White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

In Britain, Another Round of the Greatest Show on Earth

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I have history with royal weddings–just a little, but history nonetheless.

As Princess Margaret, sister to Queen Elizabeth II, was tying the knot on May 6, 1960, with Antony Armstrong-Jones, a photographer who would become Lord Snowdon, I was out finding “color” for a London news agency.

My assignment was to ride back and forth on a ferry across the River Thames.

From a phone box on one side of the river to a phone box on the other, I scurried, breathlessly reporting on every Union Jack and every wide-eyed child. That was a day on which Britain lost its head.

It was maybe the last great royal ceremony in which the British public was still wholly innocent.

Although some newspapers had debated the suitability of a mere photographer marrying into the royal family, the public had still wanted the fairy-tale wedding.

Yet it was Margaret, and this ill-fated union, that first lifted the veil on royal goings-on and began to show them not as a perfect family, but as a dysfunctional one, not as perfect servants of the people but as greedy, immoral, selfish and sometimes heartless.

This was fed by the new ability of the British tabloids to spy electronically on the royal persons.

But on that beautiful day, it seemed that everyone in Britain wanted to believe in the princess and her commoner husband.

Of course, the queen and her children would have to disappear for Margaret to become queen.

But she was in line for the throne, and that made her worthy of the national hallucination: The Glass Coach, drawn by matched pairs of horses; the impeccably choreographed regimental bands; the glorious color of noblemen’s robes; and–oh my, yes–the ladies’ hats.

And the queen herself, young and radiant with her consort, Prince Philip, always at her side, neither quite participant nor spectator.

It was the Greatest Show on Earth. Even Cecil B. DeMille could not have produced that kind of spectacle, centuries in the making.

When Prince William marries Kate Middleton–another commoner but not exactly a flower girl–it will be the greatest show on earth again.

Fortunately for the royal family, they are back in favor after three decades, when things sometimes looked bleak for the future of the monarchy.

Despite national misgivings about Prince Charles, eldest son of the queen, and his quirky ways, to say nothing of the way he treated his first wife, Princess Diana, and the way she reciprocated, Britain is again comfortable with its monarchy, even enthusiastic about it.

The thanks for this go to the queen–her long reign, her hard work and her perseverance. And partly to Diana, who in death refurbished the magic.

Queen Elizabeth is not a brilliant woman. She does not have wide interests outside of, well, being queen, a job that has no published job description–and her family.

She has tried to be more modern and to be a little closer to her subjects.

But it was probably the year in which the family seemed to have imploded that reinforced the queen’s relationship with her subjects.

Her Christmas message in 1992, in which she described the travails brought on by Charles and Diana and her humiliation as “annus horribilis,” meaning horrible year, brought forth a wave of sympathy.

It said that this remote lady, who had been their queen since before most of them were born, was not superwoman but a mum who made mistakes and who had children who misbehaved and disgraced the family.

This was a very human queen, set in authority over them, but still one of them.

Suddenly she was not aloof and imperious, but very human.

Not everyone in Britain is elated that Will and Kate are marrying after living together on and off for nearly a decade.

One social critic told me, “It sets a terrible example: Commitment-phobic men living with women and then mostly moving on. At least, they are marrying. But the hypocrisy of it! She will wear white, I suppose.”

And one day, she will wear a crown as Queen Consort of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and 15 other independent Commonwealth countries around the world.

Long live the Greatest Show on Earth: The British monarchy.

U.S. Is Losing Its Grip on World

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The patient is the United States and the diagnosis is “Asia shock.”

It is a psychological disease with physical symptoms and no known cure. However there are therapies, therapies of trade, diplomacy and fiscal restraint at home.

As President Barack Obama jets around Asia, he may be pondering not so much the economic power that lies East of Suez, but why it took so long to emerge. And why the patient is in denial.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, Asia was for the taking by the European colonialists — and take they did.

Foremost was Britain with India, Ceylon, Burma, Malaya and coastal enclaves in China. France lumped together the countries of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos as Indochina. Holland, of shrinking consequence in Europe, dominated Indonesia. Portugal had its toehold in Goa and Macao. Spain dallied in the Philippines till booted out by the emerging power of the time, the United States.

