White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Arianna Huffington, Nearly First Baroness of the Internet

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They don’t make media barons the way they used to. Therefore it was especially sad to see Arianna Huffington, who was on the way to becoming the first baroness of the new media, sell out to AOL.

In America, one had hoped that she was following in the footsteps of William Randolph Hearst (many newspapers), Joseph Pulitzer (The World), Henry Luce (Time) and Katharine Graham (The Washington Post). In Britain, those who favored the right party were often made peers: Lord Beaverbrook (Daily Express); Lord Rothermere (Daily Mirror); and Churchill’s Irish buddy, Brendan Bracken (Financial Times).

None of these masters of their universes would have sold: They owned media to make money, to scale society, to dictate to politicians, to wield power over everything that interested them, and to have fun. A.J. Liebling’s declaration that the freedom of the press belonged those who owned the presses was not only agreeable to these magnates, but they also reveled in it.

Hearst tried to make himself president and his mistress, Marion Davies, a film star. In these he failed, but he was able to make a national figure of a young preacher: Billy Graham.

Luce, who was born in China, obsessed over the communist triumph there and sought out communism worldwide. He rewarded and punished with the use of his greatest weapon: the cover story.

Graham liked to drop in on world leaders for what she felt were state visits.

Beaverbrook tried to prop up the British Empire in honor of his native Canada: and Rothermere liked to prop up a vision of England of the kind projected in “Brideshead Revisited.”

Today there is a press baron who meets the high standards of global pretensions and influence, and who thinks newspapers are for the purpose advancing his agenda alone. He is, of course, Rupert Murdoch, and he shakes the earth when he walks in Australia, Britain and the United States. He has eclipsed the others by buying into television (Fox) and treating it as a partisan newspaper.

Even so, Huffington had promise. She has the obligatory ego and a fine sense of her own correctness, which has enabled her to switch from right to left — and now, it would seem, to the middle. She craves high office, having run for governor of California and lost to Arnold Schwarzenegger. She has shown a clear propensity for collecting influential friends, which began when she was the first woman, and the first Greek, to head the Cambridge Union.

And Huffington knows how to make money. She founded the Huffington Post, which is the first Internet publication to make money and to do so without a rich consort, like Slate, founded by Microsoft and now owned by The Washington Post, or The Daily Beast, now owned by billionaire Sidney Harman who, at age 92, wants to enjoy the non-economic benefits of journalism.

Huffington started the Huffington Post as a liberal counter to the conservative Drudge Report. Soon it was a success in its own right, and vastly different from the Drudge Report in scale and impact.

Although shapeless and lacking a clear mission, the Huffington Post pointed the way to the future: a pure Internet play that was breaking into profitability and creating a business model for the future. Now she has sold it for just $315 million and an amorphous job.

One had hoped that the Huffington Post, having broken with the pack in acceptance and revenue, was going to become the first Internet news thing that was going to accumulate enough wealth to do the expensive news coverage that is still done only by newspapers: cover wars and revolutions, business and finance, homemaking and education, and the machinations of politicians and their paymasters.

Alas she has sold out to AOL, which is dabbling in localized coverage, the Patches, and many rifle-shot national titles, like Politics Daily. The way they are going will lead to scattered effort, uneven quality and a managerial nightmare.

The newsletter industry learned all about the problems of too many titles: none made enough money to stand alone, and many were impossible to discipline. (This writer published newsletters for 33 years.)

Poor Arianna. The highest-flying Greek since Icarus, they say, has fallen to earth before she could become the first Colossus of the Internet.

It Won’t Be the End of the World, but $5 Gas Is Coming

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May 21, 2011, according to a loosely-organized apocalyptic Christian movement, will be the “end of days.”

On or about that same date, the price of oil in the United States will begin to climb to $4 a gallon, according to two savants of the oil industry.

The former is highly unlikely but the latter is very probable.

The escalation in the price of oil is predicted by the legendary oil man T. Boone Pickens, known for his financial acuity as well as his oil expertise, and John Hofmeister, who retired as president of Shell Oil Company, to sound the alarm about the rate of U.S. consumption of oil.

In an interview with a trade publication, Hofmeister predicted that oil would rise to $4 a gallon this year and to $5 a gallon in the election year 2012. Separately, Pickens—who has been leaning on Congress to enact an energy policy that would switch large trucks and other commercial vehicles from imported oil to domestic natural gas—predicts that oil currently selling for just over $90 a barrel will go to $120 a barrel, with a concomitant price per gallon of $4 or more.

The Obama administration appears to have been slow to grasp the political implications of an escalation in the price of oil. When asked about it, outgoing White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs referred the questioner to the Department of Energy.

Not everyone is alarmed by the incipient rise in the price oil. Republicans, who are especially close to the oil industry and its Washington lobby, orchestrated by the American Petroleum Institute, think that a great deal of hay can be made while this particular sun shines. They plan to attack the administration for spending too many resources on alternative fuels, over-regulating the industry, and keeping too many federal lands away from oil prospecting. They also accuse the administration of being too frugal with its release of drilling areas in the Gulf of Mexico and on the two coasts, as well as Alaska.

The Republicans have unlikely bedfellows in their quest to politicize the price of oil. They are joined by environmentalists who have long believed that only high prices will break America’s passion for the automobile.

Environmentalists have long advocated European-style taxation to drive motorists out of their cars and onto buses and trains.

A third interest group that will take some pleasure in rising oil prices are those who are invested in alternatives such as ethanol, oil from algae and electric vehicles.

Meanwhile, the International Monetary Fund is keeping an eye on the price of oil, according to Caroline Atkinson, director of external relations at the IMF. She told a Washington press briefing that the IMF is particularly concerned with food and other commodities that are directly affected by the price of oil.

Hofmeister, who now heads the non-profit Citizens for Affordable Energy that advocates energy development in all forms, believes that the United States could increase oil production from the current 7 million barrels per day to 10 million, half of its consumption. He told an interviewer from Platt’s, an energy publisher and broadcaster, that we were “essentially frittering at the edges of renewable energy, stifling production in hydrocarbon energy,” which he said could lead to blackouts, brownouts, gas lines and rationing.

There are already signs that the Republican-controlled House of Representatives is planning a big push for hydrocarbon energy. An indication of this comes from Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.), a one-time global-warming believer who has dropped that issue from his agenda. He is the new chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

In periods of high gasoline prices in the past, presidents have found there is very little that they can do. Their options are to reduce the tax on gasoline, sell oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve or the Naval Petroleum Reserve. President George W. Bush went a step further: He went to Saudi Arabia twice to ask the Saudis to increase their rate of production. Twice he came back empty-handed.

All of this would be good news for the oil producers and especially those troublesome players, Russia and Venezuela.

Of course, if you believe the human endeavor ends on May 21, better fuel the SUV and hit the road.

CFS: How Snail Therapy Helped One Woman

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One of my favorite Christmas activities is to enjoy a really good French meal. I start my indulgence with a hearty serving of escargot, defying my cardiologist.

But this year, I have declared a one-man moratorium on the eating of snails. My gluttony has been impaired for this and other visits to Chez Indulgence by a slim but compelling volume that makes you think differently about that humble creature: the woodland snail.

It is also a book for Christmas: a feel-good book about a sick woman and a lowly creature of the forest floor. You never feel sorry for the writer, even in her distress, and you feel joyful about the snail. You bond with it.

The book is “The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating” by Elisabeth Tova Bailey. It belongs in that category of books that, like tunes, becomes imprinted in your memory. Bailey’s book is not a work of fiction, and it is work of wonder.

Bailey, who used to be an outdoors woman and a professional gardener, was felled nearly 20 years ago by one of the least understood but most debilitating of diseases: chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), also known as myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME).

“From where I lay, all life was out of reach,” Bailey writes in her book.

Nothing much is known about the disease, which afflicts about 1 million Americans. But there is recent evidence that it may be caused by the retrovirus XMRV.

My own research into CFS and hundreds of e-mails I have received reveal that sufferers have bad years, worse years and years of some improvement. One writer told me, “We are the living dead.” Others thought they had recovered, but fell back into the lonely painful abyss.

In Bailey’s worst year, a visitor put a woodland snail into a pot of violets and presented it to her. It was a whimsical gesture, but it may have saved her life by giving her an interest beyond dreaming of the life that could no longer be hers. Sometimes she was so ill, Bailey reports, that she could not turn over in her bed, so she watched the snail.

Later, she placed it (they are hermaphrodites) in a better home—a terrarium where it could go about its complicated life, which included audibly chewing squares of paper. She got attached to it and learned about its habits; its use of slime to get around; and its ability to fertilize its own eggs and bring forth young—an amazing 118 little snails — in this predator-free space.

As Bailey’s health improved, she began to research snails in general and to study the work of the extraordinary naturalists of the 19th century, mostly British, including Charles Darwin. In the book, Bailey quotes some wonderful observations from this rich period for the natural sciences.

Like Bailey, the 19th-century naturalists depended more on what they saw in the field rather than study in the laboratory. They found, for example, that even hermaphrodites love to make love; and if one snail gets amorous with another, the proceedings are protracted. Who would have thought?

Bailey does not dwell on her disease, but on the snail. In fact, the nature of the disease is not revealed until the epilogue.

The book is not a lament of life’s abounding injustices, nor is it full of humbug about the human spirit. It is an adventurous, fascinating investigation of a snail that comforted inadvertently as it went about its slimy business, habitat attached.

Bailey is a beautiful writer of the simple English sentence and an artful storyteller.

This is a book for Christmas because it makes one feel very good. Merry Christmas to all the snails of the earth – people, too.

 

In Britain, Another Round of the Greatest Show on Earth

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I have history with royal weddings–just a little, but history nonetheless.

As Princess Margaret, sister to Queen Elizabeth II, was tying the knot on May 6, 1960, with Antony Armstrong-Jones, a photographer who would become Lord Snowdon, I was out finding “color” for a London news agency.

My assignment was to ride back and forth on a ferry across the River Thames.

From a phone box on one side of the river to a phone box on the other, I scurried, breathlessly reporting on every Union Jack and every wide-eyed child. That was a day on which Britain lost its head.

It was maybe the last great royal ceremony in which the British public was still wholly innocent.

Although some newspapers had debated the suitability of a mere photographer marrying into the royal family, the public had still wanted the fairy-tale wedding.

Yet it was Margaret, and this ill-fated union, that first lifted the veil on royal goings-on and began to show them not as a perfect family, but as a dysfunctional one, not as perfect servants of the people but as greedy, immoral, selfish and sometimes heartless.

This was fed by the new ability of the British tabloids to spy electronically on the royal persons.

But on that beautiful day, it seemed that everyone in Britain wanted to believe in the princess and her commoner husband.

Of course, the queen and her children would have to disappear for Margaret to become queen.

But she was in line for the throne, and that made her worthy of the national hallucination: The Glass Coach, drawn by matched pairs of horses; the impeccably choreographed regimental bands; the glorious color of noblemen’s robes; and–oh my, yes–the ladies’ hats.

And the queen herself, young and radiant with her consort, Prince Philip, always at her side, neither quite participant nor spectator.

It was the Greatest Show on Earth. Even Cecil B. DeMille could not have produced that kind of spectacle, centuries in the making.

When Prince William marries Kate Middleton–another commoner but not exactly a flower girl–it will be the greatest show on earth again.

Fortunately for the royal family, they are back in favor after three decades, when things sometimes looked bleak for the future of the monarchy.

Despite national misgivings about Prince Charles, eldest son of the queen, and his quirky ways, to say nothing of the way he treated his first wife, Princess Diana, and the way she reciprocated, Britain is again comfortable with its monarchy, even enthusiastic about it.

The thanks for this go to the queen–her long reign, her hard work and her perseverance. And partly to Diana, who in death refurbished the magic.

Queen Elizabeth is not a brilliant woman. She does not have wide interests outside of, well, being queen, a job that has no published job description–and her family.

She has tried to be more modern and to be a little closer to her subjects.

But it was probably the year in which the family seemed to have imploded that reinforced the queen’s relationship with her subjects.

Her Christmas message in 1992, in which she described the travails brought on by Charles and Diana and her humiliation as “annus horribilis,” meaning horrible year, brought forth a wave of sympathy.

It said that this remote lady, who had been their queen since before most of them were born, was not superwoman but a mum who made mistakes and who had children who misbehaved and disgraced the family.

This was a very human queen, set in authority over them, but still one of them.

Suddenly she was not aloof and imperious, but very human.

Not everyone in Britain is elated that Will and Kate are marrying after living together on and off for nearly a decade.

One social critic told me, “It sets a terrible example: Commitment-phobic men living with women and then mostly moving on. At least, they are marrying. But the hypocrisy of it! She will wear white, I suppose.”

And one day, she will wear a crown as Queen Consort of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and 15 other independent Commonwealth countries around the world.

Long live the Greatest Show on Earth: The British monarchy.

CFS: To Suffering, Add Anger

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I’ve been walking on the sad side. My mailbox is jammed with dozens of heartrending e-mails from sufferers of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS); a terrible disease that is little understood, little researched and hard to diagnose.

Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, which is known as Myalgic Encephalomyelitis in many parts of the world, mostly strikes people in their thirties and forties. The disease begins with flu-like symptoms which are often a precursor to a full collapse, often after exercise.

The disease largely disables the immune system; and leads to joint and muscle pain, cognitive dissonance, memory loss, dysphasia and problems with simple math. Sufferers are often confined to bed for months, functioning at a substantially reduced capacity, where the simplest tasks become monumental.

CFS-afflicted authors describe taking years to finish projects that should have taken months. These include Hillary Johnson, whose book “Osler’s Web” is about CFS; Laura Hillenbrand, who wrote the bestseller “Sea Biscuit” while struggling with the disease; and Deborah Waroff, who is writing a book about the Jewish hero Sholom Schwartzbard, but who has found the task dragging on for years, working as she can between severe periods of disability, confined to bed.

The human suffering of both the afflicted and those close to them is incalculable in its awful impact. One woman who e-mailed me wrote: “When I became totally disabled seven years ago, because I had not announced my illness previously, nearly everyone I knew figured the illness was in my head. They were aided and abetted with this sort of reasoning based on how the majority of the medical establishment and media had treated CFS. Like many with CFS, I lost all of my companions and my spouse.”

One of the most hopeful of recent discoveries is also generating a collateral fear. The retrovirus XMRV has been found to be present in CFS patients and has led them to worry about transmitting the disease to family members. One woman who e-mailed me from Britain wrote that her husband contracted the disease after years of nursing her. Who, she asked, will look after them now?

A sufferer in Maryland wrote to me that she worries about her family. She and her husband decided to have a child. They were blessed with triplets – and the return of the mother’s disease. Now she worries for her husband and the three babies.

A man—one-third of victims are male, although the National Institutes of Health treats CFS as a woman’s disease–sums up the anger in the community towards the political establishment, and particularly the Centers for Disease Control which changed the name from Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, in a controversial action.

He wrote: “Washington didn’t so much forget – they were never told. The CDC swept it under the carpet, despite the fact that their main raison d’être is to investigate and sort epidemics of new diseases before they take hold. Now, because of the CDC’s wrongdoings, there are more than 1 million people affected in the USA and possibly 17 million worldwide. Most of these people are too sick to stand up for themselves, to fight back.”

Breaking down the e-mails, I find these commonalities:

· Anger at the CDC and, to a lesser extent, the National Institutes of Health and government in general.

· Tremendous suffering and horrendous problems with affording treatment; frequent misdiagnosis, as doctors use a “dustbin” approach that discards all the possibilities until they get to CFS.

· Anger at the media and others for not taking CFS seriously enough.

· The knowledge, with a cure rate of between 4 and 8 percent, that they are awaiting the inevitable in huge discomfort. They are on medical death row.

· Sufferers describing themselves as “living corpses.” Alone with their suffering, many commit suicide.

I’m not a medical writer. Writing about medicine has never interested me. But in a career of writing for newspapers, spanning more than 50 years, I’ve never received so much mail that has so consumed the thought process and torn at the heart.

There is a ghastly disease out there that cries out to be taken seriously, to get proper attention in the medical world, and to be prioritized along with the other big diseases claiming research dollars.


The Awful Disease Washington Forgot

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In the end, as with so much else, the fight against disease leads to Washington. There are big diseases with big lobbies, like AIDS, Alzheimer’s, cancer, diabetes and heart. Their millions of sufferers have associations and lobbies to push for federal research money and to shape its expenditure. Most have their celebrity backers, like Elizabeth Taylor for AIDS, Jerry Lewis for muscular dystrophy, and Mary Tyler Moore for diabetes.

Big lobbies mean big federal dollars, the attention of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., and the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. If the disease is the kind for which a single or series of silver bullets can produce a cure, Big Pharma comes in with big funding, in the hope that it can develop a lucrative line of medicines, patentable for long-term profits.

Yet there is a vast archipelago of diseases as cruel in their impact, horrible to bear and crying out for research that is not sporadic, underfunded or, through ignorance, misdirected.

One such is Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS), a name so gentle that it belies the ghastliness of this affliction. Sufferers accuse the U.S. government, abetted by other governments, of choosing this name over the older and more commanding name, myalgic encephalomyelitis.

CFS is not about a name game. It is about debilitation lasting decades, essentially from inception to death. It is about years of lost living, terrible joint pain and total collapse, as the immune system more or less shuts down. It is like some great constricting snake that denies its victims the final convulsion.

Enter Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.). While he is not generally regarded as a man on a horse these days, to CFS sufferers he is a figure of hope. He has stood up for CFS research.

This is not because the Senate majority leader sought to know a lot about a hard-to-understand and terrible affliction, but because CFS was found in two clusters in his home state. The largest outbreak was at Incline Village, Nev. In New York state, there is a cluster too.

In the 1980s government scientists looked at these clusters, but refused to accord them the respect the suffering deserves. It was then that the name was changed; “fatigue” was less politically incendiary than myalgic encephalomyelitis.

Incline Village is significant because it shows that CFS is infectious, or that it has environmental causes. The thinking is that while clearly not having a strong transmission path, it does happen.

Recently a sufferer in England wrote to The Daily Mail, saying that her husband, who had cared for her for nearly 20 years, had become infected. This is particularly serious in England, where the medical establishment has insisted on treating the disease as a psychological disorder, despite recent research suggesting strongly that it is retrovirus XMRV.

Now, at last, two world-famous pathogen hunters, Anthony Fauci of NIH, previously seen as a debunker of CFS science, and Ian Lipkin, a celebrity pathogen hunter, are heading a major safari into the dark world of retroviruses.

For the first time, the loose global network of sufferers–nobody knows how many there are in the world, but in the United States there could be as many as 800,000—are beginning to apply political pressure.

Their plight is pitiable. The full horror of the disease is described in a paper by Deborah Waroff, a gifted New York writer who was stricken in July 1989. An energetic cyclist, skier, squash and tennis player, Waroff wrote in a paper for a Washington conference:

“My sickness began with a flu-like illness. After a week, thinking I was pretty much well, I went back to my ordinary activities, like tennis and my biking. A week later, I was sick again. This repeated several times that summer until I soon got to a point where I was never well again. I had classic symptoms. After a little activity I would just collapse, totally fold up. I also had symptoms like fevers, dizziness, upset tummy, swollen lymph glands and a new type of frequent headache. I had cognitive problems embarrassingly often, including dysphasia—putting the wrong words in sentences. I was often too weak to talk on the phone, or after five minutes of talking I would fold.”

In 2003, things got worse. But two years later, Waroff regained some of her life through the controversial treatment of ozone therapy. This treatment cannot be prescribed in most states. Allowed in New York, it is hard to come by and expensive. Some other countries, particularly Canada, have been more committed to fighting CFS and the use of ozone therapy.

Harry Reid, and others, there is more work to be done.

In Praise of the Four-Day Work Week

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Let us make the three-day weekend permanent.

What do you remember about Labor Day? My bet is you remember not the Monday holiday but the Sunday, because the middle day of a three-day weekend is a day of luxury. It begins in the blessed minutes after waking, when you lie there in a cocoon of warmth; an indulgent few minutes that will begin to slip away with the movement of an arm or the opening of eye.

If you are with someone you love, it is luxury redefined up; guiltless indulgence, secured by the knowledge that work and stress are at bay. The chores have been executed on the previous day and — wonder of wonders — work will not cloud the horizon until Tuesday.

That mounting anxiety, which creeps into Sunday as the evening approaches, will not arrive until late Monday. You wonder, as you creep from your place of reverie to keep a flexible appointment with coffee and the bathroom, why every weekend cannot contain one day without care, one day, as the French say, sans souci.

When I worked for the BBC in London many years ago, we worked three days and took three days off. Longer work days but fewer of them.

Having worked every shift in the book, I was convinced that for journalists at least this was the perfect setup. My colleagues were more productive than any other set of workers I have labored with and happier. Many turned down jobs outside of the BBC just to keep the shifts they loved. Long, hard days followed by the triple crown of three days off.

This showed. Several wrote books, one finished a play and all kinds of gardens flourished, along with hobbies and sports. You can get on a golf course more cheaply and more easily on a Tuesday than you can on an over-stretched Saturday.

Years later, when I was president of the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild, during contract negotiations I suggested the idea of longer work days but fewer of them. The Washington Post management was ecstatic; many of their staffing problems, particularly on weekends, would be solved along with the complexity of compensatory time for well-paid employees who did not get overtime.

Win-win, you say? Not so fast. When I asked the permission of the Newspaper Guild International to put the proposal formally in negotiations, the worthies in the union hierarchy exploded. We had a model contract, blessed in the 1930s by the great journalist Heywood Broun (actually, a reluctant unionist like so many in the Guild) and we were not going to depart from that contract. Moreover, the model contract called for shortening work days, not lengthening them.

Unions may be the most liberal part of the political spectrum, but internally they are incredibly conservative and change-averse. Journalists were not to have the quality of their lives improved and The Washington Post was not to improve its staffing situation.

Well, I am back at work. And working people are talking about resetting America.

So I say, let us look afresh at the four-day work week. First let us resolve the problems of physical work, where a longer day is a bigger burden. But for the great majority of America’s workers (the paper-pushers, if you will), the virtues of a four-day work week might fit with the resetting of so many things in our lives.

Everything else is changing; newspapers are struggling, information technology dominates our lives and our transportation infrastructure is overloaded.

Fewer, longer work days would ease the stress on so many services and improve the ratio of commuting time to work time. Employers would get a happier workforce and the quality of life in the working world would be so improved.

Please join me in my campaign to abolish Monday. We can win. It has no core constituency. It is vulnerable.

 

An Era of Emptiness Awaits Huge Change

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To understand empty in its physical enormity, fly over the Empty Quarter of Saudi Arabia: thousands of square miles of sand, untrammeled by man or animal. Awesome.

To understand empty as a metaphor, look at this past week in Washington.

Glenn Beck summoned his flock to the Lincoln Memorial last Saturday and offered them quasi-religious platitudes with a strong dash of patriotism: God and country. Empty concepts without a purpose to back them up.

The tens of thousands, quite possibly hundreds of thousands, of Beck adherents who filled the Mall already have God and patriotism. They did not come to be converted: They are the faithful, even if Christopher Hitchens, writing in Slate with awful clarity, described them as self-pitying white people.

But the emptiness was not confined to the disappointing words from Beck, once Rupert Murdoch’s Man on Earth, now employed, it would seem, as God’s man down here.

On Monday, President Barack Obama made a brief — so brief it was almost furtive — appearance in the White House Rose Garden to push for tax cuts for small business and to chastise the Republicans in the Senate for bottling them up. Nothing new here. More emptiness.

Come Tuesday, it was the withdrawal-from-Iraq prime time broadcast for the president. But it had no passion, no conviction, no phrase to savor.

On Wednesday, Obama was back in the Rose Garden, talking up Middle East peace. Reporters are getting so used to this frequent use of flower power in the Rose Garden that many prefer to listen to the president from the relative comfort of the seats in the press center. In the East Room, reporters heard more platitudes about the hard path ahead to achieve peace.

It has become pretty hard just to listen to this stuff as successive presidents have sought to catch the ultimate brass ring of diplomacy. The “peace process” has become itself an empty formulation.

There has been such emptiness in the political debate that partisans are busy inventing bogeymen to run against. The gun lobby, which sends out incessant e-mail, has a whole series of horrors it has minted for gun lovers to worry about. Would you believe that, according to the lobby, Obama is in league with the United Nations to confiscate American weapons?

Others of the right see creeping “European-style socialism” about to get us. Being an empty threat, we are not told what this perversion actually is and how we would be able to recognize it when it gets here. Will it make us like England or France or Germany? One trembles.

On the left, where the hopper of ideas is as empty as it is on the right, there is paranoia and betrayal. Paranoia that the right wing and its insuperable ally, the Fox News Channel, are going to sweep into power, winning the House and Senate in November and the presidency in 2012, after which all the good things of the 20th century, like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, mutual insurance companies and credit unions, will be privatized and handed over to the people who used to run Lehman Brothers. Reproductive rights, gay and lesbian rights, and maybe some civil rights legislation will be swept away as the country is ceded to a duopoly of oligarchs and fundamentalist Christians.

All this because these are empty times. These are empty years and an empty decade, where all the old ideas contend only because of the paucity of new ones.

This hollow sound and fury comes when, in really profound ways, the world, and especially our corner of it, is changing — or, to use the word of the day, being “reset.” Copper wire is being retired for wireless, paper for computer screens, oil for electricity. The global climate is changing. Europe has become China’s largest market. And the oldest currency of all, gold, is flourishing.

Only the desert is really empty and that, too, is an illusion — it is a live, moving thing with microbial life, shifting dunes and even fauna and flora that the inexperienced observer does not see.

Our political rhetoric is empty, vacuous and vapid, but things are happening. Profound, ignored changes are underway.

Washington on Vacation: From Martha’s Vineyard to the Political Vineyards

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That great sucking sound you hear is the annual evacuation of Washingtonians. Tired and weary, but nonetheless self-important, they snatch a little beach time and act like other people.

The upper tier — including President Obama and his family — flock to Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket. A few — most notably storied editor Ben Bradlee and his fabled party giving-wife, Sally Quinn — enjoy the delights of Long Island and the Hamptons. Alas, Washington incomes aren’t commensurate with Washington egos; hence the Hamptons are only for the few, and those with super-rich friends.

A little pity, please, for members of Congress at this time of year. While bureaucrats, senior civil servants, lobbyists and journalists have boardwalk splinters in their feet and spilled beer on their T-shirts, legislators have to face the voters. Ugh!

This year, that’s an especially nasty experience.

All the polls say only about 11 percent of the country approve of the job Congress is doing. That’s tough enough, but this year there are the unemployed–the same unemployed as last year, but now they are more bitter and angry.

Legislators have forgotten the platitudes used to calm the unemployed last year. But the unemployed have not; and worse, the local TV stations can pull up clips as fast as a member of Congress can say “my record shows.”

If you’ve made a point of denouncing the deficit, it’s hard to explain why you haven’t been more diligent in bringing home the bacon to your constituency. If it’s your summer boondoggle, it’s hard to explain that it’s an entitlement.

You get a holiday in an election year? Get off it. When comfortably re-elected, you can contemplate a little time with you feet up. Unless you want to join the unemployed, better campaign; and campaign some more when fatigue has gripped you by the soft parts. Hit the phones and beg for money.

To stay in Washington, you need to be able to denounce Washington in brutal terms, while yearning for the members’ dining room, the simpering of the staff, and the adulation of the cable television network that agrees with you.

Every day you must praise the wonders of America and your fabulous constituency, while you long for a congressional fact-finding trip to London, Paris or Rome. After all, you’ve been stuffed with barbecue since you got back to the voters: the God-fearing, family-loving, hard-working, ignorant pain-in-the-butt hicks.

What do voters know of the burden of office?

What do they know of you being cajoled in the White House while the TV cameras are lining the driveway, waiting just for you? What do they know of representing our country at dinner at 10 Downing Street or the Elysee Palace? Have they ever had an audience with the Pope?

What do the voters know of the thrill of dropping in on our troops in Afghanistan with a TV crew? If you do that, you can almost book yourself on a Sunday morning talk show. Heck you can feel thrilled on “Meet the Press,” even if David Gregory reads aloud an encyclopedic list of your gaffes, votes, and friends of the opposite sex.

Actually, the worker bees of the nation’s capital just hate to be away. If you are a member of Congress, you’re reminded that there are nasty people with clever advertising agencies, trying to get into Washington and make you part of that unemployment statistic.

Even those who don’t have to run for office feel the burden of free-floating anxiety. Who’s after my job? I make out to be the most important job in the most important city in the world, even if I know in my heart I’m a clerk.

 

Tea Party Inspires Memories of Another Time

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I should feel quite at home at the tea parties. I was present at the last round of them. It was another country and another time, but the anger was as genuine, the sense of betrayal by the political class was as real, and the idea of an endangered heritage was as painful.

Also, then as now, there was a certain disconnect from reality.

The place of these tea parties was throughout the dwindling British Empire. There, middle-aged people, who had spread the concept of British exceptionalism and borne the Second World War, felt everything they had built and fought for was slipping away.

What was seen as a terrible leftward drift was opposed virulently by a phalanx of patriotic organizations, but most notably the League of Empire Loyalists, founded in 1954.

The Loyalists were good yeomen who loved the Britain they believed had existed and was endangered, along with the position of Britain as the world’s dominant power. They believed in Britain’s special writ to civilize the world, police it and sometimes settle it. Compared to the militarists of the 18th and 19th centuries, these were soft imperialists but believers nonetheless, held together in a loose federation throughout the British colonies and dominions.

In Britain, the Loyalists formed a political bloc on the far right of the Conservative Party. They were on the fringe in Britain, but they were taken seriously in the colonies as a legitimate expression of wide discontent with the decline of British traditions, British leadership in business and British moral authority.

Loyalists inside and outside Britain railed against politicians in London, much as today’s Tea Party activists rail against Washington.

In Britain, support for the Loyalists was limited because so much had already changed. The British public had already accepted the dissolution of the empire; after all, its jewel, India, was gone.

Although the Loyalists raged against non-white immigration into Britain, this had not yet been identified by most people as a society-changing occurrence. Mainline British Conservatives feared that the leader of the loyalists, Arthur Chesterton, had been a fascist sympathizer in the 1930s. Even though he had broken with the fascists and written a book about it, he was still suspect.

Where I was in Rhodesia, the Loyalists were seen as the hope for saving Britain, of returning her to greatness and somehow turning the clock back to “the good old days,” whenever they were imagined to have been. Many, including my parents, believed the Loyalists would bring about a glorious new Elizabethan era under the young Elizabeth II, who had been crowned a year before the founding of the League of Empire Loyalists.

For those outside of the British Isles, the league was back to the future. But in London and across Britain, the Loyalists were just a right-wing pressure group (known in Britain as a “ginger group”), claiming support from a handful of Conservative Members of Parliament but shunned by the Tory leadership. In the United Kingdom, they were sidelined as “Colonel Blimps,” a satirical comic figure who ridiculed the conservative middle class and had been enshrined in criticism by George Orwell.

The League of Empire Loyalists lasted 10 years, but its aspirations were sealed after six years with Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s “wind of change” speech. The league’s domestic issues — the fight against socialism, the uncontrolled flood of immigrants from Asia and the Caribbean, and the growing power of the unions — were taken up by more sophisticated entities, like The Monday Club, operating inside the Conservative Party.

There is a limit to the analogy of the Tea Party movement to the Loyalist movement of the 1950s and 1960s. But the people are eerily the same. They share a decency, the sense of being let down and the feeling that something has to be done. In the British case, nothing was done until Margaret Thatcher much later addressed some of the concerns of the Loyalists (unions, state ownership, immigration and global stature). She did not bring back the empire, but she did make the Brits feel a lot better about not having it anymore.

Who will do that for the good people of the Tea Party movement?