White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Pardon Me, Rhode Island, but You Have Lovely Manners

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By Llewellyn King

I have special reasons to be thankful this Thanksgiving. One is to be thankful to America for admitting me as an immigrant back in 1963. From what I can remember, I was welcomed as part of the then-huge British quota that applied to me, even though I was born in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).

I am also very grateful to Rhode Island, where my wife, Linda Gasparello, and I have, by happy chance, made our home for more than four years.

People, you have a little treasure here; a bolthole for the world-weary, a welcoming and pleasant place with great restaurants, a wonderful selection of beaches, interesting countryside and the warmest people this side of I know not where — and I have traveled to more than 100 countries and lived on three continents.

Take it from me, Rhode Island is a treasure. To me, it nestles between the arrogance of Massachusetts and the upward-tilted-nose superiority of Connecticut.

In London, they listen to how you speak: “Just listen to her speak, She’s not our class, darling.” In New York, they speak about money: “I’m heavily invested in pharmaceuticals.” In Washington, they speak about power: “I’m well-connected at the White House.”

By comparison, Rhode Islanders speak about everyday things. But, oh, must you have such a bad self-image? Self-deprecation has its limits and, if I might be so bold, you have reached them. I sometimes want to take dear Little Rhody by its lapels and gently shake it, saying, “Don’t you know you have it all here, give or take a larcenous politician?”

John of Gaunt described England in Shakespeare’s Richard II as “this other Eden, demi-paradise.” Of course, he had not seen Rhode Island, the jewel in New England’s crown.

But Rhode Island, my adopted home, is more than being about eating and sunbathing. A special delight for us has been good, affordable theater. There is live theater everywhere, if you look. Sure you know about Trinity, the Gamm, 2nd Story and Ocean State. But did you know about the Arctic Playhouse, in West Warwick’s impoverished Arctic village? Its productions are polished, and it is moving to new, swankier premises next year. Whereas the other theaters charge around $50 a ticket (which is a bargain), little Arctic only charges $10 for its own productions. That should be sent to the Guinness Book of World Records for theater ticket prices.

Newport has its place on the list of destination cities, but I would throw in Providence with its downtown masculine charm, its best Italian food offerings in the nation. I speak as a man familiar with the likes of Little Italy in Baltimore and North Beach in San Francisco.

When I lived in London in the early 1960s, the thing that struck Americans was how polite the English were. Now London and New York are interchangeable, and Washington is well on the way to losing what is left of its manners.

I would offer up the whole state of Rhode Island for recognition as a place of lovely, cheering politeness that makes daily living a pleasure, and smooths a little grease on the rough edges of any day. People of all ages open doors, thank you profusely for even a small purchase, give way to traffic entering a highway and stop for pedestrians.

Also — and as an old newspaperman, this is important to me — Rhode Island has great pubs, as in public houses. A bar is where you go to drink, a pub is an extension of a living room: a place to hang out, meet friends, eat and, yes, imbibe, if you wish. In Rhode Island, as in Britain, people tend to have a “local,” a regular haunt. I have two quite different locals that are quintessentially pubby: the Harris Grill in Coventry and the Square Peg in Warren.

I give thanks to Rhode Island and you, the Rhode Islanders. You are a good lot. — For InsideSources

All Hail Thanksgiving, So American a Day

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By Llewellyn King

I wasn’t raised in the United States. I’m of the British persuasion and 50 years into my life in the New World, I still think there isn’t much as nifty as Thanksgiving. But to a point.

Although there are other harvest festivals, they pale before Thanksgiving: the greatest of the “Thank you, Lord” celebrations. Christmas became commercialized a long time ago. Now it has become politicized, too. How sad.

But that doesn’t mean that Thanksgiving isn’t in the sights of those who sell things. There’s a car dealer near me who not only flies the largest Stars and Stripes that can be hoisted aloft, but he’s got a blowout sale for Veterans Day, Columbus Day, Presidents’ Day, the Fourth of July and, for good measure, he has offers you can just about refuse on Mother’s and Father’s days and, I suppose, Take Your Daughter to Work Day — and all below invoice. What a guy!

Yes, he has ads running for Thanksgiving. If you rush out and buy a car you don’t need, he’ll no doubt give thanks. He should settle for turkey like the rest of us.

Not only does Thanksgiving bring out the marketers more and more, it also puts into the kitchen people who shouldn’t have left the pizza parlor. Although it’s a largely untrammeled and genuine family day, that browned turkey, that tart cranberry sauce, that fluffy mashed potato casserole, and that oh-so-sweet pecan pie are something else.

Mark Twain said something to the effect that no one would endeavor to play the fiddle without some prior instruction, but that no such inhibition applies to writing. Twain missed something: no such inhibition applies to cooking on Thanksgiving.

Just before the Great Thursday, many unqualified cooks will be desperately asking how long to roast a turkey, steam squash, and chill a pie crust. People who never cook feel they must cook for the extended family on Thanksgiving.

Uncle Theodore’s famous apple pie might as well have been developed by the U.S. Army for close combat missions. Aunt Doreen’s sweet potatoes with marshmallows are, quite simply, lethal. They should be the first thing stored in the nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, Nev.

Adorable cousin Suzy, who overdresses and talks about her hope of being on the red carpet someday, won’t make it onto Food Network. Her cake has the taste of its name: Red Velvet.

Dad pours bourbon into just about everything. But everyone pours his bourbon-laced carrot soup into any obliging receptacle, like the table centerpiece.

A vomitorium – not the passageway in an ancient Roman amphitheater where patrons disgorged rapidly at the end of a performance – could be a welcome room, after those who hit the range once a year have inflicted gastronomic violence on those who can’t escape. No slipping out to a hostelry, calling for takeout, or claiming a fasting diet at the family Thanksgiving table.

You’ll take what’s coming to you and you’ll accept seconds because this is your family, and they love you. Besides, once again, you got out of hosting the event, for which you’ll give thanks.

Happy Thanksgiving to all. It’s the great American day and thankfully, my in-laws are good cooks. — For InsideSources.com

The Cruelty of the Holidays

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T.S. Eliot may have had it wrong: The cruelest months are November and December, when the holidays are upon us, not April. For those who are broken – broken in all the ways that people can be broken — the holidays are a special hell.
The bedridden, the incarcerated, the mourners, the maimed from accidents, disease or wars, the heartbroken – either those who have had their hearts broken by lovers or others, or those who have had no one in their lives — endure the holidays in anguish, hurting even more than the permanent hurt that has become their lives.
You may find the broken in the corners at parties, sitting glumly at the table. But the real suffering is unseen; the real sufferers cannot make it to the table – or dare not for fear that the outing will cost them later. The brave face can mask the deepest hurt. They are the permanently sick. Those who will be sick today, sick tomorrow and sick in the next holiday season as they were in the last.
There are people who suffer constant illness in all the myriad ways that a body can be afflicted or fail. No afflicted cohort is more deserving of understanding than another; none has a greater call for science to redouble its efforts for a cure than another.
But the effort to find cures is woefully skewed by the institutions of medicine, by the pharmaceutical companies and by those diseases that have celebrity champions, informing the public and the politics of research institutions. Yes, there is always politics and so there are winners and losers. Celebrities can help: Elizabeth Taylor did so for AIDS, Jerry Lewis for Multiple Sclerosis, and Michael J. Fox is doing so for Parkinson’s disease.
I write and broadcast about one disease in particular, Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME), also called Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. It is a disease largely orphaned by the medical community which has no test for it — cannot say with assurance that a patient has it until months of debility validate that it is ME. In medical parlance, there are no biological markers. What is known is that it is almost certainly a disease of the immune system, and that there is no cure. It also has no celebrity benefactors and no lobby in Washington.
I think of it as a terrorist disease, which takes its patents hostage and confines them in an alternative world of muscle pain, headaches, diarrhea, dizziness, brain fog and almost permanent collapse. Some are adversely affected by light, others by sound.
One sufferer says that having ME is like being an engine without fuel: Your tank is empty and you hurt in new and refined ways almost daily. Sufferers go through long periods of disability where they cannot function at all. “I thought I was already in my coffin,” another told me.
The joys are few and sometimes from little things, like a pet or nature observations. One sufferer, Elisabeth Tova Bailey, wrote a wonderful book, “The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating.” It is about the habits of a snail in a terrarium next to her bed, during two years of sustained collapse.
This is a disease that steals lives, chains them up in dungeons of despair where loneliness and suffering reach “excruciating proportions,” according to my colleague, Deborah Waroff, whose life was snatched by this disease 25 years ago. Together Waroff and I established a YouTube channel on ME, mecfsalert.
The loved ones, and the caregivers – if there are any — are enslaved by this disease, seeing those they care about in a place where neither love nor medicine can reach them. Literally and figuratively, they must fluff the pillows once again and mouth the empty words — lies really — of encouragement that we all utter in the face of hopelessness. Those who live on their own, often in poverty and sloth they cannot ameliorate for themselves, suffer what one woman told me was such sustained loneliness that she prayed nightly for death.
Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa and New Year's Eve are on the way. Sadly, while the rest of us are suffused with joy, the permanently ill take stock and find their lives are terribly wanting and isolated on the holidays. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate