An Era of Emptiness Awaits Huge Change
Washington on Vacation: From Martha’s Vineyard to the Political Vineyards
That great sucking sound you hear is the annual evacuation of Washingtonians. Tired and weary, but nonetheless self-important, they snatch a little beach time and act like other people.
The upper tier — including President Obama and his family — flock to Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket. A few — most notably storied editor Ben Bradlee and his fabled party giving-wife, Sally Quinn — enjoy the delights of Long Island and the Hamptons. Alas, Washington incomes aren’t commensurate with Washington egos; hence the Hamptons are only for the few, and those with super-rich friends.
A little pity, please, for members of Congress at this time of year. While bureaucrats, senior civil servants, lobbyists and journalists have boardwalk splinters in their feet and spilled beer on their T-shirts, legislators have to face the voters. Ugh!
This year, that’s an especially nasty experience.
All the polls say only about 11 percent of the country approve of the job Congress is doing. That’s tough enough, but this year there are the unemployed–the same unemployed as last year, but now they are more bitter and angry.
Legislators have forgotten the platitudes used to calm the unemployed last year. But the unemployed have not; and worse, the local TV stations can pull up clips as fast as a member of Congress can say “my record shows.”
If you’ve made a point of denouncing the deficit, it’s hard to explain why you haven’t been more diligent in bringing home the bacon to your constituency. If it’s your summer boondoggle, it’s hard to explain that it’s an entitlement.
You get a holiday in an election year? Get off it. When comfortably re-elected, you can contemplate a little time with you feet up. Unless you want to join the unemployed, better campaign; and campaign some more when fatigue has gripped you by the soft parts. Hit the phones and beg for money.
To stay in Washington, you need to be able to denounce Washington in brutal terms, while yearning for the members’ dining room, the simpering of the staff, and the adulation of the cable television network that agrees with you.
Every day you must praise the wonders of America and your fabulous constituency, while you long for a congressional fact-finding trip to London, Paris or Rome. After all, you’ve been stuffed with barbecue since you got back to the voters: the God-fearing, family-loving, hard-working, ignorant pain-in-the-butt hicks.
What do voters know of the burden of office?
What do they know of you being cajoled in the White House while the TV cameras are lining the driveway, waiting just for you? What do they know of representing our country at dinner at 10 Downing Street or the Elysee Palace? Have they ever had an audience with the Pope?
What do the voters know of the thrill of dropping in on our troops in Afghanistan with a TV crew? If you do that, you can almost book yourself on a Sunday morning talk show. Heck you can feel thrilled on “Meet the Press,” even if David Gregory reads aloud an encyclopedic list of your gaffes, votes, and friends of the opposite sex.
Actually, the worker bees of the nation’s capital just hate to be away. If you are a member of Congress, you’re reminded that there are nasty people with clever advertising agencies, trying to get into Washington and make you part of that unemployment statistic.
Even those who don’t have to run for office feel the burden of free-floating anxiety. Who’s after my job? I make out to be the most important job in the most important city in the world, even if I know in my heart I’m a clerk.
Tea Party Inspires Memories of Another Time
I should feel quite at home at the tea parties. I was present at the last round of them. It was another country and another time, but the anger was as genuine, the sense of betrayal by the political class was as real, and the idea of an endangered heritage was as painful.
Also, then as now, there was a certain disconnect from reality.
The place of these tea parties was throughout the dwindling British Empire. There, middle-aged people, who had spread the concept of British exceptionalism and borne the Second World War, felt everything they had built and fought for was slipping away.
What was seen as a terrible leftward drift was opposed virulently by a phalanx of patriotic organizations, but most notably the League of Empire Loyalists, founded in 1954.
The Loyalists were good yeomen who loved the Britain they believed had existed and was endangered, along with the position of Britain as the world’s dominant power. They believed in Britain’s special writ to civilize the world, police it and sometimes settle it. Compared to the militarists of the 18th and 19th centuries, these were soft imperialists but believers nonetheless, held together in a loose federation throughout the British colonies and dominions.
In Britain, the Loyalists formed a political bloc on the far right of the Conservative Party. They were on the fringe in Britain, but they were taken seriously in the colonies as a legitimate expression of wide discontent with the decline of British traditions, British leadership in business and British moral authority.
Loyalists inside and outside Britain railed against politicians in London, much as today’s Tea Party activists rail against Washington.
In Britain, support for the Loyalists was limited because so much had already changed. The British public had already accepted the dissolution of the empire; after all, its jewel, India, was gone.
Although the Loyalists raged against non-white immigration into Britain, this had not yet been identified by most people as a society-changing occurrence. Mainline British Conservatives feared that the leader of the loyalists, Arthur Chesterton, had been a fascist sympathizer in the 1930s. Even though he had broken with the fascists and written a book about it, he was still suspect.
Where I was in Rhodesia, the Loyalists were seen as the hope for saving Britain, of returning her to greatness and somehow turning the clock back to “the good old days,” whenever they were imagined to have been. Many, including my parents, believed the Loyalists would bring about a glorious new Elizabethan era under the young Elizabeth II, who had been crowned a year before the founding of the League of Empire Loyalists.
For those outside of the British Isles, the league was back to the future. But in London and across Britain, the Loyalists were just a right-wing pressure group (known in Britain as a “ginger group”), claiming support from a handful of Conservative Members of Parliament but shunned by the Tory leadership. In the United Kingdom, they were sidelined as “Colonel Blimps,” a satirical comic figure who ridiculed the conservative middle class and had been enshrined in criticism by George Orwell.
The League of Empire Loyalists lasted 10 years, but its aspirations were sealed after six years with Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s “wind of change” speech. The league’s domestic issues — the fight against socialism, the uncontrolled flood of immigrants from Asia and the Caribbean, and the growing power of the unions — were taken up by more sophisticated entities, like The Monday Club, operating inside the Conservative Party.
There is a limit to the analogy of the Tea Party movement to the Loyalist movement of the 1950s and 1960s. But the people are eerily the same. They share a decency, the sense of being let down and the feeling that something has to be done. In the British case, nothing was done until Margaret Thatcher much later addressed some of the concerns of the Loyalists (unions, state ownership, immigration and global stature). She did not bring back the empire, but she did make the Brits feel a lot better about not having it anymore.
Who will do that for the good people of the Tea Party movement?
Oil Industry’s Deep Well of Fear
There is an open secret in the oil industry that dare not speak its name: peak oil.
Well, two did speak its name and gained no acclaim for it. One, M. King Hubbert, died years ago. The other and the more controversial, Matthew Simmons, died Aug. 8 at his Maine summer home.
The peak oil idea is simple: Oil is a finite commodity and one day we are going to use up all of it.
Hubbert, a geologist, began speculating on the effects of the gradual decline in worldwide production in the 1950s. He expressed this in a simple graph, known as “Hubbert’s pimple.”
He tended to draw the graph freehand, and it looked more like a Rubenesque breast than a pimple. It was so simple that he drew it over and over again to illustrate his points for journalists and politicians. Later, he would draw lines through the pimple to demonstrate where we had been and where we were going, based on the then-known reserves and rate of depletion.
For his scholarship, Hubbert was eased out at Shell Oil Co. in 1964. He took a job with the U.S. Geological Survey and continued his speculative research — until he was thrust into national prominence by the 1970s oil crisis.
Simmons, in contrast, was a much more apocalyptic predictor than Hubbert. His illustration is a stark tower of a graph, more like the Empire State Building. He saw all the oil on Earth savagely used up in just two centuries, the 20th and the 21st, resulting in international catastrophe probably by 2040.
In one television interview, Simmons sounded like a survivalist. He said he was stocking his home with all kinds of supplies to survive the food and fuel shortages that would accompany the decline in oil availability, and the impending international chaos and hostility.
In the energy industry, which has a definite aversion to bad news and hard questions, Simmons was an agent provocateur and an effective one — effective because he was of the industry, not outside it.
Simmons was an oil man and his firm, Simmons & Company International, was founded in Houston in 1974. It grew to be one of the world’s most influential energy investment banks, with offices in Houston, London, Aberdeen, Scotland and Dubai, United Arab Emirates. It has been responsible for hundreds of billions of dollars of merger and acquisition activity.
The industry loved the deals Simmons made possible, but not his talk of doom and chaos.
In particular, Simmons distressed Saudi Arabia by analyzing production data and detailing what he concluded was a decline in the rate of drawdown on the Ghawar oil field, the world’s largest. This was the thrust of his book, “Twilight in the Desert,” and it incensed the Saudis and their oil company, Aramco. It also forced them to increase their field management efforts and make their operations more transparent.
Where Hubbert, who died in 1989, was a gentle seer of trouble ahead, Simmons was the knock on the door before dawn.
Ultimately, both have been betrayed by time and, in Hubbert’s case, technology. But their arguments have not been invalidated.
Hubbert did not foresee the enormous technological advances in exploration and drilling, including greater depths, horizontal wells and 3-D seismic.
Simmons saw all these things and concluded nonetheless that world demand for oil is so high that the end is near. He believed that once global production peaked and the 86 million barrels a day now consumed cannot be provided, oil will rise in price steadily to $200 a barrel and going as high as $500 a barrel as chaos and fear spread.
In recent months, Simmons became even more controversial. Correctly, he estimated that BP spillage in the Gulf of Mexico was many more times than what the company had first claimed. He was almost spot on. But he also said that BP would be forced into bankruptcy and that a nuclear device was the only way to stop the leak. BP responded by ending its relationship with Simmons’ bank. And Simmons ended his lingering involvement with it, as well.
Simmons was a perfect storm of a man, raging against the myths and self-satisfaction of the oil industry. In his absence, there will be a certain quietude in the petroleum clubs of Houston, Denver and Edmonton, Alberta, and elsewhere.
But in their hearts, they fear he was right.
On Tax Cuts, GOP Should Think like Business
Mythology in Washington holds that when it comes to economics, Republicans know best. The root of this myth is another myth, which goes like this: When it comes to business, especially small business, Republicans know best.
All of this doesn’t matter until you get to taxes, when the Republicans, buttressed by their mythological understanding of these things, believe they know best.
And what the Republicans believe they know best is that when you cut taxes, everything gets better: Government shrinks, business booms and tax revenues go up.
It’s not that there aren’t shards of truth here; it’s just that everything has to be in the right conjunction to get one or all of these benefits.
Business doesn’t go along with these myths but, like everyone else, it hates paying taxes, so by and large it endorses the Republican position.
The thing is, business believes in a more durable truth: price.
Price means revenue, and business, therefore, believes and practices aggressive pricing. When business needs to exceed the gap between cost and revenue, it increases the price. If the market refuses to pay the price, business exits that market or fails.
Sometimes, however, and increasingly in these hard times, business pulls a con. It lowers or maintains the price, but adds other charges to gain income. The airlines are doing this. The banks make as much or more on fees than they do on consumer loans. Catalog companies do it with “shipping and handling” fees.
Publishers have experimented more with price than most businesses, and their conclusion is to stay on the high side. If the market rejects your high-priced publication, so be it.
I’ve spent a lifetime studying pricing in publishing. All I’ve learned is this: Defend your price.
In London, Rupert Murdoch engaged his Times in a costly price war with Conrad Black’s Daily Telegraph. In the middle of fierce cost-cutting, Murdoch’s camp, with more resources, was triumphant.
Cheap papers were selling.
But when it was all over, the relative positions of the publications had not changed by much and millions of British pounds had been lost. The hope had been that the victor, Murdoch’s papers, would gain so many more readers that they could make up the circulation revenue losses with higher advertising rates. It didn’t work.
Taxes are different, the GOP has averred. Not really. If they’re too high, they will stifle business, choke enterprise and cause businesses to go offshore. Clearly, marginal rates that exceed some magic number (well south of 50 percent) would stifle business.
At one point after World War II, they reached 90 percent in Britain with disastrous results and a few comical ones. The titled, moneyed families fled to Kenya and Rhodesia and the show-business types took up residence in Switzerland. Actor David Niven and playwright Noel Coward were among these.
Now that the tax cuts enacted in the early days of the George W. Bush administration are about to expire, it may behoove us to examine these with a question: What would business do? Things looked pretty bright when these cuts were enacted with the prospect of years of surpluses. But that was before 9-11, two big wars and a recession.
Therefore, if you looked at the tax issue from a boardroom point of view, the unanimous decision would be to go for the revenue and review the result later. Boardroom-loving Republicans ought to know this.
In business, they laugh at people who believe that lower prices automatically will produce compensating revenue. The joke goes something like losing a little on everything and making up with volume.
Many years ago, I had lunch with George Will and Trent Lott. All three of us were speakers at the American Petroleum Institute’s annual meeting in Houston. At the time, Lott and Will agreed that we were an under-taxed country, given the demands on government.
Back then, Republicans thought like business people.
Where Are the Dog Days of Yesteryear?
The Greeks started the whole thing by calling sultry summer weather “Dog Days,” blaming it on the brightest star in the sky besides the Sun, Sirius, also known as the Dog Star. But it was the Romans who really took it seriously: They sacrificed brown dogs to appease the rage of Sirius and ameliorate the weather.
Now, could it be that the Dog Days in Washington are a thing of the past?
The weather has been foul enough, but where is the cessation of news? Where are the soft, feature articles masquerading as news that marked the metaphorical Dog Days? Where are the lesser politicians trying to get noticed for bills they have introduced that will died in committee?
It used to be at this time of year, when Congress was preparing for its long summer recess, things just slowed down, practically flat-lined. Washington emptied; the traffic thinned; no reservations were needed in restaurants; and clubs, like the Metropolitan and the Cosmos, opened their doors to non-members.
While there has been some summer flight, the journalistic and political intensity continues apace. Not only is this an election year, but the whole structure of political reporting has been revolutionized.
In a time of journalistic agony in most publications, political reporting is booming, fed by new technologies and cable news. Well, that is on the surface; out of sight, the furnace is fed by money, lobbying money.
If you want Congress to pass legislation favorable to your interests, or not to pass something unfavorable, then you hire a slew of lobbyists. They, in turn, place “advocacy” ads and the political media are off to the races. These ads appear on air, on line, on paper and on our doorsteps. Some media outlets charge hefty subscription fees, like Congressional Quarterly and National Journal, others are given away. But all seek and promise to lift the veil of secrecy in Washington.
The reporters—for Roll Call, The Hill, The Daily Caller, and hundreds of blogs clustered around publications and television channels, mainstream newspapers and wire services–slice, dice, puree, chop, blend, mix, pound, julienne, mince, whip and, sometimes, flavor the news. But mostly they feed the rapacious, 24-hour news cycle by blowing the slightest slip of the tongue, the smallest infraction of decorum, the inadvertent utterance into national events.
The remarkable new entry in the field is Politico, which exploded on the scene with the considerable fortune of Robert Allbritton, chairman and chief executive officer of Allbritton Communications, which owns television stations in Washington and elsewhere. As an example of innovative multi-platform publishing, it is an exemplar.
The impact in the surge in political reporting across the board is questionable: too many peas of news in mattresses of words. There is no time to investigate, and none to ponder. Better to be first and wrong than second and right.
One result of the swelling ranks of political reporter is politicians have clammed up. It is unwise for them to say anything that has not been vetted by their staffs. Hence, their infatuation with social media.
Here in high summer, one realizes that the glorious lazy, hazy Dog Days are a thing of the past; a time to do that interview you had put off, to try to be little more creative with your writing, to talk the bureau chief or editor into an off-beat story. No, instead, hundreds of political reporters are looking for something, anything, to fill today’s void. Was a congressman seen with a pretty woman (Damn, it is his daughter!)? Did a senator misspell something on her Facebook page?
It is this frenzy for faux news that brought us stories like Acorn, Shirley Sherrod, and the endless sightings of President Obama with known socialists? Whew!
Bring back the ancient Dog Days, but spare the brown dogs.
Obama and Cameron: Pretending To Be Pals
I cannot look at British Prime Minister David Cameron without feeling that he has been made from an Identi-Kit, and that they just missed the perfect likeness. The hair is from a Vidal Sassoon catalogue; the face from an exhibition of Dutch masters; and the body from, well, the ranks of the well-fed but not fat.
This sense that Cameron is a made-up man came back to me in the East Room, when President Barack Obama welcomed him to the White House as both men gave their first joint press conference since the prime minister was elected.
With just four questions from pre-selected reporters, it is stretching it to call these events press conferences; and the lack of enthusiasm for the format was shown by the empty media seats.
Anyway, the purpose of the event was to convince the media that Cameron and Obama are on the same page of the hymnal. Everybody knows they are not. They are divided by four not-unsubstantial issues.
They tried hard to sound like chums. They wore almost identical dark suits and blue ties. They called each other by their first names: It was “David” this and “Barack” that.
There has been a steady growth of informality at the White House, but this was a new mile post. One British reporter -presumably for the benefit of his American colleagues -actually addressed Cameron as “Mr. Prime Minister.” That is a form of address peculiarly American and never heard around the British Parliament. The British prefer to believe that a title determines the form of address. So it is simply, “Prime Minister, could you tell us …”
Cameron tried to set the stage by writing an article that appeared that morning in the Wall Street Journal. In it, he redefined the “special relationship” and called for the British to be less sentimental about it.
Underlining their differences, Cameron and Obama share something that is not helpful: neither of them is an Atlanticist.
Unlike many British Conservatives, Cameron has not been seduced by the United States. He did not spend a year at a U.S. university and has not peppered his talk with mention of the American example.
Likewise, Obama is one of the least Eurocentric of American presidents. He, too, did not spend time at a British university, as did Bill Clinton. He even offended many by banishing a bust of Winston Churchill from the Oval Office.
We do not know whether the public coziness extended into two days of talks between Obama and Cameron, but the policy differences are wide.
First, there is the global economy. Obama and his advisers believe too much austerity now will lead to a second recession and catastrophic deflation. So much so that Obama wrote to his partners in the G8 urging them to stimulate, not strangle, their economies.
But Cameron, keenly aware of the fate of Greece and the downgrading of Irish debt, has put forward an austerity budget and asked his departments to come up with possible cuts in staff and expenditures of 25 and 40 per cent, respectively. The real pain will not be felt until the cutting begins in the fall.
Second, there is the delicate matter of BP. Obama does not mind if the oil giant is squeezed so much over the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico that it has to be sold off to, say, an American company. Cameron minds a lot.
Then there is the release of Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber, by the Scottish government. Americans want an inquiry into whether there was a deal to release al-Megrahi to protect British business interests in Libya, possibly involving BP. Cameron, who opposed the release at the time, thinks it is a closed issue. But he has already been pressured into a review.
Finally there is the case of Gary McKinnon, the computer genius with Asperger’s syndrome, who hacked into Pentagon and NASA computers after 9/11. The United States wants him extradited for trial here and Cameron is under pressure on grounds of humanitarianism and sovereignty not to oblige. Obama says it is a legal not presidential matter; Cameron raised it anyway.
His “special relationship” might not be Obama’s cup of tea.
Batteries Are the Shocking Truth about Electric Cars
Can white elephants come in green?
President Barack Obama flew to Holland, Mich., on Thursday to attend groundbreaking ceremonies for a new lithium-ion battery plant, which the White House advertised as an example of federal stimulus grants at work and a gateway to a clean-energy future.
Great stuff — if you don’t look too hard.
Indeed, the Holland plant, effusively hailed by Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm as creating 300 jobs, and 62,000 “green” jobs down the road, will produce batteries in America.
But Compact Power Inc., which received $151 million from a federal stimulus program to open the $303 million plant, isn’t American and neither is its technology: It’s a subsidiary of the giant South Korean conglomerate LG Chem, and its technology is Asian.
Also that age-old bugaboo for electric cars — range and battery life — is still a work in progress. General Motors says its Chevy Volt will go up to 40 miles on a single charge and will have a range-extending, gasoline-assist feature. Nissan’s fully electric car, the Leaf, will have a 100-mile range. Ditto Ford’s electric Focus. Much depends on driving conditions.
Lithium-ion batteries are way ahead of traditional lead-acid batteries in power and weight, but they aren’t perfect. As yet, the best battery is far from being a competitor for a tank of gasoline.
There’s a back story here. The most obvious narrative is the need to create jobs in Michigan, and the hope is that electric vehicles will bolster car production there.
More obscure is the administration’s belief that a brave, new clean-energy America can produce jobs and reduce the output of greenhouse gases. In Obamaland, windmills will turn silently through the night, while millions of fully electric cars get their batteries topped up in driveways and garages.
A green and pleasant land is just a few million batteries away and, by Jove, the Department of Energy is on the job. It has $2.4 million to spend on electric car infrastructure. The department is helping to bring on nine battery plants, including the one in Holland. It’s also promoting charging stations.
Some small facts: These batteries are still so expensive (about $16,000 apiece) that any fully electric car, or near so, requires subsidies down the line to get the price down to where ordinary people will buy them in quantity. The only fully electric vehicle on the market today, the Tesla, is a sports car that costs over $100,000 and is aimed at the well-heeled greens of Hollywood.
While official retail prices for the Ford, Nissan and GM models haven’t been announced, estimates are in the range of $30,000 to $35,000. Federal tax credits are likely to trim several thousand dollars for many buyers.
Batteries have stood in the way of electric cars for more than a century. In the early days of motoring, electric cars covered short distances and held promise. But while internal combustion engines revved ahead, batteries languished.
But the dream of an electric car never died, though the batteries frequently did. In the 1970s, the U.S. government spent lavishly on battery research, including lithium and aluminum air batteries. There are dozens of ways to make batteries, but all have their disadvantages: weight, disposability, life, rate of discharge and market indifference.
If you want everything you get today on a car — electric windows, air conditioning, electric seats, multiple lights, highly variable loads and easy refueling and, maybe, towing capacity — you need a hell of a battery
We have, so to speak, been shocked by presidential energy enthusiasm before. Jimmy Carter believed in liquids from coal and launched the ill-fated Synthetic Fuels Corp., and George W. Bush went hog wild over ethanol — and those expectations are being trimmed daily.
I’ll buy a hybrid and wait, if it’s OK with Obama. –For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate
Cautious Obama is Hurting Future Oil and Electricity Supply
From somewhere–inside the White House or the Department of Energy–President Obama is getting some pretty awful advice. It’s bad enough that he’s been persuaded that there’s a Nirvana Land of windmills and sunbeams in the future of electricity. But much more gravely in halting drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, he’s committing a fearsome folly.
If exploration and drilling in the Gulf doesn’t resume and gets caught up in punitive new rules, Obama, or his successor, will find the price of gasoline high (probably more than $5 a gallon) and military action against Iran will be proscribed.
It goes like this: After 18 months the supply of replacement oil from the Gulf dries up, due to the normal decline in production from old wells. Very soon, this loss exceeds 1 million barrels a day and begins to increase the world oil price,
World oil production today is 86.5 million barrels per day; of this, the United States gulps down an amazing 20 million barrels per day. This delicate balance, helped by the global recession, keeps the price bouncing between $70 and $80 per barrel.
Worst case is not only do we lose production in the Gulf, but any global upset–such as military action in Iran–will stress this oil production-demand balance further. Result: price rises. Political solution: none.
The folly of the Obama action is that every new hole drilled in deep water is going to be safer-than-safe.
There’s a well-known pattern: Disasters produce an aftermath of safety. The nuclear industry thought it was safe before the Three Mile Island meltdown, but it went back to the drawing board and produced new institutions for safety monitoring and study, as well as revised the very idea of defense in-depth.
The Obama caution is the danger, not the possibility of another spill.
The second energy disaster in the making is with electricity. The Obama administration has signed on to a vague idea, pushed by environmentalists and post-industrial schemers: It goes by the appropriately loose title of “alternative energy.”
In real-world terms, alternative energy can be narrowed to some solar
and wind. In fact, the only mature technology is wind. It works fine when the wind is blowing. The heat wave in the Eastern states in the past week makes the point: The wind doesn’t blow when it’s most needed.
There’s nothing wrong with wind, except that its most passionate advocates often favor it not for its own sake but for what it is not: nuclear power. Paranoia over nuclear power–always the first choice of the world’s utilities, if all things are equal–is a part of the cultural-political landscape in America.
Faced with this, the Obama administration has saddled up two horses and invited the nuclear industry to ride both as they diverge. It has thrown away the $11 billion spent on the first national nuclear-waste repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, even as it has offered loan guarantees for new reactors.
Coming down the pike is a surge, a really huge surge, in electricity demand as plug-in hybrid cars and pure electric cars are deployed.
The plan–if you can call it that–is that the load of new uses will be spread by “smart meters” on the “smart grid,” and this will direct or coerce consumers to charge their cars in the middle of the night.
Fat chance. If consumers were that financially or morally conscious, they’d long since have cut their electric loads and driven smaller cars.
Want to be politically unpopular? Start telling people when they can refuel their cars. That’s known around the Tea Party circuit and elsewhere as government intervention.
Do you take yours with sugar? –For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate
The Brits to America: No Hard Feelings, Chaps
Light the candles, fire up the grill, cue the fireworks — a birthday party is in the air. A nation’s birthday. To wit, America’s birthday, 234 and still young!
My friend and colleague Martin Walker, a famous British columnist and author, likes to remind audiences that the Fourth of July is not a time for him to be downcast about the American War of Independence. “I celebrate solid British yeoman farmers taking up arms against a German king and his German mercenaries,” he says.
Quite so.
Historically somewhat accurate, too. Like so many English monarchs, George III was of German descent, in his case Hanoverian. Also, the British administration, short on troops of their own, happily fielded Hessian mercenaries to fight the Colonists.
After the war, these men were demobilized in the states — a British habit that accounted for my paternal grandfather’s taking up involuntary residence in South Africa at the end of the Boer War.
Anyway, Walker isn’t the only Briton in modern times to embrace America and to make a life here — and a good one at that. I, too, am of the British persuasion; and I feel a remote connection to the left-behind Hessians because I live in a Virginia stone house constructed by some of them. They had brought with them skills beyond war-fighting, and applied those skills in building up the nascent nation in which they found themselves immigrants of necessity. By the way, it’s a great house. Danke schon.
There are hundreds of thousands of Brits in America — no one really knows how many because of their differing legal status. They are to be found all over, but are concentrated in southern Florida and Southern California. As Noel Coward wrote, “Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun.” Dallas also is popular; and, for other reasons, New York is well supplied with Brits. If nothing else, they have to be there to oversee the transplantation of their plays to Broadway.
These wandering sons and daughters of Albion are among America’s greatest boosters, led by a coterie of journalists, known without derogatory implications at home as “hacks.” The dean of these was, without doubt, the late Alistair Cooke, who spoke lovingly about America for nearly 60 years in his weekly broadcasts of “Letter From America” for BBC radio.
The late Henry Fairlie lighted the way for British opinion writers in the America. Besides Martin Walker, these now include Gerard Baker; Tina Brown and her husband, Harry Evans; Christopher Hitchens; Andrew Sullivan; and Sebastian Mallaby.
What is it that the British expats so like about their American cousins’ homestead? Probably, it’s the sense of possibility that permeates American life. It’s what has made the word “America” a metaphor for hope, going back to the English poet John Donne in 1595.
And there is mobility. In America, one can lose one’s way in Baltimore and get a fresh start in Albany, Providence, Tampa, St. Paul or any other city. In Britain there is London; and if you lose your place in London, you may never recover.
Also in America, the Brits enjoy a special minority status. We have a terrible sense of superiority, making us immune to insult.
What do the Brits in America complain about? They complain about the lack of pubs and a pub culture; the lack of public transportation; and, above all, the lack of public health care.
And what do we give our hosts in this promised land as a thank-you gift? Well, we don’t whine. In a time when everyone is apologizing for transgressions in history, we’ll be celebrating our defeat this Fourth of July, choking down thin beer and reveling in thick, grilled rib.
Happy Birthday, America. Cheers!
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