White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Postcards from Maastricht, Netherlands

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A Frenchman, a Mercedes and a Morceau of Limburger

I had an encounter with the southern Dutch province of Limburg, long before my visit to its capital, Maastricht, last month. It was a close encounter of the rind kind—with Limburger cheese—in France.

As a teenager, I spent a couple of summers with a French family in Hossegor, a beach town located on the Basque Coast. Albert Barrieu, husband to Marie-Josee and father of seven, was a man of taste, especially for old things. For starters he had a collection of pre-Colombian and African artifacts, amassed in Peru and Africa after World War II and coveted by museum curators all over the world. At the family’s main residence in Pouillon, also a small town in the Basque Country, the commode in one of the bathrooms was encased in a heavily carved, dark-wood chair. Albert told everyone it was “the throne of the queen of Cameroon.”

Most of Albert’s antiques were displayed in the 18th-century stone house in Pouillon. The stucco villa in Hossegor (which he named Chasquitambo, after a town in northern Peru) was a museum under construction. During the summers I spent there, Albert filled it with antiques, mostly purchased from dealers in southwestern France. He could sniff out antiques like pig sniffing out a black Perigord truffle.

Albert was a regional sales manager for Gaston Jaunet, a women’s ready to wear firm. His oldest child, Dominique, and I accompanied him on some of his summer sales trips.

It was on one of those trips that I encountered Albert’s passion for old cheese—old Limburger cheese, to be precise.

One morning as I was finishing my breakfast at the long, pine table in Chasquitambo’s dining room, and was ready to hit the plage sauvage (a favorite with surfers), Albert asked Dominique and I to accompany him to St. Jean de Luz, a fishing port not far from the Spanish border.

I was thrilled to have a chance to see more of France’s Basque region. But Dominique, normally a dutiful daughter, refused to go.

Was it because Albert would be driving the black Mercedes sedan, and one of us would be peering at the scenery from the back seat, through the clothing samples? No, that was not why she refused to go.

Was it because her father threw a fit in just about every restaurant he took us to? Once, in Hendaye, he advised me that the best French food is served in restaurants with the shabbiest exteriors. He found a run-down restaurant, ordered poulet basquaise for lunch, took one mouthful and pronounced it to be “as filthy as the restaurant floor.” As we left the restaurant, Albert told me that very occasionally there were exceptions to his French restaurant rule.

No, Dominique did not care about her father’s restaurant rows. The reason she did not want to go with him was because of the Limburger cheese that he kept in the glove compartment of the Mercedes and ate as he drove the French national roads at Le Mans speed.

I volunteered to sit next to Albert. But Dominique insisted that even if she sat behind the clothing samples, they would not be a strong enough barrier to the smell of the cheese. “Deglas,” she said, which is a stronger word than “disgusting.”

Marie-Josee came to her daughter’s rescue, telling Albert that Dominque had to help the other children with their summer homework. Alas, she made no excuse for me.

Albert put on his misshapen Panama hat, stuffed more clothing samples onto the rack over the Mercedes’ back seat, and off we went to St. Jean de Luz.

Not 20 miles into the trip, Albert said he was hungry. I knew what that meant: time for the terrible, smelly cheese. He popped open the glove compartment, and I held my breath. He pulled out a crumpled piece of white paper, and I kept holding my breath. A small piece of cheese fell out of it onto the floor.

William Shakespeare had it right, when he wrote in “The Merry Wives of Windsor” that Limburger was “the rankest compound of villainous smell that ever offended a nostril.”

I stuck my head out the window and took a deep breath as Albert reached for the cheese on the floor and popped it into his mouth.

The boutique owner we were going to see in St. Jean de Luz was one of Albert’s best clients. She was as impossibly chic as she was frank.

As we pulled the samples out of the car, she implored, “Albert, please keep the cheese in the glove compartment. You are selling Gaston Jaunet, not the Limburger line.”

In Maastricht, where I attended the Association of European Journalists’ annual meeting in November, I learned two things about Limburger cheese: first, it is mostly made in Germany now; and second, there is a great benefit to its much-mocked odor. A 2006 study, which showed that the malaria mosquito is attracted equally to the smell of Limburger and to the smell of human feet, earned a Nobel Prize in the area of biology. Limburger has now been placed in strategic locations in Africa to combat the epidemic of mosquito-borne malaria.

A French Musketeer in Maastricht

In another French connection, Maastricht is where the captain of musketeers, Charles Ogier de Batz de Castelmore, also known as Compte d’Artagnan, fell in battle in 1673. He is the person upon whom Alexandre Dumas based d’Artagnan, the hero of “The Three Musketeers” and other novels.

In June 1673, as part of the Franco-Dutch War of 1672-78, the French laid siege to Maastricht. As Compte d’Artagnan, commander of King Louis XIV’s First Musketeers Company, prepared to attack the city’s Tongerese Gate on the night of June 25, he was killed by a single musket shot. The night attack was portrayed in “The Vicomte of Bragelonne: Ten Years Later,” the third and last of Dumas’s D’Artagnan Romances.

