Here’s a dirty little secret: The Post Office isn’t so bad.
Although it’s the rhetorical emblem of all that’s wrong with government, the postal service is surprisingly dependable and efficient. Letters get delivered by the millions and very few are lost. Where the Post Office fails, as most government enterprises fail, is that its dynamic is antithetical to creativity, invention and risk-taking. Government enterprises seldom innovate, except those in the defense arena and collateral endeavors like space exploration. The Bonneville Power Administration, a federal agency, does its job well enough, as does the FAA in controlling aircraft. It just wasn’t in the Post Office to create FedEx. In Washington, and across the nation, politicians repeat often and loudly that the worst outcome of any new endeavor would be for the government to run it. To hear Rep. Louis Gohmert, R-Texas, tell it, the government is a vast anti-American conspiracy. Recently, he took to the House floor to protest against a government role in health care and claimed that anything government-run means socialism to him. And socialism, according to Gohmert, is the slippery slope to totalitarianism. In Washington, there’s a more ambivalent attitude toward the bureaucracy. It’s not an abstraction to Washingtonians; government workers are neighbors, commuting companions, friends and family. But that doesn’t mean that Washingtonians are taken in by it, or that they believe the government should grow more. If you know enough government workers, you know that they’re not created equal; neither are their departments and agencies. The Department of Defense is an archipelago of islands of success in a sea of contradiction and confusion. But the agencies, like Housing and Urban Development and Labor, are resigned to a level of ineffectiveness, often doubtful of the virtue of their own missions. The challenge is to know what is best left to government or to the private sector. Attempts to privatize support sectors of the U.S. military (base maintenance, security, fuel, etc.) have led to scandals at every level for companies like Blackwater (now known as Xe Services) and KBR, denounced in Congress and the media. Privatizing war is a questionable undertaking. As often as not, government is lumbered with failing or failed businesses for political or social reasons. Amtrak is front-and-center among these and General Motors may join the group of government orphans — too important to fail and too rickety to succeed. Finally, there is no political will to tackle the thorny issue of productivity in the bureaucracy. Politicians complain of government in the abstract and praise “hard-working men and women” in specific agencies. Sadly, it boils down to hiring and firing. It’s hard to get hired in the government because of rules and rigidities and even harder to get fired. The reverse applies in the private sector. Business operates on incentives, but also on fear. Fear is missing in government employment and it shows. Government is not as inept as conservative politicians like to say, any more than CitiBank and AIG were models of corporate governance. Some things organically belong in the government’s sphere and others far from it. Today’s question is: Where does health care fit? –For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate |
Mugabe in Winter—Still Powerful and Comfortable
The devil looks after his own. Or so it would seem in the case of Robert Mugabe, the de facto dictator of Zimbabwe.
Under Zimbabwe’s unity government established last year, President Mugabe, who took Africa’s garden and trashed it, has retained enough power to reverse the optimistic direction the country is taking. He and his ZANU-PF party still control the discredited central bank; the military; the police; the Central Intelligence Organization, which is Zimbabwe’s version of the KGB; and the Ministry of Information.
Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai who, until the formation of the unity government was Mugabe’s great enemy and rival, has control of the Ministry of Finance. His ally, Finance Minister Tendai Biki, has done the impossible: He has brought the worst inflation the world has ever known to a halt.
The remedy was simple, though extreme. Biki substituted the U.S. dollar for the worthless Zimbabwe dollar. How worthless was it? Would you believe a currency that once had rough parity with the U.S. dollar was trading–if you could find a buyer–for 1 billion (sic) Zimbabwe dollars to 1 U.S. dollar? Incredibly, the Mugabe faction of the government and ZANU-PF party members want to bring back the Zim dollar, as it was known.
Under the new setup, the Zimbabwe Stock Exchange has reopened and is prospering. And again, shops have goods on the shelves for those who can afford them. While U.S. dollars have circulated illegally in Zimbabwe for some time, it is unclear where they are now coming from, and what is the plight of those who have no access to them and no employment, which is most of the population.
In fact, many Zimbabweans live in a barter economy without cash. Rural people lead a desperate subsistence life, relying on perhaps a few chickens, sometimes a goat or, if relatively well off, some cattle. Most depend on growing enough corn to feed their families and on the generosity of relief agencies, although these are often the targets of Mugabe’s thugs. Food is power and Mugabe has used his troops, police and secret operatives to control food, starving the opposition and feeding only his political loyalists.
In the face of Zimbabwe’s tenuous recovery, there are many questions about Mugabe and his acolytes, and about Tsvangirai and his Movement for Democratic Change.Will Mugabe use his control of the military and the courts to destroy Tsvangirai’s reforms?
Mugabe likes to be the top man, even the reviled top man. His unhinging can be traced back to Nelson Mandela’s release from long imprisonment in South Africa and the deserved global acclaim he was welcomed with. Until then, Mugabe had been the golden African leader. Also he and Mandela were courting Graca, the widow of former Mozambiquan leader Samora Machel. Mugabe lost out and Mandela married her.
Too much praise for the reformers in Zimbabwe might set Mugabe off on another spree of destruction. His favorite charge–if he bothers with charges as opposed to random beatings—is treason, which is a hanging offense in Zimbabwe.
There are also question about Tsvangirai: Some of his early supporters are very critical of his conduct as prime minister. One critic, who does not want to be identified but who played a big role in establishing the unity government, told me: “He has become Mugabe’s bagman. That’s about it.”
This was a reference to Tsvangirai’s recent world fund-raising trip. He did secure minor commitments from doubting donor nations, but most want to see what happens. The money that was raised will go to humanitarian efforts, not the Zimbabwe government.
The success or failure of financial reforms may rest on the diamond fields of eastern Zimbabwe. These were only discovered in 2006 and should have been a valuable source of hard currency for Zimbabwe. But Mugabe had another idea: He allowed the military to massacre itinerant miners (in one case, 80) and seize the mines for their own profit. This has solved a pay problem among soldiers and kept the military faithful to Mugabe. Another gift from the devil for his protégé, Robert Mugabe.
Disruptive Technologies and the Agenda They Set
The copper-wire telephone is in danger, traditional advertising is drying up and health care costs are through the roof and rising. What is the villain? Well, it’s technology; particularly, “disruptive technology.”
Disruptive technologies are devastating to established order. And they underlie Congress’s consideration the most wide-ranging legislative challenges it has faced since the New Deal: health care and energy.
Hugely effective but expensive new medical technologies, like magnetic resonance imaging, nuclear therapies and artificial joints, threaten to bankrupt the nation’s health care system. At the heart of the health care debate lie the escalating costs for these new technologies and how to shoulder and control them. The rudimentary solution is to get the well to pay for the sick, in the way that Social Security seeks to get the young to pay for the old.
After health care, Congress has to consider energy and its leitmotif, climate remediation. Here, too, it is faced with new technology forcing the issue. Even as the Senate contemplates taking up the House-passed bill, with its heavy emphasis on renewables, new drilling and discovery technologies are tipping the energy balance towards natural gas and away from other competitors like wind and nuclear power. Ironically, at one time, nuclear power was a disruptive technology that threatened to elbow out coal.
In electricity, Congress can force the market away from the disruptive technology toward something it favors for social and political reasons, like solar or wave power. The cost is simply passed on to the consumer.
As for transportation, the energy imperatives are dictated by the forces of infrastructure and sunk cost. In the long term, there are four options that will keep the wheels turning:
1.plug-in hybrids leading to full electric-powered vehicles;
2. hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles;
3. ethanol-powered vehicles and;
4. compressed natural gas-powered vehicles
These options are not created equal. Hybrids are here but the batteries are expensive, and the plug-in option dictates that the car sits in a garage or a parking lot that is equipped with plugs for charging. Also, the batteries decline with time and cannot be used after they lose about 30 percent of their design capacity. If you live in a high-rise, plugging in your vehicle is not yet an option. Ditto pure electric vehicles.
Hydrogen is a darling technology of the green community, which marvels that it is emission-free except for water. Trouble is, there is hydrogen aplenty in nature but not free-standing; it has to be extracted from hydrocarbons, like natural gas, or from water, with huge electrical input. Why not use the gas or the electricity directly?
General Motors markets a duel-use vehicle that can run on E85 (85-percent corn-derived ethanol). This fuel was a favorite of President George W. Bush; but the environmental impact of putting so much farmland down to corn for fuel and the effect on corn prices has taken the bloom off ethanol.
Natural gas–which can be used in a modified gasoline engine and has been made more abundant by revolutionary horizontal drilling technology–is advocated by T. Boone Pickens and others. It has come late to the transportation fuel wars because of fears of shortage, now proved groundless. Natural gas is not without emissions, but these are about half of those of gasoline. And it may be the big energy disrupter.
Congress, reluctant to pick winners for fear of also creating losers, intends to throw cash at every option in the hope that the market can make the choice later. But the market is not immaculate–and less so in energy than almost any other commodity. Electricity has to move down a finite number of power lines, and transportation fuels depend on the nation’s 160,000 gas stations for market entry. You can expect the gas station infrastructure to, say, provide replacement batteries, charging points, hydrogen terminals or natural gas compressors. But can you expect it to provide all of these?
Maybe the gas station, rather than being the vital element in the new energy regime, will be rendered obsolete by disruptive new technologies that allow gas compressing and electric charging in home garages and commercial parking lots. Maybe the hybrid of the future will have a compressed-gas engine and plug-in capacity, and all this will be achieved without the traditional gas station. Technology enhances, modifies and improves, but it is hell on established order.
Leon Trotsky said: “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.” Congress ought to know that technology, disruptive technology, is interested in it. –For the Hearst/New York Times syndicate
U.S. Chamber of Commerce Faces Its Own Guns
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s building on H Street in Washington glowers across Lafayette Park at the White House. It is a impersonal building, austere even, reminiscent of a British colonial post office.
With 3 million members, and the largest budget of any trade group in Washington, the chamber is a political force to be reckoned with, as is its hard-driving chief executive, Thomas Donohue.
Its stance is that American business is a kind of Gulliver, tied down by the Lilliputian strings of regulation and regressive public policy. Under Donohue, the chamber has relentlessly sought out threats to business, real and hypothetical. It opposes unions; regulation; government intrusion into markets; expansion of programs that cost tax dollars, which is all social programs; and raising the minimum wage. It is more ambivalent these days about health care. And Donohue can be quite capricious; for example, he has called for normalizing relations with Cuba.
Now the chamber is roiled as it seldom has been. The casus belli is climate change, and what a storm it has produced. Three large electric utilities have withdrawn from the chamber, accusing it of extremism in its stance on climate change. Sneaker giant Nike has resigned from the chamber’s board of directors in protest, but is still a member.
The utilities include Exelon, by some measures the largest utility; Pacific Gas & Electric, a giant in California; and PNM, the largest utility in New Mexico. As a percentage of membership, they do not affect the chamber much; but strategically, their rebuke means a great deal. They are the very constituency the chamber and Donohue are out to help. They burn coal as well as other fuels, and they are critically affected by what is to happen in climate legislation or regulation.
The utilities want Congress to pass cap-and-trade legislation. If Congress fails to pass the legislation, they fear Environmental Protection Agency regulation. The stakes are high. The chamber is opposed to the present cap-and-trade legislation before Congress, and has challenged the science that would be used by the EPA.
“If Congress does not act, the EPA will and the result will be more arbitrary, more expensive and more uncertain for investors and the industry than a reasonable, market-based legislative solution,” said John Rowe, Exelon’s chairman and chief executive officer.
Two of the big rebel utility CEOs are national business figures: Rowe of Exelon is revered as a prince-philosopher inside and outside of the electric industry; and Peter Darbee of PG&E, who wrote a strongly-worded letter of resignation to Donohue, is a major corporate friend of the environment.
All three utilities, along with their Washington trade association, the Edison Electric Institute, favor cap-and-trade legislation now being considered in Congress. Another utility savant, James Rogers of Duke
Energy, is pulling his utility conglomerate out of the National Association of Manufacturers, because of its opposition to cap-and-trade.
Darbee hit hardest at the chamber. In a two-page letter he wrote: “We find it dismaying that the chamber neglects the indisputable fact that a decisive majority of experts have said the data on global warming are compelling and point to a threat that cannot be ignored. In our view, an intellectually honest agreement over the best policy response to the challenges to climate change is one thing; disingenuous attempts to diminish or distort the reality of these challenges are quite another.”
The chamber has opposed not only the EPA’s plans to regulate carbon emissions in the absence of legislation, but also has attacked the scientific basis put forward by the agency. Yet Donohue insists that the chamber is neither denying the carbon emissions problem, nor is opposed to a legislative solution. Instead, it wants one tied to a global agreement on greenhouse gas emissions to protect U.S. companies from onerous conditions.
Friends of Donohue–who applaud much of what the chamber stands for–say that it is caught in a position where it has to say what it is for, not just what it is against. The chamber has always been at the barricades, not facing its own guns. The experience is novel and unpleasant for those on H Street. –For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate
The Benefits of Natural Gas
Natural gas is nifty stuff. It burns twice as clean as other fossil fuels, leaves no ash to be disposed of and is critical to many industrial processes.
It is used for everything from drying grain to distilling liquor. It also can fairly easily substitute for oil as a transportation fuel. Buses in big American cities increasingly run on it, as taxis in Australia have for years.
Its history is a tale of how markets work, how technology can broadside the best futurists, and how planners and politicians can get it wrong.
More important than the lessons of history is the fact that we appear now to have more natural gas than was ever predicted, and we can look forward to possibly hundreds of years of supply at present rates of use. And it could slay the foreign oil dragon, or at least maim the brute.
Trouble is, because of its tortured history, natural gas has often been put on the back burner.
When the first commercial oil well, the Drake, was sunk in western Pennsylvania in 1859, natural gas, or methane to give it its proper classification, was not on anyone’s mind except deep miners, for whom it was a lethal hazard. The Oil Age began without natural gas. When it was found in conjunction with oil, it was unceremoniously burned off: a process known as flaring.
In the United States, natural gas faced political problems as well as infrastructural problems. Natural gas production was regulated by the predecessor of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the Federal Power Commission. It was bound by a legal ruling known as the Permian Basin Decision that kept the price of natural gas artificially low, discouraging new supplies and new infrastructure, such as processing plants and storage. This led to shortages and to a lack of confidence in the future of natural gas.
During the energy shortages of the 1970s, natural gas was discounted by the government and much of industry. Congress panicked and passed a piece of legislation called the Fuel Use Act, which forbade the use of natural gas for many things, including pilot lights in new kitchen stoves. Utilities were told not to even think of burning natural gas: It was too precious and there was too little of it.
Gas demand declined precipitously in the 1980s. And in 1987, the Fuel Use Act was repealed. Along with deregulation of gas, a gas boom resulted.
But it was technology that changed everything. New drilling techniques increased supply. New turbines, based on airplane engines, started to enter the electricity market. They were clean, easy to install, and reached high efficiencies of fuel-to-electricity conversion. Today, 30 percent of our generation comes from these “derivative” machines.
So successful was natural gas in the 1990s that new concerns about supply shook the industry; and the public was told that gas would have to be imported from the Middle East, especially from Qatar. Permission was sought to build dozens of liquefied natural gas terminals around the coastlines.
Now it looks as if natural gas is a fuel with an enormous resource base–thanks to technology. The technology in question is horizontal drilling. Imagine you sink a hole 2 miles into the earth and then send out horizontal roots in all directions from this vertical trunk. That, in essence, is horizontal drilling and it makes available trillions of cubic feet of natural gas trapped in close formation shale deep in the earth.
Ironically, or fittingly, this takes the energy story back to Pennsylvania where a vast shale field called the Marcellus is being developed and will write the next chapter of hydrocarbon energy. This is good because it is plentiful, it is here and it builds on extant pipeline infrastructure.
Of course, it makes investments in many “alternative” sources of energy, particularly ethanol from corn, look like very poor investments. Cars and trucks that run on natural gas are an appealing alternative to ethanol with less disruption of the food chain and stress on the farms. –For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate
The Virtues and Vices of a Press Secretary
The stature of some press secretaries grows the longer they are away from the podium in the James S. Brady briefing room at the White House. Others fade quickly. Brady himself is known more for his role in fighting for gun control than he is for his time as Ronald Reagan’s spokesman. His tragic wounding and subsequent disability dwarf whatever he said in his press briefings.
Jerry terHorst, who resigned after only a month in the job because his boss, Gerry Ford, lied to him, was a hero to the press for about as long as he had been press secretary. He ended up working for the Ford Motor Company.
Bill Clinton’s second press secretary, Dee Dee Myers, had a rough ride in the job and a modest career in journalism since then.
Among the revered are Marlin Fitzwater, who served George H.W. Bush; Jody Powell, who was Jimmy Carter’s press secretary and has just died of a heart attack; and Mike McCurry of the Clinton administration. George W. Bush burned through two press secretaries before he tapped the beloved Tony Snow and the admired Dana Perino.
Barack Obama’s press secretary, Robert Gibbs, gets mixed reviews. He said that he talked to Powell and others about the job, but he executes it in his own eccentric way. This has some of the White House press corps up in arms and others giving him a passing grade. It is a classic case of where you sit.
The irritation begins with time-keeping. For Gibbs, but not Obama, nothing seems to go on time. The principal press briefing–the one seen on C-SPAN–is scheduled the night before, and reporters are e-mailed this along with the president’s schedule for the next day. Sometimes, this schedule arrives after 8 p.m., making the planning of the next day difficult.
That is only the beginning of the time problem. Invariably, the briefing time slips the next day. Updates delay the beginning of the briefing by one or more hours. But that is not final: Gibbs may make his entrance 20 or more minutes late and without apology.
Then the fault lines within the press corps really open up. They have to do with who gets to ask questions and who is shunned—and this, in turn, has to do with who has assigned seats and sits in the first two rows.
There is ugliness here. Here is class warfare by employment, and here is an unwitting exposure of the White House’s hand.
Clearly, television counts more than print–even dominant print outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post. Likewise, it is revealed in Gibbs’ world that the Associated Press trounces Reuters and Bloomberg. The foreign press gets very short schrift.
Gibbs’ clear favorites are the television networks and a new crop of correspondents he got to know on the campaign trail. Correspondents like Chuck Todd of NBC are often engaged in a colloquium to which the three dozen or more other correspondents are just spectators.
If you are not one of the favored, you sit in one of the back rows with your hand in the air for favor of recognition to ask a question. It does not happen often.
There is much less criticism of the substance of Gibbs’ answers than there is with his tardiness and favoritism. Gibbs will contentiously argue a point with a reporter, but he also will refreshingly admit when he does not have the answer. Also he does not indulge in dead-end referrals, such as “I refer you to the CIA,” or “I refer you to the vice president’s office.” George W. Bush’s first two press secretaries, Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan, did this with exasperating frequency. Snow turned away wrath with philosophy and Perino handled heckling press with humor and efficiency.
Unfortunately, Gibbs’ fascination with a small number of TV reporters has carried over to the full-blown press conferences. The chosen few are again the chosen few. The rest of us are right there with the plotted plants: to be seen but not heard.
Newsweek: Another Magazine on the Brink
In the golden age of print journalism, during the 1950s and 1960s, magazines were the aristocrats: glossy, sophisticated, used to money and generous to their own. Whereas newspapers were rough and urgent, works-in-progress, the great magazines (Paris Match, Life, Look, The Saturday Evening Post, Colliers and Picture Post) were finished like fine furniture–highly polished writing, designing by typographical architects and great platforms for displaying creative talent.
Paris Match, Life and Look went for the photographs, and heralded in a new generation of gifted photographers using the new technology of 35-millimeter Leicas. These picture magazines were the barons; their importance and prestige were unassailable.
Towering over them was Henry Luce’s Life. It was a magazine that thought it was a movie studio. Its principle was simple: seek perfection. For perfect pictures, it used the photographers of Magnum, a Paris-based cooperative founded by photographers Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa, among others, to protect photographers from exploitation.
Other magazines carried the foreign-policy debate as much as the newspapers. In The Saturday Evening Post, Stewart Alsop was able to argue the Vietnam War issue in lengthy articles, more thoughtful and nuanced than his brother Joe’s crude advocacy in a syndicated column. Over at Life’s sibling, Time, Luce fought communism, even where there wasn’t any. His magazine had such brio that its excesses were shaken off.
Besides, there was always Newsweek.
Ah, Newsweek: always trailing Time, but getting better all the time. So much so that until weeks ago, it could claim to have become the best of the news magazines.
Time, Newsweek and the also-ran U.S. News & World Report survived the plague of television that ended the reign of the news magazines. Of the great picture magazines, only Paris Match is alive.
Now Newsweek, owned by The Washington Post Company, has decided not to perish at the hands of the Internet, but to take a knife to its own wrists. Under its oh-so-public editor Jon Meacham, the magazine is seeking profitability according to an old and not very effective formula: slash the circulation to save print and distribution costs, and hope for a more exclusive readership sought by select advertisers. The Atlantic Monthly is trying the same solution, and so have many others but without success. In publishing, as in other businesses, shrinking is hard to do.
One thing Newsweek can be sure of is that previously loyal readers will abandon it without regrets. It has been transformed into something that is neither a news magazine nor any other kind of magazine. In appearance, it looks like a catalog for an art gallery. Worse, there are big advertising supplements that blend in so that readers don’t know whether they’re reading advertising or editorial content.
The magazine’s great writers, like Evan Thomas and Eleanor Clift, are clearly being held out of the battle. What remains of the reliable old features of Newsweek, “Conventional Wisdom” and “Verbatim,” are hard to find. It’s all very strange and disturbing.
News is no longer to be found in Newsweek. The new Newsweek is baroque in appearance and eccentric in subject. After the death of Sen. Edward Kennedy, a photograph of a very young Kennedy stares from the cover and seven writers–from Bob Dole to Ben Bradlee and, of course, Jon Meacham–weigh in on “Understanding Teddy.” Didn’t he die? He’s not running for office again. A week later the magazine poses this question on its cover, featuring the face of a 6-month-old baby: Is Your Baby Racist?
The golden age has been over for magazines since the 1970s, but the news magazines held on for a quarter century longer. Now they are dying. Television drained the advertising from the picture magazines, now the Internet and the economy are closing in on the news magazines. Time has been the healthiest, U.S. News & World Report has surrendered to the Internet, and Newsweek has resorted to the publishing equivalent of plastic surgery. Shame.
All the News That’s Fit To Read
And the winner is …. “Diane Sawyer to anchor ABC ‘World News.’ ”
In case you missed it, right up there with Afghanistan, health-care reform and swine flu is the news that someone other than Charles Gibson will be anchoring the flagship ABC evening program “World News” next year. Whew! Yes, Diane Sawyer is going to read us the news–all 22 minutes of it.
And why not Diane Sawyer? She is one of the most gifted people working in television, and she must be heartily sick of getting up at 3:30 a.m.
If there is a better resume floating around ABC News, it is hard to think whose it might be. Sawyer got her start as a local television reporter in Louisville, Ky. She worked as a press assistant in the Nixon White House. After Nixon’s retirement, she helped the president write his autobiography and prepare for the legendary interviews with British journalist David Frost.
In television, Sawyer has been a star for nearly 40 years. Energy, ability, hard work were taken at the flood and led on to victory. Compared to the dolly-bird journalists so favored in television these days, all peroxide and lip gloss, Sawyer is the real thing: an capable, experience journalist.
So why is she going to helm the evening news? Because, foolishly, both we and the networks–even in the twilight of their being–are in a time warp where we think it is important who reads the news at night. It is the Walter Cronkite-Edward Murrow legacy.
Yet those of us who know something about television, know that reading the news is a sinecure. If you are a halfway decent sight-reader, the work is light lifting. The networks and the anchors have tried to conceal this by making the anchors “managing editors,” but the subterfuge has its limits.
Television news is put together by a phalanx of producers and correspondents and it is, in fact, hard for the anchor to substantially reshape the product. The anchor’s views can be known and over time, and he or she can change the product by changing the culture. This can also be expressed as firing people you do not agree with. A friend of mine at ABC got cast into outer darkness when the anchor changed.
These upheavals are taken for granted. Television is a tough business in which the few who get to the top are well rewarded, but many fall victim to the star system and the star’s team.
I wrote for television anchors once and they were of two schools: Those who showed up and read what was put in front of them and those sought to influence what was put in front of them. We, the writers, liked the former and loathed the latter. We were proud of our work and did not want it denigrated by some star.
But the networks want to promote the concept that the newscaster is some kind of uber-journalist who spends long hours covering the news, bullying sources, confronting bureaucrats and exposing fraudsters. In reality, they are driven around in limousines, have lunches with other famous people at expensive restaurants, and spend a lot of time suggesting to the producers that they read an article in some newspaper, especially The New York Times. Often the skill of the producers is in parrying these suggestions. In Evelyn Waugh’s great comic novel “Scoop,” the protagonist parries the proprietor’s suggestions by saying, “to a point, Lord Copper.”
As fewer and fewer of us get our news from the networks, it is curious that who is going to read it to us is still newsworthy. It is not curious why someone would want the job. It pays wondrously and has all the prestige you can stand. The only downside is the ratings: the daily goad delivered by the Nielsen company.
I think Diane Sawyer will be a great anchor and she will be able to take it easier than at “Good Morning America.” But we will be deprived of her talent which has shined at breakfast time for a decade. –For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate
The Politics behind the Lockerbie-Libya Affair
Some damned fool on one of the cable television channels opined that the special relationship between Britain and America notwithstanding, Britain should face sanctions for allowing the return to Libya of the only terrorist imprisoned for the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland on Dec. 21, 1988.
I did not get the name of the buffoon who suggested that we sanction our greatest ally and a top investor and trading partner. Maybe the British should sanction us for using their language without paying a royalty every time we open our mouths.
The broadly reviled decision to send Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi back to Libya because of his medical condition has more to do with surging Scottish nationalism than with British perfidy.
London may have interests in trade with Libya, but would not have moved to free the prisoner, knowing how deep survivor feeling runs on both sides of the Atlantic; and knowing how seriously the United States takes the prosecution and punishment of terrorists. There was an understanding between London and Washington that the perpetrators (only one was prosecuted) would serve their full sentences if convicted.
Enter the Scottish nationalists, who are particularly assertive at present, and are hoping one day to break up the United Kingdom. Scotland and England, after a long and bloody history were united in 1707 under the Acts of Union. The merger was voted by the Scottish and English parliaments.
But rather than a merger of equals, it was a coercive match. Scotland was desperately poor at the time, and hoped to prosper from the inclusion in British trading around the globe. Also, some members of the Scottish parliament were bribed but the larger reality was that Scotland was, as they say, between a rock and a hard place. So the union went ahead, and Queen Anne was the first monarch of the United Kingdom.
Over the 300 years of union, the relationship has ebbed and flowed. While Scotland benefited from the textile boom that set off the Industrial Revolution and from the production of wool, it lost its language and the Scots resented the Anglification of their country. Poet Robert Burns, writing in dialect railed against the English. And the Scots call the English “Sassenachs” (trans. Lowlanders), a term of abuse.
There was some softening of the Scottish attitude to England during the long rule of Queen Victoria, mainly because she spent long periods at the royal estate at Balmoral in Scotland. Some have speculated that the history of Ireland might have been different if Victoria had been one half so fond the Irish as she was of the Scots.
The Scots, traditionally a proud and independent people, began a long decline in the 20th century; a decline led in part by the loss of heavy industries like shipbuilding. The discovery of oil in the North Sea and along the Scottish coast helped financially, but it failed to revive Scottish spirits. More and more turned to the welfare state and supported the Labor Party. Conservatives totally lost their footing in Scotland.
But help was on the way in the unlikely person of Tony Blair, the Labor Party’s longest-serving prime minister, who favored devolution–or the creation of a self-governing Scotland and Wales with their own devolved national assemblies. The Conservatives, led by John Major, called this blow at the structure of the union “folly.” The Scottish nationalists, led by Alex Salmond, swept to power in Scotland, beating the Labor Party which had been so generous.
Nothing about devolution suggested that the government of Scotland would have a say in British foreign policy, but they would control the prisons. And, despite the awkwardness it has caused, freeing al-Megrahi gave the Scottish nationalists an opportunity to claim world recognition; embarrass the British government; and, for good measure, gratuitously stick it to America. Whereas Irish nationalists feel a strong affiliation with the United States, the Scots do not.The Scottish Nationalist Party seeks independence one day, and international recognition today. The Scots are on the march.
For their part, the English have reason to be vexed at the Scots. Not only do they take a certain amount of abuse, but England pours more money into Scotland than Scottish taxes yield. While the Scots vote for members of the House of Commons, the English do not vote for members of the Scottish Parliament. This imbalance is known as the “West Lothian Question.”
Even though the British prime minister, Gordon Brown, is a Scot, he has no influence north of the border. The breakup of the United Kingdom may be underway–unless the English come up with another bribe. –For North Star Writers Group
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The CIA’s Private Suburb
Reston, Va., was founded as a model community. It lies about 20 miles west of Washington, D.C. and 15 miles from Langley, Va., home of the CIA.
From its founding idealists made their homes in Reston, as did employees of the CIA. It was a live-and-let-live place. It was a place that asserted its residents had things right in their heads: They were against racism, for peace, and for toleration of divorce and differing sexual orientation. They spoiled their children, enjoyed their martinis, and tried to be humble in a superior kind of way.
The CIA types fit right in with the other Restonians, partly because they were no different and partly because no one knew who worked at the CIA in the late 1960s. CIA employees talked vaguely about jobs in government, but did not spell them out. Novelists and newspapermen wrote that the CIA was headquartered in Langley, but casual travelers could not tell exactly where. On the George Washington Parkway, the sign for the turnoff for the agency said something about the Virginia Department of Highways.
Not only did the dreamers in Reston not know how many of the CIA’s employees lived among them, came to their parties and played with their children, but they also could not believe that their neighbors had anything to do with the big, bad things the CIA did, like overthrowing governments, assassinating dictators and pushing the envelope in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Overthrowing the duly elected but far leftward Salvador Allende in Chile was not something you thought your cheery neighbor had a hand in.
Then, the CIA came in from the cold. It stopped pretending: It got its own road signs, employed a public relations staff and joined the suburban life in Northern Virginia without artifice. In ultra-liberal Reston, people simply believed that their CIA neighbors, who would identify themselves as working for “the company,” were the good spies not the bad operatives. Rather than ostracizing the company’s employees, Restonians venerated them. Spies were cool: “I know you can’t tell me what you do, but I think it’s very romantic.”
All of this came flooding back to me, along with my own days in Reston, when I read about the advanced interrogation techniques practiced by the CIA against high-value prisoners. Are the people who make prisoners stand naked and have their heads banged into a wall the same people who are active in soccer coaching on one of Reston’s many sports fields?
Are the seemingly benign bureaucrats, who yawn early on Friday evenings after a hard week, the same splendid guys who deprive prisoners of sleep for 180 hours, keep them in bright lights and with noise as loud as a locomotive up close? Are the guys who watch out for their kids at the pool the same fellows who do the water-boarding at secret prisons?
Do the wives who drive large cars, because their husbands would be too cramped in a small car, know that these same husbands stuff prisoners into crates where the pain might force a confession? Do the good people living the American Dream in bucolic Reston also enjoy walking on what former vice president Dick Cheney called “the dark side?”
Who are the advanced interrogation specialists? Are they secret sadists, super-patriots or just run-of-the-mill government employees?
Is my consternation at the knowledge that the CIA did things to prisoners that could be called torture naïve, a liberal indulgence? What would I do if I worked in Langley as well as lived in idealistic Reston? Would I “walk on the dark side?” Is it the torturer next door or the one within which has me in shock?
Reston is increasingly just another suburb shorn of the better-world pretensions that ruled in the late 1960s and though the 1970s. The residential requirements of the CIA’s employees are no longer notable—just its actions. –For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate
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