Llewellyn King: Chesterton on a donkey's divine assignment

Caricature of G.K. Chesterton, by Max Beerbohm

WEST WARWICK, R.I

Who, in God’s name, praises the donkey? The answer is G.K Chesterton, the English writer (1874-1936). Chesterton, a convert from Anglicism to Catholicism and a force in literary life in London, wrote a little masterpiece for Palm Sunday, which Christians celebrate today.

He also wrote much else, including a celebrated essay defending orthodoxy, and the “Father Brown” detective stories, the television version of which can be seen on PBS.

Like Chesterton, I celebrate the donkey on Palm Sunday. The lot of the donkey hasn’t been a happy one. It has been man’s worst-treated servant, having been forced into labor over thousands of years.

Donkeys are probably among the most abused animals on Earth. Anyone who has visited poor, agrarian countries, whether in Africa, Asia or Latin America, has almost certainly seen donkeys carry loads too heavy for them, sacks of grain, lumber or people — cruel burdens for the little animal.

In this service, donkeys die young at between 12 and 15 years old. If kept decently and as pets they live 30 to 50 years, rivaling horses, which, more prized, have had a somewhat easier time down through the millennia.

There are an estimated 40 million donkeys in the world, including about 5 million feral ones in Australia which, like the rabbits, are considered pests.

Chesterton was as prolific, as he was enormous, weighing maybe 300 pounds and standing over 6 feet. He wrote 80 books, hundreds of poems and short stories, and over 4,000 newspaper columns and essays. He was notorious for his untidy dress, being compared to an unmade bed by a friend, missing trains and not knowing where he had gotten off.

In the years immediately before his death, in 1936, he became a huge BBC Radio personality because of his ability to ad lib during broadcasts of essays, giving these a human, unrehearsed quality. He was also a wit and was friendly with the wits of his time, including Oscar Wilde and Bernard Shaw. He said to the physically trim Shaw once that he looked as though the country was suffering from famine and to which Shaw replied, “You look as though you caused it.”

The Gospels have it that Jesus rode into Jerusalem the Sunday before Easter on an ass and throngs of the faithful laid down palm branches in their path.

Courtesy of the Poetry Foundation, here is Chesterton’s poem, first published in 1927, to the beast of burden, and its divine assignment:

“The Donkey’’

When fishes flew and forests walked

And figs grew upon thorn,

Some moment when the moon was blood

Then surely I was born.

With monstrous head and sickening cry

And ears like errant wings,

The devil’s walking parody

On all four-footed things.

The tattered outlaw of the earth,

Of ancient crooked will;

Starve, scourge, deride me: I am dumb,

I keep my secret still.

Fools! For I also had my hour;

One far fierce hour and sweet:

There was a shout about my ears,

And palms before my feet.

Donkeys as beasts of burden in Colombia

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com, and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

Web site: whchronicle.com

Eastern Orthodox fresco in Nativity of the Theotokos Church, Bitola, Republic of North Macedonia

— Photo of fresco by Petar Milošević

Llewellyn King: ‘Long COVID’s’ baffling sister

CFS vitim demonstrates for more research

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

“Long COVID’’ is the condition wherein people continue to experience symptoms for longer than usual after initially contracting COVID-19. Those symptoms are similar to the ones of another long-haul disease, Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, often called Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.

For a decade, in broadcasts and newspaper columns, I have been detailing the agony of those who suffer from ME/CFS. My word hopper isn’t filled with enough words to describe the abiding awfulness of this disease.

There are many sufferers, but how ME/CFS is contracted isn’t well understood. Over the years, research has been patchy. However, investigation at the National Institutes of Health has picked up and the disease now has measurable funding -- and it is taken seriously in a way it never was earlier. In fact, it has been identified since 1955, when the Royal Free Hospital, in London, had a major outbreak. The disease had certainly been around much longer.

In the mid-1980’s, there were two big cluster outbreaks in the United States -- one at Incline Village, on Lake Tahoe in Nevada, and the other in Lyndonville in northern New York. These led the Centers for Disease Control to name the disease “Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.”

The difficulty with ME/CFS is there are no biological markers. You can’t pop round to your local doctor and leave some blood and urine and, bingo! Bodily fluids yield no clues. That is why Harvard Medical School researcher Michael VanElzakker says the answer must lie in tissue.

ME/CFS patients suffer from exercise, noise and light intolerance, unrefreshing sleep, aching joints, brain fog and a variety of other awful symptoms. Many are bedridden for days, weeks, months and years.

In California, I visited a young man who had to leave college and was bedridden at his parents’ home. He couldn’t bear to be touched and communicated through sensors attached to his fingers.

In Maryland, I visited a teenage girl at her parents’ home. She had to wear sunglasses indoors and had to be propped up in a wheelchair during the brief time she could get out of bed each day.

In Rhode Island, I visited a young woman, who had a thriving career and social life in Texas, but now keeps company with her dogs at her parents’ home because she isn’t well enough to go out.

A friend in New York City weighs whether to go out to dinner (pre-pandemic) knowing that the exertion may cost her two days in bed.

I know a young man in Atlanta who can work, but he must take a cocktail of 20 pills to deal with his day.

Some ME/CFS sufferers get somewhat better. The instances of cure are few; of suicide, many.

Onset is often after exercise, and the first indications can be flu-like. Gradually, the horror of permanent, painful, lonely separation from the rest of the world dawns. Those without money or family support are in the most perilous condition.

Private groups -- among them the Open Medicine Foundation, the Solve ME/CFS Initiative, and ME Action -- have worked tirelessly to raise money and stimulate research. The debt owned them for their caring is immense. This has allowed dedicated researchers from Boston to Miami and from Los Angeles to Ontario to stay on the job when the government has been missing. Compared to other diseases, research on ME/CFS has been hugely underfunded.

Oved Amitay, chief executive officer of the Solve ME/CFS Initiative, says Long COVID gives researchers an opportunity to track the condition from onset and, importantly, to study its impact on the immune system – known to be compromised in ME/CFS. He is excited.

In December, Congress provided $1.5 billion in funding over four years for the NIH to support research into Long COVID. The ME/CFS research community is glad and somewhat anxious. I’m glad that there will be more money for research, which will spill into ME/CFS, and worried that years of endeavor, hard lessons learned and slow but hopeful progress will be washed away in a political roadshow full of flash.

Ever since I began following ME/CFS, people have stressed to me that more money is essential. But so are talented individuals and ideas.

Long COVID needs carefully thought-out proposals. If it is, in fact, a form of ME/CFS, it is a long sentence for innocent victims. I have received many emails from ME/CFS patients who pray nightly not to wake up in the morning. The disease is that awful.

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com. He’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

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Brain imagining, comparing adolescents with CFS and healthy controls showing abnormal network activity in regions of the brain

Llewellyn King: In the post-talking-on-phone era, cell phones get ever snazzier

Still triumphant iPhones

Scrapped, superseded mobile phones

— Photo by MikroLogika

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

Delve into your bank account or find a credit card that isn’t maxed out and do it. You know you want to. You know you must. You know you can’t resist. You want, must have, to hell with the expense, the latest cell phone.

Of course, the cell phone you have is perfectly good and does everything you want. That isn’t the point. When you are in need of a technology fix, utility isn’t a consideration.

Your old cell phone, truth be told, was such a whizzy little computer that you could ask it to read your e-mail aloud or you could surreptitiously enjoy watching old television shows such as Mister Ed. Now it must be cast out. You have read the CNET review that details pixel counts, camera capacity and battery longevity. The new phone, the one that you may have to raid your child’s college fund to acquire, is a must-have.

Here is a tip: Google until you are bug-eyed. It is lazy just to buy the top Android from Samsung or the latest iPhone from Apple. There are about 120 companies making cell phones. There are a dozen you can buy without going to China.

Imagine that if you have a phone that is unique, the opportunity for one-upping your pals is limitless. Think of these conversations just waiting:

“Bill, is that a new iPhone? I just bought a Blankety Blank. Actually, it is superior. You should see how I mapped a trajectory for a Mars flight on it.”

Or “Susan, you got the latest from Samsung? I guess it is great, but I really need extra functions. I can shoot and edit a feature film on this little beauty from Blankety Blank. It writes the script, too.”

Warning: When you have made one of these asinine comments, move away.

You can spend more than $3 million on a cell phone. An Australian businessman commissioned such a phone. It was replete with a 22-carat gold case, rubies and diamonds. I wonder what it weighed. More, I wonder if it worked. I don’t expect to find that model at Walmart. But don’t be downcast, if you have just $2.5 million to blow on a phone, there are several in your price range. Of course, these have nothing to do with telephony, they are pure fashion -- like those watches that cost millions and are made in Switzerland, the home of great watches, with humble, Chinese-made moving parts.

Even if you hold onto your old instrument or buy the latest, it seems the one thing you won’t be doing is making phone calls. 

We are living in the post-phone age. If, God forbid, we are to speak to someone on the phone, an appointment has to be set up by email or text (a cell phone capacity actually used). So a simple phone call becomes work, something to cause tension, apprehension, dread. I don’t think anyone ever made an appointment to call you to tell you that you are coming into money or to tell you they have accepted your marriage proposal.

I have lived through the ages of the telephone, as defined by an instrument connected to similar that enables you to talk to someone else.

The first age was the party line. I call it the public line because you could listen to anyone on the same line.

Then there was the age of the rotary. Dial, dial, dial. If, like me, you had to make a lot of phone calls, it was hell. We had pencils with rubber-blob ends to insert into the dial to ease the finger labor. The pushbutton was nirvana. A huge advance in user-friendliness.

Then came the age of the answering machine. It was the thin end of the wedge which subtracted years from lives because it led inexorably to those automatic phone systems that won’t let you speak to a human being, whether it is a doctor or a manager about your, yes, telephone account.

No doubt there will be sociologists writing about the death of talking on the telephone. I, for one, always loved a ringing telephone, before robocalls, of course, because that call might be something that, as Omar Khayyam said, transmutes “life’s leaden metal into gold.”

Sometimes phone calls (RIP) did that.

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, PBS. His e-mail address is llewellynking1@gmail.com and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

Llewellyn King: Will classy clothes return after the pandemic?

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

There is a lot of chat about the future of work: Will we do it at home, or will we revert to commuting to the old workplace?

But there is an additional, different question: What will we wear?

Go to the mirror and look at yourself. Except for the odd Zoom meeting you might have tried to dress for, you are a different person.

The fact is that even a traditionalist like me, who has worn a jacket and tie since his first days of school, is, well, letting down.

Worse, after a year of sweats and other baggy, comfortable clothing, I feel constricted and ill at ease when I put on a suit – which is mainly when I record television programs on Zoom or some other video hook-up.

I suspect that you are like me for these Zoom, or the like, formals; you wear a jacket and jeans or exercise pants, hiding your lower half under a table. Notice how cramped you feel above the waist.

Women, do you remember, putting on full makeup -- known in the cosmetic trade as “war paint” – now that you’ve grown accustomed to the au naturel look? Maybe for morale, you wear just a slash of lipstick now and again. Those nice suits in the closet, or flattering dresses, do you remember how confining they were? How hard it was managing that dangling bling?

On that Hallelujah Day when the pandemic is over, will men and women be prepared to get out of those oh-so-comfortable sneakers for Oxfords and pumps?

Was it worth it, yesterday’s clothing? After COVID-19, the way we were isn’t going to be the way it will be. Anyone for going back clotheswise? Or have we been emancipated from wardrobe tyranny and shoe slavery?

There have been various attempts in recent years to dress us down, like Casual Friday. I remember giving a speech at the prestige law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom when they were trying to dress casually all week. The women partners looked miserable; they had made partner, bought Chanel suits, but now they were expected to wear their law school rags. And, oh, the misery of the middle-aged men partners, who had looked to bespoke suits to cover up the expansion of their waists, which had accompanied the collection of fat fees with the advance of age.

The only assault on male fashion before the change agent that is COVID-19 was the abandonment, for reasons unknown, of the poor necktie. What did it do wrong? Let me tell you, no one looks better without them. The naked male throat in a shirt designed for a tie isn’t lovely. Compensation is at hand in a revived interest in the pocket handkerchief or pocket square (which was used for drying the tears of distressed damsels but is used for cleaning one’s eyeglasses in the time of Me Too).

Formality in dress has been under attack for a long time. The tech titans, such as Steve Jobs, and rock musicians were the shock troops. No longer do smart restaurants enforce coats and ties for men and look askance at women in pants. Wearing sweats, shorts, sneakers? “Your table is ready, sir or madam.” Ugh! 

Going forward, we may be so casualized in dress that we go to church in pajamas and work in anything that covers the body and is comfortable. The god of comfort has conquered the heavens.

I hope that for the sake of everyone, the fashion mavens, goaded on by the magazines like Vogue and GQ, devise a new era of clothes as comfortable as sweats and as flattering as, well, what we used to wear. Meanwhile, if you know anyone who would like to buy some suits (portly), sport coats (Scottish tweed), and shoes (leather lace-up), have them call me. I’m going to get with the new fashion, where comfort is the only criterion.

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

Web site: whchronicle.com

Llewellyn King: Biden should name panel to seek the lessons of the lethal Texas power failures

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

The horror of the Texas electricity catastrophe should chill the whole country. Nothing strikes at the survivability of a modern society more than the failure of its power supply, maybe nothing at all.

When the power supply fails, the failure of human life is not far behind. Yet, at a time when we should expect a united front to help Texas and other affected Southern states, petty and unbecoming point-scoring is in full swing.

The power-supply collapse in Texas was caused by extreme and aberrant cold weather, freezing the electric generators. The system wasn’t designed to withstand what occurred — and what may occur elsewhere in a time of new and terrifying instability in the world’s weather systems.

Coal plants froze, gas lines froze, a nuclear plant froze, solar panels froze, wind turbines froze, and Texans faced their greatest crisis in generations: terrible cold without heat and without water in some locations.

Lives were lost from freezing to death and from carbon monoxide poisoning as people struggled to create warmth by running cars, charcoal grills, and backup generators in confined spaces, and from the inability, with ice-packed roads, to get to hospitals or even to a warming center.

Others will die because they crowded together for warmth and inadvertently spread or got the COVID-19 virus.

The situation for livestock is one of suffering and death. Horses, pigs, cattle, and chickens aren’t getting fed or watered. Death abounds as farmers despair.

The sad response to tragedy has been to blame. Blame the wind turbines, blame the individual power companies, blame the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) which manages the Texas grid, and blame the Texas grid itself.

Texas prides itself on having a self-contained grid with little major interconnection to the national grid. This is political. Texas didn’t want to be subject to the Federal Power Commission and its successor agency the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). It opted to be independent; it kept its electricity out of interstate commerce.

What that has meant in this crisis is that there is no way for other states to ship power to Texas, even if there is power to spare.

Now that the terrible price of electric failure is painted in awful detail before the nation, the Biden administration should act quickly to find out what has happened and to what extent the rest of the nation is vulnerable.

Vulnerable not only to weather that has gone wild, but also to other dangers to the grid, like the ever-present cybersecurity threat. And vulnerable to the related but separate threat to operating systems from spyware buried in Chinese bulk power systems, which make up most of the big grid installations, like transformers and turbines. Ignored voices have been sounding this alarm. They need to be heard.

The Texas crisis unfolded at a time when the U.S. electric industry has been under strain as it seeks to decarbonize and to accommodate more wind and solar energy, and as it searches for technologies to store electricity, like batteries with long drawdown times and hydrogen made when there is surplus supply.

The utilities are also being digitized, data-driven in every way, from sensors that tell second by second the condition of generating units, like an individual wind turbine, to a sophisticated use of private wireless broadband networks which can report within two seconds a line failure and de-energize it, to early warning of incipient failures in the system. Microgrids, which tie together alternative energy sources in mini-networks, also need to be data-managed as the wind changes and the sun moves.

The people of Texas and elsewhere in the South have been forced to shelter like animals without warmth, food, and water, in abject, life-threatening misery. That is a future to be avoided for other parts of the nation.

Texans deserve more than a brainless blame game.

The Biden administration should establish a nonpolitical commission to tell us what went wrong and to make sure we are secure in our electric supply.

If it were ever doubted, life without electricity for a few weeks would mean the end of life for all but survivalists here and there.

Hold the blame, get the facts, take the action.

On Twitter: @llewellynking2

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. He’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C. He is a long-time expert in electricity issues.
White House Chronicle

Llewellyn King: Utilities are becoming innovation hubs as they move away from fossil fuel

Wind farm in Mars Hill, Maine

Solar-energy array in Exeter, N.H.

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

The electric utility industry looks a bit like a man on a ladder with one foot seeking the rung below, unsure of where it is. But find it he must.

The industry is beset with technological change as well as social and political pressures. It isn’t in crisis, but it is in dramatic transition.

It has one overriding driver: the need first to reduce, then to eliminate carbon emissions.

The utilities have been heroic in turning to wind and solar – which have also turned out to be economically advantageous. However, those efforts are challenged by the need to store electricity produced when these “alternatives” aren’t available.

General Motors is switching to making only electric vehicles after 2035. It can stop and retool. Utilities can never stop pumping out electrons; they must retool on the go.

Most of us only realize the hidden fragility of the system when storms are forecast, and the local utility tells us to buy batteries.

Feb. 11 was the 174th anniversary of Thomas Edison’s birth. No one has affected the way we live as completely as Edison, neither king, conqueror, philosopher, revolutionary, nor any other inventor.

New fuels produce new ancillary needs. Every new introduction in electricity requires the supporting technologies to change — sometimes new technologies must be invented for the supporting role.

The big pressures on the utilities are to get off fossil fuels and to increase the resilience of the system, including resilience against weather and cyberattack.

These pressures spawn other pressures, particularly how to store alternative electricity, which is made when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing, often not when consumption is high.

Storage is a hot area in electric innovation. Batteries, which are front-and-center in storage, must get much better, so they can have longer drawdown times. Arshad Mansoor, president of the Electric Power Research Institute, says batteries will get much better, but not enough to take up the slack for days of bad weather. He was speaking at the virtual winter meeting of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners.

Hydrogen is a favorite to deal with days of rain, as happens in Florida and elsewhere, and wind droughts that can last more than a week in Texas, a big wind-generating center.

But hydrogen isn’t a one-for-one replacement of natural gas, the current workhorse of generating fuels. On paper, hydrogen has every virtue. In reality, it has challenges of its own: It has less than half the energy of natural gas; it is harder to handle, can explode, and can produce nitrogen oxide; and turbines have to be modified to burn it.

Even so, a plethora of utilities, including Sempra, Arizona Public Service, and NextEra Energy, are experimenting with it. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power is converting a coal plant in Utah to run completely on green hydrogen (that is hydrogen derived from the electrolysis of water not from natural gas).

San Antonio’s municipally owned energy utility, CPS Energy, buys a lot of wind power and is planning to install 900 megawatts of solar power on top of 4oo MW already deployed. That means storage is critical, and the utility has launched an ambitious global search for new-and-improved technologies. This has generated 300 responses worldwide. These, according to COO Cris Eugster, include hydrogen and batteries, but also far-out ideas like compressed air, flywheels, mineshafts for pumped storage, and liquefied air.

All of this restructuring, moving from big central plants to diverse generating and complex substitutions, requires recognition that data is now central in utilities — and data has to move instantly.

Morgan O’Brien, who co-founded the game-changing cellphone company, Nextel, and is now executive chairman of Anterix, a private broadband- network provider, says, “The intermittent nature of renewable sources imposes particular requirements on grid management for speed and accuracy. Luckily, the global wireless technology, LTE, which powers our smartphones is perfectly adapted to this communications challenge.”

The speed of transition is accelerating. The electric utilities, often thought of as staid, are going to be anything but going forward: They are becoming innovation hubs.

Edison’s birthday marks a busy time for his follow-on inventors.

On Twitter: @llewellynking2
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. He’s based in Rhode Island and Washington. D.C.

Llewellyn King: Far too early to starve the fossil-fuel sector

The Mystic Generating Station, in Everett, Mass,. can burn both natural gas and petroleum, but mostly burns natural gas.

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

In politics, any idea can be pressed into service if it fits a purpose. The one I have in mind has been snatched from its Republican originators and is now at work on the left wing of the Democratic Party.

The idea is “starve the beast.” It came from one of President Ronald Reagan’s staffers and was used to curb federal spending.

It was a central idea in the Republican Party through the Reagan years and was taken up with vigor by tax-cutting zealots. It was on the lips of those who thought the way to small government was through tax cuts, i.e., financial starvation.

Now “starve the beast’ is back in a new guise: a way to cut dependence on oil and natural gas.

This is the thought behind President Biden’s decision to revoke the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline, bringing oil to the United States from Canada, even after the expenditure of billions of dollars and an infinity of studies.

It is the idea behind banning fracking and restricting leases on federal lands. Some Democrats and environmental activists believe that this blunt instrument will do the job.

But blunt instruments are unsuited to fine work.

It also is counterproductive to set out to force that which is happening in an orderly way. The Biden administration shows signs of wanting to do this, unnecessarily.

Lumping coal, oil and gas as the same thing under the title “fossil fuel” is the first error. In descending order, coal is the most important source of pollution, and its use is falling fast. Oil continues to be the primary transportation fuel for the world. World oil production and use hovers around 100 million barrels a day — and that has been fairly steady in recent years.

In the United States, the switch to electric vehicles is well underway and in, say, 20 years, they will be dominant. Likewise, in Europe, Japan, and China. That train has left the station and is picking up steam.

Government action, like building charging stations, won’t speed it up but rather will slow it down. The market is working. Willing buyers and sellers are on hand.

Every electric vehicle is a reduction in oil demand. But the world is still a huge market for petroleum and will be for a long time. What sense is there in hobbling U.S. oil exports? There are suppliers from Saudi Arabia to Nigeria keen to take up any slack.

Natural gas is different. It is a superior fuel in that it has about half the pollutants of coal and fewer than oil. It is great for heating homes, cooking, making fertilizers and other petrochemicals. Starving the production just increases the cost to consumers.

The real target is, of course, electric utilities. They rushed to gas to get off coal. It was cheaper, cleaner and more manageable. Also, gas could be burned in turbines that are easily installed and repaired. Boilers not needed; no steam required.

But there are greenhouse gases emitted and, worse, methane leaks at fracking sites and from faulty pipelines throughout the system. These represent a grave problem. Here the government can move in with tighter regulation. If it is fixable, fix it. But methane leaks are no reason to cripple domestic production.

The question for the beast-starvers comes from Clinton Vince, who chairs the U.S. energy practice and co-chairs the global energy practice of Dentons, the world’s largest law firm. He asks, “Is it better to sell natural gas to India and China or to let them build more coal-fired plants? Particularly if carbon-capture and sequestration technology can be improved.”

If we are to continue to reduce carbon emissions in the United States, we need to take a holistic view of energy production and consumption. Does it make sense to allow carbon-free nuclear plants to go out of service because of how we value electricity in the short term? A market adjustment, well within government purview, could save a lot of air pollution immediately.

The hydrocarbon beast doesn’t need to be starved, but a diet might be a good idea.

On Twitter: @llewellynking2
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. He’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

White House Chronicle
InsideSources

Llewellyn King: It was a nice inauguration but is Biden wading in too far, too fast?

At the American College of the Building Arts, in Charleston, S.C. It would be good if President Biden addresses income inequality by touting the benefits of education in the trades as opposed to, say, getting degrees in sociology. The trades offer more secure and higher-paying jobs than do the liberal arts.

The college's model is unique in the United States, with its focus on total integration of a liberal arts and science education and the traditional building arts skills. Students choose from among six craft specializations: timber framing, architectural carpentry, plaster, classical architecture, blacksmithing and stone carving.

ACBA's mission is to educate and train artisans in the traditional building arts to foster high craftsmanship and encourage the preservation, enrichment and understanding of the world's architectural heritage through a liberal arts and science education.

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

It was a good day. Warm in its content. Soft in its delivery. Kindly in its message. Generous in its intentions. Healing in its purpose.

Trying to implement the soaring hopes of President Joe Biden’s inauguration began immediately. Maybe too immediately, too fast, and with actions that were too sweeping. Biden signed 17 executive orders that suggested an underlying philosophy of “bring it on.”

Biden doesn’t need to open hostilities on all possible fronts at once. He needs to pick his wars and shun some battles. I have a feeling that 17 battles are too many to initiate simultaneously and, possibly, some are going to be lost at a cost.

In his inaugural address, Biden did well in laying out six theaters where his administration will prosecute its wars. But some of those wars will go on for decades – maybe forever.

Big ships take a long time to turn around no matter how many tugboats are engaged. Actions have consequences and so do intentions.

The Biden wars:

The pandemic: This is the war that Biden must win. It is the one into which he needs to pour all his efforts, his own time and talent, and to focus the national mind.

Americans are dying at a horrendous pace. He has promised 100 million vaccine doses in the first 100 days. If that effort falters, for whatever reason, it will stain the Biden presidency. It is job one and transcends everything else.

The environment: It will remain a work in progress. Rejoining the Paris Agreement on Climate Change is a diplomatic and political move, not an environmental one. It will help with the Biden goal of better international standing. It will make many in the environmental movement feel better, but it won’t pull carbon out of the air.

There have been dramatic reductions in the amount of carbon the United States puts into the air since 2005. Biden is in danger of picking up too much of the environmentalists’ old narrative.

The environmental movement can get it very wrong and maybe has again in pushing the world too fast toward wind and solar. These aren’t perfect solutions.

The amount of carbon put into the air by electric generation in the United States is partly due to the hostility toward new dams and particularly toward nuclear power. These were features of the environmental narrative in the 1970s and 1980s.

Simple solutions seldom resolve complex problems. I have a feeling that we are going breakneck with solar and wind; making windmills and solar panels is environmentally challenging, as will be disposing of them after their useful life is over.

Canceling the Keystone XL Pipeline -- after nearly two decades of litigation, diplomatic and environmental review in Canada and the United States -- would seem to be a concession to a constituency rather than sound policy with virtuous effect.

Biden has identified three other theaters where he plans to wage war: growing income inequality, racism, and the attack on truth and democracy.

Income inequality is escalating because new technologies are concentrating wealth, workers have lost their union voice, and our broken schools are turning out broken people, who will start at the bottom and stay there. Racial inequality ditto. Many inner-city schools are that in name more than function.

If there was one big omission from Biden’s agenda of things he is prepared to go to war for, it was education. Most of the social inequalities he listed have an educational aspect. Primary and secondary schools are not turning out students ready for the world of work. Too many universities are social-promoting students who should have been held back in high school.

More are going to college when they should get a practical education in a marketable skill. People with such skills as carpentry, stone cutting, plastering, electrical and iron work are more likely to start their own businesses than those with, say, journalism or sociology degrees.

Biden’s continuing challenge is going to be how to handle the left wing of his party, stirred up by the followers of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. They haven’t gone away and are expecting their spoils from the election.

The president’s battle for truth is going to be how we accommodate the new carrier technologies of social media with the need for veracity; how to identify lies without giving into universal censorship. That battle can’t be won until the new dynamics of a technological society are understood.

Go slow and carry a big purpose.

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

whchronicle.com

Llewellyn King: Internet companies and freedom of speech

Google headquarters, in Mountain View, Calif.

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

H.L. Mencken, journalist and essayist, wrote in 1940, “Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one.”

Twenty years later, the same thought was reprised by A.J. Liebling, of The New Yorker.

Today, these thoughts can be revived to apply, on a scale inconceivable in 1940 or 1960, to Big Tech, and to the small number of men who control it.

These men -- Jack Dorsey, of Twitter, Mark Zuckerberg, of Facebook, and Sundar Pichai, of Alphabet Inc., and its subsidiary Google -- operate what, in another time, would be known as “common carriers.” Common carriers are, as the term implies, companies that distribute anything from news to parcels to gasoline. They are a means of distributing ideas, news, goods, and services.

Think of the old Western Union, the railroads, the pipeline companies or the telephone companies. Their business was carriage, and they were recognized and regulated in law as such: common carriers.

The controversial Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act recognizes the common carrier nature of Big Tech internet companies by exempting them from libel responsibility. It specifically stated that they shouldn’t be treated as publishers. Conservatives want 230 repealed, but that would only make the companies reluctant to carry anything controversial, hurting free speech.

I think that the possible repeal of 230 should be part of a large examination of the inadvertently acquired but vast power of the Internet-based social-media companies. It should be part of a large discussion embracing all the issues of free speech on social media which could include beefed-up libel statutes -- possibly some form of the equal-time rule which kept network owners from exploiting their power for political purposes in days when there were only three networks.

President Trump deserves censure, which he has gotten: He has been impeached for incitement to insurrection. I take second place to no one in my towering dislike of him, but I am shaken at the ability of Silicon Valley to censor a political figure, let alone a president.

That Silicon Valley should shut out the voice of the president isn’t the issue. It is that a common carrier can dictate the content, even if it is content from a rogue president.

This exercise of censor authority should alarm all free-speech advocates. It is power that exceeds anything ever seen in media.

The heads of Twitter, Facebook and Alphabet are more powerful by incalculable multiples than were Joseph Pulitzer, William Randolph Hearst and Henry Luce, or is Rupert Murdoch. They can subtract any voice from any debate if they so choose. That is a bell that tolls for all. They have the power to silence any voice by closing an account.

When Edward R. Murrow talked about the awesome power of television, he was right for that time. But now technology has added a multiplier of atomic proportions via the Internet.

The internet-based social media giants didn’t seek power. They are, in that sense, blameless. They pursued technology, then money, and these led them to their awesome power. What they have done, though, is to use their wealth to buy startups which offer competition. 

Big Tech has used its financial clout to maintain its de facto monopolies. Yet unlike the newspaper proprietors of old or Murdoch’s multimedia, international endeavors today, they didn’t pursue their dreams to get political power. They were carried along on the wave of new technologies.

It may not be wrong that Twitter, Facebook and others have shut down Trump’s account when they did, at a time of crisis, but what if these companies get politically activated in the future?

We already live in the age of the cancellation culture with its attempt to edit history. If that is extended to free speech on the Internet, even with good intentions, everything begins to wobble.

The tech giants are simply too big for comfort. They have already weakened the general media by scooping up most of the advertising dollars. Will the freedom of speech belong to those who own the algorithms?

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com. He’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

Linda Gasparello

Co-host and Producer

"White House Chronicle" on PBS

Mobile: (202) 441-2703

Website: whchronicle.com

Thanks!1940, “Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one.”

Twenty years later, the same thought was reprised by A.J. Liebling of The New Yorker.

Today, these thoughts can be revived to apply, on a scale inconceivable in 1940 or 1960, to Big Tech, and to the small number of men who control it.

These men -- Jack Dorsey of Twitter, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, and Sundar Pichai of Alphabet Inc., and its subsidiary Google -- operate what, in another time, would be known as “common carriers.” Common carriers are, as the term implies, companies which distribute anything from news to parcels to gasoline. They are a means of distributing ideas, news, goods, and services.

Think of the old Western Union, the railroads, the pipeline companies, or the telephone companies. Their business was carriage, and they were recognized and regulated in law as such: common carriers.

The controversial Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act recognizes the common carrier nature of Big Tech internet companies by exempting them from libel responsibility. It specifically stated that they shouldn’t be treated as publishers. Conservatives want 230 repealed, but that would only make the companies reluctant to carry anything controversial, hurting free speech.

I think the possible repeal of 230 should be part of a large examination of the inadvertently acquired but vast power of the internet-based social media companies. It should be part of a large discussion embracing all the issues of free speech on social media which could include beefed-up libel statutes -- possibly some form of the equal-time rule which kept network owners from exploiting their power for political purposes in days when there were only three networks.

President Donald Trump deserves censure, which he has gotten: He has been impeached for incitement to insurrection. I take second place to no one in my towering dislike of him, but I am shaken at the ability of Silicon Valley to censor a political figure, let alone a president.

That Silicon Valley should shut out the voice of the president isn’t the issue. It is that a common carrier can dictate the content, even if it is content from a rogue president.

This exercise of censor authority should alarm all free-speech advocates. It is power that exceeds anything ever seen in media.

The heads of Twitter, Facebook and Alphabet are more powerful by incalculable multiples than were Joseph Pulitzer, William Randolph Hearst and Henry Luce, or is Rupert Murdoch. They can subtract any voice from any debate if they so choose. That is a bell that tolls for all. They have the power to silence any voice by closing an account.

When Edward Murrow talked about the awesome power of television, he was right for that time. But now technology has added a multiplier of atomic proportions via the internet.

The internet-based social media giants didn’t seek power. They are, in that sense, blameless. They pursued technology, then money, and these led them to their awesome power. What they have done, though, is to use their wealth to buy startups which offer competition. 

Big Tech has used its financial clout to maintain its de facto monopolies. Yet unlike the newspaper proprietors of old or Murdoch’s multimedia, international endeavors today, they didn’t pursue their dreams to get political power. They were carried along on the wave of new technologies.

It may not be wrong that Twitter, Facebook, and others have shut down Trump’s account when they did, at a time of crisis, but what if these companies get politically activated in the future?

We already live in the age of the cancellation culture with its attempt to edit history. If that is extended to free speech on the internet, even with good intentions, everything begins to wobble.

The tech giants are simply too big for comfort. They have already weakened the general media by scooping up most of the advertising dollars. Will the freedom of speech belong to those who own the algorithms?

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of “White House Chronicle” on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com.

Linda Gasparello

Co-host and Producer

"White House Chronicle" on PBS

Mobile: (202) 441-2703

Website: whchronicle.com

Thanks!

Llewellyn King: Trump and his terrorists have desecrated our temple to democracy, where I had spent many happy hours

The East Front of the Capitol at dusk

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

Cry, the beloved building.

I have been lucky and have walked the halls of the Houses of Parliament in London, visited the Elysée Palace, in Paris, the Bundestag, in Berlin, and the Kremlin, in Moscow.

Still, it is the Capitol, the building on a hill in Washington, that fills me with awe, but it isn’t awesome or frightening, and doesn’t exalt in power.

The Capitol is at once romantic, imposing and egalitarian. Ever since I first set foot on Capitol Hill, the building has been for me, an immigrant, the elegant expression of everything that is best about America: open, accessible and shared.

Until terrorism changed things, anyone could walk into the Capitol without security checks. Taxis could draw up and let you out under the arches that designate the Senate or House entrances.

It hurt me in profound ways to see a mob, inspired by the rogue president and his lickspittle enablers, trash that hallowed place; try to lay waste to the temple of American tolerance, freedom, excellence and uniqueness; to treat it as an impediment to their coup, to their lies-fed catechism of overthrow.

To see any great building desecrated is painful, but to see it happen to the Capitol is to witness heresy against democracy, against Americanism, against our better angels and highest aspirations.

When the Cathedral of Notre Dame, in Paris, was engulfed in flames, I realized  that the building was a prayer: the elegant stone, wood and plaster embodiment of man’s search for God. By that measure, the Capitol is the embodiment of man’s search for fairer government.

As a reporter, the first thing you notice about the Capitol when you go there is how open it is once you have gotten through the metal detectors at the entrances. You walk the halls, ride the elevators and the little trains that run between the Capitol and the House and Senate office buildings, and eat in the cafeterias. The members have privileges, like their own entrances, reserved elevators and reserved train seats. But you can see legislators in the corridors and snack bars, conferring with aides, and often those who are there to get help or to lobby for a cause.

The work of government is at its most accessible to outsiders in the Capitol. Although there are tours, it is still best to roam the building alone, from the tunnels in the basement (where you end up when you take the elevator or stairs and go down too far) to the glory of the Rotunda. The tiled floors, paneling, frescoes, paintings and statuary are all art of the voice of the people, cobbled into a great building.

There are secret places in the Capitol, too. I once had lunch with Sen. Bennett Johnston (D.-La.), then chairman of the Senate Energy Committee, and The Wall Street Journal’s Paul Gigot in a dining room assigned just to the chairman of that committee — one that neither of us guests even suspected existed. The old Joint Committee on Atomic Energy had a near-secret set of offices accessible through a discreet elevator, unmarked and looking as though it might carry freight instead of nuclear secrets.

But mostly the work of the Congress, which is carried on in the Capitol and its adjacent office buildings, is surprisingly open, accessible and, in that, democratic.

My fervent hope is that freedom, which has been somewhat eroded over the years with new layers of security, isn’t further eroded after the Jan. 6 assault.

Looking forward, maybe the horror of government by the Great Lie will be held at bay. While we will never see an end to politicians’ fibs, we can hope that politicians will be called out for them, won’t have them respected as an alternative truth, which is the ignominious and extraordinary achievement of the Trump administration.

Trump laid the fire before the election, declaring there would be fraud, perhaps certain that he would lose. He lit it on Jan. 6.

The mob that stormed the Capitol isn’t to blame. The blame rests with those who have assaulted the truth over the past four years.

Blame Trump and castigate his enablers, from the talking heads of television to members of Congress like Republican senators Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley and Marco Rubio. They don’t deserve to sit under the Capitol dome. That is for those who care about America. It is a noble mantle.

On Twitter: @llewellynking2

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. He’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

Linda Gasparello: What’s good for us can be very bad for wildlife

Remains of an albatross killed by ingesting plastic pollution.

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

When I lived in Manhattan, I pursued an unusual pastime. I started it to avoid eye contact with Unification Church members who peddled flowers and their faith on many street corners in the 1970s. If a Moonie (as a church member was derisively known) were to approach me, I’d cast my eyes down to the sidewalk, where I’d see things that would set my mind wandering.

In the winter, I’d see lone gloves and mittens. On the curb in front of La Cote Basque on East 55th Street, the luxe French restaurant where Truman Capote dined with the doyennes of New York’s social scene, before dishing on them in his unfinished novel, Answered Prayers, I saw a black leather glove with a gold metal “F” sewn on the cuff. I coveted such a Fendi pair, eyeing them at the glove counter at Bergdorf Goodman, but not buying them – they cost about a third of my Greenwich Village studio apartment’s monthly rent in the late 1970s. On the sidewalk on Fifth Avenue, in front of an FAO Schwartz window, I saw a child’s mitten, expertly knit in a red-and-white Norwegian pattern that I never had the patience to follow. I wondered whether the child dropped the mitten after removing it to point excitedly to a toy in the window.

In the summer, I’d see pairs of sunglasses and single sneakers on the sidewalks, things that had fallen out of weekenders’ pockets and bags. It wasn’t unusual for me to see pantyhose. Working women in Manhattan, in my time there, could wear a short-sleeved wrap dress – the one designed by Diane von Furstenberg was the working woman’s boilersuit -- in the summer, but they’d better have put on pantyhose, or packed a pair in their pocketbooks or tote bags. The pantyhose would fall out of them and roll like tumbleweed along the avenues.

One summer morning on Perry Street, near where I lived, I saw a long, black zipper. It looked like a black snake had slithered out of a drain grate on the street and was warming itself on the asphalt, its white belly gleaming in the sun.

Now when I walk on a city sidewalk, I still look down, not to pursue my pastime but to preserve myself from tripping and falling on stuff. I sometimes see interesting litter, but mostly I see single-use and reusable face masks.

This fall, as I walked on the waterfront promenade along Rondout Creek in Kingston, N.Y., I saw a single-use mask swirling in the wind with the fallen leaves. I grabbed the mask and deposited it in a trash can, worried that it would fall into the creek, ensnarling the waterfowl and the fish.

In the COVID-19 crisis, masks have been lifesavers. But masks, especially single-use, polypropylene surgical masks, have been killing marine wildlife and devastating ecosystems.

Billions of masks have been entering our oceans and washing onto our beaches when they are tossed aside, where waste-management systems are inadequate or nonexistent, or when these systems become overwhelmed because of increased volumes of waste.

A new report from OceansAsia, a Hong Kong-based marine conservation organization, estimates that 1.56 billion masks will have entered the oceans in 2020. This will result in an additional 4,680 to 6,240 metric tons of marine plastic pollution, says the report, entitled “Masks on the Beach: The impact of COVID-19 on Marine Plastic Pollution.”

Single-use masks are made from a variety of meltdown plastics and are difficult to recycle, due to both composition and risk of contamination and infection, the report points out. These masks will take as long as 450 years to break down, slowly turning into microplastics ingested by wildlife.

“Marine plastic pollution is devastating our oceans. Plastic pollution kills an estimated 100,000 marine mammals and turtles, over a million seabirds, and even greater numbers of fish, invertebrates and other animals each year. It also negatively impacts fisheries and the tourism industry and costs the global economy an estimated $13 billion per year,” according to Gary Stokes, operations director of OceansAsia.

The report recommends that people wear reusable masks, and to dispose of all masks properly.

I hope that everyone will wear them for the sake of their own and others’ health, and that I won’t see them lying on sidewalks on my strolls, or on beaches, where they are a sorry sight.

Linda Gasparello is co-host and producer of White House Chronicle, on PBS. Her email is whchronicle@gmail.com and she’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

Llewellyn King: The traitorous tribe that kills fellow Americans

President Trump touring a Honeywell mask factory (!) in May 2020. As at many other crowded events he has attended during the pandemic, Trump and his entourage, (fearful of his rebuke) refused to wear masks at this highly publicized visit.

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

When a nation goes to war its first step to survival is to protect the homeland against invasion. Every citizen is co-opted: It is their national duty.

We are on a war footing against COVID-19. It has invaded our homeland, and it is slaughtering us. Nearly 300,000 are dead and the vast hospital network in the United States is overwhelmed.

A dark cloud passes before our sun. Christmas promises more sorrow as we wait for reinforcements -- in this case, the vaccine -- to arrive.

The first line of defense against this common enemy, this indiscriminate killer, is a simple piece of layered cloth or paper held over the nose and mouth by cloth or elastic strings. It is a face mask, the simplest of defensive weapons.

But there is in the United States a tribe that has lost its head, reminiscent of Nicholas Monserrat’s great novel of 1956, The Tribe That Lost Its head. (See an old cover below.)

There are among us those who won’t defend their homeland, won’t wear masks, and accompany that treason by propagating a theory that to wear a mask is to grant a malign government total authority over the individual, and to bring about totalitarianism; or that to wear a mask is to cede manhood or endanger our way of life.

Worse, there are those who believe that it is a political statement of solidarity with the outgoing administration, with the embattled president, and the raucous nationalism that is the core of his appeal.

Some won’t wear masks out of youthful chutzpah, believing this is a disease of the old and that the young and the healthy are immune. This is a fiction they have been fed by those who should know better and most likely do know better, most of whom reside under Republican roofs, presided over by that Niagara Falls of disinformation, President Trump.

While the nation is taking fatal casualties which it doesn’t need to take, while first responders and medical personal are thrown again and again into the breach, exhausted and scared, the Trump Republicans can’t bring themselves to join the battle.

While the signs of war — a war with a terrible count in deaths -- rages on, congressional Republicans are foraging for scandals like pigs after truffles. Most of them still won’t condemn Trump for his super-spreader activities, like his rallies, parties and reckless behavior in public, which signal masks aren’t needed.

The trouble is that leaders of this headless tribe, this unacceptable face of what was the Grand Old Party, are so cowed that they won’t check the president.

The Republican Party used to be made up of muscular individuals, lawmakers who took their mandate seriously, not today’s pusillanimous followers. Incredibly, most Republican members of Congress can’t bring themselves to admit that Joe Biden won the election and will be the next president. Had there been “massive voter fraud” this wouldn’t be so. The courts would have spoken other than as they have.

All of this has played into the anti-mask movement and its lethal consequences. The virus doesn’t ask party affiliation: It is an equal-opportunity slayer.

Then there is Trump’s great enabler in the Senate, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

Even as millions of Americans don’t know where the next meal will come from this Christmas besides a food bank, and rent and utility bills are unpaid, McConnell, and McConnell alone, will decide who gets relief, who gets the shaft for Christmas. He can just refuse to bring a bill to the floor and end it right there. His personal concerns are paramount, not those of the other members of Congress. 

Not only does McConnell not wish to understand the gravity of the situation in the country, but he also seems to relish his ability to exacerbate it, to turn his job into a Lego game for his own amusement.

This will be a bleak Christmas lit by the hope that the vaccine will deliver us from despair and bottomless hurt.

But for the vaccine to vanquish the virus, we must get our shots. If the same idiocy that shuns masks prevails, the war won’t fully be won for years when it could be ended next year.

The sight of victory is the best Christmas present, and it is possible next year if we close ranks. Those who will bear the guilt are known. They are in Washington now.

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

Web Site: whchronicle.com

Llewellyn King: Trust deficit endangers vaccine rollout

An anti-vaccination caricature by James Gillray, “The Cow-Pock—or—The Wonderful Effects of the New Inoculation!’’ (1802)

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

There is a trust deficit in this country, and it may kill a lot of us.

We haven’t been trusting for a long time, but distrust reached its zenith during and after the recent election. The election, still contested, brought with it a massive overhang of distrust. Indeed, the past four years have been marked by wide distrust.

Distrusting the election results isn’t fatal. But distrusting the experts on the need to get vaccinated for COVID-19 is. Yet there are reports that as many as 50 percent of Americans won’t get the vaccine when it is available. That is lethal and a true threat to national security, the economy, our way of life, everything.

If we don’t get our jabs, we will continue to die from coronavirus at an alarming rate. Over 258,000 Americans have perished and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention projects 298,000 deaths by mid-December.

As I recall, it was during the late 1960s that we began wide distrusting. By the end of the Vietnam War, we distrusted on a huge scale. We distrusted what we were told by the military, what we were told by President Lyndon Johnson and then by President Richard Nixon.

We also distrusted the experts. Just about all experts on all subjects, from nuclear-power safety to the environmental impact of the Concorde supersonic passenger jet.

Beyond Vietnam, distrust was fed by the unfolding evidence that we had been the victims of systemic lying. This led to big social realignments, as seen in the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, and the environmental movement. These betrayals exacerbated our natural American distrust of officialdom.

The establishment and its experts had been caught lying about the war and about other things. It was a decade that detonated trust, shredded belief in expertise, and left many of us feeling that we might as well make it up as we went along.

Now the trust deficit is back.

If LBJ and Nixon fueled distrust in the 1960s and early 1970s, the current breach of trust belongs to President Trump and his enablers scattered across the body politic, from presidential counselor Kellyanne Conway with her “alternative facts” to the Senate Republicans and their disinclination to check the president.

The trust deficit has divided us. Seventy-three million did vote for Trump and many of those believe what, most dangerously, he has said about the pandemic.

The result has been the growth of diabolical myths about COVID-19. Taking seriously some, or all, of Trump’s outpourings on the coronavirus -- from his advocacy of sunlight and his off-label drug recommendations, such as hydroxychloroquine, to putting the pandemic out of mind as a “hoax” -- fomented its spread.

We have been waiting for a medical breakthrough to repel and conquer COVID-19 and it looks as though that is at hand with the arrival of not one but three vaccines, the first of which should be available in about three weeks to the most vulnerable populations. The development of these vaccines represents a stupendous medical effort: the Manhattan Project of medicine.

But it will all be in vain if Americans don’t trust the authorities and don’t get vaccinated. It looks as though, according to surveys, 50 percent of the population will get vaccinated. The rest will choose to believe in such medical fictions as herd immunity — a pernicious idea that eventually we will all be immune by living with COVID-19. It should be noted that this didn’t happen with such other infectious diseases as bubonic plague, smallpox, polio,  even the flu.

My informal survey of research doctors puts the odds on who will get vaccinated a little better than 50 percent. They conclude that one third will get vaccinated, one third will wait to see the results among those who got vaccinated early, and one third won’t get vaccinated, believing that the disease has been hyped and that it isn’t as serious as the often-castigated media says. Some of the “COVID-19 deniers” will be the permanent anti-vaxxers, people who think that vaccines have bad side effects; they believe, for example, that the MMR vaccine causes autism.

This medical heresy even as hospitals are filling to capacity, their staff are exhausted, and bodies are piling up in refrigerated trailers because there is nowhere to put them.

Without near-universal vaccination, the coronavirus will be around for years. The superhuman effort to get a vaccine will have been partially in vain. The silver bullet will be tarnished.

Get a grip, America. Get your jabs.

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com. and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

Before the anti-vaxxers: Administration of the polio inoculation, including by the first polio-vaccine developer, Jonas Salk, himself, in 1957 at the University of Pittsburgh, where his team had developed the vaccine.

In a postwar poster the Ministry of Health urged British residents to immunize children against diphtheria.

Llewellyn King: The huge unanswered questions of the presidential campaign

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game? was the title of a 1963 book by Jimmy Breslin about the disastrous first year of the New York Mets, an expansion team. It’s attributed to the team’s manager Casey Stengel.

As I’ve watched this picaresque presidential election year unfold, I’ve had the same thought.

The game is governance; the campaign, the run-up. And nobody seems to know how to play this game. The questions that should’ve been raised and answered were neither raised nor answered.

Some unheard and unanswered questions:

·       How will you rebuild our stature abroad, restore America to global leadership and moral authority?

·       What will you do if the pandemic hangs on for years? How will you place the millions whose jobs were lost through the pandemic in work?

·       How will you fix our ailing school system with its disastrous weaknesses exposed by Covid-19?

·       The health-care system is stretched to breaking under the pandemic with or without Obamacare. What is your plan?

·       If the climate change-induced sea level rise accelerates, how will you deal with cities that appear in danger, including New York, Boston, New Orleans, and San Francisco?

·       One of the rationales for the U.S.-Mexico border wall was to reduce the influx of drugs. Now, with the advent of drones, we may have a new drug-smuggling crisis. What is your plan to combat it?

·       States depend on gasoline and cigarette taxes, but electric vehicles are pushing out gasoline taxes and cigarette smoking is in steep decline. How do you see these tax streams being replaced?

·       What will you do if China invades Taiwan?

·       What will you do if China bars U.S. shipping from traversing the South China Sea?

·       The population of Africa is set to double every quarter century. Already there is vert high unemployment, what should the United States do to help?

·       Jobs are being eaten up by AI and other technologies. While those enthralled with these job-subtracting technologies point to the history of the Industrial Revolution, this may be different. What should be done?

Just think of anything to do with the future and a gusher of questions erupts, but no answers have been heard, or few at best.

President Trump, it seems, will offer us more government as demolition derby, but wilder than in the first four years. We’ve gotten a shower of hopes, fanciful and improbable. When it comes to the overhanging crisis of today, the pandemic, he is like King Canute commanding the waves to retreat.

From his opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden, we are to get what? Decency, character? Like all candidates, he’s told us he’ll fix everything. But how remains obscured from us, and quite possibly from himself.

On the evening of April 7, 1775, Samuel Johnson, the sage and lexicographer, told us that patriotism was the last refuge of the scoundrel. That is a truth that Trump -- who probably doesn’t know who Johnson was -- has exploited as his own. He would undo the things we should be proud of in the world, like human rights, and get away with it because he wraps himself in the flag like Linus in his blanket.

Those who’ll vote for Biden will vote for a man who is old in years and old in ideas. If he wins, his supporters can trade fear for apprehension.

As we face the most momentous challenges the world has ever borne -- international upheaval, a lingering pandemic and climate change – we’ve gone through a presidential campaign where the issues were shelved for repetitive nothingness. We haven’t been lifted by high rhetoric nor inspired by blinding vision.

The global upheaval triggered by disease, nation realignment and technology will have to await the judgment of those who whisper into the ears of presidents, when they, the candidates, have none, as now.

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

Web site: whchronicle.com

Llewellyn King: Bundle up for a very bleak winter

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

A winter of discontent looms. Unlike in Shakespeare’s Richard III, no one can say it will be made glorious summer by anything now in sight. Instead, it promises a tsunami of misery for many and the ugliest election in U.S. history.

At a time that calls for new energy, new thinking and a recasting of the social contract, two old men -- who more rightly should be eyeing the sunny side of the veranda at their retirement homes -- are in contentious dispute for the presidency.

Whoever wins, President Trump or former Vice President Joe Biden, the winter will be the harshest in memory for many Americans, particularly those on the lower rungs of the economic ladder.

The COVID-19 pandemic has evaporated millions of jobs and the small companies that provided them. Most obvious in this slaughter are the restaurants. Yelp, the restaurant reporting service, estimates that 53 percent of the restaurants now closed will never reopen.

Restaurants are among the most fragile and perishable of small businesses. At the best of times, most inhabit an inhospitable space between the restaurant chains and their landlords.

Restaurants are quick to hire and quick to fire. It is where the unskilled (dishwashing and prep) to the low-skilled (line cooks and front staff) find work most easily.

Restaurants tell the temperature of the economy ahead of the official soundings. When business turns down, they stumble.

They also are places of hope: The chefs and waiters of today are the restaurant entrepreneurs or stage and screen stars of tomorrow. They’ve put untold thousands through college. When restaurants close jobs go, hopes and dreams go, and often the life’s work of the owners go.

The individually owned restaurant epitomizes entrepreneurism, determination, the capitalist spirit, and the joy of self-employment for the owner. All the virtues of small business, routinely drooled over by the politicians, are present even at the humblest greasy spoon. Free enterprise is always on the menu.

And restaurants are part of the fabric of our lives, where we celebrate, occasionally mourn, and frequently refresh.

Much of what is true for restaurants is as true for the whole hospitality industry. Those who do the housekeeping in hotels, the porters and, of course, the restaurant staff are all semi-skilled and in need of work to survive. They are, I submit, not easily re-trained: You don’t go from making beds to computer programming in a short time.

Only Congress can assuage the immediate suffering at the bottom of the employment pyramid. But a new relief package has been tied up in party strife.

Trump said on Oct. 6 that he had withdrawn from negotiations with the Democrats over the package. Now he says he will sign a simplified measure, guaranteeing a payment of $1,200. That came after the stock market -- the only index Trump follows -- faltered.

Dark as things may be for the workers at the bottom, they are bleak for all. Trump won’t say that he’ll accept the results of the election if he doesn’t win. He’s laid the groundwork for this potential coup by criticizing mail-in voting. Without evidence, he’s sought ahead of the election to invalidate mail-in voting and has even trashed the U.S. Postal Service, maybe to facilitate this election subterfuge.

If Biden wins, he may be presented with his greatest crisis before he is sworn in: leading the movement for accepting the vote. He’ll be required to lead the millions who may flood the streets, prompting violence between themselves and Trump hardliners.

Shiver, people, shiver. There is much to fear as winter unfolds even if you have a paycheck.

If Trump loses and accepts the result, there will be the time from certification of the election to Biden’s swearing in when an unfettered Trump can indulge his passion for executive orders, abrogating treaties and sowing wanton havoc.

The only sunshine may come from science in the form of a somewhat effective vaccine for COVID-19. This won’t occasion us to immediately strip our masks, as it will take a year to inoculate the whole population. But its prospect will put warmth into a cold Christmas.

As the nation returns to health, a hard look at the predicament of those at the bottom will be needed -- an amendment to the social contract, if you will. Top of my list: fix health care and repair education.

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

Website: whchronicle.com

Llewellyn King: Oh for real conservative values, not Trumpism

President Gerald Ford, in 1974. He was a true conservative.

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

If Mitch McConnell’s toadying Senate has its way, we are to have a more conservative U.S. Supreme Court come the elections in November, even though it looks like the current concept of harsh conservatism will be roundly rejected in them.

One branch of government, if President Trump and McConnell have their way, will be handed over to an extreme vision of conservatism that has no deep-seated philosophy behind it. It is a corruption of a noble stream of political thought and its consequence is a political class that adheres to narrow, divisive issues that have an oppressive social effect. Taken together these have the result of seeming to be heartless and causing pain to the poor and under-educated.

That isn’t the conservatism we had known for decades: the conservatism of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and the two George Bushes. It is a political virus that threatens the Grand Old Party with years of loss of elective office.

If these new aberrant Republicans use their form of judicial activism to keep alive Trumpism, they will be ensuring today’s ugly discord for a long time.

The issues that divide us aren’t the solid Republican values of yesteryear of limited government, free trade, market solutions, open opportunity, strong defense, active scientific inquiry, educational excellence, personal freedom and privacy and universal prosperity. Not the cramped and spleen-imbued issues that are about to dominate the Senate GOP’s foraging for like-mindedness in the coming hearings.

They are out to burden conservatism with narrow views on a few issues that aren’t intrinsically conservative, including:

·       Abortion

·       The death penalty

·       Health care

·       Sexual preference

Rigidity on these matters – except for sexual preference -- has the effect of laying a disproportionate burden on the poor and, therefore, stimulating the far left of the Democratic Party, empowering the followers of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D.-N.Y.).

Take just two matters. The abortion issue falls heavily on the poor. Nobody suggests that it is a good means of birth control, but unwanted pregnancies do occur. They can break up families, cause economic burdens and bring children into untenable poverty, social dysfunction and other misery.

What women do in private shouldn’t be governed by the Senate or the court.

End Roe v. Wade and rich women will still be able to go to another country or in other ways pay for a safe end to a pregnancy. Appointing a staunch religious anti-abortionist to the Supreme Court is to put a thumb on the scales of justice and to blur the line between church and state for a transient political purpose: reelecting Trump.

The death penalty, which has failed spectacularly as a proven deterrent to murder, likewise falls mainly on the poor -- often the poor and mentally challenged. The record shows that rich people aren’t taken to the death chamber at dawn. Superior lawyering from the moment of arrest keeps them from later capital punishment. What is the ultra-conservative value proposition then?

The same imbalance extends throughout our remarkably punitive legal system that punishes those on society’s bottom rungs more aggressively than those at the top.

Families were destroyed and social mayhem resulted in the mortgage excesses of the last financial crisis. I saw it devastate one of my employees of that time: a struggling Black man of impeccable character but limited education who was talked into unwise refinancing by rapacious mortgage lenders. He lost his home, his good name, everything. No one across the length and breadth of the scandal went to prison for the damage that their greed inflected.

All the other right-wing issues of the day have the same characteristics: They defend the upper reaches of society, those with money, and are harsh and inconsiderate of the rest.

Health care glares in this. A patchy and capricious system will become worse for tens of millions of Americans if the legal attack on the Affordable Care Act by the Trump administration goes against the sick in the Supreme Court — a court weighted against ordinary people in pursuit of a suspect interpretation of conservatism.

Radical conservatism is also out to extinguish the labor movement, or what is left of it. A robust labor movement is a bulwark against the pitiless downgrading of the worker from dignity to subservience, living in fear and rewarded inadequately.

The rush to the bottom is becoming a national sink hole. We can all fall into it eventually.

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com. He’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

Llewellyn King: 'Job retraining' can be an empty slogan without aptitude

Computer skills training

WEST WARWICK ,R.I.

When a vaccine for COVID-19 is as easily available as a flu shot, and when the public is comfortable getting it, it will be a time of victory -- Victory Virus. And it will be a time to begin building the new America.

Things will have changed. We won’t be going back to the future. Most visible will be the disappearance of a huge number of low-end jobs. No one knows how many but, sadly, we have a good idea where it will hurt most: among semi-skilled and unskilled workers.

They are those who don’t have college degrees and those who wouldn’t have qualified to enter college. Higher education isn’t for everyone, even if money wasn’t an issue. College is for those who can handle it, therefore benefiting.

It isn’t only the virus that is changing the employment picture but also the continuing technology revolution. Data is going to be king, according to Andres Carvallo, founder of CMG, the Austin-based technology consulting company, and a professor at Texas State University. Data, he argues, linked with the spreading fifth-generation telephone networks (5G) will delineate the future. Carvallo has pointed out that data from all sources have value, “even the homeless.”

Carvallo’s colleague on a weekly video broadcast about the digital future, entrepreneur John Butler, a University of Texas at Austin professor, believes that data and 5G will start to affect American business in a big way and new business plans will emerge, taking into account the increasing deployment of sensors and the ability of 5G to move huge quantities of data at the speed of light.

Carvallo explains, “If you’re moving data at the rate of 40 megabytes per second now, with 5G you’ll be able to move it at 1,000 megabytes per second.”

The technology revolution will continue apace, but will there be a place for those who aren’t embraced by it, like those who serve, clean, pack, unpack, and have been doing society’s housekeeping at the minimum wage or just above it?

Evidence is that they are already in sorry shape with a much higher rate of COVID-19 infections than the general population, and even in the best of times they have poorer health — an indictment of our health system.

The future of the neediest workers is imperiled, in the short term, because the jobs they have had and the jobs that have always been there for those on the lower ladders of employment are disappearing. A goodly chunk of these workers will be out of work for a long time.

Retraining is the solution that is advocated by those who aren’t caught in this low-level work vise. Retraining for most people is, to my mind, just a crock. It is a bromide handed down by the middle class to those below; a callow concept that doesn’t fit the bill. It soothes the well-heeled conscience.

First, some people can’t grasp new concepts, particularly as they age. Are you really going to teach a middle-aged, short-order cook to navigate computer repair? That is not only impractical, it is cruel.

A further disadvantage is that the affected workers not only are going to be shut out of their traditional lines of employment, but they also carry an additional burden, another barrier to retraining: They almost exclusively are the products of shoddy public education, so there is very little to build on if you’re going to retrain. If you have marginal English most information technology work is going to be inaccessible; rudimentary math is another stumbling block.

Very smart people are candidates for retraining. The graduate schools see plenty of students who get multiple, disassociated degrees, like lawyers who have nuclear engineering degrees. I know a prominent head of surgery at a Boston hospital who has a degree in chemical engineering.

They are the polymaths, but they aren’t laboring for the minimum wage.

The loss of jobs due to COVID-19 comes at a time when technology, for the first time since the Newcomen engine kickstarted the Industrial Revolution in 1712, might be a job subtractor, not the multiplier it has been down through the ages.

Unemployment insurance is a stopgap but it also obscures the full extent of the skill void, the aptitude hurdle.

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His e-mail address is llewellynking1@gmail.com and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

Website: whchronicle.com

Llewellyn King: Planting trees for health; data-mining sewage

Late 1800s “shotgun house’’ on South 5th St., in South Louisville, focus of a tree-planting program

Louisville Waterfront Park exhibits rolling hills, spacious lawns and walking paths in the downtown area.

WEST WARWICK

There is health in trees and a narrative in sewage. That is the double story coming out of the Christina Lee Brown Envirome Institute at the University of Louisville.

In Louisville, where the air quality ranks among the worst in Kentucky, the Envirome Institute is planting trees at a near manic pace, but it isn’t planning to wait years for the first payoff.

There is scientific purpose and a plan, and even the federal government is involved because, as Theodore “Ted” Smith, director of the institute’s Center for Healthy Air, Water and Soil, told me, the tree-planting project, called Green Heart, is also a fully-fledged clinical trial of the type normally used to assess the impact of medicines.

“Actually it’s a drug trial of sorts, except the drug is trees and bushes. You could go to clinicaltrials.gov, where all the clinical trials are listed, and under ‘drug,’ it says ‘trees,’ ” said Smith. “We’re taking very seriously the need to empirically demonstrate what the value of trees, bushes, greenery, nature is; what is the basis of the connection of exposure to green places and the improvement in human health.”

People living in four South Louisville neighborhoods where trees are being planted will be monitored against a control group in neighborhoods that aren’t being planted and surrounding Jefferson County. The project’s stated purpose is “testing if increasing green space in a neighborhood improves air quality and human health with the goal of developing a ‘greenprint’ for creating healthier neighborhoods.”

Aruni Bhatnagar, the institute’s director, told me that they chose to study the heart because cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death. He said 8,000 to 10,000 trees are being planted in every available space in Louisville: open land, along roadways, and anywhere else that will support trees.

The trees are already of substantial size -- 15 feet to 20 feet high -- when they are transplanted in Louisville, which also has an urban-blight problem. They’re planting evergreen trees because they have year-round foliage, increasing their impact.

Smith said, “We’re very hopeful that we’ll be able to shed some light on just what are the benefits of trees. Maybe it’s cooling: There are a lot of people who are concerned about heat issues in cities. We’re concerned about pollution. As a research institute, we’ve had a long track record in working on exposure to pollutants. That is one of the functions trees perform for us.”

Like all scientific institutions, said Bhatnagar, the Envirome Institute felt it should swing into action to help with COVID-19. It is doing so with a program monitoring Louisville’s sewage to determine patterns of infection and to bring these to the attention of health authorities. The wastewater is sampled at 16 locations and analyzed in the institute’s own labs to find the COVID-19 penetration.

These samplings provide a schematic. Initially, researchers found higher infections in affluent parts of Louisville. But over time, infections spread to the city’s disadvantaged and low-income neighborhoods, where they increased dramatically.

Overall, according to Smith, the wastewater monitoring will lead to a  comprehensive understanding of the health anatomy of Louisville, providing data that could have a big impact on the future health and well-being of the city and, if adopted as a general part of urban health analysis, much of the world. “There’s gold in those sewage pipes,” he quipped.

Louisville philanthropist Christina Lee Brown has been working with health activists across the world on a whole-health – physical, mental, economic, spiritual -- concept for living. In the quest for sustainable, livable, enjoyable environments, Brown works closely with Britain’s Prince Charles, who has similar goals and has invested heavily in this harmony.

“We encourage people to see the interconnected nature of all the forms of health and how they reinforce and support each other,” Brown said.

Trees are not just for climbing, and sewers are talkative.

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

Linda Gasparello

Co-host and Producer

"White House Chronicle" on PBS

Mobile: (202) 441-2703

Website: whchronicle.com

Llewellyn King: Save disgusting social media from censorship

— Photo by Johnscotaus

WEST WARWICK

I don’t know a lot about social media. I don’t know how it works technically. I don’t know why it is such a force in society. I don’t know why very prominent people, such as comedian Steve Martin, prognosticator Nate Silver and New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, who have plenty of outlets, tweet.  

I don’t know why people who are great company, need to post on Facebook tedious photos of  a. their cats, b. their grandchildren, c. their hobbies, and d. their vacations (“That’s Ann and myself in a Costa Rican rainforest.’’). 

Because of this personal bric-a-brac, I tend to avoid Facebook and solicitations to befriend people there. I fear those children, that cat, those hobbies, and snaps of my friends despoiling places of natural beauty.  

What I do know is that we face a clear-and-present danger of social media censorship.

What makes it worse is those calling for censorship should know better. They are, many of them, of the progressive left. It seems they hate “hate speech” more than they hate anything else, including censorship by machine or, worse, censorship deep in Twitter or Facebook by committees of the nameless wonks. 

Now social media is full of remarkably ugly, vicious, deranged and fabricated things. The truth isn’t safe with social media. The truth is scarcely an ingredient. But that isn’t reason enough to introduce censorship, whether self-censorship or some other adjudication of what we see and hear. 

Google, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, et alia, aren’t publishers. They are common carriers, like the post office, the railroads and the telephone companies. Certainly, they aren’t publishers or broadcasters in the traditional sense. 

The remedy for the excess on social media – conspiracies, homophobia, Islamophobia, and even my phobia about cat photos – won’t be cured by getting the companies that carry them to introduce censorship, however well-intentioned and noble in purpose. 

The right to free speech is ineradicable, absolute and cardinal. Without it we start sliding down the slippery slope – except the internet slope is steeper, greasier, and globe-circling. 

So, I defend President \Trump, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D.-Minn.), Sean Hannity and Rachel Maddow as having a right not to be censored. That is all I’m defending: only their right not to be censored, not their speech or even the ideas behind it. 

There was a time, before former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher cracked down on unions, when the printers of British national newspapers set themselves up as de facto censors. Not the editors or owners, but the press operators: They wouldn’t print stories that they disapproved of. The newspapers were forever making statements like this, “One third of last night’s print run was lost due to industrial action.” That meant a shop steward didn’t like the content.  

The issue now revolves around hate speech, a social construct. It is, as U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said about pornography, “I know it when I see it.” That means that there can be no standard when the offense is so subjective that it is in the eye of the beholder. 

The blanket indictment of hate speech, if applied to any discourse – for example, political, literary or sports --  is that it can’t be conducted without the honorable traditions of wit, invective, ridicule, scorn, and satire. If a sports columnist berates a fumbling NFL quarterback, is that hate speech? 

Until now the laws of libel and slander have worked imperfectly, but they have done their bit to protect reputations, to halt dishonest and malicious allegations, and to give a kind of discipline, sometimes lax, to journalism.  

These laws aren’t adequate for the Internet, but they hint at future concepts that might endeavor to quiet the internet and its social media sewers. Censorship won’t do it with perpetrating a greater evil. 

When you’ve read this, you may want to hurl used cat litter at me in the street. Your right to want to do that should be unassailable, but if you do it, you should be prosecuted for assault.

Hate is a human emotion, and emotions aren’t criminal until they’re acted on.

If you censor the Internet, as many would like, the workaround will come in seconds. Social media and its sewer of disgusting, repugnant and vile assertions won’t be silenced, but honest disputation may be banned.  

Actually, I love cats

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

Website: whchronicle.com

Llewellyn King: America’s hyper-individualism is killing it

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

To compound the COVID-19 crisis, we have a cultural crisis. It is a crisis of our individualism.

That cultural element, precious and special, of the individual against adversity, the individual against authority, the individual against any limits imposed on free action, is at odds with the need to behave. Worse, our individualistic trait has been politicized, dragged to the right.

This aspect of American exceptionalism is now killing us, on a per-capita basis, faster than people in any other country. We are in a health crisis that demands collective action from people who revere individual freedom over the dictates of the many, as expressed by the government.

Simply, we must wear masks and stay away from groups. It works; it is onerous but not intolerable.

There is a hope, almost a belief, afoot that by the end of the year there will be a vaccine, and that the existence of a vaccine will itself signal an end to the crisis.

A reality check: No proven vaccine yet exists. Although all the experts I’ve contacted believe one will work and several might.

Another reality check: It may take up to five years to vaccinate enough people to make America safe. My informal survey of doctors finds they expect one-third of us will be keen to be vaccinated, one-third will hold back to see how it goes, and one third may resist vaccination because they’re either opposed in principle or consider it to be a government intrusion on their liberty.

If their expectation holds true, COVID-19 is going to be with us for years.

No doubt there are better therapies in the pipeline to deal with COVID-19 once the patient has reached the hospital. But that won’t affect the rate of infection. The assault on our way of life and the economy will continue; the price our children are paying now will escalate.

If you’re pinning your hopes on a vaccine, several may come along at the same time and jostle for market share. That happened with poliomyelitis: Three vaccines were available, but one failed because of alleged poor quality control in manufacture. If there is a scramble among vaccines, look out for financial muscle, politics, and nationalism to join the fray. None of these will be helpful.

So far, there has been a catastrophic failure of leadership at the White House and in many statehouses. “Say it isn’t so” is not a policy. That is what President Trump and Republican governors Ron DeSantis, of Florida, and Brian Kemp, of Georgia, have, in essence, said, resulting in climbing infections and deaths.

Americans sacrificed on a politicized cultural altar.

We know what to do: A hard lockdown for a couple of weeks would stop the virus in its tracks. It worked in New York.

We are in a war without leadership. We have governors forced to act as guerrilla chiefs rather than generals of a national army under unified leadership with common purpose.

Right now, we should hear from the political leadership about what they plan to do to slow the spread of COVID-19 and how, when this is over, they plan to rebuild: What will they do to help the 20 million to 30 million people in hospitality and retail whose jobs have gone, evaporated?

Refusing to wear a mask may have deep cultural significance for some, particularly in the West, but for all of us, restaurants are part of the fabric of our living. For most us, the happiest moments of lives have been in a restaurant, celebrating things that are precious milestones in life, such as birthdays, engagements and anniversaries.

We can’t give one cultural totem precedence over another.

More than half the nation’s restaurants may never reopen -- employing 10 percent of the nation’s workforce and accounting for 4 percent of GDP -- and the biggest helping hand to them would be to throw the Defense Production Act at manufacturing millions of indoor air scrubbers. It would increase livability for all, ending our isolation from each other.

Wash your hands, America. Don’t wring them. We can beat the virus when we fight on the same side with science and respect the commonweal.

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His e-mail is llewellynking1@gmail.com and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

Website: whchronicle.com