Maastricht surrendered to French troops on June 30, 1673. The French occupied the city until 1678. It was subsequently restored to Dutch rule. The French again took the city in 1748, during the War of Austrian Succession, but it was restored to the Dutch that year.

The French would return once more in 1794, annexing Maastricht to what would become the First French Empire. The following year, it became the capital of a French province (departement de la Meuse-Inferieure).

In Maastricht’s city park (Stadspark) there is a cast-iron statue of d’Artagnan drawing his sword. Dumas wrote, “A person who doubts himself is like a man who would enlist in the ranks of his enemies and bear arms against himself. He makes his failure certain by himself being the first person to be convinced of it.”

That is what the statue of d’Artagnan looks like he is thinking. Or is he thinking, as Dumas also wrote, “I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.”

Floriade 2012

Once a decade a world horticultural exposition, Floriade, is held in the Netherlands. The sixth Floriade, themed “Living Nature,” will be held from mid-April until mid-October 2012 in Venlo.

“In addition to the most exquisite and exceptional flowers, plants, trees, fruit and vegetables, each day at the expo features a cultural program of music, dance, literature, theater and visual art from all over the world,” Sven Stimac, director of projects for Floriade 2012, told the Association of European Journalists.

Floriade 2012 aims to get visitors to use “all their senses, so they can experience the influence horticulture has on the quality of their daily lives; be part of the theater in nature, get closer to the quality of life,” according to its organizers.

Venlo, the site of the world expo, is located in the province of Limburg, close to the borders of Belgium and Germany. “More than 30 million people live within a two-hour distance by car,” Stimac said, adding, “The Greenport Venlo agrologistics area and the Lower Rhine Agrobusiness region together form the largest area of horticultural production in Europe.”

Besides the horticultural highlights, there is another reason to visit Floriade 2012: the green buildings and landscaping.

Exhibitions of this nature often leave a legacy in the form of spectacular buildings, such as the Eiffel Tower in Paris, the Atomium in Brussels and, after Floriade 1960, the Euromast in Rotterdam, Stimac said.

“This Floriade will also have a number of imposing structures. The buildings and landscapes will leave a legacy by becoming the site of GreenPark Venlo: an innovative, sustainably developed business park where economy, ecology and knowledge transfer go hand in hand,” the organizers said.

Floriade 2012’s organizers anticipate more than 2 million visitors, and 35,000 peak-day visitors.

Press Freedom and ‘Jeans’ in Ukraine

There was much revelry at the Association of European Journalists’ meeting in Maastricht, notably at the dinner hosted by the Provincial Council of Limburg in the building where the Maastricht Treaty was signed on Feb. 7, 1992, and at the APG Group-hosted dinner among the ruins of an ancient Roman temple and forum.

But there was also much to dampen the spirits of the journalists, especially the presentations on media freedom in Europe and two former Soviet republics, Belarus and Ukraine.

In their report on freedom of speech in Ukraine, where the media benefited from the Orange Revolution, Arthur Rudzitsky, Diana Dutsyk and Mykhailyua Skoryk wrote that journalists are often pressured by media company owners. “Most owners of the media in Ukraine have political interests and partially implement them through the media,” they wrote.

Media companies are so cash-strapped that they mostly depend on “donations” for their operating capital. “The number of such media is increasing because of the advertising market’s fall by 40 percent for the first half of 2009, compared to the same period in 2008,” they wrote, adding, “The main donors for the media are Ukrainian businessmen and state and local budgets. This grant nature of media has led to mass layoffs in the media … and the closure of many television projects and programs.”

While the Ukraine’s Ministry of Justice opened access to the state register of print media and news agencies last December, “this information is still not enough to make a complete picture of the owners of Ukrainian media companies. In particular, owners of leading Ukrainian TV channels, according to the documents, are offshore companies; so it is difficult to determine who actually owns them,” they wrote.

In 2009, there was a spike in the number cases of violence against journalists. These appalling cases include:

  1. On Feb. 16, someone blew up a car owned by Valery Vorotnyk, owner of the Antenna media group, headquartered in Cherkasy.
  2. On March 16, unknown assailants beat up Anatoly Ulayanov, journalist, art critic and editor of the Kiev-based Prosa Web site, who has criticized the National Expert Committee on the Protection of Public Morals.
  3. On June 24, Kiev Pharmacy guards used tear gas against a TV crew attempting to film a stand-up in front of the company.

The saddest statement in their report was “most journalists rarely come to court in cases when the violation of their rights takes place because they do not believe in justice and do not consider it worth their time; and the rest of the journalists simply do not know how to do it. The cases that reach the court are not always resolved in favor of journalists.”

Not stated in their report was the corruption of journalists.

“ ‘Dschinza’, which means ‘jeans,’ is the name commonly used for the system of paid contributions, as the money vanishes immediately into the jeans pocket of the journalists. That this practice forms part of everyday journalistic life is an open secret among those working in the media in Ukraine,” journalists Cristoph Kersting and Dorthe Ziemer wrote in the latest edition of Kontakt, the newsletter of the social and cultural arm of the Erste Bank Group in Central and Eastern Europe.

“Volodymyr Mostovoj, editor in chief of the critical political weekly newspaper Zerkalo Nedeli, also complains about the dubious work methods of many of his colleagues. He believes that one reason for the attitude of many journalists to professional ethics lies in their poor training. ‘When I studied journalism, in what was still the Soviet Union, there were three faculties in the entire Ukraine where I could study. Today there are, believe it or not, 41 – of questionable quality,’ ” wrote Kersting and Ziemer, whose report has been picked up by Deutsche Welle and other media outlets.

Apple Park Hotel’s Polished Service

The Association of European Journalists’ meeting was held at the Golden Tulip Apple Park Hotel, located in a sports park area not far from Maastricht’s historical center.

The hotel’s Big Apple theme had a few sour notes, like the dark halls with shadow boxes filled with New York mementos hanging outside the guest rooms. The one outside my room contained pictures from the rowdy American television comedy of the 1960s, “The Three Stooges,” and Grand Street in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. As a child, I could not stomach the three knuckleheads. It was even harder to do so as a hungover adult entering a hotel room.

The hotel service was sweet and polished, especially at the front desk and in the Dreamz restaurant.

The Danger Posed by ‘The Enemy Within’

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In a time of terrorism, the enemy within is the most pernicious.

He is the terrorist who can strike at any time. He is the good neighbor who harbors hate. He is he loner who craves to be part of something larger than his own life promises.

Most disturbingly, he is probably a third or fourth generation immigrant.

He is the lethal misfit.

He is also the unique product of the modern world: The immigrant who doesn’t assimilate into the society in which he lives, but connects with the world of his ancestors through technology. He may be a Nigerian youth living in London, Madrid, or Houston, but in his mind he lives in Nigeria because technology makes it possible to do so.

Britain is filled with pockets of immigrants who choose not to assimilate, enjoy the privileges of British society, and deny their nationality.

A few years ago I met a young woman in Doha, Qatar, who covered her head with a scarf and spoke with an English accent.

“Oh, you’re English,” I said, thinking we might talk about the old country.

Stiffly, she said, “I was born there, but I am an Arab.”

Before taking a job with Al Jazeera’s Web site in Doha, she had never been out of England. But psychologically, she had grown up in the Middle East and was indifferent to the culture and the people who had taken in her family and educated her with tax money. She closed her ears in school and opened them in her local mosque. She is typical of immigrant children from Houston to Rome and from Toronto to Sydney, alienated by their own intent, angry and vulnerable.

When America’s immigrants were pouring in through Ellis Island, N.Y., they were coming to a new life; and however hard, it was going to be an American life. Sentimentally, they might sing rebel Irish songs in Boston, dance the polka in St. Paul, Minn., and mix the marinara sauce in Hoboken, N.J., but the tickets that brought them here were one-way tickets. The only contact with the world they had left was by slow, sea-borne letters.

Now, with technology, all immigrants’ tickets to America are essentially roundtrip tickets. Immigrants no longer have to consider assimilation as a worthy or a necessary goal.

There are reasons of national unity to work against the Balkanization of America. However, the clear and present danger is from those likely to fall prey to the malicious excesses of politics or religion.

It is frightening that a wealthy young man from Nigeria, Umar Farouk Abdulmuttalab, tried to blow up an inbound airliner on Christmas Day. But the home-grown rebel–like the five, middle-class young men who are now being held in Pakistan–is more concerning.

Gradually, screening of passengers will improve and the intelligence community will handle information better. In the meantime what are we, and other nations like Britain, to do about our citizens who hate the lands that have given them so much? Spy on our neighbors? Inform on our friends?

If we do those things, the enemy within will have won; and if we don’t, the enemy within may win with an act of terrorism. –For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

Hey Dick, Add a Spoonful of Socialism to Your Tea

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MAASTRICHT, Netherlands — The English like to say, from an old music hall song, “a little of what you fancy does you good.”  Well, so does a smidgeon of socialism.

Shock horror! Alert Dick Armey, inform Rudy Giuliani and let Rupert Murdoch know. Heresy is dangerous, and the correct authorities should be informed.

Like most people who rail against European socialism, those three have been the beneficiaries of some largesse that might be described as socialistic.

Armey, who is leading the tea bag revolution and who talks of the socialist threat as though a fleet were coming up the Potomac to sack Washington, is the beneficiary of the rights, honors and money that come from being a former congressman, all the way down to a handsome health care package.

Then there is Giuliani, who presided over the second most liberal city in the United States, after San Francisco, added to its amenities and improved America’s largest subway system. Notably, he did not end rent control, now known as “rent stabilization,” nor did he end a plethora of liberal services available in New York. Yet if the former mayor, who wanted to be president, wants to denigrate something, he utters the “s” word.

Murdoch is special. He has played footsie with the Gordon Brown Labor government in London; played up to the Communist Chinese; cooed over the Clintons and booed ideas of assistance to the media; and employed a staff at Fox Cable News who are devoted to castigating Europe and its left-of-center democracies. Worse, Murdoch has benefitted over the years from various government subsidies including the Commonwealth Press Cable Rate, which moved news inexpensively around the world before the Internet. And he has never cried out against second-class postage, another huge government subsidy to publishers.

OK, socialism, even the mild kind favored here in the Netherlands, isn’t the promised land of governance; but it produces, at the street level, some pretty agreeable result. Scads of American visitors groove on the country’s parks, public toilets, bike paths and buses that are easy to use.

This small city of about 200,000 bears its medieval history with pride and its socialist amenities with grace, from miles of bike paths to trains that can whisk you to the next hamlet or to Hamburg, Germany.

Travel to a nearby major city, like Amsterdam, Brussels or Paris, and Europe is yours with its high-speed trains that crisscross the continent at 200 mph, and even plunge under the English Channel to London’s St. Pancras Station, a masterpiece which has been restored to its Victorian glory.

London itself adds public amusements with pride. Three recent ones are the Ferris wheel, known as the London Eye; the foot bridge across the Thames, nicknamed the “wobbly bridge”; and the New Tate, an art gallery in an old power station.

You can put this down to the kind of post-socialism that former British prime minister Tony Blair (a Murdoch man) described as “social-ism;” not the old-school, “Keep the Red Flag Flying” socialism, but the idea that people are entitled to services beyond national defense. A good question for Giuliani might be: “Would you have approved the building of Central Park?”

Where socialism–lite has failed in Europe is in an excess of regulation, particularly the rigidity it has brought to hiring and firing. This has kept small business in Europe operating at the mom-and-pop level, scared to hire because in most European countries firing is subject to a labor tribunal’s approval. Approval seldom comes.

One of the great drivers of entrepreneurism in the United States is the harsh but effective idea that employees serve “at will.” That, the socialists can’t stomach. They want Paradise enow.

A little socialism will do–and we needn’t mention single-payer health care.

 

Crime and Art: A Young Man’s Christmas in London

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It was Christmas, exactly 50 years ago. It was also when I masked petty crime with arguments of social justice, and when life exactly imitated art. Really.

Fortnum & Mason, the London food emporium, has been dispensing Christmas cheer in Piccadilly since 1707. It is a British tradition as famous as its rival Harrods, located about a mile away in Knightsbridge.

But whereas Harrods is a department store with a great Food Hall, Fortnum & Mason is mostly a top-of-the-line — very top — food store that flourishes at Christmas as at no other time of year.

Fortnum’s specialty is its Christmas hampers. They are capacious wicker baskets stuffed with comestibles from around the world: candied fruits and honey, dates and figs, goose foie gras with truffles, jellies and preserves, shortbread and rare teas, smoked salmon and caviar, Stilton, fruitcake and Christmas puddings. You get the picture: a cornucopia of goodies, or conspicuous consumption, depending on your point of view.

Well, all these goodies do not get into the Christmas hampers and snuggle in the wood shavings all by themselves. Nor do they stretch the cellophane and tie the bows themselves.

No, that was my job at Fortnum’s where I and a small crew of disparate young men worked, held together by the reality that we were all far from home, broke, cold and our immediate prospects were not great.

I had arrived in wintry London a month earlier from sunny Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, expecting immediate journalistic success. Instead I was broke, owed rent on my room, lacked a warm coat and had a hole in one shoe.

Then I learned that Fortnum’s was hiring packers for the Christmas season. I signed on at the glorious store in Piccadilly, but that was the last I saw of it. Instead, I worked in an unheated warehouse at the Elephant and Castle in South London.

The wages were 6 pounds a week (about $25) — a reminder that England was still a poor country in 1959. Poor, that is, except for those who sent and received fabulous Christmas hampers.

Some customers sent hampers like Christmas cards to lists of friends, usually titled people, from earls and marchionesses all the way down to lords and ladies. Worse, some recipients were on multiple lists. So heavily laden, how could the hamper fairy make her deliveries to the stately homes?

Although I was a staunch conservative, I found myself dreaming of revolution. All of the hamper packers seemed to be hungry all the time. Our pay was spent after a few days and then we starved — starved while packing the world’s finest foods.

Stealing a few items seemed reasonable, but the security people checked for empty wrappers and other incriminating evidence of consumption. But I came up the solution, the perfect crime: We would selectively eat the food and ship the empty cans and boxes out to the better-fed.

What is more, I explained to my fellow packers, no one would complain to their friends that the hamper was wanting in some areas. More, the chance of recipients ever touching the hampers was slight, particularly if we pilfered only from those going to a family that was on several lists.

The butler, I calculated, would simply tell his employers that hampers had been received from, say, nine friends. And the servants would almost certainly be given the hampers the day after Christmas: Boxing Day in Britain, when the leftovers of Christmas are boxed for the servants and the less fortunate. We were just getting our boxes early.

So we gorged and rationalized our thievery, the way people do.

On our last day the foreman, a permanent employee of the store who earned the princely sum of 8.5 pounds a week (about $34), came to us at midday and in his gentle, world-weary way said that as a Christmas treat, he was taking us to lunch.

