I present to you the strange case of Elon Musk. Whatever he does, his detractors, or at least his minimizers, seem to control the narrative.

When his Falcon Heavy rocket — the largest and most sophisticated flying today — blasted into space on Feb. 6, there should have been a national outpouring of unabated joy.

Yet it only briefly edged out the news coverage of the GOP memo, emanating from House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, R-California, and its Democratic counter-memo. The greatest show on earth had it all: a rocket you could watch ascending, shedding its reusable stages and flying away, whimsically, with a sports car for a payload.

It was a showcase of American technology and know-how. It was a clear statement that the individual can still triumph in the United States.

President Trump acknowledged the achievement, which was probably hard for him because he and Musk don’t see eye to eye on global warming or much else. Musk’s visions are wildly futuristic, like populating Mars, while Trump is a man firmly rooted in the glories of the United States as an industrial power tethered to past strengths. Also, awkwardly, Musk is an immigrant who might have been kept out under Trump’s policies.

But the general indifference and in some circles antipathy to Musk goes far beyond politics. We embraced Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg as tech heroes, the faces of the future. Musk less so or not at all; maybe because we have narrowed our view of what is exciting tech to the internet and its collaterals.

Although he made his first $500 selling a game program when he was 12, and his first billion as a founder of PayPal, Musk’s real claim to fame is as an engineer and physicist. His Tesla electric car may not survive as the industry leader, but today it is out front.

His rocket may not be the future of heavy-lift space vehicles, but it is the leader today: cheaper and with reusable stages. His SolarCity is not alone in seeking to convert idle roofs to electricity sources, but it is a big player. And Musk’s batteries, though disappointing at the outset, may yet make grid-free houses a reality.

Yet Musk’s detractors are legion and effective. I know quite a few and they range from an electric company chairman (who accused him of lying and denounced him to me in the most vociferous tones), to financial seers (who question the viability of any of his companies), to conservatives (who believe that he has misused government funds, and his “private” company owes everything to government support). The transportation industry, almost to a man, believes Musk’s plan for an underground, people-mover vacuum tube is nuts.

I, too, have been in the ranks of the detractors, at least in part. I sought to have him correct a whopper about nuclear versus solar power. He had his sums wrong by a factor of hundreds.

Yet you have to love Musk for thinking on a scale that hasn’t been seen for over half a century. He is a throwback to the great builder-engineers of the past: men who built the bridges, canals, dams and railroads, and electrified the United States.

As a nation, we used to be devoted to the big, the bold and the futuristic. Now, we’ve developed sophisticated ways of defeating big projects.

After the 1960s we lost our passion for the big idea and the big machine, from nuclear power plants to big civil engineering. The late, great Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-New York, lamented this lack of courage to go big on a project.

Westway — the highway for New York City’s West Side — was defeated partly to protect the striped bass in New York Harbor. Moynihan said, “There is a kind of stasis that is beginning to settle into our public life. We cannot reach decision.”

I don’t wish to live on Mars, I don’t want to be whisked in a tube from Washington to New York. I’m even undecided whether I want to ride in space — but try me.

I don’t know whether Musk will go broke, whether he’ll overreach or whether he’ll give the whole world a new frontier. But until (and if) a better dreamer comes along, I’m glad we have him reaching for the planets.

 

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Photo: Elon Musk stands inside a rocket awaiting assembly. Credit: SpaceX

Nicholas von Hoffman, who has died at the age of 88, streaked across the journalistic sky in the 1970s like a comet. From the pages of The Washington Post, he shined in a way that no journalist had done on any paper since H.L. Mencken in The Baltimore Sun in the early 20th Century.

Nick, as he was called, burst onto the pages of The Post’s Style section in a way that was unique. At that time, the section itself was novel and about to be copied across the country.

People lined up to buy The Post to be entertained, to be outraged, to be titillated, but mostly to see what the mad wordsmith devil was up to that day. Nick used words to create explosive devices, which he lobbed from the pages of the paper with awesome effect.

He was my colleague at The Post and he proved that the page, any page in any newspaper, can come alive with great writing; in Nick’s case, combative stuff that took no prisoners, favored none and offended all. If you read him long enough, eventually you would be outraged. It was so exquisitely abusive, so willfully offensive that The Post had to hire security personnel to sort the mail: It contained dead animals, feces, razor blades and possibly poison.

Nick was not the perfect journalist. The serious people in the journalism schools would not cite him, I imagine, as a model. His facts were chosen to accommodate his point of view that day.

He said he was a “radical journalist”. He had worked for Saul Alinsky, the admired and reviled Chicago community organizer. Criticizing the high cost of medicine, Nick wrote that if you stare at the sign of the Hippocratic oath it will morph into a dollar sign.

Nick did not go to college, but he had a deep knowledge and love of language. He was, well, a poseur, a literary exhibitionist and a controversialist.

He did not let the facts stand in the way of a great rant. He skewered Republicans and Democrats alike, calling the Republican minority leader in the Senate, Everett Dirksen, of Illinois, “a piece of American political bric-a-brac.” The Democratic Party, he wrote ,“to its committed members was still the party of heart, humanity and justice, but to those removed a few paces it looked like a Captain Hook’s crew of ambulance-chasing lawyers, rapacious public-policy grants persons, civil rights gamesmen, ditzy-brained movie stars, fat-assed civil servant desk squatters, recovering alcoholics, recovering wife-beaters, recovering child-buggers, and so forth and so on: a grotesque lineup of ill-mannered, self-pitying, caterwauling freeloaders, banging their tin cups on the pavement demanding handouts.”

He was fired from CBS’s 60 Minutes for likening Richard Nixon, during the last days of his presidency, to a dead mouse on a kitchen floor, waiting for someone to take it by the tail and throw it in the garbage.

Yes, Nick was reprehensible. And I loved him. I loved him for his outrageousness and his hatred of cant. I loved his personal insouciance and his extraordinary literary skill. But most of all, I loved him because he made the pages of newspapers thrilling and unmissable: the place to have your nose buried first thing in the morning. Thanks, Nick.

Comfort Dogs Brought Up Short by the Airlines

Doggone, but it was nice while it lasted.

I refer to the number of dogs you saw in the airports during the last holiday season. People had simply declared their dogs “comfort dogs.” Quite right. Every dog is a comfort dog. I have never had a dog that was not a comfort. They are the great reliable comfort in human life, bar none, I might add.

But I read that the airlines, appalled at the sheer number of canines traveling, are going to try and limit the number of comfort dogs to those of the truly sick, blind and otherwise incapacitated. It makes me heartsick.

By the way, dogs love to fly. I used to take my Siberian Husky flying, back in my private pilot days. He loved it, except for landing: He was upset by the ground rushing up. No fool he.

The Things They Say

“There comes a time to join the side you’re on.” — Midge Decter, journalist

In announcing import tariffs on solar panels of 30 percent, President Trump appears, as often, to be taking a hammer to fix a watch: If it doesn’t break, it might start running again. In the case of the solar industry he won’t break it, but he might cause it to miss a beat or two.

Solar is one of the great success stories. It is a fast-growing industry, which is adding more jobs — mostly in installation — than any other economic sector. It is, as they say, on a roll.

The big mission for solar is carbon-free electricity on rooftops, at electric utilities and in the facilities of companies like Google, Apple and Walmart, which want to be colored green. Other uses include autonomous generators for remote locations.

The idea of using the sun’s energy in various things is not new. In Botswana, for example, a few black pipes placed on a roof have provided hot water probably since the 1920s. I first saw them there in the 1960s.

After the 1973 oil crisis, solar was examined seriously in the United States as a power source. Various ideas were afoot. The favored one was to create “farms” of mirrors aimed at a central tower with a boiler. One such installation was at the Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, N.M.; a larger demonstration plant was built in Barstow, Calif.

But it was science that made the difference, much of it done in the Department of Energy’s national laboratories. The solar cell, pioneered at Bell Laboratories and used for space exploration, was the ticket. The direct conversion of sunlight into electricity opened the floodgates of possibility. Whoosh!

Early in the solar story, the technology was regarded as fanciful by the electric industry, which favored coal and nuclear. But as prices have fallen, enthusiasm has risen and now solar and wind are hot tickets in the electricity stakes. Germany has more deployed solar than any other country, but deployment is aflame worldwide. When better batteries or other storage devices come on the market, solar will get a second boost.

Like many technologies pioneered in the United States, solar cell and panel manufacturing has moved to Asia. China is playing a dominant manufacturing role with factories on the mainland and other countries, including Taiwan and Vietnam.

Industry calculates that the immediate effect of Trump’s tariffs will be to cut the rate of deployment and cost jobs. The Solar Energy Industries Association calculates 23,000 jobs will go this year.

But solar will begin to adjust, probably with more Chinese factories being established in the United States. This is how the Japanese car manufacturers dealt with tariffs.

Interestingly, the two companies that filed complaints to the U.S. International Trade Commission, resulting in the Trump tariff hike, are both foreign-owned. Atlanta-based Suniva is mostly Chinese-owned and Hillsboro, Ore.-based SolarWorld is German-owned.

More interesting is the Department of Energy’s decision announced by secretary Rick Perry to offer a prize of $3 million for innovation in domestic chip manufacturing. The government, in my experience, does best when it is pulling an industry to achieve a goal and far less well when it is pushing it.

A prize is classic pulling. Aviation prizes offered by newspapers and boosters were early incentives for flight, first across the English Channel and later the Atlantic.

The government saying, “We are going to the moon. You help us get there” works far better than giving aerospace contractors a bunch of money in the 1960s and saying, “Try to get to the moon.”

With its solar actions of a tariff and a prize-incentive, the Trump administration is both pushing and pulling.

Great Drama at The Washington Post Caught by Spielberg

I read somewhere that director Steven Spielberg says he does not read books. However Spielberg gets his information, he has gotten the newspaper trade right, very right in “The Post.”

It is one of the best films about the inside workings of a newspaper.

It involves the decision, reached between the publisher of The Washington Post and its editor in June 1971, to publish the collection of secret documents detailing the hopelessness of the Vietnam War from 1964 onward. Collectively, these are known as the Pentagon Papers. They showed conclusively that the government had always known that the war was a losing proposition and covered it up.

They also, it must be said, showed that the media, for all the reporters crawling over South Vietnam, did not know what the government knew. The story was missed.

This is a film apposite for our time, both as an illustration of the duplicity of governments, in this case under Democratic and Republican administrations (Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon), and the key role of a free press in checking government.

It is also a shot in the arm for the newspaper trade, which is under attack frontally from President Trump and his merry band of besmirches and from financial undermining, occasioned by the flight of advertisers to the internet.

This is a work that is not only fine entertainment but also incredibly accurate. I can make that statement because I was working at The Washington Post at the time and I knew the protagonists, Ben Bradlee, the storied editor and his publisher, Katharine Graham.

Watching this film I marveled at how much Tom Hanks looked like Bradlee, given he was a little heavier than Bradlee, who delighted in looking like David Niven playing a jewel thief in the South of France. Graham, always called “Mrs. Graham,” is very well replicated by Meryl Streep, although Graham was a little taller and maybe a smidgeon more imperial.

It is Hanks’ portrayal of Bradlee that floored me. He is Bradlee, the boulevardier who used profanity as a tool and could drop an expletive as though it were a precision-guided munition.

Graham and Bradlee risked prison to publish the papers, as did editor Abe Rosenthal and publisher Arthur Sulzberger at The New York Times. You will come out of this movie feeling good about the First Amendment, good about newspapers, bad about governments.

You will be very glad the film industry has a talent as great as Spielberg.

A lesser director might have settled for getting Graham and Bradlee right, but Rosenthal and Ben Bagdikian, The Post’s national editor, too? That is meticulous.

Even the atmosphere of the composing room, back when linotype machines clattered and skilled fingers spaced and secured the little lines of type, is authentic.

Hot-type aficionados, like me, rejoice.

Those were the days. And this is the movie.

 

The Night Paul Bocuse Messed Up

Paul Bocuse, widely described as the most important chef of the last century, has died at 91. He invented nouvelle cuisine, a new form of high French cooking. More fresh produce, lighter sauces and the imaginative pairing of flavors and ingredients marked it. It is reflected in nearly all the fashionable restaurants of today and has influenced chefs around the world.

I was lucky enough to be a guest, along with 11 other diners, at the great man’s legendary restaurant L’Augberge du Pont de Collonges, near Lyon. It was an experience foodies dream about. The restaurant had an open kitchen of the kind that came to be associated with California: You could watch the chefs work.

Bocuse and his wife both stopped by our table.

The food? Exceptional — even though one order got lost. The order just didn’t make it out of the kitchen, and the result was the whole restaurant felt the shame.

When we left one of the captains followed me — thinking that I might be a food writer, which I was not — to apologize. He said simply, “Please believe me, we usually do better.”

Indeed, the great chef did, and in doing so changed the world of fine dining.

When I have told this story to people who know more about Bocuse and his legacy than I do, they tell me I may be the only person who left with an apology: a three-star Michelin apology. I am humbled.

 

The Things They Say

“Facts are better than dreams.” — Winston Churchill

 

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Photo: Washington, DC – July 19, 2017: Inside the Washington Post building. Editorial credit: Nicole S Glass / Shutterstock.com

There are neither enough reporters nor newspapers to cover the great human story of today: the shredding of families to fulfill political goals.

Husbands and fathers are saying goodbye to their American children; and wives and mothers are weeping as they are led away by agents of the U.S. government. They are headed for countries they hardly know and for a future they do know: one of heartache and worry about their loved ones in the United States, and fear for their own survival.

One well-recorded case, thanks to the diligence of local media, was the deportation from Detroit to Mexico of landscaper Jorge Garcia, who was brought to the United States when he was 10 years old. At 39, he was too old to qualify as a “dreamer.”

An Associated Press picture shows him hugging his 15-year-old daughter, 12-year-old son and wife, as she extends her arm to take a parting family photo. There were tears aplenty, but the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents had their way and this, to my mind, state-sponsored cruelty went ahead.

If deportation is extended to the innocent dreamers — approximately 800,000 individuals who enrolled in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which started in 2012 under President Obama — who have been used mercilessly as political hostages, the horror will be multiplied. ICE agents will round up these kids, who have done nothing wrong, and airports will figuratively be drenched in tears.

Slavery left an indelible stain on America. The deportations will come to be a second stain. Many came to America in chains, now many will leave in them.

Every time I write about deportations, I get abusive emails, like this one in which the writer asked rhetorically, “What is it about ‘illegal’ that you don’t understand?”

To that, I offer this battery of replies:

What is it about innocent that you don’t understand?

What is it that is right about sending human beings into danger and possible death?

Where are the evangelical churches with their professed commitment to “family values”?

When did the tears of children, mothers and fathers lose their capacity to wash away the ink of officialdom?

What is it about laws that is so immutable? Are they not made and revoked all the time?

What is it about America that has caused it to turn its back on immigrants when ancestors, save for Native Americans, came from faraway places without papers but with a desire to escape everything from religious persecution (the Pilgrims), to starvation (the Irish), war and genocide (Jews, Armenians, Rwandans)?

I have always opposed free immigration into the United States and Europe, particularly from a single country. That way you get conquest through migration. Some years ago I argued with a friend, a conservative writer, who took me to task. “We are an immigrant country,” he insisted. He still writes about public affairs, but he is silent on immigration.

Once they, the immigrants, are here, assimilation underway or complete, the equation is changed. They have left their Egypt, crossed their Red Sea and they are here: Americans in all but the paperwork. They deserve to live in peace.

Meanwhile the ICE agents, with their paper authorization and their handcuffs, have about them the whiff of authoritarianism; the crushing power of the state coming down on the individual.

The deportation stain is spreading.

 

 

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Photo Editorial credit: Diego G Diaz / Shutterstock.com. An activist wearing a t-shirt reading “Undocumented and Unafraid” speaks at a rally to protest president Donald Trump’s decision to end DACA in Downtown Portland, Oregon, on September 5th, 2017.

Even in a Race Riot, There Was a Place for Civility

Little things mean a lot and manners mean a great deal. Fifty years after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, our national manners about race seems to be fraying.

After King was fatally shot, I was in the thick of the riots in Washington. The one thing I recall with great clarity is — even as shops were being looted and fires set — the rioters paused to be polite to me. Several times men, who were out to destroy or steal as much as they could, ushered me to safety and inquired if I was all right.

In those race riots, there were outbreaks of manners; of people seeing each other as people. Richard Harwood of The Washington Post noticed the same outbreak of politeness and wrote about it.

That is why it is distressing to see socially considerate language deteriorate. It means a deterioration in manners.

In these 50 years, we have come both a long way and not far enough. How we talk about things does matter.

Twenty years ago, while I was hanging out with some Irish television journalists in a bar in Dublin, they began attacking a local newscaster. Nothing unusual there: The writers and producers who write the words spoken on air often resent the newscasters who read them.

They are invariably paid much more than the people who prepare the broadcasts, reap the rewards of celebrity and can be a pain. Remember Ted Baxter in “The Mary Tyler Moore Show”?

In a final comment, one of the most senior of the journalists declared, “Let’s face it, he’s just a Protestant prick!” This remark gave me a start and made me glad that I was naturalized American. We might call someone names in America, but we would not drag in religious affiliation.

In Washington, at the venerable National Press Club, another little shocker. A Malaysian publisher, discussing the dominant position of the Chinese minority in his country, said in a voice so loud that other guests looked around, “The only straight thing about a Chinaman is his hair.” We would neither say nor think that.

A small thing, words and the related manners they codify, but they set the tone. We scatter the words and they grow into attitude and policy.

In my own negotiations — business negotiations, labor negotiations and news-story negotiations — manners have been an essential part of them. If you have publicly denigrated your opponent before you sit down, you will have traded a position on the high ground for one in the swamp.

So why is President Trump, who fancies himself the deal-maker in chief, the denigrator in chief? Dissing others is like lying; no one will believe anything that comes out of your mouth later. A veracity gap has a permanence about it.

 

The Bad, Sad News from Puerto Rico

I have had a lifelong interest in electricity. As a kid in Africa, I learned the difference between having it and not. It is the difference between living and subsisting, hope and hopelessness.

I read an alarming story in The Intercept, an online news publication, which says that despite more than 1,500 highly experienced emergency workers from the mainland in Puerto Rico, crews are sitting idle while the supplies, which would enable them to get on with the job of restoring power to about 1 million American citizens, are locked away in warehouses.

Yankee can-do is apparently not doing, owing to local incompetence and maybe corruption.

 

The Debate over Embassies: Don’t Lose Track of the Facts

Amid all the outrage and some endorsement of Trump’s moving the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, the fact that the two cities are close to each other got lost. It is a distance of 50 miles and I have traveled it several times in, as I remember, about 40 minutes or less by taxi.

As for the new London embassy, it is on the London Underground in Nine Elms, an up-and-coming area in a dynamic and changing city.

It is not Ye Olde London: Just look at the skyline and marvel.

 

The Things They Say

“It’s not tyranny we desire; it’s just, limited, federal government.” — Alexander Hamilton.