White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

The New Education — Chisels, Hammers, Saws and Dickens

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Innovation and entrepreneurism, these are strains of the American Dream. That dream is simple: to be self-employed, to own your own business, to be answerable to customers and not to bosses, as well as to make a better living and to enjoy the benefits of the tax system that favors business.

It may be fundamental to the dream, but students pouring out of universities are, by and large, unprepared to follow the business-of-their-own dream. We do not create in the educational system people equipped to launch companies that create jobs and protect the fabric of our society, giving it strength and texture.

At the base of the educational tower, students graduating from many high school systems are poorly equipped for little more demanding than fast-food service or day labor.

Graduates of liberal arts colleges have to seek jobs in large companies or in government. It is darn hard to start a history company or a sociology service, or to incorporate as a geography business.

In short, the liberal education system is skewed against entrepreneurship, particularly against small startups where sweat equity is the principal financing and where a single skill can be the foundation of a healthy enterprise.

I once heard a speech by one of the founders of Intel in which he said there was a difference between small business and new business. Quite.

It is small business that interests me. The little enterprises that are the essential ingredient in free enterprise, the source of creativity and, not to be forgotten, the source of happy and fulfilled lives. The pursuit of happiness can be entwined with the pursuit of self-employment in work that the worker loves.

When I first learned of a small college — minuscule, you might say, because there are fewer than 100 students — in Charleston, S.C., I was gladdened— and when I learned that about a third of its graduates had gone on to start their own small businesses, I was ecstatic.

The institution is the American College of the Building Arts. Its mission is not to create entrepreneurs, but to meld together trade crafts and liberal arts.

Entrepreneurism is a byproduct, an unexpected bonus.

The combining of the liberal arts with skilled artistry is a potent concept at a time when there is an extreme shortage of craftsmen, and a real dearth of those who reach the master level, both men and women.

About a third of the student body at ACBA are women. In two days reporting at the college, I found women doing complex forgings in the blacksmithing department, chiseling stone in the masonry classes, and doing timber-frame construction.

The same students, away from the forges, chisels, hammers and saws are to be found studying Charles Dickens’ “Hard Times” and the Industrial Revolution or puzzling over Palladian concepts in the architectural drawing class.

If I sound enthusiastic about this concept in education, it is because I am.

My father was a blue-collar worker and small businessman, but he missed in his life, which was hard, the joy of literature, the stimulation of art and the wonder of the theater. He missed the liberal arts. For myself, I miss the satisfaction that he got from making a decorative gate in wrought iron or putting up a barn.

I find the idea the liberal arts can be taught alongside trade craft to be stimulating. ACBA President Colby Broadwater III, a retired three-star general, acknowledges the college is so small — it came out of a shortage of skilled artisans to do restoration after Charleston was hard hit by Hurricane Hugo in September 1989 —that it is less than a grain of dust in the stone carving room compared to big universities. But it is important, a frontier in education.

“Who said artisans shouldn’t be educated?” says Broadwater. Quite so.

I might add, “Who says they shouldn’t build craft skills into businesses?”

They are chiseling, hammering, plastering and sawing a new kind of educational future in a very small college.

 

Photo credit: Linda Gasparello

The Death of Martin Luther King Jr. and the End of Patriotism

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The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968, was a shot that rang out like none other in the tumultuous 1960s.

Washington and many other cities erupted in riots, mostly described as race riots, but I would aver. I was there. I walked the streets of the nation’s capital, saw the looting, and had rioters protect me from fire and mayhem.

These were riots of anguish. They were, if you will, a great bellow of pain. King meant more to the African-American community of that time than we can now imagine.

If anything, right after the Washington riots, when peace was being kept by National Guard troops backing up local police, there was a surreal politeness between the races. Reporters, who were in the thick of things, wrote about it.

Later, when Congress held hearings and conservative Southern congressmen wanted to know why the District of Columbia police had not opened fire on the rioters, why they had been so restrained, race was emphasized. To its credit, the largely white police force held its fire.

Despite the civility, it was not pretty. Washington’s stores were looted and restaurants burned. On 14th Street, maybe the worst hit, I watched as a pleasant restaurant called California, as I remember, blazed while the owner stood on the street and wept, tears running down his face. He wanted to know why the police did not act, why the fire department could not save his restaurant.

The price Washington and the nation paid was high. After cataclysmic events, things do not return to the status quo ante. They are forever changed.

As King had changed the civil rights debate, so his murder changed Washington. The obvious things were a greater segregation in a city that had been quietly edging toward modest integration. At that time, we went to black-owned clubs on U Street to hear jazz, and young people like myself had black friends in a natural, not a contrived, way.

Sure, there was racism everywhere (particularly, I had found, in the police department), but there was a cozy feel to the nation’s capital. It went. White flight was almost immediate, and the move by so many whites to the suburbs changed a lot of things. Washington became a black city surrounded by white suburbs in Maryland and Virginia.

The riots were emblematic of what was happening in the tumultuous decade. It was a decade in which old values perished and were replaced with a new lack of trust in government and institutions, big and small, public and private. It persists today.

The 1960s were host to major movements, all underlaid by the Vietnam War and the loss of young American life there. It was the key in which the symphony of discontent was written.

Along with the war were the social movements, all of which fingered the establishment, the elites. There was the civil rights movement, the environmental movement, the women’s movement and a huge sense among young people that the older people could not be trusted.

These legacies of the 1960s are still with us: distrust of government, lack of confidence in expertise, suspicion of institutions, and the use of the media and the courts to achieve political and social goals.

The greatest loss to the 1960s might be patriotism. We do not have the absolute confidence in the rightness of the national cause, which had motivated what Tom Brokaw called the “greatest generation.” Craven praise of the military should not be confused with what we had in the 1940s and 1950s: selfless patriotism.

The turbulent decade put paid to the old patriotism and unleashed a new kind of social riot that is alive and well.

 

Photo credit: Civil Rights March on Washington, D.C. [Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mathew Ahmann in a crowd.]. Rowland Scherman; restored by Adam Cuerden. U.S. Information Agency. Press and Publications Service. (ca. 1953 – ca. 1978)

Would Earmarks Restore Purpose to Being in Congress?

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To know what is wrong with Congress, look to Britain. Look to what is wrong with the venerable British system and the House of Commons.

The fact is rank-and-file members of both institutions have little role in government.

In Britain, it has always been accepted that members of Parliament vote with their parties except when there are rare free votes on issues where there is conscience but no policy — for example the vote to abandon the death penalty in 1969, which was a free vote with members voting their consciences.

The sense of the impotence that the British system engenders in ordinary backbenchers was well explained in the autobiography of Matthew Parris, a former Conservative member of Parliament who served in the House of Commons when Margaret Thatcher was prime minister. He concluded that he could do much more for Britain out of Parliament and abandoned it to become one of the nation’s most successful political writers and broadcasters. He says of his time in Parliament, “To be an MP is to feed your ego and starve your self-respect.”

Political television star and former Republican congressman from Florida, Joe Scarborough, might concur.

Do members of Congress, particularly in the House, feel as frustrated? Many have told me so.

Richard Arenberg, who worked for Democrats on Capitol Hill for 34 years and now teaches at Brown University, told me, “There is not much point in being a member of the House if you are in minority.”

Members of that chamber, particularly in opposition, have insignificant effect on the governance for which they came to Washington to carry out. The outcome on most issues is predetermined by the leadership of the majority.

The U.S. system is tolerant of those who defy the party in a way the British system is not, but we have moved, since the Gingrich Revolution of 1994, to a practice that is closer to parliamentary than it ever has been. We, the leadership decides, you vote.

Members do not control what comes to the floor and are expected to vote with their parties most of the time. They are the proverbial potted plants, revered socially and stunted professionally. They can shine in committee work, but they do not affect the outcome in legislation.

In this system, with the rigidity that has evolved, Congress is not the place to be if you are member without a leadership role.

Therefore, it is no surprise that bipartisanship is so hard to come by these days and compromise has been largely abandoned as a part of the work on Capitol Hill.

Although the parties seethe internally, Democrats tugged between the center and the left, Republicans torn between their center and their right, there is no common ground between them, little bipartisan agreement.

Craig Shirley, a noted biographer of Ronald Reagan, points out that compromise was possible when there were liberal New England Republicans and conservative Southern Democrats. That overlap, he says, is gone and with it, possibility for compromise.

What is to be done? One answer, suggested by President Trump, hinted by House Speaker Paul Ryan and floated around Washington in the think tanks, is to bring back earmarks so that members of Congress can fight for projects for their districts, trade support and have a greater sense of purpose.

Although earmarks, as they became more profligate, got a bad name (the “Bridge to Nowhere” in Alaska) and were denounced by the fledgling tea party as congressional sin incarnate, they gave purpose to members — something to bring home.

At a recent meeting of the American Enterprise Institute, Jason Grumet, founder and president of the Bipartisan Policy Center, said, “What do we have to lose? The current congressional process is broken.”

My guess is that it will happen, if the tea party Republicans can be mollified, and it will be an enhancement of Congress, not a diminishment.

You see, there is a bridge I would really like to see built close to where I live, so I can get to the beach faster in summer.

Skilled Jobs Go Begging Now, But Thinking Machines Are Coming

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Consider it as the work dichotomy.

There is a shortage in the millions for skilled labor jobs in the United States. The country is desperate for men and women who drive trucks, operate machines, weld, wield hammers — or can fill skilled jobs in dozens of categories from bulldozer operator to utility lineman.

Bill Hillman, chief executive officer of the National Utility Contractors Association, the organization that represents contractors (people who do everything, from replacing electricity poles to working down manholes to operating heavy equipment), says getting help is a major problem for his members. So they are setting up training programs and working with schools and community colleges.

But these also are some of the people who could be jobless due to artificial intelligence (AI) in the near future. Thomas Kochan, co-director of the MIT Sloan Institute for Work and Employment Research, told me this “middle of the labor market” is coming under attack by AI deployment.

John Savage, professor of computer science at Brown University, foresees a need for major retraining of workers with the spread of AI. But he told me he is “optimistic”: He sees major displacements but new opportunities.

Displacement is a worry for workers, but so is job quality deterioration in the so-named gig economy or freelance economy: a volatile labor pool where the employer holds most of the cards.

Gig workers are spread among diverse occupation groups: arts and design, computer and information technology, media and communication, transportation and material moving, construction and extraction. They are working here and there without permanence, medical insurance or pension provisions, like employer 401(k) contributions.

That is for starters and it is happening now. Then comes the apocalypse when millions of workers find themselves displaced by thinking machines. Think of what happened to elevator operators in cities when elevators were automated.

The first to go might be taxi drivers, some truck drivers, airline pilots and others in transportation. Already in Phoenix, you can ride in a robot taxi operated by Waymo, the Google self-driving car project. Truck makers, stirred on by potential competition from new entrants, like Tesla, are hard at perfecting autonomous intercity trucks.

To my mind, the issue is not whether but when. There are more than 3 million truck drivers on U.S. roads. Not all will be displaced by AI, but if 1 million go, there will be considerable downward pressure on wages.

Traditionally, and Savage points this out, automation has led to a surge in new, different jobs. Ned Ludd, who with his followers destroyed mechanical weaving machines in England in the early 1800s, was wrong. Mechanized weaving added far more related jobs than those lost.

But this time it could be different, warns John Raymont, chief strategy officer of Kurion, an advanced technology nuclear company. He says the difference is that automation heretofore has led to more products, and therefore more jobs. Artificial intelligence threatens to take away jobs without producing new products, which themselves produced new jobs.

Take the automobile production line: It led to more people being able to afford cars and more jobs maintaining and fueling those cars. It enhanced America’s growing prosperity.

So far, AI appears to be aimed directly at employment. In the way that cheap labor in Asia sucked manufacturing jobs out of the United States, so machines may take over skilled jobs from airline pilots to Uber drivers, Raymont says. Other jobs may still be safe, including plumbers, he says.

And it will not be just manual workers who will have their jobs taken over by wily computers. Accounting, tax preparing and auditing, money lending, loading and unloading ships and trucks will be done by machines guided by artificial intelligence. A ship, it is theorized, will be able to leave a U.S. port without the aid of seamen or dock workers and sail to Singapore, dock and unload autonomously.

Job displacement may have this opportunity: More leisure time in which people can play golf on greens maintained by thinking mowers, aerifiers and fertilizer spreaders. After they play, a machine may make them an extra dry martini at the club bar.

 

Photo: August 6, 2017 Mountain View/Ca/USA – Waymo self driving car cruising on a street, Silicon Valley. Editorial credit: Sundry Photography / Shutterstock.com

Cyberwarfare Has the Electric Grid as Prime Target

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Electricity is the sexiest thing you can’t see. It’s the tie that binds modern society together; makes life comfortable, even livable; and keeps everything humming, from computers to production lines. Without it civil disorder and a swift descent into hard-to-imagine chaos. Just look at Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, then start multiplying.

Electricity comes to us courtesy of the grid — or as Jim Cunningham, executive director of Protect Our Power, explains, the generating stations, high-voltage transmission lines, poles, wires, substations, transformers and meters that make up the matrix known as the grid.