This was terrible. We had already had our fill of rich Christmas cake, gooseberry jam spooned out with our fingers and piles Scottish shortbread.

Nevertheless, we accompanied the foreman to a workmen’s cafe that served up vast portions of such dishes as sausage, egg and chips (French fries), bubble and squeak (reheated potato and cabbage) and rissoles (ground, fried, leftover meat). The wise ordered the sausage, egg and chips.

We ate like marathon runners on the 25th mile, doggedly, dutifully and desperately. We lied in our thanks and longed to throw up. We chewed out of decency.

It was all out of an O. Henry short story. Or was it Dickens?

This soothed my conscience: Life was imitating art.

 

Unwelcoming House

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There is a knot of people standing outside the Northwest Gate of the White House. They are cold and unhappy, clutching driver’s licenses and other forms of identification.

Taking his turn, one man shouts into a communications box. He has an appointment, but he is made to feel as though he is a rascal after the silver.

There are no welcome mats at this or any other gate to the White House. You feel under suspicion until you are cleared in–when you go from indignity to thrilling proximity to power.

There are no waiting rooms or seats at the gates. There is no one posted at the gates to welcome visitors.

Things go badly for visitors who are not carrying ID. Some years ago, singer Vic Damone and his wife, Rena Rowan Damone, showed up at the Northwest Gate. They had an appointment, but Mrs. Damone didn’t bring her purse and didn’t have any ID. No ID, no entry.

The Damone tableau is played out frequently. The People’s House is not people-friendly.

Worse, because entry is badly organized, and often excessively restrictive, neither visitors nor guards respect the system–a clue as to how the Bonnie and Clyde of social-climbing, Tareq and Michaele Salahi, got in to President Obama’s first state dinner without an invitation, and even spoke to the President.

Security at the White House gates has grown since the Lyndon B. Johnson administration. Every subsequent administration has built on the excess security, and faux security, of the previous one.

The guards are members of the uniformed unit of the Secret Service. They complain about the job a lot. The problem seems to be pay; their beef contributes to the attitude faced by visitors.

The Salahi affair demonstrates how too much security results in a breachable wall. But there is too much faux security in Washington, too.

Since 9/11, a vast army of security people (rent-a-cops) has taken over corporate and government buildings in the nation’s capital. They sit at desks or in glass boxes in the lobby of almost every office building. They are there to get visitors to sign in and to show the dreaded ID.

But you can sign in as almost anyone and nothing happens. Any name is good enough in the world of faux security.

Every week I go to a particular radio studio, where I have to sign in and wait for a producers to escort me. The busy producers have to leave their consoles. The guards know this is a waste of time and effort. Everyone despises the charade and, therefore, disrespects the system.

At Voice of America headquarters, you have to produce a driver’s license and have your picture taken each time you enter the building. Taking pictures of all visitors is something even the White House does not require.

So which national secrets is Voice of America hiding that the White House is not? –-For the Hearst/New York Times Syndicate

 

Disruptive Technologies and the Agenda They Set

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The copper-wire telephone is in danger, traditional advertising is drying up and health care costs are through the roof and rising. What is the villain? Well, it’s technology; particularly, “disruptive technology.”

Disruptive technologies are devastating to established order. And they underlie Congress’s consideration the most wide-ranging legislative challenges it has faced since the New Deal: health care and energy.

Hugely effective but expensive new medical technologies, like magnetic resonance imaging, nuclear therapies and artificial joints, threaten to bankrupt the nation’s health care system. At the heart of the health care debate lie the escalating costs for these new technologies and how to shoulder and control them. The rudimentary solution is to get the well to pay for the sick, in the way that Social Security seeks to get the young to pay for the old.

After health care, Congress has to consider energy and its leitmotif, climate remediation. Here, too, it is faced with new technology forcing the issue. Even as the Senate contemplates taking up the House-passed bill, with its heavy emphasis on renewables, new drilling and discovery technologies are tipping the energy balance towards natural gas and away from other competitors like wind and nuclear power. Ironically, at one time, nuclear power was a disruptive technology that threatened to elbow out coal.

In electricity, Congress can force the market away from the disruptive technology toward something it favors for social and political reasons, like solar or wave power. The cost is simply passed on to the consumer.

As for transportation, the energy imperatives are dictated by the forces of infrastructure and sunk cost. In the long term, there are four options that will keep the wheels turning:

1.plug-in hybrids leading to full electric-powered vehicles;

2. hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles;

3. ethanol-powered vehicles and;

4. compressed natural gas-powered vehicles

These options are not created equal. Hybrids are here but the batteries are expensive, and the plug-in option dictates that the car sits in a garage or a parking lot that is equipped with plugs for charging. Also, the batteries decline with time and cannot be used after they lose about 30 percent of their design capacity. If you live in a high-rise, plugging in your vehicle is not yet an option. Ditto pure electric vehicles.

Hydrogen is a darling technology of the green community, which marvels that it is emission-free except for water. Trouble is, there is hydrogen aplenty in nature but not free-standing; it has to be extracted from hydrocarbons, like natural gas, or from water, with huge electrical input. Why not use the gas or the electricity directly?

General Motors markets a duel-use vehicle that can run on E85 (85-percent corn-derived ethanol). This fuel was a favorite of President George W. Bush; but the environmental impact of putting so much farmland down to corn for fuel and the effect on corn prices has taken the bloom off ethanol.

Natural gas–which can be used in a modified gasoline engine and has been made more abundant by revolutionary horizontal drilling technology–is advocated by T. Boone Pickens and others. It has come late to the transportation fuel wars because of fears of shortage, now proved groundless. Natural gas is not without emissions, but these are about half of those of gasoline. And it may be the big energy disrupter.

Congress, reluctant to pick winners for fear of also creating losers, intends to throw cash at every option in the hope that the market can make the choice later. But the market is not immaculate–and less so in energy than almost any other commodity. Electricity has to move down a finite number of power lines, and transportation fuels depend on the nation’s 160,000 gas stations for market entry. You can expect the gas station infrastructure to, say, provide replacement batteries, charging points, hydrogen terminals or natural gas compressors. But can you expect it to provide all of these?

Maybe the gas station, rather than being the vital element in the new energy regime, will be rendered obsolete by disruptive new technologies that allow gas compressing and electric charging in home garages and commercial parking lots. Maybe the hybrid of the future will have a compressed-gas engine and plug-in capacity, and all this will be achieved without the traditional gas station. Technology enhances, modifies and improves, but it is hell on established order.

Leon Trotsky said: “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.” Congress ought to know that technology, disruptive technology, is interested in it. –For the Hearst/New York Times syndicate

 

Newsweek: Another Magazine on the Brink

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In the golden age of print journalism, during the 1950s and 1960s, magazines were the aristocrats: glossy, sophisticated, used to money and generous to their own. Whereas newspapers were rough and urgent, works-in-progress, the great magazines (Paris Match, Life, Look, The Saturday Evening Post, Colliers and Picture Post) were finished like fine furniture–highly polished writing, designing by typographical architects and great platforms for displaying creative talent.

Paris Match, Life and Look went for the photographs, and heralded in a new generation of gifted photographers using the new technology of 35-millimeter Leicas. These picture magazines were the barons; their importance and prestige were unassailable.

Towering over them was Henry Luce’s Life. It was a magazine that thought it was a movie studio. Its principle was simple: seek perfection. For perfect pictures, it used the photographers of Magnum, a Paris-based cooperative founded by photographers Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa, among others, to protect photographers from exploitation.

Other magazines carried the foreign-policy debate as much as the newspapers. In The Saturday Evening Post, Stewart Alsop was able to argue the Vietnam War issue in lengthy articles, more thoughtful and nuanced than his brother Joe’s crude advocacy in a syndicated column. Over at Life’s sibling, Time, Luce fought communism, even where there wasn’t any. His magazine had such brio that its excesses were shaken off.

Besides, there was always Newsweek.

Ah, Newsweek: always trailing Time, but getting better all the time. So much so that until weeks ago, it could claim to have become the best of the news magazines.

Time, Newsweek and the also-ran U.S. News & World Report survived the plague of television that ended the reign of the news magazines. Of the great picture magazines, only Paris Match is alive.

Now Newsweek, owned by The Washington Post Company, has decided not to perish at the hands of the Internet, but to take a knife to its own wrists. Under its oh-so-public editor Jon Meacham, the magazine is seeking profitability according to an old and not very effective formula: slash the circulation to save print and distribution costs, and hope for a more exclusive readership sought by select advertisers. The Atlantic Monthly is trying the same solution, and so have many others but without success. In publishing, as in other businesses, shrinking is hard to do.

One thing Newsweek can be sure of is that previously loyal readers will abandon it without regrets. It has been transformed into something that is neither a news magazine nor any other kind of magazine. In appearance, it looks like a catalog for an art gallery. Worse, there are big advertising supplements that blend in so that readers don’t know whether they’re reading advertising or editorial content.

The magazine’s great writers, like Evan Thomas and Eleanor Clift, are clearly being held out of the battle. What remains of the reliable old features of Newsweek, “Conventional Wisdom” and “Verbatim,” are hard to find. It’s all very strange and disturbing.

News is no longer to be found in Newsweek. The new Newsweek is baroque in appearance and eccentric in subject. After the death of Sen. Edward Kennedy, a photograph of a very young Kennedy stares from the cover and seven writers–from Bob Dole to Ben Bradlee and, of course, Jon Meacham–weigh in on “Understanding Teddy.” Didn’t he die? He’s not running for office again. A week later the magazine poses this question on its cover, featuring the face of a 6-month-old baby: Is Your Baby Racist?

The golden age has been over for magazines since the 1970s, but the news magazines held on for a quarter century longer. Now they are dying. Television drained the advertising from the picture magazines, now the Internet and the economy are closing in on the news magazines. Time has been the healthiest, U.S. News & World Report has surrendered to the Internet, and Newsweek has resorted to the publishing equivalent of plastic surgery. Shame.

 


The Politics behind the Lockerbie-Libya Affair

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Some damned fool on one of the cable television channels opined that the special relationship between Britain and America notwithstanding, Britain should face sanctions for allowing the return to Libya of the only terrorist imprisoned for the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland on Dec. 21, 1988.

 

I did not get the name of the buffoon who suggested that we sanction our greatest ally and a top investor and trading partner. Maybe the British should sanction us for using their language without paying a royalty every time we open our mouths.

 

The broadly reviled decision to send Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi back to Libya because of his medical condition has more to do with surging Scottish nationalism than with British perfidy.

 

London may have interests in trade with Libya, but would not have moved to free the prisoner, knowing how deep survivor feeling runs on both sides of the Atlantic; and knowing how seriously the United States takes the prosecution and punishment of terrorists. There was an understanding between London and Washington that the perpetrators (only one was prosecuted) would serve their full sentences if convicted.

 

Enter the Scottish nationalists, who are particularly assertive at present, and are hoping one day to break up the United Kingdom. Scotland and England, after a long and bloody history were united in 1707 under the Acts of Union. The merger was voted by the Scottish and English parliaments.

 

But rather than a merger of equals, it was a coercive match. Scotland was desperately poor at the time, and hoped to prosper from the inclusion in British trading around the globe. Also, some members of the Scottish parliament were bribed but the larger reality was that Scotland was, as they say, between a rock and a hard place. So the union went ahead, and Queen Anne was the first monarch of the United Kingdom.

 

Over the 300 years of union, the relationship has ebbed and flowed. While Scotland benefited from the textile boom that set off the Industrial Revolution and from the production of wool, it lost its language and the Scots resented the Anglification of their country. Poet Robert Burns, writing in dialect railed against the English. And the Scots call the English “Sassenachs” (trans. Lowlanders), a term of abuse.

 

There was some softening of the Scottish attitude to England during the long rule of Queen Victoria, mainly because she spent long periods at the royal estate at Balmoral in Scotland. Some have speculated that the history of Ireland might have been different if Victoria had been one half so fond the Irish as she was of the Scots.

 

The Scots, traditionally a proud and independent people, began a long decline in the 20th century; a decline led in part by the loss of heavy industries like shipbuilding. The discovery of oil in the North Sea and along the Scottish coast helped financially, but it failed to revive Scottish spirits. More and more turned to the welfare state and supported the Labor Party. Conservatives totally lost their footing in Scotland.

 

But help was on the way in the unlikely person of Tony Blair, the Labor Party’s longest-serving prime minister, who favored devolution–or the creation of a self-governing Scotland and Wales with their own devolved national assemblies. The Conservatives, led by John Major, called this blow at the structure of the union “folly.” The Scottish nationalists, led by Alex Salmond, swept to power in Scotland, beating the Labor Party which had been so generous.

 

Nothing about devolution suggested that the government of Scotland would have a say in British foreign policy, but they would control the prisons. And, despite the awkwardness it has caused, freeing al-Megrahi gave the Scottish nationalists an opportunity to claim world recognition; embarrass the British government; and, for good measure, gratuitously stick it to America. Whereas Irish nationalists feel a strong affiliation with the United States, the Scots do not.The Scottish Nationalist Party seeks independence one day, and international recognition today. The Scots are on the march.

 

For their part, the English have reason to be vexed at the Scots. Not only do they take a certain amount of abuse, but England pours more money into Scotland than Scottish taxes yield. While the Scots vote for members of the House of Commons, the English do not vote for members of the Scottish Parliament. This imbalance is known as the “West Lothian Question.”

 

Even though the British prime minister, Gordon Brown, is a Scot, he has no influence north of the border. The breakup of the United Kingdom may be underway–unless the English come up with another bribe.  –For North Star Writers Group

 

 


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Ireland: Trouble in Threes

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BALLINA, Ireland–Even by Ireland’s legendary standards for rain, this summer has been particularly wet. But it not the weather that accounts for the gloom in the Emerald Isle. As heavy rains were pushing the River Moy, which flows through this Co. Mayo town of 8,000, above flood stage, the attendees of the Humbert Summer School (a kind of think tank) were pondering this solemn subject: “Can Ireland be redeemed?” The answer was maybe, if there was a single answer.

Ireland is in the grip of two crises and is facing a third—three crises that undermine its national self-confidence and imperil its economic future.

Crisis One: A shattering report on child abuse in the Catholic Church in Ireland has found that it was systematic and extended possibly over centuries; that it was known and tolerated by the highest levels of government; and that it was also known and tolerated by the Vatican. Indeed Tom Arnold, head of Concern, a Dublin charity, told the conference that the Vatican did not act because it believed the church would be undermined and it wanted a devout Christian country to counter the secular nature of neighboring Britain.

The child abuse scandal, which dwarfs church sex scandals elsewhere, is alleged in Ireland to have been more pervasive, more institutionalized and to incorporate cruelty, especially by the notorious Christian Brothers, a disciplinary educational order. For the Irish, with their large families and sense of family values being paramount, the full extent of the scandal has been devastating, causing a great swath of the population to wonder how long they have been living a lie.

Crisis Two: The Irish economy is in tatters and, by most analysis, will not recover in tandem with the rest of the world.

In recent years Ireland has enjoyed prosperity, the like of which it has never known in history. It boomed partly because of European Union structural funds and partly because of American computer companies, which located there to take advantage of the population’s high literacy rate. Computer firms flooded cities like Galway: once a dreamy seaport city more famous for its bookshops than its millionaires.

The boom caused Ireland to be dubbed “The Celtic Tiger.” Ireland was growing faster than any other economy in Europe.

With dynamic growth came overheating and property speculation. And with property speculation came banking insanity. The banks were eager, too eager, to lend against inflating property values. Sound familiar?

But now, the banks are being bailed out and the taxpayers are howling. Justice Vivian Lavan told me that no houses are being sold because no one knows how to value them. Unemployment, under control for 15 years, is back and climbing beyond 13 percent.

On the horizon is Crisis Three: Once again, the Irish have to vote on the Lisbon Treaty: a document that tidies up odds and ends in the structure of the European Union. A year ago, Irish voters rejected the treaty to the considerable annoyance of the rest of the EU and the embarrassment of the Irish government.

Now Irish objections have been met and a new vote, critical to Ireland’s continuing influence in the councils of Europe, is scheduled for Oct. 2.

Ireland, with a population of only 4.5 million, has worked tirelessly to extend its influence through “good offices” and diplomatic maneuvering. Now, that is imperiled. Ireland may well again bite the hand that has fed it generously.

In favor of the treaty are the main Irish political parties (Fine Gael and Fianna Fail); the Irish business establishment: and the inward investors, including American companies like Shell Oil and Dell. Against is a strange coalition that includes the nationalistic Sinn Fein (the political wing of the Irish Republican Army), extremely conservative Catholic groups, Greens and a band of hippie activists. On paper they are not much, but they defeated the Lisbon Treaty last June. They argue that Europe will legalize and promote abortion, imperil Irish neutrality, raise taxes and dilute labor laws. Proponents say there are cast-iron guarantees on all of these issues, but detractors say they are not worth the paper they are written on. The Oct. 2 referendum on the treaty will test a battered island. –For North Star Writers Group

 

New to Protesting? Enjoy

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One can only be glad that so many white middle-class conservatives are fairly late in life learning the joy of protest, the feeling the thrill of the barricades, and experiencing the carthartic wonders of getting involved.

 

Let’s face it, public protest is exhilarating. To see so many otherwise stodgy people on an adrenalin high as they shout down their elected representatives and lay siege to the very idea of a town-hall meeting as a forum for ideas, is to take one back to civil rights marches, anti-nuclear demonstrations, picket lines and construction protests.

 

You’ve not lived until you’ve yelled your heart out in public. Protest–even misguided protest–is good for the soul.

 

Day after day we see really nice respectable people giving voice to their dislike of the Obama administration, their sense that the America that has been so generous to them is changing; that it may not be as generous to their grandchildren.

 

Righteous anger is as good as a whole slew of martinis, and there are no calories and no hangover.

 

After all, this all about heat not light. You’re out there yelling in public for one of two reasons: (1)You’ve missed doing it since the days of Vietnam War, protests, or (2) It’s something you’ve never done because the beastly liberals were doing it.

 

These protesters want to take back America. But first, they want to wrest the joy of public protesting from the liberals. For too long these crypto-socialists have had all the fun, from free love to smoking exotic cheroots and pouring into the streets to protest every conservative initiative, social policy or war. Just think of Victor Hugo.

 

Begone liberals. You can’t have all the fun because now we have some of it. And if any of those crackpot, socialistic, inconveniently elected Congress types try and sell their Dr. Government health care schemes by town hall meeting, we’ll be there, golf shirts and pants with a touch of spandex freshly laundered. Protesting is no longer for the unwashed; people with Brooks Brothers suits in the closet can now head to the barricades to fight for the right.

 

These town hall meetings are the gift that keeps on giving. There’s really no impediment to the joy of protest for the aging guys and gals who find

retirement a yawn. Public policy activism is the tonic these people need. Get out there and let Obamacare take it on the chin. Tell them that old people are left to die in England, that rationing dominates in Canada, that the French are forced to guzzle wine in lieu of medication, and that the Japanese are falling like flies.

 

Isn’t this a great country in which even conservatives can have a go at hitting the bricks?

 

You’re the rebels now, at the baracades, standing strong against the forces of the evil reformers. Compare socialized medicine with the post office. Beat on those bureaucrats, who you claim are going to be making health care decisions instead of doctors.

 

Here is a quick guide for the neophyte protester:

 

Don’t use an out-of-state car. Don’t wear too many diamonds. Journalists don’t understand; besides they’re in the tank for Obama. Try to look like a liberal: shabby. Don’t mention daddy’s fortune, your Palm Beach pied-a-terre, or the place in France. Go forth and shout for America.

 

Just one more thing: Whatever you do, don’t let it out that you are on Medicare. Sadly, it’s one of the most popular government programs ever.  –For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate