Untitled Document

24 May 2004

Cooking With Oil

President Bush reassured the American people on the plan for stabilizing Iraq, though I did not know about it in real-time.

I was more concerned about the small Japanese car that crept along the left-hand lane somewhere south of the tunnel at Baltimore. The car drifted across the center line, headed somewhere unknown, blocking the passing lane, and in a breathtaking display, both lanes of the highway in a stately move to the right.

It startled us in the hurtling Oldsmobile, two businessmen returning from a lightning day-trip to The Labs in the Garden State.

Make that slow-motion lightning. More than four hours up, almost five coming back.

Let me be the first with this news-flash: there is no easy way to get to New Jersey. Trains, planes or automobiles all must cross over or under the treacherous reaches of harbors and old brick cities and vast rivers.

Automobiles must stop at an endless series of tollbooths, which appear to be part of New Jersey's full employment program for unskilled labor.

You cannot pump your own gas in the Garden State. Attendants handle that chore, though they do not check the air pressure on the tires, or the levels of coolant or oil. They just put the nozzle in the throat to the gas tank and ask for your credit card.

In the case of the great concrete highways, alert public workers sit in the booths and hand you tickets.

In progressive states, like Pennsylvania and Ohio, they have installed machines that spit the ticket out at you, leaving the highly skilled positions of change-making to employees at the exit points. So in the Garden State, there appears to be a social agenda at work, a sort of local tax on the river of steel flowing through the state which otherwise would contribute only wear and tear to the infrastructure.

Somewhere west of Philly the radio gave us reports of car bombings and casualties and a news-flash we could use.

I'm not making this up. It is neither a sea-story nor a fairy tale. Apparently the cost of petroleum has once more brought technology to the rescue. National salvation may be at hand. Apparently diesel engines will run perfectly well on ordinary cooking oil. No kidding. People are stopping at Chinese restaurants and fast-food places to top off special tanks with used cooking oil from stir-fry and the french-frier.

This is a miracle, of sorts. And the times being what they are, a miracle is just what the doctor ordered. The radio was careful to point out that you need to purchase a special after-market kit to run on bio-oil, and you must filter it, and the engine still must start and stop on real diesel fuel, since the glow-plugs will clog like our arteries like French-fries.

But it does not take much petro-fuel to do that, and once the cooking oil is up to temperature, it burns like a champ.

This is a win-win deal. The restaurants have to pay to have the old grease hauled away, and the Environmental Protection Agency is scratching their heads, saying the emissions don't seem to be any worse regardless of what tailpipe they emanate from.

We needed good news like that. We left DC at 8:30AM, we were in the dark-paneled, high-vaulted employee cafeteria of the Labs by 1:30PM. Traffic had not been bad, and our only stopping had been at the ubiquitous tollbooths, each one coming with a cost that varied by the level of difficulty involved in the transit, just like Iraq.

We had plunged south the instant the meetings were done, well and fairly on the road south by 5:00PM. We estimated we would be back in Washington by 10:00.

President Bush apparently was wearing make-up to conceal the abrasions he incurred when he crashed his mountain bike down in Texas. I had to imagine all this, radio-style, since I had to assemble the context of the address through the wreckage of the morning reporting.

It is bad enough trying to do it while watching the Chief Executive live.

Or maybe it is easier, not having to wince when he mispronounces the name of the notorious prison we are going to rip down in Baghdad. The after-action reports indicate the President was calm and he read his lines well. We may have had more intellectual leaders in the White House, but I admire him his serenity.

He said he was going to make the people of Iraq free, but "not to make them American." This is an enormous relief, since it was possible that he could have announced a massive guest worker program and bring them all here to relieve labor pressure on agribusiness in the Southwest.

After all, it worked after Vietnam, didn't it?

I was relieved to discover that the President instead announced a five-point-plan to implement the transition of sovereignty. Being a Pentagon PowerPoint Ranger of previous wars, I am tempted to create a hard-hitting VuGraph presentation and brief it to you with a laser-pointer.

But I will restrain myself.

In sum, the President says we are going to give them back the copyright to their national anthem, or whatever it is we mean by sovereignty, we are going to establish security, rebuild the infrastructure, encourage international support and move toward free elections by next January.

I blinked as I read the words. Shoot, I thought, we could do all that stuff with a rational system of tollbooths every few blocks, just like The Garden State Parkway.

He was gracious enough to not announce the names of a new Iraqi Prime Minister or other top Iraqi government officials. He is leaving that to Lakhdar Brahimi, the new United Nations special envoy to Iraq.

The speech lasted thirty-three minutes and the Army War College audience was supportive, giving the biggest round of applause when he announced that the abu Ghraib prison would be razed just as soon as they can replace it with something less tinged with dishonor.

I think it is a great, but the French ripped down the Bastille, and they still remember.

The President's people are trying to stay on message, and there will be a string of major policy addresses over the next month. They will stress some simple themes, and they are ones with which Mr. Kerry will have to wrestle through the long months to the election. The President has hunted down terrorists, routed the Taliban, ousted Saddam Hussein, and presided over a rebounding economy. The marvelous economic engine may eliminate the horrific cost of the Global War on Terrorism.

And we have discovered that cooking oil could provide us with the sensible energy policy we have been looking for, and free us from OPEC. Plus, the increase in consumption of stir-fry vegetables could, in a measured diet, increase our roughage and reduce our national cholesterol.

On the downside, Mr. Bush says we are going to keep 138,000 troops in Iraq for as long as necessary, plus the invisible army of contractors to keep them equipped. We can be precise about the number of people in uniform. If you add the private sector support, I think the number will be right around the population of New Jersey.

I have discovered I do not enjoy traveling to the Garden State.

But having gone, you must still pay a significant toll to get out.