Not since Newt Gingrich, Dick Armey and The Heritage Foundation cooked up the Contract with America in 1994, has there been such a clever piece of political stagecraft as the Green New Deal.

But whereas the Gingrich plan was able to make its way untrammeled through the congressional election and, in many of its goals, into law, the Green New Deal is by its nature more political theater than legislative agenda.

The Green New Deal is a crummy document, featuring many old and failed ideas from the past — stretching back to the 19th century. But as a banner, it is effective; as a call to arms, it works.

What its Republican critics have wrong is that in cleaving to the White House line on global warming, they underestimate the degree of real alarm that aberrant weather, more severe hurricanes, rising sea levels and daily reports of catastrophic ice melts in the Arctic and Antarctic will engender.

A television video of a starving polar bear, whose sea ice habitat is under threat from climate change, has an incalculable effect on public alarm. But that bear and the bad news of rising water in Miami, Norfolk, Va., and San Francisco cannot be denied and will be present at the balloting in 2020.

The Green New Deal document is too broad, too idealistic and too weakly drafted to be taken seriously as legislation. But as propaganda, it is brilliant.

As presented by the Democratic House-Senate duo of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts, it is more than an environmental wish list. It is a far-left social and environmental game plan. It is a call to reorder, re-engineer and convert our society from what we drive to what we eat. It delves into the crypt of failed socialist ideas and brings out the cadavers, like the one of a living, guaranteed wage.

Sadly, the Green New Deal will hang some of these old, failed ideas around the necks of many of the Democratic presidential hopefuls — at least five have uncritically endorsed it.

Recently, I went to hear one of those contenders, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii. In a few words, she impressed me; then, in a few more, she appalled me.

As someone who has served two deployments in the Middle East, as an enlisted woman and as an officer, Gabbard has something to say about foreign policy: She says no more wasteful foreign wars. But as an environmental champion, she has swallowed whole the weary fictions of the left.

Gabbard determines all electricity should be generated by renewables, defined as solar and wind. For good measure she throws in a denunciation of nuclear power, concentrating on the abandoned San Onofre plant, between Los Angeles and San Diego. To make her point, she says the waste would last for 500,000 years, which should get a sharp rebuke from scientists.

Nuclear, she should be told, is progressive. It is science at the beginning of its age of discovery with new products and ideas swirling around as they have not since the 1950s. Small, factory-built reactors with various new technologies are being readied for market. The Holy Grail of nuclear fusion is closer than ever.

The science of carbon capture and storage, she should also be told, is evolving.

The green world needs to know that wind and solar are limited in that they cannot produce more power than they reap. Solar is confined by the amount of sun that falls on a given collector, wind by the amount of ambient breeze blowing though one windmill. That is guaranteed by the second law of thermodynamics.

Nonetheless, the message of the framing-word green in the Green New Deal is a clear call to arms. The rest of it should be put down to Ocasio-Cortez’s youth and inexperience and Markey’s foggy hopes.

But that does not mean that the next election will not, to rephrase a Clinton slogan, hinge on “It’s the climate, stupid.” The Green New Deal makes a nifty bumper sticker.

 

 

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Photo: Washington, DC. USA. 12.10.18- Hundreds of young people occupy Representative offices to pressure the new Congress to support a committee for a Green New Deal. Editorial credit: Rachael Warriner / Shutterstock.com

There is a persistent belief that business people are what you need in the Oval Office. It was one of the credentials on Donald Trump’s resume.

That, too, may be one of the underlying weaknesses of Trump’s presidency.

When Trump was elected, he thought he was the new proprietor of the United States, as though he had bought it in a deal. He had paid his money and acquired a new company: Donald Trump, chairman, chief executive officer and majority stockholder.

Trump came to Washington to run his new company. He won, as he likes to say, and the United States was his with which to do what he liked, where his whim was law. Pull out of a treaty, abrogate an agreement, decide the moral acceptability of the sexual preferences of the staff, and fire, fire, fire.

Rupert Murdoch — Trump’s man Friday in the media — famously said he had the right to say what was published in his newspapers. He asserted a kind of divine right of the proprietor; a concept that was eroding as the concept of the newspaper as a public service was gaining ground. Murdoch was not interested in the public service approach. Neither is Trump. They sit next to each other in the pea pod of history.

Trump’s view of the presidency as a proprietorship, the wholly owned property of the CEO, is seen in his actions and even more in his frustrations. If he were sitting atop a giant corporation, his word would be law; he could hire and fire at will, dictate a course of action and maybe retract it. The boss gets what the boss wants, particularly if it is a privately held outfit, like the Trump real estate empire.

Clearly, Trump thought that was what he would do when he took over the United States. His attempts to govern by fiat illustrate that frustration.

Trump, who is not a reader, had not schooled himself in the realities of governance, the give and take of Washington, the grand negotiation that is democracy, imperfect but purposeful — the great purpose being the republic and its well-being.

The organizing principle of a business is profit: It must take in more money than it spends. In real estate you bet against rising demand, borrow and buy. That is not a guide as to how to run the United States, or any other country.

The assets and liabilities balance differently. For example, NATO is an asset and Russia a liability.

Statesmen want to project power rather than use it. Trump wants to use it, to have dominion over the whole government and allies. He wants Congress to act only as permissive board of directors, not an equal partner. If the deal fails, he wants to be able to walk away. In government, and especially in international relations, you cannot walk away. The deal is nonetheless your deal, your failure.

I have watched other business people come to Washington and make, on a smaller scale, the same mistakes. They failed to understand the system; that to get things done you bend the system, not break it.

These, the benders, are the consummate Washington hands, often with institutional memories. They are the ones who get things done.

There is another side to this coin, and that is that no knowledge of business is a detriment to a leader. Sen. George McGovern, D-South Dakota, after his unsuccessful bid to win the 1972 presidential election, lamented that he wished he had understood business better when he was candidate lashing out at big business.

Lashing out at business is a standard approach by today’s Democratic hopefuls. It does not sit well with a lot of voters, particularly as most are employed by business. Those who think that kicking posterior is all that is needed in Washington are as wrong as those who think that business needs a boot in the same place.

The C suite does not fit in the Oval Office but, conversely, politicians have often been ignorant of the disciplines of business. Some tension is constructive; too much, and the nation loses.

Socialism is a toxic word, and so its happy adoption by some of the new stars of the Democratic left is to handle something that might blow up with lethal political consequences.

Words are the materiel of politics: its artillery, its infantry and its minefield, packed with unstable incendiary devices; hence the potency of one word, socialism.

Trouble is neither the opponents, who hold out anything to do with socialism as a plague that will engulf and destroy, nor the new wave of endorsers seem to have a clear idea of what socialism means. For the Democratic left it means the Nordic countries, which, according to the old definitions of socialism, are not socialist. They are capitalist democracies with advanced social welfare.

Socialism, classic socialism, had at its bedrock a concept that is now curiously old and irrelevant, like a gas lamp. Socialism, in classic definition, states simply that the means of production should be owned by the workers — understandable in the 19th century and now a historical relic.

Karl Marx extended the struggle between workers and owners to embrace all of society as a great class battle between the workers and the owners; a struggle that embraced all aspects of endeavor.

Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks seized on this as a means of total control. The state, representing the workers, would control everything and so a small cadre at the top could dominate as thoroughly and effectively as any emperor or monarch ever had, in fact more so.

Joseph Stalin dragged the idealism of the earlier communism down further and added a massive state apparatus of suppression and industrial-scale brutality.

In the hands of 19th-century socialists, like the Englishman Sidney Webb and his wife, Beatrice, who gave us the phrase “collective bargaining,” socialism was humanitarianism as a political system. Harsh events and evil men overtook them.

Communism failed in the botched Soviet Union, and even the word mostly came down with the Berlin Wall in 1989. Only Cuba and few other far, far left states clung to the appellation communist. China remains avowedly communist, but it has evolved into an autocratic mercantilism, far from Marx, Lenin and the rest.

Venezuela tried communism and called it socialism.

All of Africa after the colonial withdrawal went for what they called socialist government and failed awfully. The new leaders were not so much attracted to the enlightenment of the Webbs or of the theories of Marx as to the lure of controlling everything. From the Limpopo River (South Africa’s northern border) to the Nile, they failed disastrously.

Those who cling to the word socialism, besides Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), himself a durable anachronism, tempt to be tarred with the brush of the failed states, like Nicaragua and Venezuela.

Words play tricks with policy and they should be treated like munitions, useful in the battle but hazardous later. For example, whatever happened to the working class? They morphed into the middle class, and in so doing lost their old power base, the trade unions.

President Trump’s common-man populism is no substitute for a working union with its upward wage pressure, job security and healthcare. But unionism has lost its way, and the unions themselves have not found a new footing in the political firmament.

The Democratic left, which is in ascendancy, needs a new vocabulary to fit its goals. If it wishes, as it seems, to emulate the successful countries that lie along the Baltic Sea, it needs to define its goals outside of the old lingo of socialism. It should articulate its new tangible vision of a more equitable future, untainted with the toxic limitations of the past.

For the Republicans, though, socialism is the gift that has given and keeps on giving. It is the weapon of choice, made more potent by failures in countries that defined themselves as socialist.

In the battle of 2020, Venezuela is a conservative asset. If Sanders and the shining star of the left, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, keep the appellation socialism alive, that is a laurel tied around the GOP’s best weapon.

Can one mourn a building, cry for it as one weeps for a loved one? Yes, if this loved one is Notre Dame Cathedral.

I am mourning after the fire which gutted the great structure. I am choked, hurting, in sorrow.
No other cathedral or church has so touched me. I have seen my share of great places of Christian worship in and near Paris, from the Sacre Coeur basilica to the Chartres Cathedral. I have seen the cathedral in Florence, the Sistine Chapel in Rome, and churches, churches everywhere in Italy. The English cathedrals are well known to me: Westminster, St. Paul’s, Canterbury, Wells and York (known as the York Minster).

But it is on the Ile de la Cite, in the middle of the Seine River in Paris, that I found, for me, the middle of Christendom.

Cry the beloved building, sitting there for more than eight centuries, witness to everything: war, plague, revolution, the crowning of the Emperor Napoleon, and conquest. And, let us not forget, the setting for one of the great novels of all time, Victor Hugo’s “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” published in 1831.

For me, visiting Notre Dame for the first of many visits was to feel humanity’s eternal striving for God; striving in a space where it was possible to believe. That is not to say that, for some, every holy site is place for that, but I sensed it the first time I first went through the massive doors decades ago, and the many times since then.

Notre Dame with its flying buttresses, ribbed vaulting and leering gargoyles was, for me, the ultimate religious structure; man’s finest architecture, craftsmanship and imagination let loose in the confines of medieval expectations. It had dignity, function and innovation, and supreme commitment to purpose — the whole building a prayer.

Winston Churchill said we shape buildings and then they shape us. Quite so. Notre Dame has shaped France since medieval times, even as it has undergone its own struggles. It was ravaged by fire — but not a badly as now — and had fallen into disrepair and disrespect before Victor Hugo turned it into the most famous church ever through a story of love and pain, of mob violence, of betrayal, of sanctuary and, ultimately, of love unto death.

Hugo wrote his novel to save the cathedral. He was appalled by the disappearing medieval architecture of Paris. Hugo more than saved Notre Dame: He gave it to the world. From being the great cathedral of Paris, it became the cathedral of the world: a place where millions upon millions of people could seek a brief sanctuary from daily life.

Once I had climbed up some stairs in Notre Dame and heard the most extraordinary noise. It sounded as though the cathedral was being attacked by locusts. Then I saw the noisemakers in the nave: a tour group of Japanese, respectfully photographing without flash.

It seems that Notre Dame will be rebuilt, and it should be, but for me, it will have lost something — that sense of more than eight centuries of mankind’s striving to find God and possibly for some succeeding.

When the age of communication started (pick your time, but I think it was when we started sending print by telephone in the form of a fax), it was thought that dictators would fall, and democracy would be reinvigorated.

The first big disappointment was Saudi Arabia. When the Saudis began to get uncensored news and information, it was believed that the grip of the royal family and its extreme religious allies would be loosened. It did not happen. Instead, Saudi Arabia was spurred to use its oil wealth to push conservative Islam around the globe, especially in places where it was present but could be radicalized, including Pakistan and Bangladesh. They poured their money into madrassas — religious schools — that preached the Wahhabism, a strict and puritanical interpretation of Sunni Islam.

When Iran, a majority Shia country, was under the dictatorial thumb of the shah, it was thought that the Iranians, a sophisticated people with an ancient and proud history, would be liberalized by the flow of Western, secular ideas. These ideas came into the country through the presence of visitors and contractors, and a liking for movies and television.

Fax transmission was important in the spread of ideas in Iran. But the faxes that had an effect were not those preaching democracy but those coming from an old Shia cleric living in exile in a village outside Paris, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. He used the fax to push the Islamic Revolution.

People ask me why, when the mainstream media daily points up President Donald Trump’s failures and transgressions, his supporters are unmoved, disdaining what is being revealed in favor of what they want to believe. They believe in Trump and they believe in his courtiers at Fox News Channel and on talk radio.

People do not react to raw information but, rather, to information that sits well with them for other reasons: what they are predisposed to believe.

Rupert Murdoch, the boss of Fox News, has had a genius, a real genius, for corralling those who felt ignored by society. He did it in Britain with his hugely successful tabloid newspaper, The Sun, and he has done it here with Fox News. In Britain and in the United States, he found and exploited a nativism that both countries had forgotten they had.

Fox News did not invent Trump; instead, the shoe fit. In Britain, The Sun did not invent Brexit. But when it came along, The Sun was ready to lead the charge — and it did.

How we react to the news depends on our involvement with it in tertiary ways. If you were already convinced of British exceptionalism, you would move toward the hostility to Europe expressed in The Sun. If you think immigrants take jobs, speak strange languages and are usurping our Americanism, you will be gung-ho for Trump’s southern border wall.

In the 1990s you could find, and I did, from Nicaragua to Zimbabwe, old-line communists lamenting the fall of the Soviet Union. They argued that it had not been given a chance. These people really believed that all that was wanted was more of what did not work.

If you are a Trump supporter, you are genuinely amazed that the mainstream media cannot see that what he is doing is great. Democrats and renegade Republicans, like columnist George Will, can find nothing, absolutely nothing, good in the Trump presidency.

People, including AOL founder Steve Case, talked idealistically about the internet in the days when it was getting going as the great, new democratic tool; a boon to global democracy. Wrong. If anything, it stirred up a destructive nationalism.

Information, I have noticed as a journalist who has worked on three continents, does not necessarily shape political opinion.

Political opinion tends to find the media that agree with it, not the other way. But after the two have mated, media can inflame its public partner. Good for two-party rivalry, but not for elucidation.

 

 

 

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Photo: LAN-UDE, RUSSIA – FEBRUARY 20: Young family watching Russian President Vladimir Putin on TV on February 20, 2015 in Ulan-Ude. Editorial credit: Andrey Burmakin / Shutterstock.com

Confused about Brexit? Then let me tell you about my father. He was born when the British Empire was still in bloom and being British was to inherit a divine state of grace. It was an exceptionalism. You carried the long and varied history of Britain with you. It was your honor and your obligation.

My father was born in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and only visited Britain briefly. But he was quintessentially British and, more than that, English.

He was neither well-lettered nor well-traveled; he earned his living with his hands as a mechanic. But his commitment to “King and Country” was absolute. He believed in Britain as the source of all good things, from justice to innovation.

That’s why when war broke out in 1939, he volunteered immediately for the Rhodesian regiment that was forming. He was rejected because he couldn’t fully straighten his left arm, which he had broken as a child.

No matter. He sold all the family’s possessions and with my mother, my 3-year-old brother and me, just months old, we took a six-day train journey with very little money to the South African port of Durban. He figured that The Royal South African Navy would be less interested in medical status than the infantry. He was right and he went to sea. Hugely important to him: he could serve.

In London in 1962, I worked for Lord Beaverbrook, the Canadian press lord who had been a big part of the war effort, a close friend of Churchill, and a man violently opposed to Britain joining the precursor to the European Union, the Common Market. My job was to help the effort to keep Britain out with the help of the influential Beaverbrook press — think Rupert Murdoch media — and to mobilize support against anything to do with the nascent European project.

The men and women I met were socially and intellectually far more accomplished than my father, but they had the same flame, the same basic belief in British exceptionalism. They believed in honor, duty, justice, but also that Britain, especially England, had an exceptional role in history: It was chosen. It’s a belief so deep that it’s primal, coming from a far place in the psyche.

The overt arguments we assembled were economic: Beaverbrook said, and I believed, the British farmer would be hurt, British trade would suffer and the precious empire — now in its new non-imperial guise as the Commonwealth — would be imperiled. Beaverbrook was wrong and, of course, I was wrong, and so were the Britain-first people we spoke for and sometimes recruited.

When Britain finally joined Europe in 1973, the farmers, and the economy in general were to bloom. Britain became Europe’s financial hub as well as the point of entry into Europe for global companies. Its own exports to Europe boomed: At one time, and perhaps still, half the pizza shells in Italy were made in Britain.

Now that economic order is to be disrupted, damaged or destroyed. Britain is going back to a glorious place that only existed in myth: the pre-European days when, without glory, it was still recovering from loss of empire and World War II.

When I try to imagine why this is happening, I find the arguments about “sovereignty, freedom and faceless bureaucrats in Brussels” even more empty than Beaverbrook’s fictions that I once peddled. I hear instead the brave music of a distant drum, the echoes of past victories, inventions and achievements, “Rule Britannia” in a minor key.

Winston Churchill said of the Seven Years War, “mankind was not to be spared the rigors of the human pilgrimage.” Neither, alas, it seems, is Britain.

As to my father, he lived many years in the independent African country Botswana teaching his trade and harboring in his home newborn African babies, who were fatherless and whose mothers had to work. He, unlike his sentimental compatriots, realized that times had changed, and that the Britishness of yesteryear was, well, of a time gone by and best left to BBC costume dramas like “Downton Abbey.”

A shadow has fallen across the future of autonomous transportation, one of the key aspects of the city of the future and of the widespread use of artificial intelligence. It comes from Boeing in the form of the computer problem that has grounded the world’s fleet of 737 Max 8 aircraft.

No definitive cause of the crashes of Lion Air Flight 610 in the Java Sea, which killed 189 people, and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 en route from Nairobi to Addis Ababa, which killed 157 people, has been established yet. But everything points to the computerized stall-avoidance system.

In terms of computing in aircraft, this is no more than an embarrassment. In terms of loss of life, it is ghastly. In terms of the public confidence in the growing role of computing in everything, it is grave.

These crashes have stimulated public fear, and public fear hangs around. So does institutional fear — even when the problem has been identified and remediated.

Consider these events which have left a long-lasting residue of fear:

—Thalidomide was a drug developed in Germany and first marketed there to pregnant women. Use spread around the globe and the results were devastating: More than 10,000 babies were born without one or two major limbs, like arms and legs.

I am told, although it is never mentioned, thalidomide haunts the drug industry. It has affected both the development of new drugs and the regulation of drugs to this day. The long delays and exhausting trials new drugs go through are partly due to something that happened in the late 1950s.

—The Three Mile Island nuclear power plant accident in Pennsylvania in 1979 has affected nuclear design and regulation of nuclear plants ever since, although no life was lost. There was a partial meltdown of the core and the result fed the anti-nuclear movement, which, ironically, pushed utilities back to coal — now under attack because of its environmental impact.

The Max 8 problem, in terms of computing in aircraft, is no more than a glitch, possibly the result of a rush to market. But the loss of life is terrible and the loss of confidence immeasurable.

A whole array of high-tech companies is hoping to bring autonomous transportation to the streets within a decade or not much longer. These include Uber, Lyft and Google. Tesla would like to see autonomous electric trucks handling intercity deliveries.

This push to the driverless has huge energy and resources behind it. It is a part of what has come to be known as the smart city revolution. It also is part of what has been described as the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Early autonomous cars have depended on sensors to guide them. The car in front slows and the car behind picks this up from its sensors. When autonomous vehicles are fully developed, these cars and all the others on the road will be in constant communication with each other.  Car A will tell Car B, “I am breaking” and so on down through a line of traffic. It is coming.

The message from Boeing’s catastrophe is: Get it right or you will scare the public off, as happened with Three Mile Island. Some willing propagandists scared the public off nuclear — our best way of making a lot of electricity without carbon.

The technology in aircraft is very sophisticated. Almost all passenger airliners have been able to land themselves once they intercept a radio signal, called the glide slope, at an advanced airport. They are packed full of computers operating all sorts of wondrous systems.

If all the computers on the fatal Max 8s had been talking to each other, as traffic will have to in the coming era of autonomous vehicles, they might well have shut down the stall avoidance system that was mis-sensing an imminent stall.

The neo-Luddites will try to exploit the Boeing catastrophe into slowing smart city development. The challenge for autonomous technology is to get it right. Not rush to market.

White House press secretary Sarah Sanders’ disinclination, with approval from President Trump, to hold daily press briefings represents a serious setback of the public’s right to know. The briefings aren’t enshrined in the Constitution and she isn’t violating it — except in its broad regard for freedom of the press.

But press briefings have become part of the lore of our governance. It’s the opportunity where, through the media, the public can ask, “What is going on?” And, as important, “What’ve you got to hide?”

Like many things in a democracy, the system of questioning the administration at the daily briefings is imperfect, cantankerous, open to abuse, and unfair to smaller news organizations.

But the briefings are a small, frequently foggy, window into the White House and the administration of the day. The briefings are how the public, through the media, peers in. Presidents should be worried about what will be asked and how it will play. That’s in their long-term interest.

From time to time, some politician or commentator says we need something equivalent to the British House of Commons’ Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQ).

Actually, we did have it for quite a long time, and now we don’t: It was those daily briefings.

Some press secretaries haven’t been forthcoming, but there’s always the palliative effect of simply raising an issue. A small pebble unearthed, as with a small secret, can set in motion a landslide, revealing truths, identifying mendacities and adding to the hygiene of a democracy.

Much depends on the character of the press secretary and the relationship he or she has with the president. A good press secretary is one we, the media, trust and one who’s also trusted by the president — not to lie for him, but to advance his interests while informing the press of the president’s thinking.

Most press secretaries aren’t asked to lie, but to work around awkward truths.

I recall, particularly, when I was in the press party that accompanied President Bill Clinton to China. Mike McCurry, the press secretary, a favorite of Clinton and the press, did his best to eschew the Monica Lewinsky scandal. For example, McCurry manipulated the exit press conference in Hong Kong. I heard him arrange for an Irish correspondent to get a question in because McCurry knew that correspondent wouldn’t ask about Lewinsky.

Another press secretary who was liked and admired by the president he served, George W. Bush, was Tony Snow. He’d been a member of the press corps and we trusted him through contentious times to brief fairly and answer questions to the best of his knowledge. There was plenty that was debatable, but the three-way trust between the media, Snow and the president was preserved. The same could be said of his successor, Dana Perino, who is now a Fox News host.

A president tweeting isn’t a president being open. It’s a harangue. It’s a version of my way or the highway. Likewise, questions answered or avoided at the end of a photo opportunity in the Oval Office or on the South Lawn on the way to the helicopter aren’t a press conference. It’s a hit-and-run where the president drives off unscathed.

The Trump administration got off on a bad footing with the media not because of pre-existing bias but because of initial pre-emptive lying. When Sean Spicer, Trump’s first press secretary, maintained, despite incontrovertible photographic evidence, that Trump had larger crowds at his inauguration than Barack Obama had had at his, the back story was that lying in defense of the president was OK, part of the job. It shouldn’t be; lying undermines the veracity of every factual answer to come.

On Sept. 8, 1974, Jerry terHorst, President Gerald Ford’s press secretary, resigned when he found that he’d been kept in the dark of Ford’s plan to pardon Richard Nixon and had, as a result, misled the press. The press corps revered Jerry for what he did; for what appeared to a be a blow for the truth. He got a long, standing ovation when he spoke at the National Press Club.

Despite what the Trump administration says, the facts are journalism’s bread and butter. Honest.

The Irish are an accommodating people. Well, not in everything but in some things. They share their culture with the world. Then they incorporate into Irish life modifications that other nations, especially the United States, have made.

Take St. Patrick’s Day. It was traditionally a dour day of religious observance in Ireland. Then Irish-Americans turned it into the festival that we celebrate here. And now St. Patrick’s Day is celebrated in Ireland much the way it is here: joyously.

Likewise, corned beef and cabbage. That was a cheap dish that got its Irish identification among the poor immigrants in New York. It wasn’t a tradition in Ireland where thick bacon, lamb and salmon, served with an astonishing array of potato options, is standard fare along with battered cod — fish and chips to the rest of the world. But in an accommodation to visitors, corned beef and cabbage can now be had in the big hotels.

A word about those potatoes: If you can think of preparation for potatoes, you might find them offered. Never, in my experience, are less than three varieties available in a restaurant. At a banquet once, I was offered a choice of chips (French fries) duchess, sautéed, boiled, croquette, mashed and scalloped.

What isn’t seen in Irish restaurants are baked potatoes — although, to please visitors, they may be sneaking into the hotels. In my nearly four decades of annual travels in Ireland, I learned that baked potatoes, known as jacket potatoes, are street food — to be bought with all sorts of great fillings from stalls, food trucks and the like, not in restaurants and pubs.

Irish stew is also less common than you would expect.

The Irish do drink, but in their own way. As Ireland has become a modern, competitive country, people are drinking less. But drinking is part of the fabric of daily life, just as drinking coffee, tea (hot or iced) and soft drinks might be elsewhere. You do business in Ireland over a drink, celebrate with a drink, mourn with a drink and, well, just have a drink because that’s what you do between what you just did and what you’re going to do. A breather, you might say.

For 20 years I was the American organizer for an Irish summer school. Summer schools — there are more than two dozen — are more like themed think tanks that meet only in the summer, often just for a long weekend. They cover literature, music, politics and are named accordingly, like the Yeats International Summer School and the Parnell Summer School.

The one my wife and I were affiliated with was the Humbert International Summer School, named for the French general sent to Ireland in 1798 to help with the uprising against the British, which was put down brutally by Gen. Lord Cornwallis, fresh from his American defeat. Humbert was sent back to France — the English not having a beef with the French at that moment. He had an affair with Napoleon’s sister and was ordered to New Orleans, where he passed his days drinking with Lafitte, the French pirate and privateer, teaching French and living his exiled life in style. He did fight bravely in the Battle of New Orleans and helped the American forces with his military skill. He died in New Orleans and is buried there.

Back to the welcoming of American embellishments to Irish traditions. These are not resented in Ireland because of the great affinity of the Irish have with their 35 million or so kinsmen in the United States. The Irish enjoy the American stage and screen songs of Ireland, like “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.” The Little People of Ireland’s folklore are beginning to look like Disney’s Seven Dwarfs.

That doesn’t mean that the Little People are not alive and well, it’s just that their presence has been enhanced by legends that came from Hollywood as much as from the Auld Sod. A friend of mine built a wall around his mother’s retirement house in Cork. But her neighbors insisted that it have a gap for the Little People to go through — so it has a gap.

As for the fairies, my wife and I were riding in northwest Ireland and our guide told us it was all right to ride through a copse, but we shouldn’t let the horses disturb the fairy circle there. He rode around the copse to be sure he didn’t upset the fairies.

Despite the drink, the Little People and the fairies, Ireland is the computing capital of Europe and hopes to take over as a financial center after England loses many banking houses due to Brexit.

Sláinte! That’s the equivalent of cheers as you raise a glass. Do that Sunday or the Little People, or the fairies, or your Irish friends may be upset. You’ve been warned.

 

 

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Photo: Girl riding on her father’s back with a fairy costume on Saint Patrick’s day in Swords, Ireland on 17 March 2016. Editorial credit: lukian025 / Shutterstock.com

The case for electric airplanes is overwhelming.

The problems of today’s aircraft are well-known: noise and pollution. Homeowners may hate the noise, but pollution is the bigger issue.

While jet aircraft account only for a small part of the greenhouse gas releases worldwide, it is where they release them that makes them especially damaging. Nasty at sea level; at 30,000 feet and above, they are potent contributors to the greenhouse problem.

The answer is to begin to electrify aviation.

The need has not escaped the big air frame makers. Boeing in the United States and Airbus in Europe both have electric airplane programs. Tech giants Uber, Google and Amazon all want to develop electric vehicles to use as ride-sharing cars, pilotless air taxis and delivery drones.

A raft of small companies worldwide is working on new electric airplanes, usually just two-seaters. Some are flying, but batteries limit their airborne endurance to one to two hours.

Already, there is an experimental, pilotless air taxi system in Abu Dhabi. Frankfurt airport is about to announce a system as is Singapore.

Enter Andre Borschberg: a Swiss innovator, pilot, entrepreneur and passionate environmentalist. He may know more about electric propulsion than anyone else and is a great believer in the electric future of flying.

Borschberg, along with Swiss balloonist Bertrand Piccard, built and flew the solar-powered electric airplane, Solar Impulse 2, around the world, landing triumphantly in Abu Dhabi on July 26, 2016.

Flying the first aircraft they built, Solar Impulse 1, Borschberg eclipsed all records for endurance by staying aloft alone for 117 hours. He holds 14 world flying records.

Borschberg and Piccard created the Solar Impulse Foundation that is seeking to identify and assist 1,000 technologies that help the environment. Those listed so far range from a plastic recycling system to self-contained toilets to village-scale desalination plants.

“They have to be able to make a profit,” Borschberg told me in a telephone interview. He believes the dynamics of the free market must be put in play to solve the growing global environmental crisis.

In his latest undertaking, Borschberg has spun off a company, H55, to develop systems for electric aircraft and to help electric aircraft manufacturers with H55 know-how. The company has developed a single-seat, acrobatic aircraft with an hour’s endurance. They hope to make a two-seater that can stay aloft longer.

In February, Silicon Valley venture-capital firm Nanodimension signed on for a first round of financing. H55 has turned onto the runway and is beginning to accelerate.

Borschberg is a pilot for all seasons. He learned to fly in the Swiss Air Force and is rated in fighter jets and helicopters. For fun he does aerobatics, as does Piccard.

Borschberg graduated with a degree in engineering and aerodynamics from the Federal University of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland, and with a management degree from the MIT Sloan School of Management.

It is not only the environmental aspects of electric flight that charm Borschberg, but also the incredible efficiency. He says electric-powered airplanes are 60 percent more efficient than those with fossil-fueled engines and can be very precisely tuned because of the immediate availability of torque when the current is flowing.

That same efficiency with appropriate software, extends to the control of the aircraft. “A simple electric drone, which you can buy in any store, is more stable in wind turbulence than a helicopter,” Borschberg says. These properties will make vertical takeoffs and landings a reality for many new aircraft, he says.

The airplane of the future will be at an airport near you soon — and it may not need to use the runway.

John Gillespie Magee’s poem “High Flight,” loved by aviators, begins, “Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth/And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings.”

A new generation of engineers from Boeing to Borschberg to backyard tinkerers wants to slip the surly bonds of petroleum.