The oft-mentioned “smart grid” is the use of sophisticated metering and measuring technologies, close to the point of use, which increase efficiency and manage the troughs and peaks in electricity demand. At 2 a.m., there’s less demand than at 6 p.m. But if you can move some demand to that slack period, efficiency increases both for the electric consumer and the electric provider. Win-win.

But the more sophisticated the grid, the more vulnerable to cyberattack it becomes. That’s a great existential threat.

Cyber is the new war space. Every new computer online, every laptop connected to the system can be the point at which the system is breached.

That’s why a novel word has crept into electric-speak: resiliency. It’s trumpeted by Secretary of Energy Rick Perry and throughout the administration. It also is a great concern inside the electric industry.

Where once the industry was concerned with reliability, it’s now concerned with resiliency, which embraces several things, one of which is the ability to deter cyberattacks and to restore power quickly if an attack takes a part or more of the grid down.

The historical philosophy of the industry has been quick response, as when catastrophic weather has brought about a supply interruption. Prevention where possible, quick response always.

Wherever computer experts gather these days, in my experience, cybersecurity of the grid has come up. The think tanks, universities and national security agencies all worry about cyberattacks.

They worry about them a lot more than they do about the other existential threat that deserves mention in any discussion of the resilience of the electric grid: electromagnetic pulses. This is a threat from a nuclear detonation in the atmosphere, which would fry computers and bring down the grid.

That concern is, among most experts, orders of magnitude less urgent than what is seen as the clear-and-present danger of a cyberattack.

Suedeen Kelly, a former three-term commissioner of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the federal body that regulates wholesale power transactions and reliability, sees the big threat as coming from “Russia, China and possibly North Korea.” She is now a Washington lawyer with Jenner & Block and counsel to Protect Our Power.

The industry looks to a creation of its own for grid security standards: the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC). While respected, it’s also criticized. I’ve heard NERC standards questioned in the science world, inside the utilities themselves, and in the computer-science departments of universities. As the policy centers of the electric industry are connected like a grid of their own, there’s a general desire for anonymity.

Now the Department of Energy has joined the fray. Secretary Perry has announced the administration will create a new office in the department called the Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security and Emergency Response (CESER). In the FY2019 budget request, President Donald Trump proposes $96 million for this initiative.

Unfortunately, resilience, doesn’t just mean security of supply to the Trump administration. It also means saving economically stranded, coal-fired and nuclear plants. And that complicates CESER’s mission.

Worries are abruptly rising about security of electricity supply just when broad vistas of new opportunity are opening for the electric industry. Electric vehicles are beginning to take their place on the highways, and trucks won’t be far behind. The Navy wants electric ships and Boeing, Google and others are working on electric aircraft.

Neutrons are inheriting the earth, if only we can keep the bad guys from turning off the lights.

 

Photo: Robert Moses Niagara Hydroelectric Power Station, New York, United States. Credit: Kokkarani GNU Free Documentation License

My Failed Love Affair With Guns

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I have until now eschewed writing about guns. It’s personal. I like guns.

I grew up in what might be called a gun culture, but it was very different from today’s gun culture in the United States. It was in colonial Africa and guns were for hunting. They were also, as here today, just for having, works of art to be revered.

Many boys, at age 13 or 14, got a .22 rifle. Some got a combination rifle and shotgun: a .22 rifle on the top and a .410 shotgun on the bottom.

Handguns didn’t figure: They were illegal. The only man I knew who had one was always worried that he’d be discovered and prosecuted. Automatic weapons were still on the horizon where we were in a British colony.

Military training, though sketchy, started early, when we were still in high school. We were issued British army, circa 1918, Lee Enfield .303 rifles — heavy, durable and lethal. We were told — as soldiers everywhere are — that our weapons were our best friends and would save our lives one day. We took the friendship part very seriously. People with guns do.

I still had some of that when I came to the United States in 1963. But my friendship with guns deteriorated in the era of the Saturday-night special.

Now in this era of the assault rifle, I believe our gun tolerance is a fatal social disease. It’s a public health issue right up there with the big killers and more terrible because so many of the victims, and most of the perpetrators, are children.

I was once the keynote speaker at a pro-gun group’s event. It was a seminal day, Nov. 5, 2008: the day after Barack Obama was elected president.

At that point, Obama had said nothing that I’d been able to find about guns. I told them that.

I told them about myself. I told them that members of my family, including my mother, had been professional hunters in the 1920s when felling large animals was acceptable, indeed regarded as a serious sport and as a way of harvesting nature’s bounty, even for ivory.

I didn’t tell them that I was leaning toward gun registration or my thoughts about the need to begin to turn the culture against guns, just as the culture had turned against homophobia and segregation. Just the facts. That’s what I tried to give them and what I had agreed with my speakers bureau. Yet when I sat down, the chairman said, “I think we have to read between the lines with journalists.”

The audience wasn’t what you might think of as gun extremists. They were serious, middle-class business people, mostly men; some were in the gun industry working for manufacturers. They believed that they were the victims of a vast left-wing conspiracy to destroy their businesses, their sport and their culture. They also believed, despite what I’d said, that I was the agent of that conspiracy.

So it is with my friends who are gun owners, from Florida to New Hampshire and across the country to Arizona. They vary from an erudite historian who has a collection of ancient and modern weapons in working order, to an electrician who believes he’s defending the people from the government by owning an AR-15, to a conservative economist who took to guns when he took to Republicanism.

Michael Gerson of The Washington Post has pointed out that the real child carnage, the senseless ghastly slaughter often over a gesture or an imagined slight, is in the inner cities. Tonight and tomorrow night, on and on, in the inner cities, children with guns will kill children, teenagers will kill teenagers. It’ll happen in Chicago and Baltimore and Detroit and across the country to Oakland, Calif. Those who’ve been betrayed by their upbringing, by their absent fathers, and by their schools will be betrayed again. This time by the false security of their friend: the gun.

We have an estimated 300 million guns in America and 265 million passenger vehicles. The difference is we know the whereabouts of the vehicles: We register them. We also engineer them for safety, and we teach the drivers to drive. With guns we do just the opposite.

Wake up America and smell the cordite. It’s going off and killing someone near you right now.

Photo: Editorial credit: Allen.G / Shutterstock.com

Learn a Trade, Study Liberal Arts at Tiny, One-Stop College

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An awful lot of people would love to work with their hands. But there’s a problem: If you don’t go to college, preferably a four-year college, you’ll be doomed to a stigmatized existence. You are blue collar, seated all of your life below the salt.

Yet blue-collar industries across the country are facing a massive skills shortage. There are shortages of bulldozer and crane operators, carpenters, electricians, automotive mechanics, truckers and welders, among other workers.

If you want to build or fix things, you need skilled workers, artisans — men and women who work with their hands and their heads.

The popular solution, which I hear a lot about (including on “White House Chronicle,” the television show I host, where we’ve been running a series on the future of work), is that we need more apprenticeships.

The apprenticeship approach has an ancient and noble lineage, but it may not be for our time. It involves a degree of bondage to a trade. I’ve seen apprenticeships up close in a number of trades including construction, printing and newspaper production in general.

While apprenticeships work, they don’t address the social consequences of not going to college. Ergo, trade schools don’t solve the social dynamic that keeps willing hands off essential tools.

Society doesn’t expect blue-collar workers to have ambition. They’re expected to drive a pickup, go bowling and love hunting.

They aren’t expected to enjoy the refined things of life; they’ve chosen to travel by the low road, at least in society’s thinking. They may love the poetry of Keats and revel in grand opera, but the corner office doesn’t care. They haven’t been stamped out by a four-year college; they’re inferior.

Well, you can have both and a small college (so small you might not think it’s a college) is nurturing a big idea, a really big idea — an idea for our time. It’s the American College of the Building Arts (ACBA) in Charleston, S.C.

As Anthony Wade Razzi, chief academic officer, explained it in a letter to the Charleston Post and Courier, and in a telephone interview with me, “At ACBA, we teach six traditional trades: architectural carpentry, timber framing, architectural stone, masonry, plaster and architectural forged iron.”

But while learning their specialties for years, the students still get a traditional liberal arts education. This includes math, science, literature, philosophy, foreign language, drawing and drafting, and business management.

Razzi, who holds a doctorate in English literature from Oxford, says the college “fuses two branches of learning that have been artificially separated for 2,500 years.”

The college came out of the devastation following Hurricane Hugo in 1989. A group of civic-minded South Carolinians realized that there weren’t enough artisans to help with the rebuilding. So they founded the four-year college, which has a two-year option.

In the letter, Razzi says the students “learn to lay brick, carve stone, forge iron and frame timber” but they also learn to plan work and manage a job.

The unanticipated outcome: entrepreneurism. Many ACBA graduates have started their own businesses because they graduated with skills that allowed them to do that.

ACBA is minuscule, hardly a speck of its own stone dust on the face of education. There are just 55 students this year at the private, nonprofit college but, as Razzi says, it’s a start.

I think it’s more than a start. I think it should be a guiding light to the future of education; a curriculum for the future that addresses the urgent need for artisans, allows many to do the manual work they love, and ends the “no college” stigma. Yes, you can enjoy framing carpentry and aspire to be the president of the construction company.

There’s a way forward for society and the individual in this tiny, private venture in Charleston. Eureka!

 

Photo: American College of the Building Arts main building, Credit: Jason W. Kaumeyer – JWKPEC, LLC CC BY-SA 4.0

When Love Happened on a Snowy Valentine’s Day

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Thinking back on Valentine’s Days past, there is one which was not marked by flowers, chocolate and champagne. But there was love; total, absolute love. The purest love money can buy: Yes, money did change hands.

It was Feb. 14, 1983.

My wife Linda Gasparello, although it was before we married, and I lived in the horse country of Virginia on 5 acres that backed up onto vast conservation acreage, so we felt land-rich. We had two horses and one dog: a difficult but loved Siberian Husky named Woo. I thought, what better Valentine’s Day gift for Linda than another dog?

It was a mean evening, cold and snowy. But on my way home from Washington, I made my way to the animal shelter in Leesburg, Va., 28 miles from our home in The Plains.

I was driving a rather clumsy Ford F-250 pickup, which I had bought for towing a horse trailer. It was, of course, rear-wheel drive and it slid on snow and ice. But I was determined.

Shelters are not for the weak of heart; so many dogs deserving to be set free. That night, as I recall, there were about 20 all crying in their way,“Take me! Take me!” Each pleading for the protection of a forever home.

I told the young woman attendant that I was looking for a Husky or Husky-type dog. She showed me a tan-colored, cock-eyed inmate and insisted that it had Husky lineage – maybe because the shelter was about to close.

The weather window was about to close, too. So I scooped up the dog, a two-year-old female, paid the $12 fee and we were off.

It was a drive from hell. I fought to keep the truck from sliding off the road — no anti-lock brakes. My new charge fought to assure me that she was the right pick by licking my face, trying to position her 60 pounds on my lap and commenting between licks. Love can be pushy when it comes on four feet.

At home, she, still nameless, took over and established in minutes, including to Woo, that she was the new proprietor of the house. What to call her? Valentine, of course.

Valentine was not, perhaps, the prettiest dog – our vet thought she was a German Shepherd-Airedale Terrier mix — but she was right up there with the most loyal, the most caring and easily the one of the most gifted dogs we ever owned. Intellectually gifted, you might say. She got flustered when she saw Linda cooking in the kitchen but speaking on the television in the living room.

Valentine did it all: boating, running alongside the horses, keeping tabs on wandering Woo, or just sleeping near the fire.

On day one, she climbed the stairs to sleep at the foot of our bed, as she did for the 12-year span of her life. When arthritis hobbled her, she struggled up the stairs of our 18th-century house.

Valentine’s Day is about love. Love is waiting at the nearby animal shelter — reach out and be loved.

All the Rage for Gin and Tonic

If you are a gin and tonic person, you probably know it is as much or more about the tonic than it is about the gin.

All the rage among G&T aficionados is Fever Tree, now a hot stock on the London Stock Exchange. The secret: cane sugar, more quinine and natural ingredients. It is available in U.S. supermarkets.

Adventures in Flying: The Grand Canyon

I once flew into the Grand Canyon, where three people have been killed in a helicopter crash. The thermals are wicked there.

I had rented a Cessna 182 RG from Sky Harbor airport in Phoenix and took three passengers flying early one morning, before the famous thermals were due to develop. The tower at Grand Canyon Airport had warned me to remain 1,500 feet above the lip and to be aware of thermals.

I asked if there were any pilots’ reports – called “PIREPs” — of turbulence over the canyon. He said there were none.

I told my passengers we were in luck: It was going to be smooth flying. Off we went, overwhelmed with the sheer size and splendor of the great tear in the earth.

Then the airplane fell, maybe 200 feet, then shot up pitched to the side. Then up, down and sideways.

We were all over the sky until I got back over the rim and everything smoothed out. I do not believe any of my passengers flew in a single- engine airplane again.

The Things They Say

“How did you go bankrupt?”

“Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.” — Ernest Hemingway, from “The Sun Also Rises”

Why Doesn’t Elon Musk Thrill Us Like Tech-Frontiersmen of Old?

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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.

 

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

The King File: Tribute to a mad wordsmith; the comfort dog crisis

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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