White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Democratic Lightheadedness Won’t Erase Trump’s Stain

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It sounds like an admonition from a senior detective to a junior colleague: Assume nothing.

Right now, across America, a lot of political assuming is going on, mostly among Democrats. The first assumption is that the Democrats will win the midterms. It is dangerous to assume the winner of any race until the winning post has clearly been passed. Nonetheless, a certain lightheadedness has taken over Democrats and those who are planning to vote with them.

The Democrats are also assuming victory not only in November 2026, but also victory in November 2028. They are dreaming of changes, cosmetic and profound.

Cosmetically, they assume some of the extremes of President Trump’s architectural bric-a-brac in Washington will be torn down — especially the ballroom at the White House and the arch he is dead set on building at Memorial Bridge. Trouble is that people may like the arch and take it to heart. Also, the cost of taking it down will matter.

The ballroom will survive because, well, what could replace it? The East Wing of the White House has gone, and a replica would be an expensive undertaking. Nothing — a gaping hole — isn’t an option.

If he razes the Kennedy Center, the Democrats will rebuild it. The Kennedy name remains dear to them.

The new face of Washington is to be one built by Trump: the ballroom, the arch, and many monuments.

Expect to see these on selfies, postcards and as location identifiers in movies, like the way the London Eye, a Ferris wheel, has come to be the modern symbol of London, taking over from Tower Bridge.

Should a Republican win the presidency in 2028, other Trump changes, like renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America and Lake Ontario Lake America, will create optics and likely trigger legal challenges. A Democratic president will turn that clock back with relish, restoring the old names as the beginning of accommodations with Mexico and Canada.

The heavy lifting, as usual, won’t be the optics but the substance. There is a new world order, and future administrations will have to find America’s place in it —  while still facing off against China.

The Democrats, suffering from lightheadedness based on the assumption of victory in the midterms and further victory in 2028, assume that by some magic time travel, the status quo ante will return and the world will be put back together again as it was before Trump 2. Magical thinking.

They should contemplate the significance of Lady Macbeth’s declaration, “What’s done cannot be undone.”

Consider two seemingly irrevocable changes affecting two very different nations, Canada and Iran.

Canada, which has been a constant friend to America throughout its history, is riled as never before. The astute Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, has sought to align his vast underpopulated country with Europe. There is even talk of Canada joining the European Union as its 28th member. That is Canadian lightheadedness.

First, the EU isn’t in great shape and has failed to coalesce into a country-like entity. It is riven with national interests and rivalries.

Second, there is the problem of the Atlantic. Whereas most of the EU is contiguous, Canada is far away, and its borders are determined not by a customs post but by an ocean — and by oceans of other differences.

Somehow, despite the loss of trust over torn-up treaties, Canada and the United States need each other.

While at war with America, Iran has discovered a compelling advantage in the region: the Strait of Hormuz. Control of the strait means control of a major asset, affecting the production and export of oil and gas in much of the Middle East. One-third of the world’s fertilizer passes through the strait.

The Trump administration believes America can control the strait and operate it as though it were the Panama Canal before President Jimmy Carter handed it over to Panama.

Sadly, this assumption belies reality. The Iran war has awakened the sleeping dog at the gate, and it is unlikely to obey a new owner or go back to sleep.

I believe we will win the war in the conventional sense, but we can never carry home the prize — that remains a territorial possession of Iran.

Trump’s mark on Washington and the world, like Lady Macbeth’s stain, is indelible.

Spot the Illegals — a Chilling, Sad Neighborhood Game

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Here is a disturbing game: Try to spot the illegal immigrant.

Is it the waitress, the winning one from Bulgaria, or is it the charming emergency room doctor from Pakistan, or is it one of the Mexican men working on the housing site at the corner? Maybe it is the Haitian caregiver in your home, whom you adore and are afraid to ask if employing her will compromise you.

You look hard at them because if they are illegal, or also referred to as undocumented immigrants, ICE could pounce.

They are a shadow underclass, productive members of society, and they are part of our national fabric.

Many of us are silent conspirators when it comes to these immigrants. We know and don’t tell. We don’t reach for the phone, and if they are arrested, we feel it personally.

Some would want you to believe that a majority of these people are rapists, murderers, thieves or drug dealers. If they are, they should be arrested, tried and imprisoned. That is what the police and the FBI should be doing, not the extracurricular, often barbarous ICE.