Only Japan was sufficiently organized to be a local maker of mischief in Korea and China.

Anyone looking at brawling, muscular, talented Asia today has to wonder why the giants slept for so long, and how the colonial masters were so ignorant of the abilities of their subservient people.

Blame Britain.

During the 15th century, the Age of Discovery, exploration was driven by a lust for wealth in the form of spices, gold and silver. Once the Industrial Revolution got under way in late 18th-century Britain, the lust was for those things, plus raw materials to feed the factories back home.

The newly wealthy in London and the south, with their lavish country homes, wanted tea and coffee, herbs and spices, tropical goodies and strange flavors from the East.

The colonial compact, more implied than written, was simple: They — the Asians — grow and harvest. We manufacture.

Britain, followed by its rivals, set the policy, and in so doing kept the Industrial Revolution at home; it was not for export.

While the British like to export their values, their justice systems and, in a tepid way, Anglicism (Catholic countries were more aggressive in the export of religion), they kept their industrial revolution at home, and all of the secondary industry it spawned. It was a black day in London when it was learned that industrial espionage had allowed cloth spinning technology to escape to America.

To this day, the remnants of the system which ruled that “value-added will take place in Britain” can be seen in British specialty products. The great tea-packing houses are still in Britain and Ireland, and some cottons are still woven in Britain.

No factories sprang up in the Asian empires of the European colonists. No technology transfer was encouraged, and the enormous latent talent of Asia went unrecognized.

Japan, without colonial influence, industrialized in the first part of the 20th century, but mostly to mechanize its military.

It was not until after World War II that Asia stirred and threw off the European constraints. Ironically, along with Japan, the British colonies of Hong Kong and Singapore showed the way.

If China was slow to industrialize, it has charged ahead, changing the balance in the world and embracing the central truth of the Industrial Revolution: You need energy to make and move goods.

China has signed up developing countries’ oil and gas suppliers at a dizzying rate. In contrast, the United States looks at energy — the indispensable element in industrial output — through a post-industrial, environmental lens.

According to the World Nuclear Association, China has 39 nuclear reactors planned or on order and 23 under construction. There are 120 on its wish list. The United States has nine on its wish list and is building two.

The United States can no longer forge the large components for nuclear reactors. This can be done only in Japan; but China and South Korea are building new facilities to do the work. We dominate the world in two disparate arenas: defense technology and entertainment. In nearly all else, we are slipping.

It will be a shocking day for Americans when people from another country walk on the moon, where astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin trod in 1969. But it will happen.

 

If the House Defunds DOE, It Slashes Science

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There are those who claim the greatest line of advertising ever written was “Drink Coca-Cola.” Maybe. For me, it’s the much more recent “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.”

In this past election, the Republicans had the phrases and the ideas that stuck. The constant repetition of “small government” left the belief that it could be done and that it was achievable, no matter that government has grown under Republicans as much as it has under Democrats.

After the tumult, Dick Armey–he of the Tea Party persuasion–introduced us to a new political animal: the small-government conservative. These are the people, according to Armey, who will dictate the conservative agenda in the House and put the spokes in the Obama wheel.

This is my profile of this new class in American politics and on Main Street: They believe the government is too big and should be radically cut. They are sworn never to raise taxes. Never. So it is a good thing they believe in cutting government.

But there’s the rub. What are they going to cut and how?

With a Democratic president and Senate, the chainsaw-wielders have only one course of action: defunding the things they don’t like, which are mostly the things they don’t understand. The Tea Party types and those they have dragged to the right of the Republican Party say, for example, the Department of Energy must go because it makes no energy; besides, it was created by Jimmy Carter. Shudder!

In truth, the Energy Department was created the way presidents create departments; to show they are doing something when they don’t know what to do. That was the genesis of the Department of Homeland Security—a true monstrosity, created by George W. Bush to show that we were serious about terrorism—and of Carter’s Department of Education.

The Energy Department’s responsibilities include the long-range, high-risk research and development of energy technology, power marketing at the federal level, the promotion of energy conservation, oversight of the nuclear weapons program, regulatory programs, and the collection and analysis of energy data.

Day to day the department tries to clean up coal, perfect batteries, improve solar cells, tend the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in salt domes along the Gulf Coast, and operate the military Waste Isolation Pilot Project site in New Mexico. It ought to be doing as much for civilian wastes at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, but Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid nixed that, along with about $10 billion of taxpayer money and some great engineering.

The Energy Department operates an extraordinary necklace of National Laboratories and Technology Centers, 20 of them.The jewels in this string are the weapons labs of Los Alamos, Sandia and Lawrence Livermore.

These labs comprise a unique national asset, unmatched anywhere. They employ thousands–that is right, thousands–of PhDs under a unique structure: The Energy Department sets the labs’ agendas and doles out the dollars, but they are operated by a mix of contractors from the university system of California to industrial firms.

To know the national laboratories is to love them. I know them.

The Energy Department has been burdened with indifferent and terrible secretaries, excepting these three: James Schlesinger, who created the department; Don Hodel, who served during the early years of the Reagan Administration; and Bill Richardson, who served under Bill Clinton.

One really wonders whether those who would hack away at the Energy

Department know what damage they would do. If the department were broken up, its functions would have to be housed elsewhere. Interior? Defense? NASA? EPA? No money would be saved.

The department is the largest science—especially physics–incubator on earth. It might more appropriately be called the Department of Science. Sure it could be better run; much duplication could be eliminated. But why close down our primary science institution?

Along with “small government,” there is a also a cry for more “math and science.” Woodsmen spare that department; prune but do not chop it down.

The Agony and the Ecstasy of Voting

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I shall be voting today. I shall toddle down to the Episcopal church hall in my town, once described by Washington Post writer Hank Burchard as “a hotbed of social rest.”

Polling place volunteers will check my ID, and apologize for so doing. All very civilized, like a Norman Rockwell painting. None of the ugliness of the campaign will penetrate the faux England of the Virginia Hunt Country.

A wretch like myself, though, will wonder which of our billionaires, so decorously standing in line with farmhands and exurbanites, gave big money for attack ads or whether one of the nice lawyers, with his multimillion-dollar, class-action practice, has paid to have a politician’s private life made public.

Yet, when it comes to voting, my cynicism is contained. I carry the scars of failed democracy, but my passion for voting is undimmed.

It all goes back to the late 1950s, when I was a wild-eyed teenaged reformer—is there another kind? The place was Southern Rhodesia and the issue was white minority rule.

We, the wild-eyed, had an almost messianic faith in the curative powers of voting. We even believed that democracy in Africa would be more gentlemanly and idealistic than it was in Europe or America. Oddly, this belief later affected liberal American newspaper columnists like Meg Greenfield of The Washington Post and Anthony Lewis of The New York Times.

Our belief, naive and well-meaning, was that without the old colonial restrictions, stronger, better societies would rise in Africa than had existed in the rest of the world. Our belief was akin to that of Jews who had high hopes that the State of Israel, informed by the suffering of European Jews, culminating in the Holocaust, would produce a kinder, gentler nation than the world had yet seen.

In looking back the odd thing is how kind and gentle, though skewed to the whites, Southern Rhodesia was. There was little crime, no measurable social unrest, but a profound sense that things would change for the better when one man, one vote was the law of the land.

Democracy was the balm and elixir that would move Africa to Winston Churchill’s “sunlit uplands.”

In 1980, after a brutal civil war, Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, got its vote. It was rigged from the beginning, and Robert Mugabe began to lay waste what had been literally and figuratively a sunlit upland.

His first action was one of genocide in the southern part of the country, called Matabeleland. Mugabe’s troops killed an estimated 25,000 people who, being of a different tribal grouping, had had the temerity to vote against him in the first free election.

The new reality of African democracy was “one man, one vote, once.”
Even so, the idealists clung to their hopes. As late as 1996, the dwindling white minority was still hopeful. At that point in time, they had not suffered direct reprisals; Mugabe’s evolving hatred of the white minority had not been seen. It soon would, with seizure of the farms and later businesses.

Zimbabwe elections lost all validity with intimidation, violence and phony prosecutions. Yet the people voted even if they risked brutality for doing so. They had signed on to the hope implicit in voting.

Sadly, democracy elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa, excluding Botswana and South Africa, also failed awfully in Uganda under Idi Amin and foolishly in Zambia under Kenneth Kaunda. Democracy had become a contrivance to set up a dictatorship.

We, the boy soldiers of democracy marching around Salisbury, the Southern Rhodesian capital, with placards, did not understand that democracy is learned and it thrives only where it is husbanded by the voters and protected by a phalanx of independent institutions.

We were not alone in not seeing this. Neither, by the way, did the British, French and Portuguese governments. Neither, one fears, did the advocates for the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan.

So, get out there and vote. Cherish the moment. You will not get a gun butt against your head outside the polling place.

Hail! New Cabs Are Coming

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When New York City was in a bad way, mostly from crime and grime, before the first Giuliani administration, the editor and social critic Lewis Lapham said: “First, fix the taxis.”

Quite so. Taxis are the public face of a city. In the United States, taxis are mostly a disgrace: dirty, poorly maintained and driven by people, often new arrivals, who do not know their way around.

It is not clear that New York fixed the taxis, but they seemed to improve along with a general improvement in street-level life in the Big Apple.

New York taxis are pretty special. An English writer in the 1960s described them with enthusiasm as “great yellow projectiles” hurtling down the Manhattan canyons. Next to London’s clumsy-looking but very nimble black boxes, there is a raw energy about New York taxis that mirrors the city they serve.

Yet there has been no distinctive vehicle for taxis since the Checker Motors Corporation of Kalamazoo, Mich., went out of business in 1982. Like other cities, the New York taxi fleet has become eclectic. The de facto standard vehicle has been the taxi version of the Ford Crown Victoria, utilitarian rather than distinctive, and now being discontinued by Ford.

The first victim of non-standard vehicles in taxi livery is comfort, especially in New York City, where operators install intrusive Plexiglas partitions to protect drivers. These make the back seat feel more crowded than it perhaps is, and cause the passengers to wonder about the safety of their noses in the event of a short stop.

For most people taxis are a luxury, something special. We want to feel special in the back seat, more like a person and less like a package.

Well nearly three decades after the last Checker went into service in New York, donned its yellow livery and had its prized medallion (the city-issued license that controls the number of cabs permitted to operate), New York is copying the London example—a vehicle built just for taxi work. Bravo.

According to The New York Daily News, four companies are competing for the honor of building purpose-specific taxi cabs: General Motors, Ford, Nissan and an obscure Turkish auto company, KarsanKarsan. The newspaper says the two top contenders are in fact Nissan and KarsanKarsan.

Reports give the advantage to the Turkish entry. Photographs of the Nissan suggest something built on the platform of a commercial van, whereas the Turkish offering is more elegant, after the style of a crossover. The issue is before the New York Taxi and Limousine Commission.

Every few years, London has a competition for a new taxi model and these are sometimes built by companies not otherwise known for making cars.

London cabs have been regulated since the 17th century, when special designs for the horse-drawn contraptions were introduced and influenced carriage design around the world. They also led to some of the lore about London cabs. Cabbies, it is said, are obliged by law to carry a bale of hay for the horse; and it is legal for a gentleman to pee on the left rear wheel of the conveyance as necessary.

I have done many things in the back of a London cab, but I have never tested the left rear wheel. Also, I can attest that there is no trace of hay in or about today’s London taxi.

But there are things about London taxis that New York City, and by extension taxi operators across the United States, might wish to emulate:

—a. First, the roominess: Four people can comfortably ride in the back, two on the bench seat and two on fold-down seats facing backwards. This really is superior.

—b. Second, the roof height: In theory, this has to be high enough to accommodate a man wearing a top hat. The height of the man is not part of the legend.

—c. Third, the vehicle has to be able to turn almost in its own length. This, it is said, was introduced to accommodate the narrow circle in front of the Savoy Hotel, an Art Deco masterpiece.

If New York City gets new taxis, they will affect the whole country in time as did the Checker. After all, the original Checker market was not New York City but Chicago. Good ideas spread.

 

OMB Faulted in Nuclear Abandonment

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If you are heading north on the Chesapeake Bay, just above where the Patuxent River enters it, and you will see the Cove Point liquefied natural gas terminal and gas processing plant.

Journey on, about three miles, and you will see a superbly landscaped industrial installation that, unlike the gas terminal, blends into the cliffs of Maryland. This is the Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant, which has been making electricity quietly, efficiently and abundantly since 1975.

By contrast, the Cove Point terminal and gas plant has been a symbol of the vagaries of the gas market. Much of the time it has stood idle, with fishermen maneuvering their boats among its piers.

The terminal and gas plant were built when the nation was gripped by the energy crises of the 1970s, the Arab oil embargo and the Iranian Revolution. In reality, it has been seldom used and has been in and out of operation.

Until a week ago the Calvert Cliffs 1 and 2 reactors on the site, 55 miles from Washington, were set to get a sibling. Calvert Cliffs 3, a joint venture between Baltimore-based Constellation Energy and Electricite de France (EDF), the mammoth French utility, was to join the two venerable reactors.

But now there will be no Calvert Cliffs 3, according to one of its promoters, Constellation Energy.

The project has been canceled–strangled in its crib, if you like, by the White House Office of Management and Budget, which insisted on a sky-high fee in return for federal guarantees of the private commercial loans the utilities needed to finance unit 3.

By effective axing a new reactor, OMB was acting against the Department of Energy, Congress, and possibly the wishes of President Obama.

The nuclear industry and Unistar, the Franco-American company created to build Calvert Cliffs 3, say the fee was wrongly calculated and that OMB is contradicting the intention of Congress and the expressed hopes of Obama.

Two other projects are also facing cancellation over the OMB calculation for its loan guarantees. The utilities say the terms dictated by OMB are onerous, just too expensive.

Yet the industry can find no appellate route to overcome OMB’s stubbornness. The result is that the much-anticipated “nuclear renaissance” is sliding back into the dark ages. Only the Atlanta-based Southern Company has come to terms with the government and secured the loan guarantees it sought to build Vogtle, a two-unit plant.

Strangely, Congress and the Obama administration have declared the revival of nuclear power as national policy and money has been appropriated for loan guarantees. But both are seeing their desires frustrated by OMB and its formula for calculating the chances of success or failure for new nuclear projects.

Angered by OMB intransigence, the two partners in Unistar, Constellation and EDF, have fallen out. EDF wants to go ahead, despite the difficulties and possibly with French government money. It may have to find a new American partner because a foreign company cannot own a U.S. nuclear plant outright.

Adding to the agony of the nuclear reactor builders is the changed picture for natural gas. There is now too much of it coming to market for utilities to ignore the attendant low price. At the inception of the new wave of interest in reactors, gas was selling for $7 to $8 for 1,000 cubic feet (a standard measure in gas pricing). Now it is bobbing around $4 for 1,000 cubic feet, which means that utilities are tempted by the low capital cost of gas turbines.

The joker is wild–and the joker is natural gas, aided by the OMB bureaucracy.

The nuclear renaissance may be delayed again in the United States, but 58 nuclear plants are under construction in 14 countries, including 24 in China alone.

Hearing from Those Who Suffer Mostly in Silence

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“There have been some medical schools in which somewhere along the assembly line, a faculty member has informed the students, not so much by what he said but by what he did, that there is an intimate relation between curing and caring.”

So remarked Ashley Montague, the British-American anthropologist and humanist.

The millions who suffer from what is termed Chronic Fatigue Syndrome in the United States, and Myalgic Encephalomyelitis in the rest of the world, await day that the medical establishment cares enough about the disease to cure it.

They await that day with an anxiousness that is unimaginable to those who have not been afflicted by the disease.

The two commentaries on CFS/ME that Llewellyn King wrote for the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate (and posted on this Web site) have elicited a terrible cry from the afflicted, including a woman who called herself “an unburied corpse.”

These cries called out for a special edition of “White House Chronicle” on CFS. That edition, featuring Deborah Waroff, a New York author, and Dr. Paul Plotz, a National Institutes of Health clinician scientist, first aired on television Oct. 8, 2010.

“I hope the television special and my syndicated columns push the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control, and its political masters, to take action on this life-robbing disease,” said King, executive producer and host of “White House Chronicle.”

Here are some of the viewer responses to the CFS/ME special that we have received so far:

From: Terry

Thank you so much for your broadcast featuring ME/CFS.

I am a Canadian ME/CFS patient who has suffered from this disease for over 12 years. I am involved in research looking to see if there is a connection between the newly discovered XMRV retrovirus and neuropsychiatric disease in my child. The thought is XMRV may have been passed onto my child by me and played a role in expression of her condition.

I am waiting for general XMRV research to learn if the retrovirus played a role in cancer I was diagnosed with four years ago as well. I am wondering if I will develop other cancers and wait anxiously to learn more about ME/CFS and cancer.

I would like to state here, in my experience, CFS/ME is not biologically benign, and highlighting CFS/ME on your show is significant. Perhaps you may help move research forward and thank you in advance for this.

I am immensely appreciative, since as you can imagine, I am anxious for research to help my family understand our poor state of health.

I am a most grateful U.S. neighbor.

 

From: Melinda

I can’t thank you enough for the attention you have brought to ME/CFS suffers.

I have had to deal many times with the ignorance and intolerance towards this illness. It is such an isolating illness and it is well and truly about time that more attention is given to it.

It would be so much easier to deal with if we had understanding and support.

Again thank you!

From: Cheryl


Thank you so very much for your willingness and openness to bring new light to ME/CFS on your show.

We need you. We are desperate to have our voices heard. I can only tell you from my experience that no one would want to have this horrible, life-stealing illness.


I was a very active social worker and church and community volunteer before contracting a virus in 2004 that never went away. It took so long to get an accurate diagnosis that by the time that I did, I was completely bedbound, not being able to leave my home for weeks at a time.

I have to travel over 1,000 miles for medical care, since I am unable to find a doctor here that believes me.


In January of this year, I had to crawl out of my bed to fight breast cancer. With a compromised immune system, I worry about it coming back and not being strong enough for more treatments.

Cancer was a breeze compared to the battles of ME/CFS–and I do not say that flippantly.


Please continue to bring this horrible illness and the injustices to the public. It is a crime against humanity to be made to suffer like this with no answers.


God bless you, Mr. King.

From: Karen

How is “epidemic” defined at the White House?

When is National XMRV Testing Day?

How much longer do you think I can hold out before Chronic Fatigue Syndrome induced dysautonomia shuts down a vital central nervous system?

CFS: To Suffering, Add Anger

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I’ve been walking on the sad side. My mailbox is jammed with dozens of heartrending e-mails from sufferers of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS); a terrible disease that is little understood, little researched and hard to diagnose.

Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, which is known as Myalgic Encephalomyelitis in many parts of the world, mostly strikes people in their thirties and forties. The disease begins with flu-like symptoms which are often a precursor to a full collapse, often after exercise.

The disease largely disables the immune system; and leads to joint and muscle pain, cognitive dissonance, memory loss, dysphasia and problems with simple math. Sufferers are often confined to bed for months, functioning at a substantially reduced capacity, where the simplest tasks become monumental.

CFS-afflicted authors describe taking years to finish projects that should have taken months. These include Hillary Johnson, whose book “Osler’s Web” is about CFS; Laura Hillenbrand, who wrote the bestseller “Sea Biscuit” while struggling with the disease; and Deborah Waroff, who is writing a book about the Jewish hero Sholom Schwartzbard, but who has found the task dragging on for years, working as she can between severe periods of disability, confined to bed.

The human suffering of both the afflicted and those close to them is incalculable in its awful impact. One woman who e-mailed me wrote: “When I became totally disabled seven years ago, because I had not announced my illness previously, nearly everyone I knew figured the illness was in my head. They were aided and abetted with this sort of reasoning based on how the majority of the medical establishment and media had treated CFS. Like many with CFS, I lost all of my companions and my spouse.”

One of the most hopeful of recent discoveries is also generating a collateral fear. The retrovirus XMRV has been found to be present in CFS patients and has led them to worry about transmitting the disease to family members. One woman who e-mailed me from Britain wrote that her husband contracted the disease after years of nursing her. Who, she asked, will look after them now?

A sufferer in Maryland wrote to me that she worries about her family. She and her husband decided to have a child. They were blessed with triplets – and the return of the mother’s disease. Now she worries for her husband and the three babies.

A man—one-third of victims are male, although the National Institutes of Health treats CFS as a woman’s disease–sums up the anger in the community towards the political establishment, and particularly the Centers for Disease Control which changed the name from Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, in a controversial action.

He wrote: “Washington didn’t so much forget – they were never told. The CDC swept it under the carpet, despite the fact that their main raison d’être is to investigate and sort epidemics of new diseases before they take hold. Now, because of the CDC’s wrongdoings, there are more than 1 million people affected in the USA and possibly 17 million worldwide. Most of these people are too sick to stand up for themselves, to fight back.”

Breaking down the e-mails, I find these commonalities:

· Anger at the CDC and, to a lesser extent, the National Institutes of Health and government in general.

· Tremendous suffering and horrendous problems with affording treatment; frequent misdiagnosis, as doctors use a “dustbin” approach that discards all the possibilities until they get to CFS.

· Anger at the media and others for not taking CFS seriously enough.

· The knowledge, with a cure rate of between 4 and 8 percent, that they are awaiting the inevitable in huge discomfort. They are on medical death row.

· Sufferers describing themselves as “living corpses.” Alone with their suffering, many commit suicide.

I’m not a medical writer. Writing about medicine has never interested me. But in a career of writing for newspapers, spanning more than 50 years, I’ve never received so much mail that has so consumed the thought process and torn at the heart.

There is a ghastly disease out there that cries out to be taken seriously, to get proper attention in the medical world, and to be prioritized along with the other big diseases claiming research dollars.


Out, Damned Washington! Out, We Say.

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“Out, damned spot! Out, I say.” So says the demented Lady Macbeth.
Not demented but exercised, the tea party movement says, “Out, damned Washington! Out, we say.”

They say this even as they are trying to get into Washington themselves—indeed to take it over. And no Republican politician, no matter how aware of the naivete of this new dimension in conservatism, dare ignore them.

They are a force to be accommodated for now. In time, they will be blunted by being incorporated.

Running against Washington is not new. It worked like a dream for Ronald Reagan who preached the need to reduce the size of government but let it grow in wondrous ways. Astonishingly, he won re-election in 1984 by again campaigning against Washington, even though he had been president for the past four years.

Part of Reagan’s genius was in channeling the anger of Middle America to his purposes. He was so alluring a figure to Republicans that many were prepared to abandon businesses and careers to serve—often far down the ladder—in his administration.

In the far off days of Jack Kennedy, Washington still had its charm. Knowing people in Washington meant something—at least socially, if not financially and politically. Chicago bankers, New York consultants and Western cattlemen all came to Washington, where they would lunch with minor political appointees.

These lunches in the nation’s capital impressed their colleagues back home.
As in the Reagan years, capable businessmen (it was mostly men then) abandoned careers to serve in the administration.

Edward Stockdale, a successful Miami Beach realtor, gave up everything to serve Kennedy as ambassador to Ireland and in other ways. Bill Ruder, a brilliant New York public relations executive, quit his company just to serve as one of those assistant secretaries in the Commerce Department. His PR firm, Ruder and Finn, went into a severe decline without its top man.

There is a difference between those who came to Washington to serve in the Kennedy administration and those who came later, and with the same passion, to serve in the Reagan administration: The Kennedy recruits felt they were doing it for America, whereas Reagan’s people did it for Reagan.

This made them more political and, as a result, they were more frustrated. They wanted the world to know that their man, Reagan, deserved everybody’s adulation and respect. People like John Herrington, who worked his way from the personnel office at the White House to being secretary of energy, would explode with rage when people didn’t speak deferentially of Reagan.

There was plenty of the cult of personality around Kennedy, but it enhanced the idea of Washington rather than diminished it. Washington was cool in the time of Kennedy. Reagan was cool, but not Washington, in the time of Reagan.

For today’s tea party set, Washington is an alien bridgehead, manned by Euro socialists with U.N. numbers on their speed dials.

Anyone who has ever walked a picket line or joined a mass protest knows the joy of being at the barricades, the adrenalin rush, the thrill of righteousness. The tea party people have had enough and they’re not going to take it anymore.

So have most of us. We are the victims of insensitive government agencies, stagnant wages and large, faceless corporations with automated phone systems.
Any full-blooded citizen who doesn’t feel the rage ought to see a doctor—if he can afford that. The pull of the tea party is there.

But hating Washington is neither a remedy nor a policy, especially when there is no leader like Reagan to produce a policy.

It also is a trifle disingenuous to be trying to take over the place you have so reviled.

Without a leader, Washington will swallow the tea party activists, who will either drift to the center of Republican thought or settle for the no-man’s land of eccentric nobodies, like Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, on the left, and Rep. Louis Gohmert, R-Texas, on the right.

Weak tea, indeed. And poor Lady Macbeth died without getting the stain out.

We Ask More of Government, but Say We Want Less

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Ready for a little heresy? Here goes: The government we have is about the right size, or a little small, for what it is asked to do.

I call as my first witness the humble banana. In a few short years the Cavendish banana, the variety which we know and love (about 100 billion are consumed annually worldwide), may fail as a crop throughout the banana-producing regions of the world.

That is because Cavendish bananas, which have no useful seeds and are cultivated from clippings, have been infected with the strain of a fungus that nearly wiped out the world’s former top banana, the Gros Michel, or Big Mike, in the 1960s.

But worry not. Somewhere in the sprawling Department of Agriculture, scientists are working to save the American breakfast fruit, at least I hope so.

I call my second witness: the Burmese Python. This invasive rascal – a constrictor that can crush and swallow an alligator – is perpetrating the animal equivalent of genocide in the Florida Everglades. I hope there is a federal program to contain this constrictor before it overcomes its aversion to cold winters or, as the climate continues to warm, it comes sailing up the Potomac River at 6 miles per hour.

The same hope extends to saving honeybees, without which all plant life (except bananas and other clones) will perish. We also need to save the dwindling bat population, to stop the Asian carp from swimming up the Mississippi River and threatening the Great Lakes. And we need federal sleuths to track down the salmonella infection in eggs and punish the farmers who produced them.

We expect the federal government to be omnipotent and omnipresent. We were shattered to learn, for example, that the Feds had no way of sealing the runaway oil well in the Gulf of Mexico. We also want the government to have limitless compassion for the flood victims in Pakistan and the hurricane survivors in Haiti.

These are just some of the small-scale problems, not the big ones of war and peace, of welfare and Obamacare. But they are among a myriad of things we want done by our government. Now. Fast.

Recently I have become interested in so-called orphan diseases. These are the cripplers and killers that have no powerful lobbies fighting for federal research dollars, and have failed to excite the pharmaceutical industry because there is unlikely to be a cure in a pill. Desperately, those who suffer from these diseases call on the government to do the research and find a cure.

But here is another problem: not enough competition in the government. While the National Institutes of Health is criticized for picking winners and losers for research dollars, it is the only game in town. The solution would be a competing institution.

In the world of energy and nuclear weaponry, there are many competing government laboratories, including the three large federal weapons labs: Los Alamos, Sandia and Lawrence Livermore. They compete, they overlap, sometimes they duplicate, but they provide a kind of defense in depth against scientific favoritism.

Pluralism and diversity have a place in government, even if the critics cry “waste.”

Some years ago at an Aspen Institute meeting, the economist Irwin Stelzer, a passionate free-marketer, clashed with James Schlesinger, an economist, historian and former chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, secretary of defense and secretary of energy. Stelzer’s argument was that the private sector was better and more efficient at research.

Brilliant as Stelzer is (I have known both men for about 40 years), that round went to Schlesinger who listed effortlessly more than a dozen government-funded inventions, from the Internet to the aero-derivative gas turbine. He made the case for government sufficiently well-funded to do the job.

My case is less sophisticated. We keep asking more of government even while we say we want less.

Even the government has not been able to invent a plausible free lunch. So, pay up.