White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Anti-terrorism Industry Eyes Private Aviation

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A disturbed man, Joseph Andrew Stack, flies a single-engine Piper airplane into a Texas federal office building. He kills himself and an IRS worker. It is tragic and awful – and it points up vulnerability in our society that could be exploited by terrorists. But it is not a reason to impose new restrictions on private flying.

General aviation–the blanket term given to everything that is not a scheduled airline or cargo flight–has not to this point in time been subject to onerous security. Yet there are those calling for a security regime to be introduced after the Texas incident.

To apply even modest security on general aviation would be a daunting task because airplanes fly from small airports to big ones; and they fly 24 hours a day. Some are light aircraft like Stack’s and others are corporate jets and charter aircraft, all the way up to airline size.

Charter companies and corporations could take the hit from expensive security. But it would mortally wound private flying and not increase security at all. Elaborate evasions–such as flying from deserted roads, farms and abandoned airfields–might increase. What now happens in the light would happen in the dark.

Here I should declare that I have held a private pilot’s license for nearly 40 years, although I no longer take to the air as I once did (whenever possible).

The aviation community has always known that airplanes are easily used as weapons in the hands of suicidal pilots or if rigged with off-the-shelf technology. To turn a light aircraft into a crude missile you need purpose, know-how and access to a hobby shop or an electronics retailer in the local mall.

Over the years, I have heard many discussions on what you can cause an unmanned aircraft to do. No one was planning to do so, but it is a subject that used to come up from time to time in pilots’ lounges: airport facilities where pilots hang out, get weather briefings or just to tell stories of derring-do.

Pilots belong to a freemasonry that binds people of disparate backgrounds together in a common love of aviation and common bad experiences. Horseman and boaters enjoy something similar but not with the depth and passion that unites pilots, whether they are weekend stick jocks (their term for themselves) or former military pilots, who have done extraordinary things and now fly for the airlines or just fly privately.

Pilots tend to revere anything that leaves the ground and to know that part of the thrill is the high price that will be paid if things go wrong. As Walter Hinton wrote in 1926: “Recently, a man asked whether the business of flying ever could be regulated by rules and statutes. I doubt it. Not that flying men are lawless. No one realizes better than they the need for discipline. But they have learned discipline through constant contact with two of the oldest statutes in the universe–the law of gravity and the law of self-preservation. Ten feet off the ground these two laws supersede all others and there is little hope of their repeal.”

At Barron Hilton’s ranch in Yerington, Nev., I saw astronauts riding in gliders, hot air balloons, as happy as they were going into space. Every form of flight deserves the same respect as another. The price of failure is the same: death.

One of the great freedoms in America is that anyone can learn to fly and can fly from the smallest airport; really just a field that has been surveyed and leveled to JFK or LAX. You will need a reservation to land, but you can do it.

Aviation is truly one of the last egalitarian pursuits. You can put passengers through a metal detector at the general aviation terminal at Washington Dulles International Airport, but what about a farm in Kansas?

One of the many firms that is part of the anti-terrorism industry, STRATFOR, has been proselytizing about the dangers of private aviation. Sure there is a remote danger there, as there is with the availability guns or the vulnerability of city water supplies.

Flying is one of the great freedoms. And to those who are lucky enough to fly, it is the supreme achievement in the ascent of man. To curtail it is to make a terrorist somewhere chortle. –For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

In Nuclear, as in Other Things, the Past Was Glorious

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A train hurtles under the English Channel at 200 mph. In Japan, an even faster train levitates above the track. In France the largest passenger aircraft on earth, the Airbus A380, takes to the sky. Two Asian giants, China and India, are involved in a space race.

If you want to build a new nuclear plant you’d better order the largest component, the pressure vessel, from Japan. They aren’t made in America anymore; stagnation killed that business.

All is not lost to the United States, but there are warning signs that our global scientific and technological expertise is under attack. It is not yet vanquished, but we’re showing signs of vulnerability: Technological arrogance ia leading to the blunting our precious cutting edge.

That arrogance, in the way of arrogance, comes from past triumphs rather than present capabilities.

Once, the world waited for U.S. scientific and technological innovations. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office was stuffed — and still is — with American inventions. But when it comes to applied science, the world no longer waits for us.

When Britain and France built the Concorde supersonic jet, they expected the United States to be right behind them. When the Senate killed the idea of a government-financed, supersonic civilian airliner, the Concorde was doomed.

Likewise with advanced nuclear reactors. When the Clinch River Breeder Reactor was terminated, it was a mortal blow for similar programs in Britain, France, and even Russia.

Those were the days. We were the pacesetter.

Nowhere was this truer than nuclear power. It was our technology, and the world almost demanded our leadership. So much so, it even copied our licensing procedure; and anti-nuclear activists were trained in the American ways. The German pebble bed reactors, British graphite-moderated reactors, and Canadian natural uranium reactors were squeezed in the market, because the Americans, who were known to know about these things, favored the light water reactors. That would make them the world standard. And so it was.

But as the United States faltered, the world went ahead. France built out its nuclear fleet, Japan forged forward, and today reactors are under construction in many places: 25 in China, five in South Korea, and two in tiny Finland.

With this in mind, there’s something sad about the Obama administration’s backing, with loan guarantees, just two new reactors. Gosh.

The industry has calculated that 65 new reactors are needed but two are welcome, even if they’re to be built by Westinghouse, once one of the great industrial names and now a subsidiary of Toshiba.

The master must now play the apprentice.

With sickening predictability, Friends of the Earth President Erich Pica was on the PBS NewsHour to decry the oh-so-modest Obama move. He stopped by the morgue on the way to the studio to get cadavers of arguments about subsidies and waste.

Those technologies favored by Pica, wind and solar, are only known to us because of government subsidies. But he went further and had more disingenuousness up his sleeve. He claimed hydroelectric production from dams built decades ago as part of the “green” bounty. He must know that many members of his own organization want those dams torn down.

Jim Riccio of Greenpeace said that splitting atoms is inherently dangerous and should be treated as such. There’s a vision of pusillanimous policy-making. Columbus, keep those ships in port. John Glenn, stay on Earth; space travel is, er, dangerous.

Worrying about what’s going to happen to nuclear waste in thousands of years is a conceit as well as a stupidity. There’s plenty of it around, which did not come from electric production but from making weapons and driving Navy ships and submarines.

Civilian electric production is the bonus, not the problem, and the solution lies in nuclear evolution — not in unilateral abandonment. –For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

 

In Congress, Party Loyalty Trumps Conscience

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All those people who treat politics like baseball may have to start again. All those statistics about what happened in off years down through our history, all those references to recurring political phenomena, like the impact of the weather on elections, are null and void.

What’s changed?

We’re moving from government as we have known it — a system of two parties modulated by bipartisanship on many issues, where factors other than ideology matter to members of Congress — to a new order in which party loyalty trumps conscience.

Congress is acting more like a parliament than a congress. People who have been clamoring for a Congress more like the British Parliament, with features like “Prime Minister’s Question Time,” have got more than they wanted. They’ve got something like the British party system, and it is not a step forward.

While watching the Brits go at it on C-SPAN is good sport, and certainly tests the mental acuity and verbal dexterity of the players, it is an inflexible way of governing.

Despite the jolly repartee and the openness of discussion, the House of Commons can be a sterile place. The individual member feels impotent and frustrated. Unless a member loves constituency work with a passion, they can feel very unloved by the parliamentary legislative process.

The former Conservative M.P. Matthew Parris has written brilliantly about the impotence of the backbenchers in his autobiography. He abandoned elective politics for journalism, where he felt he could be more effective in shaping public policy.

The dirty little secret about Britain in particular, and parliaments modeled on Westminster in general, is that they aren’t kind to mavericks and are institutionally structured to keep them down or out. Private consciences cannot be aired easily, if at all. A cri de coeur may have to be embedded in a question on an aside in a debate late at night. It won’t be reflected in a vote when “the whips are on” — party discipline in force. The rare exception is a free vote of the House of Commons on a matter like the death penalty.

Here in the U.S., despite the emasculation that goes with party discipline, the Republicans are well down that road. And one wonders, can the Democrats be far behind?

The dynamic across the aisle is becoming asymmetric, and the only Democratic response will have to be a closing of ranks. Something unique to the American system is being lost here.

The genius of Congress is its ability to hear minority voices and, on occasion, for the administration to make common cause with the opposition — as President Clinton did with the Republicans to pass the North American Free Trade Agreement.

But the Republicans have given up one the great freedoms of our system of government. They have sacrificed on the altar of discipline the special freedom to vote as you see fit.

Sadly the move to party authoritarianism hasn’t come from within the party — although Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, of Kentucky, and House Republican Leader John Boehner, of Ohio, are enjoying it — but from the forces that are shaping conservatism from without.

First among these forces is right-wing broadcasting. It’s a vicious and relentless goad to Republicans to move ever further to right, to embrace positions not of their own making.

Then there’s the party rump, characterized by the Tea Party movement. It’s implacably at odds not just with the administration of Barack Obama but with the times we live in. It yearns for another America in another time. It doesn’t want to face the cultural, demographic and political realities of today. But it’s in tune with the conservative broadcasting colossus, and it will have a large and negative affect on the Republican Party.

Arcing across the political sky, compounding all of this, is the phosphorous rocket of Sarah Palin. The former governor of Alaska may be in the 10th minute of her 15 minutes of fame, but for now she’s a bigger force in Republicanism than are its wiser leaders.

All of this has forced the Republicans in the Senate, and to a lesser extent in the House, to look more like the opposition in a parliament than the minority in Congress. Significantly, we’ve always favored “minority” to describe the other party rather than “opposition.” These words have described the uniqueness of Congress — its authenticity, if you will.

At least until history took a new course in 2010. –For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

If only Tax Credits Were Answer for Small Firms

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The shutters are coming down at hundreds of thousands of small businesses, grossing between $1 million and $10 million. For them the question that hangs in the air, if not spoken, is: How much did we take today?

It’s the eternal question that haunts small business. Whether it is daily, weekly or monthly, the same brutal calculation has to be made: Was more money booked than committed?

Politicians, and certainly President Barack Obama, gathering from what he said in his State of the Union address, know that they need the support of myriad small businesses.

They need the husband and wife who drive an 18-wheeler across the country and the baker who rises at 4 a.m. to make doughnuts for city office workers. They need the suburban bicycle repair shop, the ethnic restaurant in the rundown strip mall and the Web design firm in a city loft.

These are real entrepreneurs who start businesses from dreams, not from textbooks in business schools.

Politicians know America needs the entrepreneurial class. But they are morbidly disinterested in the real needs of this class. They demonstrate this in their only answer to the question of helping small business people: tax credits. In the 33 years I operated a small publishing company, only one year were taxes close to being a problem.

The problems for small businesses, whether making gadgets for Wal-Mart, running a salon or operating a travel agency, are the same: Banks think you are a nuisance and are loath to lend you money, or even take the time to understand your business.

Banks’ lending criteria are created by MBAs in marble towers, far from the street below. That’s why so many businesses have been launched on credit cards with previously established credit. It’s risky and expensive, but it happens all the time.

Then, there’s the problem of providing health care for employees. It’s punitively expensive if you provide it, and you feel morally at fault if you don’t.

Corporations — all corporations — are inclined to seek monopoly. Therefore, they squeeze small companies, whether it’s Target pressuring the local toy shop or Borders putting the old neighborhood bookshop out of business. They close those lines of endeavor to countless people.

For every chain restaurant, count one family restaurant that didn’t open. The family-run hotels and motels that dotted U.S. highways are gone. Things of the past.

Congress’s normal response, and one given by the President, is to give tax breaks to small businesses. Most small businesses would be glad to do well enough to pay taxes.

Once, there were many small business people in Congress. Now, there are few. The last congressman I knew who knew something about small business was Rep. Chet Holifield, D-Calif. Powerful and hardworking, he chaired the House Government Operations Committee. He also operated a haberdashery in California. Are there many haberdashers left in the age of Banana Republic?

The Small Business Administration underwrites loans for small business, but it is a slow business. I knew a printer who qualified for assistance, but he was out of business by the time the agency agreed to help. Government is not nimble enough to help the person who can’t make payroll next Friday.

Obama should stop further complicating the tax code, which is a burden to small business. Instead, he should put together a brain trust on revitalizing small business. Forcing the banks to lend to small business is a good first step. The main problem for small business isn’t taxes, it’s credit.  –For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

By Their Parties, Ye Shall Know Them

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The trouble with Washington’s social scene is that it’s a horizontal city — and, try as one may, it’s hard to escape one’s assigned social stratum.

The lawyers know the lawyers; the journalists drink with the journalists; the lobbyists lobby the lobbyists (and the lobbyists-in-training, the Capitol Hill staffers).

By contrast, other cities are vertical. The most vertical city of all is New York. And Dublin is right behind it.

The test of horizontal versus vertical is in a city’s parties. If everyone at a party is either known to you or is in the same line of work — health care, information technology, law enforcement — you are living in a horizontal city; and you are trapped in a stratum that colors what you hear and ultimately think.

In a vertical city, a party is a wondrous place where you’ll learn things other than those things you think you know. A party that includes, say, an actor, a financier, a nurse, a tailor and a writer is a brew of delights.

In my experience, you’ll find such a party in New York above all other cities. However, there always seems to be an interesting mix at social gatherings in Ireland, and Dublin in particular. Generally, the Irish are so well read that they can talk to anyone about anything.

The legend goes that Washington parties are where things get done. If so, I’ve never been to those parties. I think in the days of Jack Kennedy, intimate, influential dinner parties — perhaps at the home of columnist Joe Alsop — were important.

Perle Mesta hosted parties that were as famous as they may have been influential (in Harry Truman’s day). Sally Quinn, wife of the storied Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, has established herself as a Washington hostess with clout. And NPR’s Cokie Roberts is said to put on a great party.

But these are Washington parties for the like-minded and that’s the problem.

These days, I think the best party-giver in Washington is Gloria Dittus, a public relations phenomenon who recently sold her company but is still hosting parties at her Washington home. Just this week, she gave a grand bash for legendary White House reporter Helen Thomas and her new book, “Listen Up, Mr. President,” co-written with Craig Crawford.

Dittus knows how to throw a party.

First, she has a stunning home in the fashionable Kalorama section of Washington. But that’s just the beginning. She always has valet parking and coat-checking. And her parties are full bar and groaning board.

The party swirls from room to room in a natural flow. No bottlenecks at the bars.

Dittus knows who to invite across the social spectrum. Are great political deals cut at one of her parties? Maybe. But don’t blame her, or any hostess. Since bipartisanship has been replaced with the new Washington ethic of “my party right or wrong,” the deals are done intraparty in the depressing backrooms of Congress.

The other prevailing Washington value has reduced the party attendance: If you are in elected office, you’ll never be seen to take more than one glass of wine. Hardly worth dragging yourself across town for that.

Time was when at 6 p.m. the bottles came out all over Washington, and in the Capitol itself. Some of the best parties were impromptu ones in congressional offices. Nowadays, you have to settle for water; carbonated, if you’re lucky.

Then there’s the question of drinking and driving. Most of Washington’s denizens live in the suburbs and they have to drive. By contrast, parties thrive in New York and London, where there is more public transportation. But it should be noted that London parties tend to suffer from the same rigidities as Washington. Call it capital party syndrome.

Across the Atlantic, our democratic partners are still enjoying a drink. There are bars scattered all over the British Parliament, and two very busy bars in the much smaller Irish Parliament.

The principal virtue of partying is that it’s bipartisan. Until bipartisanship comes back, there is always the sainted Gloria Dittus. –For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

The Perils of Palin on the Fox Box

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The great television event of this winter is not what happens with Jay Leno and the late-night crew at NBC. Rather it is Sarah Palin signing on as a contributor for the top-rated Fox News Channel.

In her maiden run on Fox, Palin delighted her admirers and confirmed the negative view of her by those who watched “The O’Reilly Factor” just to see if the former Alaska governor would make a spectacle of herself.

When Palin dismissed allegations about her shortcomings as John McCain’s 2008 running mate in the new book Game Change, by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, as “crap,” both her followers and detractors got what they thought they wanted from the Woman Who Would Be President. Her followers saw a gutsy conservative and her detractors heard a woman who they believe to be ignorant and incapable of serious responses to serious charges.

For Palin, the real issue is what will television do for her? Will it hurt or hinder? Will it be the final nail in her political coffin as she becomes a talking head, an entertainment, a figure of fun?

To appear from time to time on television is essential for aspiring office seekers. To have a regular spot there is something else. It reveals the mind behind the face, and no politician has been able to survive or be enhanced by too much television.

If Palin doubts this, she look at her colleagues on the Fox box. Step forward Newt Gingrich, Karl Rove and Dick Morris. Or switch over to MSNBC, and see how things are going for two other former politicians: Pat Buchanan and Joe Scarborough.

Let us take them one at a time.

Newt Gingrich, once the fount of Republican ideas, is a somewhat reduced man on television, another pundit among many. It has not put him up in the polls as a potential Republican candidate for president.

Karl Rove, once thought to be the omnipotent brain behind President George W. Bush, has also been leveled by regular television appearances, with his insights no more compelling than those of a host of Washington commentators.

Watching Dick Morris’s lugubriousness on Fox, it is hard to believe that President Bill Clinton hung on his words, as did many other politicians. Many political reporters in Washington have as much insight.

Over at MSNBC, Pat Buchanan, some-time presidential candidate and longtime columnist, gets more air time than all the rest. This outpouring of Buchanan philosophy has not produced the slightest groundswell for him to run again.

Joe Scarborough, a former U.S. congressman, has done well as a morning television host, but nobody has suggested he should give this up and return to politics.

Television can be good for the ego but it is a career killer, unless that career is in television.

While television builds name recognition, it also breeds familiarity and robs politicians of their mystique. We do not want to know what politicians think about absolutely everything that happens every day. We want to believe they know things we do not know and think things above our understanding.

Mike Huckabee, former Arkansas governor and presidential candidate, alone has been enhanced by appearing on Fox. But he is hosting a variety show, not just showing the variety of his opinions. He is good on television — so good that he may never run for office again. Huckabee could offer himself to any network as an accomplished entertainer and host.

Palin comes to television with a fearsome following. She has reputedly sold 2 million copies of her book, Going Rogue, has 1.5 million friends on Facebook and half a million followers on Twitter. All of those numbers are in the stratosphere.

Has there ever been such devotion to a political woman, so much homage paid to the idea of an iconoclast as a leader? It is a lot to risk for jabbing at liberals on television, along with other women who jab at liberals like Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, Laura Ingraham and Monica Crowley. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

 

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

Britain and China: Echoes of the Opium Wars

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As though there had not been trouble enough in 2009, the year ended with a nasty spat between Britain and China. A spat that might portend more trouble ahead as the world comes to terms with China’s new assertiveness.

The proximate cause of rift was the execution in China of a Briton, Akmal Shaikh, for smuggling heroin into China. The family of the 53-year-old father of three say he was mentally unstable and was duped into carrying a suitcase stuffed with heroin.

According to Shaikh’s family, he traveled to China because he was told he could become a rock star there.

The British government pled for clemency; and made 27 representations to China, after it failed to have the man examined by psychiatrists. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown condemned the execution.

China responded by accusing Britain of interfering in its judicial affairs. The Chinese also referred to the two Opium Wars that Britain fought with China in the mid-19th century to protect the opium trade conducted by British merchants. The Chinese embassy in London said the Shaikh case brought back “bitter memories of history.”

The opium was grown and processed in India. Then it was shipped to China, where addiction was encouraged by British merchants. Those merchants included Jardine Matheson, which is still a power in Asian business.

The Chinese government tried to ban the opium from entering China. But the British would have none of it, and went to war in one of the most shameful of imperial adventures. The British argument was that the Chinese were willing buyers and opium was not illegal in Europe.

At the heart of this lethal trade was an imbalance as familiar now as it was then: There was high demand in Europe for Chinese goods– porcelain, tea and silk–and low demand in China for European goods. Although always technically illegal, the opium trade grew so large that it became an important source of revenue for the British administration of India.

The two wars, 1839-43 and 1856-60, humiliated the Chinese and undermined the Quin Dynasty. Now China says Britain is up to its old tricks: supporting illegal drug dealers and undermining Chinese law.

If China were not so self-confident in its new role as a world power, the latest dispute would have been papered over by China agreeing to the reasonable British demand that the executed man be examined for mental competence. But not so. And not so on many fronts.

Last year China consolidated its grip on Africa, where it signed scientific cooperative agreements with 47 countries and entered natural resource tie-ups with as many. It also has natural resources tie-ups in Latin America.

China is beginning to throw its considerable weight around–just enough to remind the world that it is too big and too important to be seriously challenged.

Consider that China refuses to revalue its currency; won’t sanction Iran; undermined the climate change conference in Copenhagen; and makes outlandish territorial claims on the South China Sea and the outer continental shelves of its neighbors. Also, China coddles pariah states North Korea and Sudan.

One cannot blame China for succeeding, but one can blame the international business community for fleeing to Chinese manufacturing. Americans can blame budget deficits for China’s holding of more than $2 trillion in U.S. debt. We put ourselves willingly in the noose. In criticizing, as it has done, the buildup in the U.S. deficit, China reminds that it can tighten the noose at any time.

It looks as though 2009 was the year when we began to pay the high price of cheap sneakers at Walmart.

 

Naming the Decade of Arbitrary Facts

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Tradition dictates that we now play “Name That Decade.” To play the game, we need to list the seminal events of the past decade.

Dominating was the bloody, evil and heinous attack on the World Trade Center, setting Christendom at odds with the Muslim world and causing people all over the world to wonder where and why Islam had gone so wrong.

The decade had begun with an enthusiastic innocence about the United States being the only superpower and under its new president, George W. Bush, becoming a kind of international homebody: no nation-building, foreign adventures or radical changes at home.

The Bush administration was to be about creating an echo of Ronald Reagan. If there were to be bumps, they would be the bumps necessitated by the need, as seen by Bush and his supporters, to eradicate the worst excesses of Clintonism.

Out went treaties — especially the Kyoto Protocol — and in came a kind of arrogance through ideology. To win was simple: Straighten up and think right. If you got the philosophy right, everything else would fall into place.

Oddly, this was the same thinking that bedeviled countries in Europe and Africa after World War II. Successive British Labor governments, starting with the Attlee government of 1945-51, said as much. They believed in the theory of pure heart: Get that right and everything else would work out.

In Britain it meant financial crisis after crisis; and the uncontrolled growth in trade-union power, accompanied by a surge of immigration from former British possessions including Pakistan, Bangladesh, India the Caribbean and Africa. Islam gained a foothold in Britain that looks like a bridgehead today.

Reality met liberalism and trounced it. Having the right philosophy turned out to be more liability than asset when it came to governing.

But philosophy — dogma really — retains its allure for the right as well as the left. The Reagan years left the impression that if you had the right philosophy, you could accomplish big things. If George W. Bush had any far-reaching idea, this was it: Get the philosophy right and the walls of any evil empire will tumble, including militant Islam.

So began one of the decade’s outstanding aspects: the manufacturing of facts to justify actions motivated by, er, philosophy.

Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair believed so fervently that all people yearned for democracy and only bad leaders kept them from being free in the Western way, that they manufactured facts about Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.

This led to the real awfulness of this decade: the idea that facts do not matter. The late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Democrat from New York, said you are entitled to your own opinions, but not to your own facts.

Alas, the first decade of the new millennium became a place where rhetoric is uncontaminated with facts.

Do you prefer the fact-free or the lying decade? Politicians lied, but they always have.

The decade ended with another seminal event: the election of Barack Obama as president.

Again, there was euphoria. It did not last. The great expectations of the campaign were dampened by realities of governing.

The man who was voted into office to end the American wars in the Middle East found that in Afghanistan, he had facts that required an extension, an escalation. He never revealed these facts. The right clapped with one hand and the left sank into misery.

The mid-term elections in 2010 will pit left-wing facts against right-wing facts. But they are not facts; they are claims posing as facts — about war and peace, energy and climate, immigration, health care and taxation. –For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate