White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

America’s Year of Thinking Dangerously

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By Llewellyn King

If you accept that seminal means an event or moment after which things will never be the same again, then we are living through a seminal year.

In matters big and small, change is in the wind.

This wind blew through Iowa and New Hampshire, and is defining the 2016 presidential election. Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are not so much the leaders of this time of change, but rather the products.

The product is something hard to pin down, but it is there nonetheless — a sense that it is time to turn the page, to read the next chapter; a yearning for something fresh.

The millennials, hunched over their cell phones, are looking for the future in their small screens. The rest of us are looking for it in new leaders, new lifestyles; and new thinking, sometimes about old ideas.

Societies go through periods when they feel the need to change up things. But they want a sped-up evolution rather than a full-fledged revolution. This is such a time.

Change is everywhere from the bold, new things television is doing — frontal nudity, gay coupling and interracial love — to the kind of car we favor.

While we grapple with change and yearn for the new, we are surprisingly open-minded. American values appear to be undergoing a recalibration: We are getting more socially tolerant. Social conservatives are a diminished force.

Young people do not have the same commitment their parents had to conventional employment, to be defined by where they work. This leads to a world where people are less concerned with appearances, and all that goes with appearances. The business suit and its essential accoutrement, the necktie, are on the way out – and in much of the country, they are now curiously out of date. Apartments are being favored over houses because of new social values.

My generation experienced the hopeful 1940s (just the tail end), the smug 1950s, the turbulent 1960s, the oil-shocked 1970s, and the computer-excited 1980s, which continued unabated until the dot-com bubble burst at the turn of the century – but re-inflated with new developments in Internet products like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

In recent times, the only new American billionaire outside of the Internet was Hamdi Ulukaya, who popularized Greek yogurt in country hungry for yogurt choices. That is a dumbfounding fact. It means that it will be harder to get investment in old-line businesses and start-ups. The smart money has become myopically obsessed with the cyberworld.

If you were to go to Wall Street today to raise money for a new nuclear reactor that put all doubts of the past to rest and offered income for 100 years — there are such machines on the drawing board – you would find it hard to raise money; easier for a new Internet messaging system. This when there is no shortage of Internet messages (too many, I cry each morning). We are leery of the hard and enamored of the soft.

We sense that the education system is not doing its job; that it is broken and needs fixing. But how, we are not sure. We are sure, though, that we are going to change it.

We sense that we had the dynamic wrong in foreign affairs; that change at home, like toppling a generation of political leadership, is desirable, while toppling leaders abroad is a fraught undertaking, as with Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi and Bashar al-Assad.

We feel less good about the wealthy, and we are less sure that there are secure places for us in the future. We watch cooking shows and order in pizza. We gave up smoking and started jogging. But we are, so to speak, deaf to the damage we are doing to our ears with incessant music piped to them by earbuds.

We are more nationalistic and less confident at the same time. We treasure our values more, and wonder about their long-term durability.

The largest contradiction that can easily be inspected is in the themes of Trump and Sanders: Trump has rehabilitated a kind of racism aimed at immigrants, while Sanders has made the taboo word “socialism” acceptable in political dialogue.

The desire for change has moved from a slight wish to a hard desire for a new alignment. It is everywhere, from what we eat to how we feel about the climate. But we do not agree on this new alignment, hence the huge gulf between Sanders followers and Trump adherents. — For InsideSources

Twitter Rides to the Aid of Britain’s Gossip Press

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A mighty battle is shaping up between the British government and the American-controlled social networking sites, primarily Twitter and Facebook.

The government of Prime Minister David Cameron is committed to extending the harsh libel and privacy laws, with which it attempts to control the notorious tabloids, to social networking sites. The sites not only carry salacious gossip, but also provide tools for circumventing laws on the books for newspapers.

This state of hostilities between the government and the social media is a new front in a war that has raged in Britain since the first tabloids appeared in the 1920s.

The appetite for gossip in Britain is at the heart of the government's schemes to discipline the media, or at least hold it accountable, for the violation of the privacy of the famous, infamous and titled. Notwithstanding Lindsay Lohan, Charlie Sheen, Jennifer Aniston and assorted American glitterati adorning the supermarket tabloids, the British passion for the sex lives of the rich and famous dwarfs its American equivalents by orders of magnitude.

In turn the energy, resourcefulness, deceit and intrusion of the British tabloids is appalling. No electronic device, trick or bribe is overlooked in the endless campaigns to shame the famous, embarrass the wayward and, in general, romp around their boudoirs and places of assignation.

The tradition of paying informants – maids, butlers, nurses and old lovers –handsomely for lurid details (or anything that can be made to sound lurid) means that the prominent love at their own risk. Yes, it is sex, far more than money or corruption, that sells the British tabloids; and sales push up the revenues. The ability with modern technology to eavesdrop on private conversations has made things worse.

Despite the toughness of British libel law, the battle rages, led by two of a bunch of tabloids, the daily Sun and the weekly News of the World, both owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, the parent company of Fox and The Wall Street Journal in the United States.

It is not that these two are more amoral than the rest, but rather they are better at the game than their competitors. They pay more to informants and the paparazzi than the rest.

For these scoundrels, the United Kingdom in general and England in particular, are target-rich. It starts at the top with the monarchy. Yes, the tabloids cheered the royal wedding but they are ready – indeed, anxious – for the first hint of an indiscretion, domestic discord or even wardrobe malfunction. Then there are the aristocrats, often ignored, but center stage at the suggestion of sexual impropriety.

On to the rest, the footballers, the television personalities, the movie stars. Know what “bonking” is? It is the word favored by the tabloids for sex, as in footballer Y is bonking actress X.

No detail is too private or sick-making not to be rushed to millions of breakfast tables. To keep things spiced up, The Sun has a young, busty woman, naked to the waist on Page Three most days. Helps the corn flakes go down.

To protect the private lives of public figures, the British courts enjoin newspapers from publishing specific reports, if the victim is forewarned — and the preemptive “gagging” orders are feared and loathed in the media. They are so restrictive that it is illegal even to say that one has been taken out. But these themselves may have rebounded against the government the courts and the celebrities.

Frustrated journalists and gossip lovers have taken to Twitter and sometimes Facebook to list, often erroneously, which celebrities are hiding behind preemptive injunctions. The implication of such outing is that there are dark goings on.

Now celebrities are taking to the Internet to deny that they have taken out restraining orders or have a need to. So the government is ham-fistedly going after the social networks. It wants them to reveal the names of the Twitter and Facebook account holders.

As with a lot of regulation, the government and courts have made things worse. But if it goes after the American firms that provide Internet services in American courts, they will run into the First Amendment.

Even the European Court has sided in the past with the press. Generally governments are suspected of wanting to curb political speech and investigation, not tales from the bedchamber. Britain rules the sheets, apparently. – For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate