White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

I Had a Fall in Paris and Got Amazing Emergency Care

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The dog wasn’t to blame. The lovely Paris night wasn’t to blame. The charming 7th arrondissement wasn’t to blame.

No. It was my old enemy, gravity, that caused the blameless sidewalk to rise up and smite me.

I had thought I was done with gravity. It had frequently interjected itself into my well-being when I was riding horses. Mercifully, it had held its peace when I was flying single-engine aircraft.

However, gravity came back for me, vengefully, I might say, in Paris on Sept. 12.

My wife, Linda Gasparello, and I traveled to France for a meeting on aspects of the future of Europe at the lovely Jean Monnet House, just outside Paris. On the day of our arrival, we checked into our Paris hotel. We were scheduled for a meeting at the French Foreign Ministry the next day, after which we would be transported to the Jean Monnet House in Houjarray.

We were guests at the house because a few years ago, we had filmed a television program about another delightful Monnet house: the one on leafy Foxhall Road in Washington, where Monnet lived during World War II.

Monnet, who worked from an office at the Willard Hotel, was a central figure in the American arms supply operation vital to the Allied effort — and some say he shortened the war by at least a year. After the war, Monnet and French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman became the two principal fathers of what became the European Union.

Back to Paris, where my wife and I were taking a stroll after a snack in the evening. I have been walking with a cane for several years, so I was not too steady to start.

Then came the blameless dog. I leaned over to pet this fine Parisian pooch, and over I went, my head hitting the sidewalk hard. Blood everywhere. The young couple who owned the dog and two young couples visiting from Corsica offered immediate assistance and called an ambulance.

Years earlier, during one of the many attempts to overhaul the U.S. healthcare system. I wrote about the French emergency medical services called Services d’Aide Médicale Urgente (SAMU). I said it was considered the best in Europe. Little did I know that I would investigate it in so personal a way.

I hasten to say that I have built up a huge respect for emergency responders, whether they are part of a volunteer fire department in rural Virginia or the ambulance service in London, where I was a reporter long ago.

But France’s SAMU takes it to another level.

It begins with the first telephone call, where the dispatcher learns what the injury or illness may be, and an ambulance is sent with the appropriate equipment and personnel. Often, a doctor rides in the ambulance.

The trick is that the ambulance is an emergency room, well-equipped and with the right staff. The ambulance that scooped me up had four technicians — I don’t know if one of them was a doctor.

They went to work immediately, taking health information, cleaning the wound, and constantly checking my vital signs.

The result of this spacious emergency-room-on-wheels is that when you get to the hospital, the trauma staff is ready for you. Under the French medical system, there is no producing proof of insurance, no upfront mention of payment, just care.

For me, it felt like checking into a luxury hotel. The trauma center was airy and well-staffed, and although people were being wheeled around on gurneys, there was no sense of this being a place of the sick and suffering, though it was.

Everyone spoke some English, and as my wife speaks French, we had no language barrier — my French falls away the farther I am from a menu.

The doctor, a young woman, spent more than half an hour with me and my wife. Then, I was wheeled into a room for a head scan, and there was no waiting. Indeed, the nurses and technicians were waiting for me.

The doctor explained the scan and gave prescriptions for dressing the wound and pain relief. Amazingly, she walked us to the discharge area and then to a waiting taxi.

France is criticized in the EU for having one of the most expensive medical systems of the 27 countries. I looked up that cost — medicine is a birthright in France — and the result is: Presently, France spends about 12.3 percent of its GDP on health. We spend about 17.3 of our GDP on it. 

The Myth of Immigrant Assimilation

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By Llewellyn King

In the aftermath of the Brussels attacks, critics are blaming Belgium for not assimilating immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa.

The fact is that Europe does not do assimilation. Europeans widely practice what might be called “anti-assimilation.” Instead of engagement with their immigrants, they practice a kind of look-the-other-way stance.

Muslim immigrants on the whole do not seek to integrate into European societies, but rather to demand that European societies adopt their ways. In Belgium, which has three official languages, Dutch, French and German, there are constant demands that Arabic become a fourth. Muslims in Britain, and throughout Europe, demand shari’a, or Islamic law, for their communities. Muslims in Europe, and the United States, demand that Eid al-Adha (Feast of the Sacrifice) be accorded the same recognition as a public holiday as Christmas.

Muslim defenders, after the bombings in Brussels, insist that Western countries with large Muslim minorities should do more to integrate them into national life. But this integration mostly means that the host culture should bow to the insurgent one.

In ancient lands, like Britain and France, this is an affront; as though the extraordinary traditions of those countries should be shoved aside to accommodate the cultural demands of an a very antagonistic minority. That is asking too much.

Europe has mostly dealt with the challenge by hoping that new generations born in Europe and subjected to the influence of European education, the arts and media will become little Europeans: little Frenchmen, little Belgians, little Englishmen, versed in European history and imbued with European values. There are such people throughout Europe, from those of Turkish descent in Germany to those of Indian descent in Britain and North African descent in France.

But by and large the Muslim minorities remain separate, unequal and belligerently hostile to the countries that have given them shelter and opportunity. Rather than the generations born in Europe adopting European norms, they have ended in an unfortunate place where they are outcasts by their own inclinations and by the difficulties posed by European societies, which are quietly nationalistic, closed, eyes-averted.

If anything, the separation has grown worse for generations that know no life other than the one they lead in Europe. This is often marginal, lived in ghettos like the banlieues, the suburbs to the north of Paris, the troubled Brussels neighborhood of Molenbeek, or Bradford in the north of England.

The original immigrants could look back to what they had escaped, whether it was war and persecution in Algeria, in the case of those who migrated to France, or the grinding poverty that prevailed in Pakistan, in the British case. People move for safety or for a better life. They do not move because they want a new food or a new religion: They want the old food and the old religion in a better place.

Trouble is that three or four generations on, the immigrant descendants may not feel they are in a better place. They are isolated, largely unemployed and subjected to the preaching of murderous extremists.

Once in Brussels, my wife and I were walking down a side street not far from the Grand Place. My wife, who lived in the Middle East and speaks Arabic, remarked that we had left Europe within a few streets and entered North Africa.

As we passed some young men standing outside a cafe, she heard one say to another in Arabic, “What are they doing here? They don’t belong here.”

When the London suburb of Brixton was becoming a black enclave, favored by West Indian immigrants, I lived nearby. “Don’t go there. Maybe they will leave one day,” my neighbors said when I wanted to go there.

No-go areas are not always that: they also are not-want-to-go areas. Someone has to want assimilation, if that is the answer. — For InsideSources


The Carbon Solution Obama Won’t Take to Paris

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By Llewellyn King

The Treaty of Paris, signed in 1783 by representatives of King George III of England and the fledgling United States of America in a Paris hotel, ended the Revolutionary War.

Next month, another document will be signed in Paris: the climate agreement. It will be signed by about 200 countries, and will commit the signatories to meaningful reductions in their greenhouse gas emissions, mostly carbon. And it will be as seminal in its way as the one recognizing that the colonists of America would no longer be subject to the rule of England.

My point is not that this treaty of Paris will be perfect, or that every signatory will abide by its terms, but that it will do something that is vital, if climate change endeavors are to prevail: It will establish globally a kind of carbon ethic.

The concept of an environmental ethic started with Rachel Carson’s book “Silent Spring,” back in 1962. Since then, the world has known it should examine the environmental impact of major actions. After Paris, it will consider the carbon impact in a new way.

President Obama’s supporters will be jubilant when the signing starts in Paris. But Obama does not deserve all the praise that will come his way from Democrats and environmental organizations.

If the Obama administration were as concerned with the reduction in greenhouse gases, particularly carbon, as it says it is, it would not have given the back of its hand to nuclear power. Nuclear produces a lot of electricity and no greenhouse gases. Zero.

Yet the administration, yearning for a carbon-free future, has done nothing to address the temporary market imbalance that cheap natural gas has produced. Get this: a nuclear plant has a life of 60 years, and new ones may last 80 years. What we have now is a short-term price advantage in natural gas forcing the closure of nuclear plants, even though gas will cost more over the decades.

The administration leans heavily toward wind and solar power, understandably against coal and almost ignores nuclear. For example, nuclear does not get the support it deserves in the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Power Plan: its blueprint for carbon reduction. Nuclear is an also ran, not a central plank.

The nuclear project needs updating. It needs a revision of the standards for radiation protection which were enacted when nuclear science was young and radiation little understood. They need to be reevaluated and almost certainly lowered in the light of today’s science. This would help across the nuclear spectrum from power plants to medicine to how nuclear waste is handled.

The administration declares itself in love with innovation and has offered partial funding for new, small modular power plants. But it does this without regard to the dysfunctional nature of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. This bureaucracy is so sclerotic, pusillanimous and risk averse that it has priced new reactors out of the possibility of being built in the United States. Because the NRC is a fee-collecting agency, it is estimated that to license a brand new reactor — a better, safer, cheaper reactor — would cost $1 billion and 10 years of hearings and submissions. That is a preposterous inhibitor of American invention.

If the Federal Aviation Administration acted as the NRC does, we might well be flying around in propeller aircraft, while the agency studied jet engines and, for good measure, questioned the ability of wings to provide lift.

Certainly, the NRC should be protected from outside pressure that might impinge on safety, but it should not be so ossified, so confined in a bunker, that it cannot evaluate anything new.

Yes, something big is going to happen in Paris: Those big polluting nations, China and India, but especially China, are going to lay out their ambitious plans to reduce carbon — with nuclear.

Champions of the president will cheer Paris as a big part of his legacy, but his achievement is less than it should be. And nuclear power, like so much else that America led the world in, is headed overseas where it will evolve and probably flourish as the carbon-free champion of the future. Shame on the administration. — For InsideSources.com

For Lutetia

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Fluctuat nec mergitur

 

O Lutetia, you’ve seen these seas before;

Seas roiling, and red with blood.

Raise your head now bowed in sorrow. Look up!

Montmartre: the Mons Martyrum,

Where gore and gaiety have embraced in a danse macabre

For centuries. During the siege, did you despair, Clovis?

Or you, Henri? Wasn’t the city well worth a Mass?

Terror has rained down on you. You’ve emerged confident.

Liberté, Liberté cherie

Tonight your proud tower is dark.

You are tossed but not sunk.

— Linda Gasparello

Signaling Climate Virtue in Paris

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By Llewellyn King

Anyone who is anyone will be off to Paris in December. That’s where the United Nations is holding its Climate Change Conference. Forget Davos: That annual summit in the Swiss Alps is just for billionaire buffoons who have made it big on the Internet and mastered the art of lending money to Greece and getting out early, or those who think that standardizing coffee shops is good for the world.

Davos is better for partying in January than the Super Bowl because it drags on for days. But if you aren’t one of the aforementioned billionaires, after your first two bottles of wine, you’ll have to fly home because no one told you how expensive Switzerland is, nor how hard the Swiss franc is next to every other currency.

The best of all possible places in the world to be on November 30 to December 11 is Paris. If you’re not there, it says you don’t care.

In progressive circles, you have to be seen to care deeply. Your presence in Paris will manifest “virtue signaling” — a phrase on everyone’s lips in Britain since James Bartholomew coined it in the April 18, 2015 edition of The Spectator, a weekly British conservative magazine. You know how it works. You wear fake fur to signal that you love animals. You drive a hybrid vehicle to show that you save oil and are doing your bit to reduce your carbon footprint. That signals virtue, but it’s a week signal. You can boost that signal by attaching a conspicuous bicycle rack to your hybrid vehicle, even if you don’t own a bike.

You have to be careful in Paris. Signaling is everything: Think before you signal. For example, claim you had other business that brought you to Paris, like the book you’re planning to write on the Louvre or the history of alfresco sex along the Seine in the time of the Francois I. This way, you avoid the thought — perish it — that you wasted all that jet fuel just to attend a conference where you absolutely knew you had to be seen, like the White House Correspondents’ Association annual dinner in Washington, D.C.

If you flew to Paris first class, conceal it by complaining about the smallness of the seats and awfulness of the meals. If you’re winging across the Atlantic or the Pacific in a private jet, land in another country and take the train to Paris. European trains are electric and that signals virtue. Generally trains signal virtue, except Amtrak, which signals something else.

Housing is a problem in Paris because you’ll be tempted to stay in one of the great hotels. Warning! Cross these places of luxury, taste and convenience off the list: The Ritz, the George V, the Bristol, and the Meurice. People who signal their deep concern about global warming are also concerned by the amount of energy it takes to keep the rich in comfort.

If you’re to get entry to the finest salons on the Left Bank and the conference halls, and if you’re to shake hands with climate seer James Hansen, you must signal virtue. Borrow a bicycle, or grow a beard, but not too full or Le Flick, the French police, will have you in the cells as a terrorist in no time.  Sandals send a great signal, as do rough linens from India. If you have a lovely mink, leave it at home. Bad signaling. If Paris turns cold, buy a duffel coat or an old military great coat. Show them that you care, that you live lightly on the Earth.

If you can’t resist a slap-up dinner at Maxim’s or Laperouse, try getting there on the Metro wrapped in something dowdy. You can expose the fine threads inside. You’ll find staff very understanding. Hell, they learned it all from the French existentialists, who loved to signal virtue almost as much as they loved rich women, who bought them things while they philosophized: an unmistakable signal of virtue.

If you can just signal virtue, you can sink to any depths – and the good people of Paris will help you.

If I make it there, I’ll be staying in a modest hotel on the Ile St. Louis. And I’ll signal virtue by wearing cords and an old tweed jacket

Mark Twain said, “Give a man a reputation as an early riser, and he can sleep ‘til noon.” Signal virtue and you can let rip. –For InsideSources.com

Lackluster City? Get a Brand

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If your city is mostly famous for being between two other cities, if its main claim to fame is “It’s a great place to raise children,” then it’s time for your city fathers to take a course in branding.
Cities that prosper — that bring in company headquarters, tourists and where the crazy rich want be — have to have distinguished brands.
New York’s brand is glorious excess. It has the brand of ever higher, stranger skyscrapers. The world’s most successful media mogul, Rupert Murdoch, has just plunked down $57.2 million for what looks to be the world’s most lonely living space: the top four floors of a 60-story, bronze-and-glass building of a kind that is now transforming the Manhattan skyline. Take a small plot of land, build until what you get is slender tower that defies nature and looks as though its purpose is to challenge a strong wind.
Murdoch’s aerie has glass on four sides, and he can see forever, at the least until other towers rise up. If you want to spy on him, you will have to do it by drone. His own paparazzi might try to get a picture using a drone, but where would they publish it?
If you have a few million to spare you can still get in the East 23rd Street building. But those that would make an eagle jealous have gone to Murdoch. Most of us would be scared up there: a new take on “Naked and Afraid” because without neighbors, there is no need to wear clothes.
Cities in the United States that have done the branding thing right are New Orleans, jazz and food; San Francisco, cable cars and attitude; Boston, higher education and hospitals (eds and meds); and Chicago, wind and the uber-hub airport. Washington is a special case: great museums, the White House and the Capitol, and palpable delusions of importance.
The branding ace, running in front worldwide, is London. The Romans gave it a head start, but it was not until the Swinging Sixties that London became a destination for the globe. You would think that the place had enough branding with the old features: Tower Bridge, the Tower, the Houses of Parliament and Buckingham Palace, plus the Changing of the Guard.
But no. London keeps adding dizzying new features to its brand superiority. There is the Tate Modern, an art gallery in an old power station; the London Eye, a Ferris wheel that has captured world attention and city imitators; a bridge across the Thames River that wobbles, and now a new bridge is planned with gardens and shops on it. Then there are the taxis — black boxes, that remind you where you are in case you have overlooked the big red buses.
The current mayor of London, Boris Johnson (who has branded himself as a possible prime minister) has been keen to preserve and protect the London brand by insisting on preserving the double-decker buses, distinctive taxis and other expensive city bric-a-brac, because it is a hell of an investment.
Sure Paris has the Eiffel Tower, but it is aging. Rome has the Coliseum — talk about aging. And St. Petersburg has the Winter Palace and the Hermitage. But for city branding, London is in front and pulling away, as the Brits exploit the cash value of differentness.
Providence and Baltimore are two cities of which I am particularly fond. But I would urge the city leadership in both places to get a brand, a trademark. It pays. Rides (London Eye, Eiffel Tower elevators, the San Francisco cable cars) are sure winners. Could I suggest an amphibious train across Baltimore Harbor, and the mother of all rollercoasters – big, but not scary — in Providence?
Like London and New York, these days you have got to think big in city branding, or you will miss the incredible fun and profit of a city being silly.
Frivolity pays, ask London’s Boris Johnson — and share a thought for Rupert Murdoch, stuck up in the sky. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

The Loud Silence from Islam

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A dark shadow passed over Paris, the City of Light, on Wednesday, January 7.. Well-organized, well-trained killers murdered 13 people in the name of Allah. As Shakespeare said 500 years earlier, about the heinous murder of King Duncan by Macbeth, “O horror, horror, horror! Tongue nor heart cannot conceive nor name thee.”
Indeed, recent horrors in the name of Allah have been so gruesome it is impossible to conceive the mutilated reason, the perverted concept of God’s will, and the unvarnished rage that has subverted the once admired religion.
The killers are ruthless and depraved, but those who inspire them are evil and those who tolerate them are guilty.
In 2005, when a Danish newspaper published 12 cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed and riots were stirred up against the publishers, a meeting was arranged at a community room in the basement of The Washington Times. It was not organized by the newspaper but, as I recall, by an interfaith group. There were several fringe “let’s be nice” speakers before the main event.
The main event was the Danish ambassador and, to a lesser extent, myself. The ambassador spoke about life in Denmark and what the Danish government would do to understand and listen to the concerns of the Muslim community. My role was to defend and explain the Western concept of freedom of speech and the place satire. The overflow audience, which by dress and appearance was dominated by emigrants from Pakistan, was implacable.
I have spoken to some hostile audiences in my time, but this one was special: No compromise, no quarter. Nor interest in cultures other than their own. Ugly and insatiable rage came out in their questions.
They did not want to know about the values of the country that had given their brethren sanctuary, education, healthcare and a decent life. My audience only wanted to know why the blasphemers in Denmark and Norway (the cartoons were reprinted there) were not being punished. For good measure, they wanted to know why the American media was so committed to heresy against Islam. No thought that they had moved voluntarily to the United States and were enjoying three of its great freedoms: freedom to assemble, freedom of speech and freedom of religion.
They wanted absolute subjection of all Western values to the dictates of Islam. They had been fired up and they were angry, self-righteous and obdurate.
In 2009, I was invited to a conference of world religions in Astana, Kazakhstan. There were maybe 100 religions present, but at a featured session the conference degenerated into an Islamic diatribe against sexuality and the treatment of women (mostly in advertising) in the West. No dialogue. No discussion. Absolute certainty.
I mention this because of the reaction to the barbarity in Paris, and to a string of other barbarous murders across the world, from Muslims has been so muted.
“Je Suis Charlie” said millions of people in dozens of countries in sympathy with the murdered journalists and with their fight for press freedom. From Muslim leaders in the West, including the Council on American-Islamic Relations in the United States, there were statements of condemnation but no sense of outrage. From the bulk of the followers of Islam there was nothing. There never is. Not when innocent children are shot in their schools, or when aid workers are beheaded, or when or when satirical journalists are executed. The Muslim multitudes have acquiesced to evil.
When will those who believe deeply in Islam take to the streets to denounce the excesses of the few? After the horror in Paris, British Muslims took to the BBC to mildly criticize the murders, but more to vigorously demand a better deal for Muslims in Britain.
The medieval certainty of the leadership of Islam is endorsed by the silence of its congregants. The silence of the millions gives a kind of absolution to the extremists, intoxicated with fervor and hate. It will all go on until the good Muslims stand up and are heard. The guilt of silence hangs over Islam. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate