White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Obama’s Empty Gasoline Tank

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There is a piece of doggerel which goes:

They said it couldn’t be done.

So I went right to it — that thing they said

Couldn’t be done.

And I couldn’t do it.

And that is the way it has been with presidents since the 1973 oil crisis. All of them – from Richard Nixon to Barack Obama, who has just joined the club — have wrung their hands and exhorted us to use less oil in general and less foreign oil in particular.

Nixon had his commerce secretary, Peter G. Peterson (he of enormous wealth these days), promise far reaching and revolutionary “initiatives” to tame our thirst for oil. But Nixon was out of office before these palliatives were revealed.

Gerald Ford, caught up in vicious inflation, partly linked to the cost of oil, launched the Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA), combining the Atomic Energy Commission, the Office of Coal Research and other energy entities in the federal government. ERDA initiated many programs, while politicians invoked the Manhattan Project and the Apollo 11 moon landing. But the search for the Fountain of Eternal Energy failed.

Jimmy Carter wanted not only to solve the energy challenge, but to be seen to be solving it. Ergo, he expanded ERDA into the Department of Energy (DOE) and created a separate Synthetic Fuels Corporation. The latter failed after a short and unhappy life. No oil reached the pumps.

When the price of oil collapsed in the 1980s, so did hopes for many of the alternative energy sources, including ocean thermal gradients and flywheel energy storage.

To its credit, though at great cost, DOE, through its chain of national laboratories, kept searching. The result has been evolutionary improvements in many fields, and some really revolutionary ones in how we find oil and drill for it; these include seismic mapping, new drill bits and horizontal drilling.

These evolutionary developments brought more oil to market and have contributed to the recent improvement in domestic production that Obama likes to point out. It has enabled us to cut our imports slightly, so they now stand at 11 million barrels per day out of consumption of 20 million barrels per day.

Obama wants us to cut those imports by a third. To do this, he has no magic bullet.

In fact, he has no ammunition: solid numbers and research. His speech at Georgetown University was founded more on hearsay than science or economics.

Because he criticized them for taking out leases they have not drilled, the oil industry disliked the oil component of the speech, but thrilled at the emphasis on natural gas. When it comes to leases, the industry hankers not for those it holds, but for the plums that have not been leased for political reasons:  the eastern Gulf of Mexico and Alaska.

Sadly, Obama seemed to have learned the wrong lesson on his recent trip to Brazil because he is brimming with enthusiasm for ethanol. In Brazil, this is made from sugar cane, of which the Brazilians have a lot and cheap labor to farm it. Here, it is made from corn with devastating results on all the food products that come from corn. George W. Bush shoved the country down that slippery slope, and Obama wants to add more lubricant.

Another Obama tool is mandated fuel-economy standards. Problem is the market will start circumventing the regulations. It works like this: If you mandate 40-miles-per-gallon fleet average instead of floods of new small hybrids of the Toyota Prius type, the market will supply small, regular cars and large, luxury hybrids. Better, but not everything the president might want.

Real oil savings come with high prices dictated either by taxes or shortage. Presidents, however, have to placate voters by holding down the price of oil, signaling that it is all right to consume. That leaves presidents — and Obama has just proved it — with that last resort of the impotent in office: exhortation. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate


 

Taylor and Burton: In Love for All of Us

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I don't believe I've ever seen two people so in love as Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. I was a young reporter in London when the lovers were staying at the luxurious Dorchester Hotel on Park Lane.

My assignment from one of those notorious British tabloids, where more good journalism than bad actually takes place, was to go up to the hotel and track them down; maybe get an interview; certainly tell the world everything that you could about their accommodations, what they were eating, and when they came and left.

The hotel, as you might expect, skillfully frustrated my efforts and those of my competitors. They guided us to the bar and an endless supply of Champagne — Veuve Clicquot, as I recall.

Meanwhile, the lovers came and went by side doors and back entrances. Day after day, I went to the Dorchester; and day after day, my prey avoided me.

All I really needed was to see them and extract a few words. Even if they'd said, “Go away and stop following us,” it would've been enough.

I can see the piece I would've written even now, “The world's most famous lovers pleaded yesterday for privacy as they sallied forth from their love nest at the posh Dorchester Hotel. … ” One would've noted their clothes; the car they got into; possibly the doorman, for a consideration, would've told me where they were headed.

But alas, no: It was not to be. And then, a miracle.

I was living in the south London suburb of Dulwich, famous for its college, its art gallery and as the birthplace of the novelist Raymond Chandler. A block or two from where my wife and I lived was a pretty decent pub with a good dining room. We often went there for lunch on Sunday. After a dispiriting week of failing to even see the Taylor-Burton duo, I was looking forward to forgetting them over a good lunch and bottle of wine.

I can't remember if we were shown to a table or if we took the table because it was the only remaining one, but we sat down without looking around. And when we did, there they were: Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton at the next table, only feet away.

They were so beautiful. Never do I recall seeing any couple so in love. They glowed. They stared at each other. They talked softly to each other. They smiled and they laughed, oblivious to the room and the two journalists sitting next to them.

My wife, a fine journalist herself, whispered: “Are you going to speak to them or call the office [for a photographer]?”

The mere place where they were lunching — a bit off the beaten track, as it was — would've made an item in the paper; a chat would've produced a career-building, mini-scoop. But there was something about the joy emanating from the next table that stayed my hand and my wife's. We let our opportunity slide away because of the palpable joy coming from the Burton table.

The chase could resume the next day. Maybe we had a second bottle.

Over years, I've always wondered what it was about Taylor, great actress, great beauty, great lover, great humanitarian, that caused her to be more admired by women than men, the way Marilyn Monroe or Ava Gardner were. Conversely it is men who really revered Burton, identified with him.

Maybe that made their love affair our love affair. I, for one, think it was.

Taylor, who has died at age 79, shone even brighter in the firmament than Burton. But together they lit up the world. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

 

 

Champion Bitch Tells All; Doggone Good Story

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I was lucky enough to snag the first, and I believe only, print interview with Foxcliffe Hickory Wind, the Scottish deerhound who won “best in show” from the Westminster Kennel Club. The great lady — and 5-year-old Hickory is awesome — had just opened the New York Stock Exchange, appeared on all the morning television shows, and was being pursued by a posse of paparazzi. But that is to be expected when you are a star in New York.

Me: What do you like about New York?

Hickory: Pastrami sandwiches.

Me: What do you dislike about New York?

Hickory: There’s nowhere to run. Do you know that in rough country we can outrun a greyhound, anorexic creatures that they are?

Me: How far back does your family go?

Hickory: In Scotland, into prehistoric times. We brought down the red deer that fed the Picts and the clans before bows and arrows. That’s breeding, man.

Me: You don’t grant many interviews to newspapers, but you’ve gone from television studio to studio. Why is that?

Hickory: I like to control the message. You guys get it wrong.

Me: When you went up the Empire State Building and looked down, what impressed you?

Hickory: There’s nowhere to go to the bathroom without people watching. My heart went out to those poor creatures on leashes going up and down Park Avenue looking for, you know, the spot. Dreadful.

Me: What did you think of Central Park?

Hickory: Nothing to chase there except bicycles. No deer, no rabbits, not even one of those miniature degenerates you see in the expensive hotels. Anyway, three bounds and you’ve outrun them.

Me: You’re clearly very proud of your Scottish heritage, have you ever been to Scotland?

Hickory: No. I live in the Virginia Hunt Country and it’s the next best thing: loads of deer, squirrels, rabbits and low-slung, rodent-type things, like possums and woodchucks. Don’t run. Always going into holes. Not at all sporting.

I eschew foxes. I can tell you, I’m even apprehensive about Fox News. The stupid cousins, foxhounds, chase them and kill them sometimes. But really, I like my meals served in my bowl at home. No need to kill things in the Age of Alpo.

Me: You don’t live far from Washington and President Obama has a dog, a Portuguese water dog, named Bo. Would he interest you romantically?

Hickory: Wash your mouth out with soap. I wouldn’t run around a barn with a Portuguese water dog. And that name! It’s not much better than being called Spot. I have many names because I’m an aristocrat and I live in Virginia with other aristos, canine and equine. Soon I’ll marry a dog with a name like McTavish Ben Nevis Peebles MacDonald-Smith. We’ll have beautiful puppies which will have even longer names and will be bought by billionaires for big, folding money.

Me: What is your biggest indulgence?

Hickory: When nobody’s looking, I roll in manure. Oooh, it’s good fun. But they do kick up a fuss with shouting, baths and the pointed finger. I just look at them and think: Poor things, without me they would be nothing.

Me: What’s your favorite dinner?

Hickory: Venison, of course. Have you forgotten, I’m a deerhound? Also, I love Walker’s shortbread; all butter, sugar, flour — and very Scottish. But they don’t like me to have it. I don’t know why, considering that I’ve brought such credit on them and joy into their lives. Live a little, I say!

Me: On a delicate matter, one doesn’t usually expect a beauty queen to have coarse hair, a beard and whiskers. How do you feel about, well, being so hairy?

Hickory: That’s rude and I could bite your throat out! But right now, could you scratch behind my ears?

That’s better. You don’t have one of those pastrami sandwiches with you, do you? — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

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.