not heal quickly. Once a nation is labeled untrustworthy, it is distrusted long after the creator of the distrust has left the field. The rifts remain, great gashes in global confidence.

The Awful Budget and the Ugly Thinking Behind It

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On the face of it, President Donald Trump’s $4.1 trillion budget for 2018 is risible. Its math doesn’t add up; it assumes an unlikely growth rate of 3 percent per year through 2027; and it avoids calculating the tax cut, which has been promised as the largest in history.

It lays siege to research from medicine to high energy physics — future invention is none of the government’s business. It takes calculated aim against environmental science. It also takes an axe to the State Department and American diplomacy, which has been vital to our national interest since the founding of the republic.

But it really warms to its perfidy when it comes to Medicaid and other programs for the poor. It says what some people have whispered for years: The poor are poor because they don’t work, and the sick have charities and emergency rooms.

It is policy based on hearsay, on the reprehensible arguments of the country club soiree and on the folk wisdom of talk radio.

At one level, the budget is an abrogation of responsibility as it says to Congress, “You make this work.” At another, it is a look into the dark hearts of some of those around the president. You have to exempt Trump, partly, because pulling together the budget is not his kind of thing: He wasn’t slaving over the numbers, debating the importance of medical research or the global need for diplomacy. That was done by his surrogates, those who hate what they call the “deep state,” but which might also be called governance.

Broad strokes are Trump’s thing and having authorized them, eager hands have molded what passes for a budget but is in fact a guide to the narrow and deeply prejudiced thinking of the men and women who work in the White House and Mick Mulvaney, the budget director and former congressman from South Carolina.

It is not so much a budget as it is a view into the hearts and minds of the most extreme wing of the conservative persuasion, circa 2017. It is a revelation of ignorance, prejudice and indifference to the humane needs of the United States.

It is the lifting of a caprice that has contained their worst instincts for a long time. Now the hard edge, the granite heart, the cold-steel shoulder to sickness, poverty, incapacity and the resources that might abate their attendant suffering is on full view.

If you don’t see it in the budget, look to the Justice Department and to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who is all silvery charm on the outside and whose heartlessness can only be measured degrees below zero. For the first time in a long time, Congress was moving toward meaningful reform of the justice system with an end to mandatory and hideously long sentences. The Sessions view: Better to lock them up and throw away the key — and all the better if you put them in for-profit prisons.

Criminologists hate mandatory sentences, and most congressmen know them to be perverse and to result in punishment that is both cruel and unusual. It frustrates judges. The judges and prosecutors are denied the right to use their wisdom in the sentencing, instead substituting the wisdom of Congress and the attorney general.

The same harshness permeates the Department of Homeland Security with the vicious implementation of deportations of family members who are living good, productive lives in America. No thought is being given to any solution to the illegal immigration problem — at heart a human problem, not a national security or a criminal one. There are other ways short of deportation to recognize both the illegality of the immigrants and to give them the American life they have so desired. A renewable work permit, for example, not citizenship or the heavy knock of the state on the door — dreaded down through all of history.

This is a budget that is not only dangerous but also explicitly callous. It reveals a black heart, a locked mind and an indifference to U.S. needs in years to come. It will be amended in Congress, but its message will linger. It is an ugly message.

 

Image: President Donald J. Trump, joined by Vice President Mike Pence, displays his signed Executive Order for the Establishment of a Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, Thursday, May 11, 2017, in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C.  This image is a work of an employee of the Executive Office of the President of the United States, taken or made as part of that person’s official duties. As a work of the U.S. federal government, the image is in the public domain.

Signs of Faith: Portuguese Culture Thrives in West Warwick, R.I.

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I live in the Riverpoint section of West Warwick, R.I., which I call “Portugal on the Pawtuxet River.” Riverpoint has a Portuguese American Citizens Club; the Jerry’s supermarket stocks Portuguese food brands, like Gonsalves; and there is a Portuguese bakery, Matos, in nearby Arctic Village – I recommend their three-bite, egg custard tarts, pasteis de nata.

Photo: Linda Gasparello

All around the circle at Riverpoint, but especially as you go up Providence Street to Arctic Village, you’ll see modest houses, each with baroque front yard landscaping: flowering cherry trees shaped like umbrellas, espaliered shrubs and statuary – especially Virgin Mary statues, either brightly painted or stark white.

Most of the Virgin Mary statues are adorned with plantings – often with perennials, like hostas, and sometimes with plastic flowers or small American and Portuguese flags.

In the backyard of a house near the Bradford Soap Works, there is an Our Lady of Grace statue: a Virgin Mary with outstretched arms, standing on the serpent Satan. The blue paint has largely peeled off her robe, but the snake hasn’t lost any of its black paint. It looks lifelike — and like it is headed into the poison ivy that is creeping closer to the statue.

Just off Riverpoint circle, there is a house where another Our Lady of Grace statue stands among well-tended hostas in a tiny plot along the driveway. I call her “Our Lady of the Hostas.”

I have a chit-chat friendship with the Portuguese American woman who lives there. Recently, when she saw me admiring the lush plants, she said, “I think Our Lady is smiling because the Pope has made saints of two Portuguese children.” She was referring to Pope Francis’s canonization of siblings Francisco and Jacinta Marto who, with their cousin Lucia Santos, reported that on March 13, 1917, the Virgin Mary made the first of six appearances to them while they grazed their sheep in Fatima, Portugal.

My favorite religious statue in Riverpoint is on East Main Street. It occupies the entire side yard of a house, where you’d expect to see a picnic table and benches or a circle of lawn chairs.

Actually, it is a tableau of brightly painted statues: a statue of Jesus is flanked by one of St. Anthony holding Baby Jesus and another of the Virgin Mary. Fourteen winged cherubs, hands clasped in prayer, stand at their feet. I can only surmise that the boys are dressed in blue, and the girls are dressed in pink.

Bygones Worth Remembering

My first encounter with the Portuguese wasn’t in Portugal. It was on a train from Paris to Dax in June 1968. I was 13 years old and I was headed to this spa town in southwestern France, whose thermal springs and mud baths have been noted for the cure of rheumatism since Roman times, when it was known as Aquae Tarbellicae. There I was to meet Monsieur and Mme. Albert Barrieu with whose family I would spend a few life-expanding summers.

The afternoon before I was to take the train to Dax, Madame Berri, who owned the suburban Paris agency that paired me with the Barrieus, warned me to get to the Gare d’Austerlitz early. “The trains to the southwest are crowded on Saturdays,” she said, handing me my ticket. It was going to be a long trip, over six hours, and I couldn’t wait to take it.

I was staying at a youth hostel at 11 rue du Fauconnier in the Marais – and 49 years later, the Hotel Fauconnier is one of three youth hostels in Paris. After a week in Paris, I was a Metro master; I knew it was about a 10-minute ride from the St. Paul station to the Gare d’Austerlitz. Even so, I packed my suitcase, showered and slept in my dress that Friday night. As I remember, I wanted to have more time to eat the breakfast the hostel laid out for the always-hungry youth: croissants, bread rolls, butter, apricot jam, and small bowls of coffee with hot milk.

Eating that breakfast turned out to be one of the smarter things I did that day.

I got to the station with a lot of time to spare. When my train was announced, I noticed that people where running down the platform and pushing into the cars, and shouting to each other in a language I couldn’t identify. I had a second-class ticket, and all those people seemed to be headed to second-class cars.

I couldn’t run fast because I was wearing wooden-soled clogs. By the time I climbed into one, all the seats in the compartments were taken – and all were taken in the other second-class cars.

As the train pulled out of the station, I placed my hard-sided, American Tourister suitcase in the aisle of one of the cars, and looked out the window. An unsympathetic conductor took my ticket and told me that I might have to stand a long time because “the train is filled with Portuguese, who are going back home for their national holiday.”

Clogs were the right shoes for standing for hours. I was alternately standing and looking out the window, or sitting on my suitcase looking at the Portuguese family across the aisle in a compartment.

About two hours into the trip, the father pulled down a couple of suitcases from the overhead racks. Out came the bread, the sausage, the cheese, the fruit and the wine.

A girl about my age asked her mother something. Then, through the open compartment door, she asked me in French if I wanted some of their lunch. I thanked her and helped myself to some bread and cheese. It was the first time I had eaten a papa seco – a soft, baby bottom-shaped roll. Poof went my memory of the hostel’s petits pains.

The train arrived in Dax in the late afternoon. I got off and waited for M. and Mme. Barrieu on the platform, as Mme. Berri had told me to do. A blonde woman accompanied by a teenaged girl looked at me for a while. They spoke with each other, shook their heads and walked away. No one was left on the platform but me, so I took a seat – and I was happy to do so.

After a couple of hours, the station manager approached me. “Are you still waiting for someone?” he asked.

I told him that I was supposed to be picked up by Monsieur and Mme. Albert Barrieu who live in Pouillon. “It is a village not far from here. Do you have a telephone number?”

Just as I was reaching into my dress pocket to get it, I saw the blonde woman with the teenager walking toward us.

“Are you Linda?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said.

Mme. Barrieu’s blue eyes filled with tears of relief. “We are so sorry. We saw you, but we thought you were Dutch,” she said.

They were confused by the tag on my American Tourister suitcase, which looked like the flag of the Netherlands, and by my clogs.

 

All photos by Linda Gasparello

Linda Gasparello is the co-host of “White House Chronicle” on PBS. Her e-mail is lgasparello@kingpublishing.com.

Llewellyn King’s Notebook: Stars Realign in Boston Radio

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Joe Mathieu, who for the past six years has been a drive-time news anchor, from 5 a.m. to 10:30 a.m., on WBZ NewsRadio 1030 is moving to WGBH’s “Morning Edition” as the anchor, replacing Bob Seay. Seay will concentrate, according to the NPR station, on enterprise reporting. Probably on sleeping in as well. Drive-time hours are brutal.

On a personal note, I’m delighted. I met Joe when he was putting together the very successful POTUS ’08 channel on SiriusXM Radio. While the channel was supposed to run just for the length of the 2008 presidential campaign, it was so popular that it was made permanent.

Originally, the channel took its title from POTUS, an abbreviation for President of the United States (first used in the late 1800s in telegraphic communications). It dropped the year in its title and defined POTUS as “Politics of the United States.”

I’m glad not only to be a regular commentator on POTUS, Channel 124, but also that it airs the audio from my PBS program, “White House Chronicle,” four times weekends.

My presence there is all due to the days when Joe was the impresario of the channel. I’m indebted to him.

But despite the national reach of his Washington commitments, Joe yearned for his native Boston. He told me he began his career in broadcasting at 14 years old. He graduated from Emerson College, renowned for its arts and communications programs.

I’m glad of the new assignment, not because WBZ is anything but an excellent public service in Boston, but because the new venue will provide more room for Joe’s extraordinary talents as a broadcaster, a political analyst and, his special mastery, as an interviewer.

On the downside, Joe won’t get any more sleep: his WGBH anchor slot, beginning in August, starts at 5 a.m. As a longtime newspaperman and broadcaster, I can tell you about those hours: They’re tough.

Applause for a Table and Its Donors – the Show, too

The Arctic Playhouse, the little not-for-profit theater, located on the main street of Arctic Village in West Warwick, R.I., has a table for you.

Well, it is raffling a magnificent dining-room table, matching upholstered chairs, a sideboard and a hutch. Cardi’s, the furniture chain, donated the table to the theater. It is the centerpiece of the set for the theater’s current, lively production of A.R. Gurney’s “The Dining Room.”

The dining-room set is worth $3,500, and the raffle winner will be chosen after the play’s run. One of the table’s leaves will be signed by the cast and the three Cardi brothers. Instant provenance for a serious set of dining-room furniture.

Raffle tickets are just $10 for one ticket, or $25 for three. Tickets can be bought online or in person at the theater until June 3.

Photo: The cast of A.R. Gurney’s “The Dining Room, currently playing at The Arctic Playhouse, credit Linda Gasparello

Amtrak Is an Exemplar of Infrastructure Woes

Amtrak, so important to New England and the operator of the only bit of rail service between Boston and Washington, D.C., which looks something like a train service should, is having problems at New York’s Penn Station. It is not the awful, crowded concourse at the station, but the awful, crowded rails which passengers don’t see.

Commuter trains have derailed and fixes are going to have to be made with equivalent disruptions this summer. There is even a scheme to reroute the New England trains through Grand Central for the duration.

When will we get the message that infrastructure starved of funding and preventative maintenance fails? Looks like the Trump budget will make matters worse. Broken infrastructure is a tax in its own way. Very taxing.

 

Lead photo: Joe Mathieu, credit CBS

The Air Traffic Control System Is a Miracle, Handle with Care

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The air traffic control system is one of the miracles of our infrastructure: an essential and silent cornerstone of modern transportation. Not only is it the largest and most complex air traffic system on earth, but it is the most egalitarian. It integrates little Textron Cessnas into the same airways as Airbus A380s and Boeing 747s. It manages flights to the smallest airports and the largest.

To know how it works and to have been involved with it as a pilot is to love the system, to venerate it and to want to see it survive. The system was celebrated in “Pushing Tin,” the 1999 film with John Cusack and Cate Blanchett.

But it is falling behind the times. Like so much of the infrastructure it is getting old and has suffered from inadequate sustained funding for years. Attempts to modernize it have been haphazard, underfunded and subject to whims of contractors and Congress.

The first thing about the air traffic control system we have is that it works and it works safely. The second is that it is in real time: You can’t park airplanes in the sky while you fool with new ways of doing things.

The system’s governance has grown to sluggish and bureaucratic, but is the solution to create a corporation? Isn’t that the kind of thinking which gave us Amtrak?

The technical plans for the future of the air traffic control system come under the rubric of “NextGen.” That means using new technologies and changing from the present radar-based system to a GPS-based one. There is no doubt that it will be more efficient and get more airplanes into the sky and onto the ground with the same number of runways. FedEx has already proved that with a privately funded experiment in Memphis.

But NextGen will be a great upheaval. It involves converting from a system which works perfectly with humans at every stage to one which relies on advanced technology for the grunt work of air traffic separation.

It also will affect the air traffic controllers — the heroes of today’s system — who love what they do as much as the pilots who they direct. It is a band of brothers and sisters tied together by tension, excitement and the certainty that they make a difference and that what they do is unforgiving of sloth, stupidity or moodiness.

New systems will affect these extraordinary people bound together by the camaraderie of aviation – which is as strong a bond as I’ve ever found.

They will go, as airline pilots have, from being people who control things to people who manage systems; the art of air traffic control will be subsumed to the technology of air traffic control. No more seat-of-the-pants, just systems management. No more controllers like the one at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport who told me and my flying partner Mike Skov in bad weather, “Get in here! I’ve got a hole.” Or the controller at New York’s LaGuardia who said at 5 p.m., when I was stuck behind a line of jets, and the jet wash was causing my little plane difficulties, “Gentlemen, let me get the single out ahead of you, if you don’t mind.” I went. Machines don’t do kindness, people do.

Now the future of the air traffic controllers and, for that matter, the future of the whole system is in President Donald Trump’s sights. Tighten your seat belts, turbulence ahead.

The case for privatization is that the Federal Aviation Administration is too bureaucratic to manage the changes in the system which are needed. It suggests that the current system is failing. It isn’t. But it is falling behind the technology available: Its computers are old, systems date back to the post-World War II era.

What the FAA’s system needs now is steady funding to facilitate the technological revolution. It doesn’t need a system which will favor the airlines, UPS and FedEx. Can a company be expected to treat the small, rural airport and the small airplane with the same care it does now when money is the rationale?

Surely, there are other ways of streamlining the FAA bureaucracy and guaranteeing multi-year funding without flying into the clear blue yonder of privatization.

Cities, I Know Them by Their Bread

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By Linda Gasparello

I’ve always associated cities with bread. Boston, south of which I was raised, I associate with oatmeal bread. Washington, D.C., where I spent most of my life, I associate with white bread — the Wonder kind.

New York, where I lived for a few years, I associate with seeded rye bread. If you said “New York” to me, I’d think of the malty, sour taste of the rye flour, the slight licorice flavor of the caraway seeds and the fight my teeth would have with the crust. Seeded rye bread is assertive, like New York.

My husband, Llewellyn King, and I have lived in Rhode Island for nearly five years. But I don’t yet associate a bread with Providence. This is curious because the city abounds with artisan and ethnic bread bakeries, especially Italian and Portuguese.

What’s really curious is that restaurants in Providence and around the state don’t routinely bring you bread at some point between sitting down and getting your food.

Restaurants serve bread for a number of reasons. Here are two: Traditionally, serving bread has been a way to welcome guests; and practically, a basket of bread or a small loaf keeps guests happy before the food arrives.

When the poet Omar Khayyam said ecstatically, “A jug of wine, a loaf of bread – and thou,” he was sitting beneath a bough with his beloved, reading a book of verses. Just think, if the 11th-century lovers were alive today, they’d be sitting in a Persian restaurant (alas, there isn’t one in Providence), reading their menus and eating nan-e barbari, a flatbread with pillowy ridges.

I could associate Providence with a flatbread that is ubiquitous in the city: pizza. Providence is a welcoming city. It’s not a stretch to associate pizza with the share-a-slice-with-us welcome that my husband and I have gotten from the city.

It’s Comedy and a Concert Tonight!

Last October, I was introduced to the Rhode Island Philharmonic Orchestra by a friend who sings with the Providence Singers. Under the superb direction of guest conductor Bramwell Tovey, the orchestra and singers performed Mozart’s “Requiem Mass in D Minor” on Oct. 15.

Before stepping onto the podium, Tovey told the bizarre story of how Mozart got a commission from a court intermediary to write a piece commemorating the death of Count Franz von Walsegg’s young wife, Anna, which the pretentious count could pass off as his own. The musical heavyweight died, at 35, while writing the requiem.

Tovey’s lecture came as a surprise to me. Conductors, in my symphonic concert-going experience, never spoke and carried a small stick. My friend told me that the orchestra’s musical director, Larry Rachleff, loved to talk to the audience: It was his schtick.

For 21 seasons, until his retirement from the orchestra on May 6, Rachleff often gave short lectures before he lifted his baton. He is a noted music educator, and currently holds the Walter Chris Hubert Chair at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music in Houston, where he lives with his wife, mezzo soprano Susan Lorette Dunn, and their young son, Sam.

Rachleff is also a skilled standup comedian, as I found out during his farewell concert on May 6.

The performance of the second piece he chose, Joseph Canteloube’s “Songs of the Auvergne,” was delayed to deal with an offstage problem with the soloist’s – his wife Susan – gown. For about 15 minutes, Rachleff summoned all his comedic talents: He told a story about how his family had encountered a naked woman in a lobby of a hotel in Geneva. When someone walked onstage with his score, he joked, “Usually the librarian hands me the score, but tonight she must be otherwise engaged.”

His adoring audience laughed, and they cried when he took his final bow.

Cry Me a River

“In rivers, the water that you touch is the last of what has passed and the first of that which comes; so with present time,” said Leonardo da Vinci.

For nearly a week, if you dipped your hand into the Pawtuxet River at Riverpoint in West Warwick, R.I., you’d touch mounds of filthy foam and pieces of white styrofoam blocks.

From morning till night, I watched this dreck float down the river, collect on the banks and cascade over the dam. I watched pairs of mallard ducks and flocks of geese wading in the smelly suds trapped in the shrubs on both banks. I watched cardinals and other birds, that usually stop for a bite at my neighbor’s porch feeder, pick at the styrofoam icebergs and carry off pieces, presumably to their nests in the wooded banks.

I took pictures and reported this to Anna Cole, a technical staff assistant at the state’s Department of Environmental Management. She dispatched Robert Fritsche, an environmental scientist the department’s Bureau of Environmental Protection, Office of Compliance and Inspection, with impressive speed.

My husband has praised Rhode Island’s beauty in columns in The Providence Journal, on our television program, “White House Chronicle,” and on Rhode Island Public Radio. Now I praise the government for taking the preservation of that beauty seriously.

Above: Pawtuxet River at Riverpoint in West Warwick, R.I., Photos by Linda Gasparello.

Electricity Is the Big Future Winner for Cars, Even Small Planes

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Electricity, the world’s silent workhorse for a century, is about to conquer new worlds.

While electric cars are coming on fast, their acceptance will speed up geometrically in the next decade, according to an extraordinary new study by RethinkX, a San Francisco-based research group and think tank. Indeed, the group is predicting a true revolution in electrified transportation.

In this revolution, futuristic companies with a lot of talent and a lot of money — like Uber, Google and Amazon — will be seminal players. Old-line car companies and the oil companies will have to deal with a new order in which their roles could be dramatically diminished.

The big winner in this transportation future is electricity. Even the electric airplane — an idea about as old as aviation — is surging forward.

While RethinkX raised the curtain on the future of ground transportation in its new study, Uber raised the curtain on the future of the electric airplane this month at its Elevate conference in Dallas. More than 500 aviation enthusiasts attended the conference: dreamers, designers, builders — and even venture capital investors, who have already signed their checks. Dozens of designs for small electric airplanes, using multiple rotors and batteries, were on display. Enthusiasm was incandescent.

This July, small, electric pilotless aircraft — crosses between drones and helicopters — are scheduled to go into service in Dubai. They are supposed to ferry single passengers from their hotels and other gathering points to airports and recreation centers in the largest and most populous city in the United Arab Emirates.

These small aircraft, with electric motors and batteries, have an endurance time of about 30 minutes. EHang, a Chinese company, developed them.

If Uber, and more than a dozen other U.S. companies have their way, similar aircraft will one day take their place in the skies of America and other advanced nations. Uber hopes to test-fly an electric airplane in 2020.

According to RethinkX, the private car is about to disappear, or to be rapidly reduced in importance. The report — which might boost the stock of futuristic companies and electric utilities, and depress the stock of oil companies and old-line car makers and oil companies — is making waves in the far reaches of corporate thinking.

Tony Seba, co-founder of RethinkX and co-author of the report, told me that mainstream analysts are not yet on board with the changes, which will rock the automobile, oil and electric industries. They have not understood the impact of technological convergence, he said.

He sees a future, about to happen, in which driverless electric cars, owned not by individuals, but rather by transportation companies like Uber, flood the streets, to be summoned by phone and directed by voice: “Take me out to the ballgame.”

Seba, an MIT-trained engineer and student of what he calls “disruption,” told me he expects a convergence between electric vehicles, automated driving and ride-sharing will come soon, reducing the number of vehicles on U.S. roads from 247 million in 2020 to 44 million in 2030.

“The average family will save $5,600 in transportation costs,” Seba says.

Apart from the transport companies, the big winner will be the utilities that will see a demand growth of 18 percent, Seba predicts. He believes present infrastructure can accommodate this growth surge because demand will be mostly off-peak.

There are similar expectations of a golden future for small, electric, vertical takeoff airplanes, incorporating drone and other technologies. The limit for the aircraft, which use lithium batteries, is the batteries. But the enthusiasts gathered at Uber’s conference say flight is possible now with present-day batteries and these will only get better.

Richard Whittle, a leading aviation journalist and author who chaired an Elevate session, told me, “It was a pretty impressive event.”

While the arguments by Seba and his co-author James Arbib, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and philanthropist, point to an electrified transportation future, I have one question: Will people give up the personal, primal pleasure of owning a car?

Seba and Arbib think so, pointing out that people used to take pride in their LP and CD collections, but now they access their music electronically.

The future is pulling up on a highway near you; it may also be flying overhead.

 

Photo: Håkan Dahlström, “Electric car charging station” 2013. Used under the Creative Commons Attributions 2.0 Generic License.