The trouble starts with the word “illegal,” which conjures visions of an evil underworld. Undocumented workers are indeed living in an underworld, doing essential jobs that others won’t. That labor force is part of the grease that keeps America’s wheel turning.

Whether cleaning houses, minding elderly parents or children, building houses, repairing roads or plucking chickens, immigrants, legal and illegal, are an essential part of the functioning of our society. Failure over decades to enact sensible immigration laws has left us persecuting those we depend on for so much.

The paperless came here chasing a dream that was also the legendary American Dream: a better life in a fairer, happier, safer place, where you can trade a day of work for a day of pay, even if the work was rejected by the rest of society.

Behind all crimes is motive. The motive of the person who walked across the southern border or overstayed a tourist visa is the same: a better life, a life worth living. It is the same motivation that has always brought the needy to these shores, whether it was for religious freedom in the 1600s, the Irish famine in the 19th century or escaping Hitler.

The true asylum seekers came to avoid death, an unquestionable motive.

My plea is for those who are here and have established lives of merit, not for open borders. Migration is a global challenge exacerbated by war, climate change, religious persecution and political oppression. It causes fear that an existing culture will be overwhelmed, as when migrants bring in a different language or a disruptive religion.

These are real concerns, but they should be less so in the United States than in Europe or Australia. This nation is so large, and has benefitted so hugely from immigration, that it should tailor its policies to local reality, not global fear.

The politics of immigration are murky. Democratic and Republican administrations have had vigorous deportation regimes — but the statistics are skewed for President Biden and President Trump’s first administration because of the COVID crisis.

Under the administrations of President Obama and Biden, enforcement was active but less conspicuous, while the southern border remained porous. Under Obama, deportations reached their zenith with 400,000 expulsion orders. In the second Trump administration, deportations will probably exceed the Obama removals’ total.

Among immigrants, there is confusion about their status. There are those from 13 countries who had special protected status, which included allies from the Afghanistan war, Haitians and Venezuelans, who wonder why they have lost it.

Then there are those who wrongly believe their Social Security numbers will protect them; and those who have work permits but don’t have the right to abide by a bizarre legal contradiction.

ICE agents with their thuggish demeanor appear to relish arrests and deportations. We are told ICE has numeric targets for arrests. Whenever its agents appear, they strike fear into the hearts of otherwise innocent people who wanted to share a dream.

None of us choose where to be born. Those born in awful circumstances and who come here without permission are guilty of breaking the law even while signing on to the American dream.

Now that the borders are essentially sealed, how about some American forgiveness?

The ‘New Weather’ Reality Will Change the Nation, Defy Politics

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I have never done political consulting. So it was novel to me when a candidate in the midterms asked me what he should be worried about in 2027. I repeated what Harold Macmillan, British prime minister from 1957 to 1963, is believed to have said, “Events, dear boy, events.”

Actually, I had a little list of crises that I have been gathering and which will come to bear on the political establishment — and we the people. Topping the list is one that is already at hand: the climate, which I call the “new weather.”

We have had weeks of atmospheric disturbance resulting in catastrophic floods, power outages, flight cancellations, oppressive heat and fires. Weather disruptions have been the first or second stories on the networks’ evening newscasts, pushing back the news on the wars in Iran and Ukraine, as well as news from the White House.

Television stations like to tell viewers they have “news you can use.” The new weather is news that will abuse you. It knows where you live and it may call. It has called in Europe and across North America. It is a new reality.

The Southwest is parched and the Colorado River, that life channel, is running dry, severely affecting people in seven states. It also affects the food supply, as much of farming depends on the river’s bounty. Even Mexico receives some of the dwindling Colorado River water supply under a treaty with the United States.

Hundreds of thousands have lost power for hours or days, and others may be choosing between keeping the air conditioning on and spending on other necessities.

Sustained heat of over 110 degrees is a killer, and electricity for air conditioning is a lifesaver. Every year, more than a thousand people die of heat.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports the number of heat-related deaths nationwide. The worst year was 2023, with 2,325 deaths, as measured by death certificate analysis.

But heat-related fatalities are hard to collect. I would wager that the real death toll is much higher.

Liberal politicians will blame the fossil fuel industries — coal, oil and natural gas — for continuing to drive up greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere; conservatives will blame regulation and lack of infrastructure building. Local politicians will attack the data centers and the utilities.

President Trump has called global warming a hoax. But “say it ain’t so” doesn’t work when it is too hot for kids to play outside or streets are rivers, and when the flow of food from farm to supermarket is interrupted.

Huge infrastructure projects will be proposed at a time when there is a growing awareness that the budget deficit is out of control and there is no way America will grow out of it on its present tax trajectory.

If my candidate makes it to Congress, he will find it easier to say no to new expenditures than it is to say yes to new taxes.

Nonetheless, effective pipelines will be proposed to move water from water-rich areas to water-starved states. Some of those, like Texas, drunk on its recent Mecca-like effect on business, will have difficulty accepting that people won’t come if there is no water and inadequate electricity.

Heat, not economics, could curtail the North-to-Southwest flow of people, which has been the population realignment in recent years.

How to live with the new weather will definitely be a new priority that politicians will find difficult to address. It doesn’t fit behind a political slogan. It does favor infrastructure repair and enhancement, from boosting the electric grid to planting water-frugal crops to serious concern about where people live and how they pay their electric bill — a matter of keeping cool and staying alive.

But for the political establishment, other issues are forming, each competing with the weather for attention. For a start, there is integrating artificial intelligence into our economy without severe disruption, dealing with a broken healthcare system, and providing care that is beyond the reach of people facing higher prices for other survival services and products, like electricity and water.

Easier to say your opponent is a rascal, the other party is fascist or communist, and to worry about the use of AI on cellphones in classrooms.

We all have the weather to deal with, Democrat or Republican, and it is still an issue for governance.

Foreign Aid That Works — the Malawi Story

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In 2005, Gordon Brown, British chancellor of the exchequer, later prime  minister, was in Washington, seeking to raise $50 billion annually in  additional international aid for Africa.

I hosted a press event for Brown at the National Press Club, and I  asked him how all this money would get to the people who needed it?

“We’ll give it to the right people,” he said crossly.

I told him I had seen foreign aid stolen, diverted and spent by the agencies that were supposed to deliver it on pet projects and themselves.

But there is another way, and it is working in the small, peaceful and democratic Southern African country of Malawi.

An organization called GiveDirectly has been handing $550 to every  adult — men and women — in villages with no strings attached. It is  estimated that for every $1,000 disbursed, there is an economic impact  of $2,400.

This differs radically from foreign aid that has poured into sub-Saharan Africa since the end of colonial rule. Normally, this is passed on to a local government agency or a non-governmental organization and has been earmarked for a school, a hospital, water supply or famine relief. Often, this has led to bureaucratic delays and high overhead costs.

The aid organizations, mostly from North America and Europe, haven’t  always earned plaudits. I have heard them described as “cheap tourists”  and worse.

Another source of friction has been the tendency of aid workers to  impose their values on recipients — for example, promoting green  technologies or Western dietary preferences.

“We are flipping the traditional aid logic on its head. Rather than  us figuring out what people need and having a kind of one-size-fits-all  approach, we are saying people are the best placed to say what they need and what will be best for their circumstances,” Grace Jackson,  GiveDirectly country director for Malawi, told me and my co-host, Adam  Clayton Powell III, on the television program “White House Chronicle.”

“What we can do is to provide the tools, i.e. cash, so they can go ahead and do what is the most important and most useful to them,” she  added.

Everyone over the age of 18 in a village gets the money delivered via a phone wallet, and if the villager doesn’t have a phone, Jackson said  GiveDirectly provides one.

They also make sure there is a viable local financial entity with enough money on hand to pay out as villagers require it.

I believe this approach works well because of the nature of  subsistence life in rural Africa, typified by village life in Malawi. It is wrong to think of poverty in the African countryside, and it is  extreme, the way we think of urban poverty in America.

Rural people in Malawi — and a majority of its 22 million people are rural — simply have nothing. I repeat, nothing. They have few clothes, no shoes and no food security.

They survive by subsistence farming, mostly growing corn, which, with an occasional protein, is their diet. They have to eat all year on what they grow.

Yet families hold together as do the villages. Often, grown children live with their parents and help with the farming, generally done with simple hand tools. In the nothingness there is order.

The Malawi experiment is working, lifting whole villages above the international poverty line. Jackson, who is English, said the money was used in various ways. People bought more land, got medical attention, paid school fees or pooled the money for big things like electrification.

Recently, the program has received a $150 million boost from the Canva Foundation, the charity established by billionaires Melanie Perkins and Cliff Obrecht, co-founders of Canva, a popular graphic design tool.

GiveDirectly was created by MIT and Harvard students as a giving circle, based on their studies of the efficacy of charity programs. It was formalized in 2012. The organization hasn’t just helped the needy overseas, it has also handed out aid in the form of debit cards to U.S. disaster survivors.

The idea of letting the recipients of the aid decide how to spend it  may appeal to conservatives and incline them more favorably toward  foreign aid, especially if it is entirely derived from the private  sector.

By the way, Gordon Brown’s grand scheme never got off the ground.

A British Immigrant’s Defense of Immigration

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Migration, people moving to new lands, is as old as human history, and as fraught. Today it is a global problem complete with layered hypocrisy, cruelty and, always, hope among those on the move. War and extreme poverty collude in driving people to seek a livable future.

There is no simple solution, no slogan that encompasses a fair and reasonable course of action for the receiving country.

I moved from a British African colony, Southern Rhodesia, to the homeland, Britain, when that was our birthright, and to America a few years later. I did that because it was the place I wanted to be, the happening place, the place of all possibility and challenge.

I didn’t plan to stay, and now it is more than 60 years later. And, yes, I was elated to become a citizen.

In those days, if you were British, immigration was no harder than filling in some forms and swearing that you weren’t a communist and wouldn’t live in “moral turpitude” when you got to America. That reprehensible state wasn’t described.

To me, America was more than a country; it was, and remains, a state of mind.

At its best, America is generous, caring, open and empathetic to the world and its hurts. Yet, how human a country! It is replete with hideous mistakes from the Palmer Raids, to McCarthyism and the Red Scare, to the Vietnam War. The gash of slavery hasn’t healed, and racism has left its mark.

America’s genius is that it realizes itself as a work in progress. 

Our major weakness, it always seemed to me, was the obverse of our strength: wishing our ways on others; wanting them to see the light we see. 

Like so many others, my attitudes are conflicted, hypocritical and without a simple, elegant defense. About 30 years ago, I first raised the issue of immigration’s effect on the nation. My concern then was that Spanish was becoming a second language. If that were to happen, I feared the country would enter into the same debilitating, two-nation status that has divided Canada and Belgium.

Also, I have argued against the way immigration has left its mark on Europe, especially from North African migrants who have set up enclaves where there is no attempt to integrate and where their religion has maintained them in isolation; angry minorities in their urban strongholds. That undermines the value of the journey both to the migrant and the host country.

I have come to believe that Spanish isn’t the threat it appeared at that time, and that our ability to absorb and prosper as a result of immigration is at a real and present danger of being wasted, denying us the talent flow that has made us a beacon to the world.

Never forget that every deportation is a human disaster: a life and a family sent into an unknown purgatory.

Recently, I had a weeklong stay at a Rhode Island hospital and marveled at doctors who were from distant lands, including Iran and Arab countries. In the late reaches of one night, I had a crisis. My room was flooded with nurses and their assistants, all helping and caring. From their accents, I was certain that at least four of my angels weren’t born here. I was glad of them.

Just as I am glad that we lead the world in high tech and, at the apex of its leadership, sit immigrants. They dominate at the top tech behemoths.

Not every immigrant has added to America’s greatness; some have brought with them creeds that are hard to accommodate, some have brought crime. Overall, each wave of immigrants has lifted America and its people to new heights.

From those early settlers to the German filmmakers, to the Scandinavians who planted the Great Plains, to the Irish who have informed our culture, to the Italian builders, to the German filmmakers, who came in the 1920s and 1930s and created the Hollywood we know and treasure, to the Jewish refugees from Europe who gave us everything from great music to the magic of Broadway, to high science and lifesaving medical research.

When I first arrived in New York, I wrote to a friend, “This is an extraordinary place, less of a mixing bowl and more of a stew, where all of the ingredients remain intact and yet work together in a kind of wondrous unity.” I wouldn’t withdraw or amend a word of that more than 60 years later.

People move because they aspire to a better life for themselves and their families. Grabbing those who slipped in and sending them to all they sought to leave behind is, to this grateful immigrant, un-American.

We are a big country, big-hearted, too, and we have room for these big contributors to our future.

Don’t Let AI Get Away Without Helping You: Iterate

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I haven’t had a good relationship with the Age of Computing. I don’t understand computers, but I believe they understand me. And that is the problem.

The first time I used an ATM machine, I expected it to sneer at my balance — and to do it aloud, so everyone in range could hear. It didn’t, but I kept my doubts.

Fast-forward to the Age of Artificial Intelligence. I have been writing and broadcasting about AI with brio, traveling to conferences across the United States and Europe, and questioning the great and knowledgeable in giant tech companies and universities. I have put these experts on television and quoted them in columns.

When it comes to my own use of AI, I am in fear. I was worried about ATMs, but I have been trembling before AI and its awesomeness.

Now, a professor at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin has guided me, and I am at peace with AI.

I thought, until my recent epiphany, that the AI assistants would laugh at my puerile prompts and resent me bothering them. Assiduously, I have been saying “please” and “thank you” to all the AI assistants, even China’s DeepSeek.

I was sure that, at some level, ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Grok and Gemini were in cahoots; that no matter which assistant I used, these AI masters of the universe had a file on me and it was loaded with derisive comments like “He is pea-brained” and “He doesn’t have a pot to tinkle in.”

Not now. Not since I read an article in the Harvard Business Review, authored by Nicholas Jennings Hallman, the brilliant accounting professor at UT’s McCombs School of Business. He is also the school’s senior scholar for AI initiatives.

Hallman has been studying, in partnership with the giant accounting and consulting firm KPMG, how workers are using AI. Conclusion: They are way underusing it.  Most workers and recreational users are just skimming the surface of what AI can do to help them. They are turning on the car’s engine without going anywhere.

Resoundingly, Hallman and KPMG found in their study that workers used AI assistants, for example, to draft an email or solve a minor problem. But if the AI assistant they used didn’t provide the answer they were seeking, they either gave up or thought there wasn’t an answer.

Hallman’s answer is to “iterate.” Keep asking, push AI assistants to do better, and they will. It can be the main show, not a side event.

In a recent appearance on “White House Chronicle” on PBS (whchronicle.com), he said, “Some of what we found in the work we’ve done here with KPMG is that the most productive users are those who ask a question often and get back a less-than-satisfactory response, but they iterate until they get back something that is satisfactory and learn along the way — so that the next time, they can get the same satisfactory response with fewer iterations.”

Hallman urged: Don’t be afraid of how often you ask a question or modify it.

Too many workers, a majority, according to the UT/KPMG study, are prepared to accept one-and-done rather than pushing an AI assistant for more. Hallman also said users should give an AI assistant enough to work with. State the task in a way that authorizes it to dig deeper.

When “White House Chronicle” co-host Adam Clayton Powell III asked about security, reminding Hallman that emails, which were never supposed to be public, can end up in the wrong hands, Hallman said there is little chance of your privacy being violated by AI use or of your interactions with AI going public. Also, he said, there are security measures that a corporation or sensitive user can employ, including using a modified AI assistant or totally disengaging from the wider net.

Hallman doesn’t recommend that workers use voice interaction with AI. He said he has found it is less efficient and the answers tend to be more superficial.

However, Hallman said that when driving long distances, he uses voice-activated AI to learn about subjects he knows little about. He said he did this with black holes in space because he wanted to know more about them.

Many leaders in the AI firmament, including former IBM CEO Ginni Rometty, have said that AI  won’t replace humans, but those who use AI will replace those who don’t.

Clearly, the unsaid thing isn’t that you use AI, but how well you use it. It isn’t enough to ask one question, as Hallman said. You must make AI work for you if you plan to stay in work yourself.

A Conversation With 2026 on America’s Meaning to the World

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Come on in, 2026. Welcome. I am glad to see you because your predecessor year was not to my liking.

Yes, I know there is always something going on in the world that we wish were not going on. Paul Harvey, the conservative broadcaster, said, “In times like these, it helps to recall that there have always been times like these.”

Indeed. Wars, uprisings, oppression, cruelty and man’s inhumanity to man are to be found in every year. But last year, the world lost something it may not get back. You see, ’26 — you don’t mind if I shorten your title, do you — we lost America. Not the country but the metaphor.

We were, ’26, despite our tragic mistakes — including slavery and wrongheaded wars — a country of caring people, a country that cared (mostly) for its own people and those who lived elsewhere in the world.

It was the country that sought to help itself and to help the world. It was the sharing country, the country that showed the way, the country that sought to correct wrong, to overthrow evil and to excel at global kindness.

It was the country that led by example in freedom of speech, freedom of movement and in free, democratic government.

When John Donne, the English metaphysical poet, described his lover’s beauty as “my America” in the 1590s, he foreshadowed the emergence of the United States a nation of spiritual beauty.

From World War II on, caring was an American inclination as well as a policy.

We rebuilt Europe with the Marshall Plan, an act of international largesse without historical parallel. We rushed to help after droughts, fires, earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunamis and wars.

We were everywhere with open hands and hearts. America the bountiful. We had the resources and the great heart to do good, to show our own overflowing decency, even if it got mixed up with ideology. We led the world in caring.

We bound up the wounds of the world, as much as we could, whether they were the result of human folly or nature’s occasional callousness.

We delivered truth through the Voice of America and aid through the U.S. Agency for International Development. Our might was always at hand to help, to save the drowning, to feed the starving and to minister to the victims of pandemic — as with AIDS and Ebola in Africa.

In 2025, that ended. More than a century of decency suspended, suddenly, thoughtlessly.

America the Great Country became America Just Another Striving Country, decency confused with weakness, indifference with strength, friends with oil autocracies.

It wasn’t just the sense of noblesse oblige, which not only distinguished us in the 20th century, but also earlier. In the 19th century, we opened our gates to the starving, the downtrodden and the desperate. They joined the people already living here to build the greatest nation — a democracy — that the world has ever seen. First in science. First in business. First in medicine. First in agriculture. First in decency.

These people brought to America labor and know-how across the board, from weaving technology in the 18th century to engineering in the 19th century to musical theater in the 20th century, along with movie-making and rocket science.

I would submit, ’26, that it is all about American greatness, and last year we slammed the door shut on greatness, abandoned longtime allies and friends. We forsook people who had been compatriots in war, culture and history for the dubious company of the worst of the worst, aggressors, oppressors, liars, everyone soaked in the blood of their innocent victims.

Yes, ’26, America stood tall in the world because it stood for what was right. Its system of law — including the ability to have small wrongs addressed by high courts — was the envy of foreign lands where law was bent to politics, where democracy was an empty phrase for state manipulation of the vote. The Soviet Union claimed democracy; America practiced it.

America soared, for example, with President Jimmy Carter’s principled and persuasive pursuit of human rights and President Ronald Reagan’s extraordinary explanation of its greatness: the “shining city upon a hill.”

It sunk from time to time. Slavery was horrific; Dred Scott, appalling; Prohibition, silly; the Hollywood blacklist, outrageous.

But ’26, decency finally triumphed and America was great, its better instincts superb — and now worth restoring for the nation and for the troubled, brutalized world.

Good luck, ’26. You will bear a standard that the world has looked to. Lift it high again.

 

How Europe Stole Christmas and Promoted Snow

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The Grinch didn’t steal Christmas. Europe did. Filched it, packed it up and moved it north, where it snows.

In this wholesale looting of the world’s greatest holiday, the U.S., Canada and some other non-European northern habitats were also complicit.

I grew up in the Southern Hemisphere in faraway Zimbabwe — then called Southern Rhodesia, a British colony — and we had to bear Northern hegemony at Christmas. We had to bear it the rest of the year as well, but this is about Christmas and that symbol of the North: snow.

In subequatorial Africa, snow was a distant European asset. We had learned to associate it with Christmas, and we would celebrate the holiday by singing the carol about the good Bohemian King Wenceslas, looking out “on the feast of Stephen, when the snow lay round about, deep and crisp and even.”

Cotton wool was our snow substitute. When we decorated for Christmas, we couldn’t have it lying about “deep and crisp and even.” We just put cotton wool puffs on Christmas trees (another symbol of European expansionism), picture rails and window frames.

The shops used glitter and cotton wool in Christmas window scenes that were out of Victorian-period Europe, not the Holy Land.

Only nativity scenes in churches were exempt from the scourge of cotton wool. Well, mostly. As kids we were confused by the snow mania, and sometimes we tried to embellish the straw in manger scenes with cotton wool.

My mother, who never visited anywhere north of the equator, was a campaigner, in her way, against the theft of Christmas. She would lecture people on what the temperature was at Christmas in Bethlehem. She said it was very hot.

There was no way she could have known what the actual temperature was in Bethlehem, but she didn’t let that inhibit her argument against the Northern appropriation of something that was rooted in the Levant.

In fact, Christmas is the beginning of the coolest time of year in Jerusalem and Bethlehem; the temperature hovers around 40 F. It isn’t a winter wonderland in the way that Christmas is portrayed in Europe and America.

And all that hoopla about sales and shopping till you drop came from those delightful Christmas markets, which you see all over continental Europe at this time of year.

You can blame the Germans for Christmas trees and the Scandinavians for reindeer, but it seems to me that the Brits, my people, have done a rather good job of Christmas appropriation.

Put aside that they have tried to grab the entire concept of the people of Israel. Yes, the British Israelite movement postulates the British are descendants of the 10 lost tribes of Israel.

This is an attempted act of cultural appropriation on a massive scale, and it hasn’t succeeded, but it still has its adherents.

The great English poet William Blake has been more successful. His poem “Jerusalem,” which he wrote in 1804, was put to music by Hubert Parry in 1916 to aid the World War I effort and has become a second British national anthem. People prefer it to “God Save the King” — and it has a better tune.

Blake wrote:

“I will not cease from Mental Fight/ Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:/Till we have built Jerusalem,/ In England’s green & pleasant Land.”

Well, that is a very ambitious attempt to steal a legend, and it makes cotton wool seem rather timid in the struggle to own Christmas.

I wish you, yes, a white Christmas. I like the white stuff — snow, not cotton wool.

The Stateless in America Would Face a Kind of Damnation

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I have only known one stateless person. You don’t get a medal for it or wear a lapel pin.

The stateless are the hapless who live in the shadows, in fear.

They don’t know where the next misadventure will come from: It could be deportation, imprisonment or an enslavement of the kind the late Johnny Prokov suffered as a shipboard stowaway for seven years.

His story ended well, but few do.

When I knew Johnny, he was a revered bartender at the National Press Club in Washington. By then, he had American citizenship, was married and lived a normal life.

It hadn’t always been that way. He told me he had come from Dalmatia, when that area was so poor people took their clothes to a specialist who would kill the lice in the seams with a little wooden mallet, which wouldn’t damage the cloth.

To escape that extreme poverty, Prokov became a stowaway on a ship.

So began his seven-year odyssey of exploitation and fear of violence. The captains took advantage of the free labor and total servitude of the stowaways.

Eventually, Prokov jumped ship in Mexico. He made his way to the United States, where a life worth living was available.

I don’t know the details of how he became a citizen, but he dreamed the American dream — and it came true for him.

An odd legacy of his years at sea was that Prokov had become a brilliant chess player. He would often have as many as a dozen chess games going along the bar in the National Press Club. He always won. He had had time to practice.

The United Nations says there are 4 million stateless people in the world, but that is a massive undercount. Many of those who are stateless are refugees and have no idea if they are entitled to claim citizenship of the countries they are desperate to escape from. Citizenship in Gaza?

Now the Trump administration wants to add to the number of stateless people by denying birthright citizenship to children born of illegal immigrants in the United States.

It wants to deny people — who are in all ways Americans — their constitutional right of citizenship. Their lives will be lived on a lower rung than their friends and contemporaries. They will be denied passports, maybe education, possibly medical care, and the ability to emigrate to any country that otherwise might have received them.

Instead, they will live their lives in the shadows, children of a lesser God, probably destined to have children of their own who might also be deemed noncitizens. They didn’t choose the womb that bore them, nor did they sanction the actions of their parents.

The world is awash in refugees fleeing war, crime and violence, and environmental collapse. Those desperate people will seek refuge in countries which can’t absorb them and will take strong actions to keep them out, as have the United States and, increasingly, countries in Europe.

There is a point, particularly in Europe, where the culture and established religion is threatened by different cultures and clashing religions.

But when it comes to children born in America to mothers who live in America, why mint a new class of stateless people, condemned to a second-class life here, or deport them to some country, such as Rwanda or Uganda, where its own people are already living in abject poverty?

All immigrants can’t be accommodated, but the cruelty that now passes for policy is hurtful to those who have worked hard and dared to seek a better life for themselves and their children.

It is bad enough that millions of people are seeking somewhere to live and perchance a better life, due to war or crime or drought or political follies.

To extend the numbers by denying citizenship to the children of parents who live and work here isn’t good policy. It is also unconstitutional.

If the Supreme Court rules in favor of the administration, it will add social instability of haunting proportions.

Children are proud of their native lands. What will the new second class be proud of — the home that denied them?

The Case for Prescribed Burning: Fighting Fire With Fire

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Wildfire takes no prisoners, has no mercy, knows no boundaries, respects no nation and is a clear and present danger this and every summer as summers grow drier and hotter.

The American West is burning; across Canada there are wildfires; and swaths of France, Spain, Portugal and Greece are ablaze. In 2022, faraway Siberia was ablaze.

California bears the scars of where wildfires and humans have collided and the humans and their homes have lost, recently and devastatingly in Los Angeles’ Pacific Palisades neighborhood. Experts say that even in the formerly moist East, conditions for wildfire are growing.

The damage to lives and livelihoods here and abroad is beyond calculation.

Olive oil and wine from Europe will be more expensive this year because so many trees and vines have burned. Humankind’s ancient enemy stalks the world: irrational, brutal and very hard to stop.

One of the largest U.S. electric utilities, Pacific Gas and Electric, facing an estimated $30 billion in liabilities from 2017 and 2018 wildfires believed to have been caused by their equipment, filed for bankruptcy protection in 2019. Utilities have been on the forefront of wildfire suppression because some fires are started by sparking from overhead lines.

An army of people and technology is deployed in the United States to fight wildfires and still it comes up short; these tools include AI and drones, aircraft and, of course, the indefatigable but inevitably limited intervention of firefighters on the ground.

There is an additional tool: Fighting fire with fire with so-called prescribed burning or controlled burning.

I learned about this technique from J. Morgan Varner, director of research and senior scientist at Tall Timbers in Tallahassee, Florida.

For 60 years, Tall Timbers, a nonprofit group, has been doing prescribed burning — the controlled application of fire to a specific area of land to achieve defined management objectives — in southern Georgia and northern Florida. Now their expertise on this traditional and effective tool for maintaining ecosystems and reducing wildfire risks is widely sought.

Even so, Varner said, the technique has its critics, mostly from those who have sought to suppress or avoid fire as the first line of defense.

Varner explained that this has led to decades of fuel (made up of dead trees and vegetation) accumulation on forest floors. When this burns, it burns with great heat and destroys everything; in a prescribed burn, the damage is less severe and more of a forest’s natural infrastructure survives.

I didn’t see a burn in progress, but I did see the aftermath of one on a hunting estate in southern Georgia, where the landlord worked with Tall Timbers. There was a strong smell of burning and some residual smoldering logs, but the land was ready for natural rejuvenation.

The idea is that with careful burning, the land is returned to its natural rhythm. This region of Georgia along the Florida border, known as the Red Hills, has seen controlled burning for a long time, and the forests and the wildlife are both healthy.

Wildlife is one of the concerns about deliberate burning, but Varner says animals are naturally fire sensitive and very adept at getting out of the way.

A prescribed burn is a carefully managed event. Conditions must be exactly right: wind, humidity, the nature of the vegetation and the amount of fuel on the ground.

Varner says that the ideal burn area is 40 acres, and burning is done in the spring or the fall, not in the summer heat. A team of experts surveys the area of the burn and calculates the behavior of the fire before ignition.

Although prescribed burning has ancient history and a lot of scientific evidence supporting it, it isn’t everyone’s solution. I asked the president of a West Coast utility about using it and got a curt reply: “No way.”

Looking at a beautiful stand of trees, I find it hard to imagine deliberately setting it alight. However, I am convinced that fire has to be used to fight fire and that periodically in nature there is wildfire, and it is part of a natural cycle. I’m beginning to take note of the dead trees among the living ones.

If summers get even hotter and drier, more radical solutions to fire will have to be employed, including fire.