It’s true that, under cap and trade, companies receive permits to pollute. But it’s also true that the permits gradually reduce the amount of greenhouse gasses they are allowed to emit.  For the record, it’s not just rich companies that get to buy permits to pollute, but clean companies that get to sell them. The idea is to get as much pollution reduction as possible at the least possible cost. There are two basic alternatives to cap and trade: 1. a simple cap—what is often called command and control regulation; or 2. a tax on carbon. By setting a cap or tax on pollution, you are still allowing it to take place—and so it is still “permission to legally pollute.” An out and out prohibition on carbon dioxide emissions is infeasible, since it would end economic life as we know it. Jon Stewart’s Daily Show would be taken off the air, since there would be no electricity to run our televisions. That would be a shame, since it’s my favorite TV show.

The problem of global warming is a complicated one, and it is only the most visible of the impacts of our growing technological capacity. Our economic and political lives are becoming more complicated and more difficult to manage. We benefit from these technological marvels, but we are more vulnerable as a result of them.  The growing complexity of economic life and financial transactions has been further complicated by the increased technical and scientific content of the goods and services provided by our post-industrial society. For example, the free market marvel of Henry Ford’s Model T has been replaced by today’s highly regulated automobile—a vehicle that includes pollution control technology, required safety equipment, and a range of computer controls and other technologies. Similarly, American farming has come a long way from “40 acres and a mule” to become a highly mechanized, computer-controlled agribusiness. 

Public policy requires an understanding of science and technology to be effective. Farming practices influence food safety, public health, and water supplies, and even generate ethical issues that stem from cloning and genetic engineering. Our public officials cannot regulate those activities in the public interest if they do not understand the science and technology upon which they are based. How can one create policy on “how clean is clean” at a toxic waste site—how far clean-up must proceed before it is complete—without some understanding of the transport, toxicity, and latency of the individual and interacting chemicals?

The names Henry Ford, Alexander Graham Bell, and Thomas Edison are well known and are of a time when technology and the economy was simple enough for inventors to become “heroes” and even players in the national economy.  Today’s version of these innovators, like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, may not be “inventors,” but are technically sophisticated managers who depend on huge R & D machines to develop new products. They continue the 20th century practice that tied economic growth to technological innovation.

New products, made with new and more efficient production techniques, are constantly introduced and upgraded: autos, electricity and illumination, refrigeration, air conditioning, radio, telephones, black and white TV, color TV, digital TV, main frame computers, laptop computes, satellite communication, air travel, cell phones, Blackberries, the Internet, and computer software. Modern economic life is dominated by the development and introduction of new technologies.

Just as economic life is dominated by science and technology, public policy issues are increasingly shaped by scientific and technological developments as well. Understanding public policy requires increased levels of scientific literacy. For example (not an exhaustive list):

• National security: Arms, aircraft, submarines, ships, missiles, atomic weapons, and spy satellites are all subject to constant technological change and advancement. Modern warfare is dominated by the importance of new technology and the ability or inability to develop counter-measures to these new technologies.
• Health care. From immunizations to MRIs, health care and the associated calculation of costs and benefits are constantly changing due to the development of new drugs and technologies. Moreover, the effect of the use of non-medical technologies on human health requires both an understanding of those technologies and of their impact on human biology and chemistry. People are living longer and healthier lives as a result of medical technologies. These technologies are reshaping our economies, societies, and politics in profound ways that we are only beginning to understand.
• Environmental Protection and Sustainability. The entire range of human activity influences a web of biological relationships in our ecosystems that eventually lead back to humans and their health. We are learning more every day about the science of our planet, how it is changing due to human impacts and what we need to do to minimize our negative impact or “footprint.” We need to learn more about how to provide food, water, energy, and other resources based on the principles of reuse and sustainability.

Scientific and technical literacy is essential for understanding and governing the modern world. To maximize the benefits and reduce the costs of using new technologies, decision-makers must develop a more sophisticated understanding of the science of the new technologies they are selling or trying to regulate. For example, in the 1950s and 1960s, engineers knew that the toxic waste they were dumping the ground could kill people and ruin the environment, but the business leaders they worked for were largely ignorant of those scientific facts.  Most of the elected leaders responsible for the communities “hosting” these dumpsites did not even know they existed or, if they did, that they were dangerous. At the infamous Love Canal in Niagara Falls, New York, the Hooker Chemical Company sold the land they dumped chemicals on to the local government for a dollar. The community then built a school on top of the site, with a playground directly over the dump. Eventually, the chemicals leached off the site, causing great harm to the local community. It is difficult to know how much it will cost us to clean up this nation’s toxic waste, but the job is far from over and the bill is probably over $100 billion. Ignorance was far from bliss. In the 21st century we need to do a better job of teaching our leaders to understand science and technology. 

In addition to understanding science, last year’s Wall Street meltdown should also convince us that we need our leaders to develop a deeper understanding of finance as well.  The media can play a role in increasing our scientific and economic literacy, or they can focus on death squads, the President’s birth certificate or cute word plays on “cap’n trade.” A cheap laugh is always better than a vicious lie, so I’ll keep tuning into The Daily Show—since even on the rare occasions that he is wrong, Jon Stewart always does his job and makes us laugh.

Perhaps the lack of coverage of the attack on the Nobel Prize–winning Holocaust survivor is understandable: It’s one of the most deeply depressing, dispiriting, demoralizing and sickening stories that one can imagine. On every level.

I didn’t read anything about it until a week or so after it happened, when a friend e-mailed me the San Francisco Examiner online account of it. A later report claimed that the police delayed releasing details while they searched for the suspect. The only clue to the cretin’s identity in media reports at the time is from a pseudonymous Holocaust-denier posting on the Web site Ziopedia, which calls itself “anti-Zionist” but turns out to be a cyber-nexus for Holocaust denial.

In case you missed it, Mr. Wiesel, 78, who won a Nobel Prize in 1986 for his memoirs and novels of the Holocaust, suddenly found himself in a microcosmic American nightmare. Returning to his room after a talk at a San Francisco hotel, he was dragged out of the elevator by a demented denier who attacked Mr. Wiesel and started yelling at him that he had to “tell the truth”—the truth, for this sick moron, being that the Holocaust didn’t happen.

According to the poster on Ziopedia (who used the same name as a New Jersey man arrested on Feb. 17 for the crime), the thug planned to forcibly convey Mr. Wiesel—whom he called “the Pope of the Holocaust religion”—into his hotel room (he claimed to have been stalking him for weeks), where he planned to torture him into “confessing” that the Holocaust and Mr. Wiesel’s account of his experiences in it were lies.

Fortunately, the cops intervened before Mr. Wiesel—who survived Hitler—could be tormented by one of Hitler’s modern Mini-Me’s.

My initial reaction was to place the blame on Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The Iranian president’s dimwit Holocaust-deniers’ “conference”—last month’s convocation of vicious Jew-hating clowns—served, for certain infantile goons, to validate and empower their drooling nuttery.

While it’s true that if Mr. Ahmadinejad hadn’t “enabled” this pinhead punk, Internet filth might have well done it, nonetheless, I think there’s something deeper than the Iranian connection behind this repellent incident.

For one thing, there’s the way that Holocaust denial has become a familiar weapon in the arsenal of a certain element of the “anti-Zionist” spectrum. They use Holocaust denial like Mr. Ahmadinejad does—as part of a strategy to delegitimize the state of Israel preliminary to wiping it “off the map.” The Holocaust deniers have in common with other anti-Zionists the belief that the Jewish state’s only legitimacy comes from the guilt of the West for mass murder. The Holocaust deniers say the same thing, ignoring the fact that Jews lived there for thousands of years and that the Balfour Declaration antedated the Holocaust by two decades—only they just say that the Holocaust didn’t happen; it was a fabrication used to guilt-trip the West.

But, as I said, I’ve come to think there’s something deeper here: I’ve come to think the assault on a Holocaust survivor is an extreme symptom of something very dark, something that extends beyond the sick paranoia of Holocaust-deniers: a subterranean, subtextual anger at Holocaust survivors. A resentment of their presence—because they’re still alive to remind us of our shame, the shame of Western civilization. A civilization that, in perverse form, gave birth to the Holocaust, and at the very least stood aside and allowed it to happen.

Resentment at Holocaust survivors? After all they’ve suffered? Yes, alas: They are uncomfortable reminders in their witness to the depth that human nature can fall to in what was regarded as one of the most highly civilized and cultured nation states in history. They tell us something that we don’t want to know about who we are as a species, and it’s not something that we want to be reminded of.

What’s more, Holocaust survivors are witness to the criminal indifference of the world. And they are Jewish. If only they’d go away.

They’re dying, but they’re still here. Their sight provokes some to physical violence, enrages those who want to believe in the goodness of man and a loving God. If only they’d go away.

Romney: Ignorant or Brain-Dead?

Let me append one further incident that I find in some way related to the attack on a Holocaust survivor by a Holocaust denier, because it involved another kind of denial of the truth—knowing indifference, which is perhaps even worse.

This was the lack of attention that was paid to the fact that Mitt Romney announced his Presidential candidacy at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn Michigan. As far as I know, only the National Council of Jewish Democrats protested the fact that Mr. Romney chose to honor in this way Hitler’s personal idol, the man from whom he absorbed the form and essence of his racist anti-Semitic ideology.

Yes, Ford made many serviceable cars, and his family later tried to make reparations for his worldwide hate campaign. But, as I point out in my book Explaining Hitler, no single person had more influence on the success of Hitler and the Nazi Party than Henry Ford with the influence of his vile publication The International Jew (a modernization of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion), his subsidies, and his international validation of murderous anti-Semitism as a modernist creed.

No wonder there was a life-sized portrait of Henry Ford in Hitler’s Munich Nazi party headquarters during his rise to power. It’s unlikely that you’ll find a life-sized portrait—or any hint—of Adolf Hitler in the Henry Ford Museum. But he’s there. Ford’s had less influence on history with his mass-production of cars than he did with his mass production of hate. It’s, as has been said in another context, an inconvenient truth.

It’s funny—while I haven’t read all the reports of the Romney event, I didn’t see any that recalled Henry Ford’s Hitler connection. Some may have, but for most it was too inconvenient, I guess. There were a few reports of the National Council of Jewish Democrats’ protest, but that was all; there wasn’t a single word of protest from any of the other candidates of either party, as far as I can tell.

Could Mr. Romney be so ignorant that he didn’t know Henry Ford’s history? I wouldn’t rule it out. But it’s worse if he did know it and chose the Ford Museum anyway. Some might argue it’s different in degree, but not in kind, from Ronald Reagan choosing the home base of the racist murderers of civil-rights workers in Mississippi as the venue for the first major speech of his Presidential campaign, or laying a wreath at Bitburg, where SS soldiers are buried.

His father, George Romney, was famous for saying he’d been “brainwashed.” The son sounds brain-dead. His Henry Ford appearance was as much of an assault on history, on truth, as the Holocaust denier’s attack on the inconvenient Holocaust survivor.

It’s fitting, then, that an English professor, Walter Benn Michaels, from the University of Illinois at Chicago, should be taking full aim at one of our age’s most characteristic—and most troubling—shifty linguistic turns: the bid to recast racial-cum-cultural conflict as a struggle to achieve “diversity.” A sweeping, unobjectionable and ultimately bland social ideal, diversity has smoothly supplanted more politically charged notions of equity and justice in debates over the material deficits in American racial and ethnic life. Nowhere was this elision more plain than in the symbolic crusade to diversify the racial and linguistic ranks of federal officialdom, initiated by the Clinton-era pledge to have a cabinet that “looked more like America”—an aim whose hollowness was promptly exposed by the Bush administration, which appointed a yet more racially diverse group of senior advisors to preside over far more divisive policies of malign economic neglect. What we want is not for cabinets to resemble the nation they serve, but rather for them to make that nation fairer, more equitable and less economically cruel.

But as Mr. Michaels notes in his sharply argued polemic The Trouble with Diversity, that tends to be the very point of the jargon of diversity: It allows us not to talk about the increasingly rigid partition of our society along class lines. For as we enthusiastically fine-tune our sensibilities about how cultural or racial groupings can best be spoken about or symbolized, most social goods in our country—health care, affordable housing and higher education, income support, a living wage—drift further and further out of reach for many ordinary Americans. This is far from accidental, Mr. Michaels says; the marketing of cultural diversity as a social desideratum has crowded out any clear understanding—especially on the left end of the political spectrum—of how class privilege operates in America today.

Examples abound, but Mr. Michaels correctly focuses on the fetishizing of racial difference—a tic shared among partisans of every ideological persuasion—as the key factor in the flight from a class-based politics. Mr. Michaels doesn’t deny the persistence of racism, but notes that it’s been significantly downgraded: “Racism has been privatized,” he writes, “converted from a political position into a personal failing.” And Americans romance nothing quite so ardently as remedies for a personal failing: The mandate to appreciate the anodyne ideal of “cultural diversity”—itself a labored euphemism for the defeat of structural racism—“gives us a vision of difference without equality,” since all cultures in this view of things are equally worthy of respect. And this central reverie, Mr. Michaels argues, means that “the political commitment to equality involves not creating it (by, say, redistributing wealth) but just insisting that it’s already there.”

This brazen lie has permitted the extravagant trade in corporate-sponsored diversity appreciation to flourish. Mr. Michaels notes, for example, that a former president of Dartmouth has used his office to sponsor anti-hate rallies on campus, and that a clutch of “heritage management firms” have set up shop to research older companies’ past racial transgressions and help manage the public-apology strategies for same. This is to say nothing of still crasser undertakings, like the “Show Me the Money Diversity Venture Capital Conference” and—yes—the “Diversity Rocks Classic Thong,” which permits its user both to “show your support for multiculturalism” and “put an end to panty lines.”

Perhaps if such excesses were simply exercises in commodifying one’s beliefs, they would be fairly unobjectionable—encouraging signs of progress, even, since one can only successfully market on a mass scale ideas that have decisively joined the mainstream. But as Mr. Michaels observes, diversity-speak does its greatest mischief when misapplied to social inequality. By adopting the passive tolerance preached by diversity consultants to matters of economic opportunity, we confuse the fundamental issue: “[W]e have started to treat economic difference as if it were cultural difference,” Mr. Michaels writes. “So now we’re urged to be more respectful of poor people and to stop thinking of them as victims, since to treat them as victims is condescending—it denies them their ‘agency.’ And if we stop thinking of the poor as people who have too little money and start thinking of them instead as people who have too little respect, then it’s our attitude toward the poor, not their poverty, that becomes the problem to be solved, and we can focus our efforts of reform not on getting rid of classes but on getting rid of what we like to call classism.”

(I should add that Mr. Michaels kindly acknowledges in a footnote some of my own published criticisms of the “classist” fallacy.)

In reality, of course, the whole notion of encouraging economic diversity is farcical: A sane view of social justice involves decreasing the number of poor people, and hence reducing economic diversity. “Indeed,” Mr. Michaels writes, “since economic diversity is just another name for economic inequality, it’s hard to see why we would want to promote it.”

And yet that’s precisely what much of the American left seems content to do—or at least to continue flogging the inert social facts of cultural diversity over and against any universalist view of economic justice. The diversity crusade—together with its gender-sensitive variants—has turned the American left into “something like the human resources department of the right,” Mr. Michaels argues. Instead of accepting the standard vision of a bitterly polarized right-and-left political landscape, he suggests that “we might more plausibly describe contemporary politics and contemporary political argument as nothing but a dispute between our reactionaries and our conservatives. The reactionaries are the ones who attack diversity, the conservatives are the ones who defend it; the reactionaries are the ones who think our inequalities are justified, the conservatives are the ones who think we don’t have any, or, more precisely, that the ones we do have are the products of prejudice, of treating people as if they were worse than we are.”

Such sentiments are bound to anger many bien-pensant liberals, who cleave to diversity rhetoric because it provides much the same powerful rush that “moral certainty” grants to propagandists for the war on terror. As Mr. Michaels puts it: “What American liberals want is for our conservatives to be racists …. We want a fictional George Bush who doesn’t care about black people rather than the George Bush we’ve actually got, one who doesn’t care about poor people.”

At times, Mr. Michaels does let his rhetoric run away with his argument, as when, inveighing against the idolatry of racial heritage for its own sake, he approvingly quotes Henry Ford’s toweringly smug maxim, “History is bunk.” (Of course, Mr. Michaels—a pillar of the “new historicist” school of literary criticism—cannot hew completely to Ford’s presentist nay-saying; he criticizes, for example, the counterfactual flourishes in Philip Roth’s recent fantasia of American anti-Semitism, The Plot Against America.) Still, he has produced that rarity in the present idea-starved forum of American political debate: a closely reasoned, genuinely impassioned call to revive a left politics of economic justice. Perhaps if enough people heed it, we can trade in the managed sensitivity of the human-resources department for a robust political movement that can at last start calling greed, privilege and class prerogative by their true names.

Chris Lehmann is an editor at CQ Weekly and the author of Revolt of the Masscult.

In this thorough and thoughtful biography, Steven Watts makes a compelling case that Ford was the greatest entrepreneur of the 20th century. A micro-manager, he selected a special steel containing vanadium, which made the Model T lightweight and durable. Recognizing the value of a continuous flow of production, he supervised the design and construction of the plant at Highland Park, which covered 65 acres, and the even more massive facility at River Rouge. He knew that work on assembly lines was mind- and body-numbing, the principal reason that turnover in his company in 1913 was 370 percent. Raising wages far above the market rate, therefore, “was a piece of efficiency engineering, too,” because it made arduous jobs attractive.

Ford harnessed the power of publicity, “literally baptizing civilization with the name Ford.” He raced cars himself and then hired Barney Oldfield to drive the Ford 999 in the Manufacturers’ Challenge Cup. Advertisements encouraged the notion that in America, as Will Rogers quipped, “a man’s castle is his sedan”—a Ford sedan. And the boss didn’t hesitate to use his pencil on ad copy to encourage an ethic of consumption: “Buy a Ford and Save the Difference” became “Buy a Ford and Spend the Difference.” Thanks in no small measure to Ford, Frederick Lewis Allen has written, thoroughfares throughout the United States in the 1920’s “bloomed with garages, filling stations, hot-dog stands, chicken-dinner restaurants, tearooms, tourists’ rests, camping sites, and affluence.”

Of course, Henry Ford had a dark side almost as black as the Model T. Mr. Watts’ Ford is a pioneer and a populist who, “like Citizen Kane, became a victim of his own powerful personality and great success.” A living symbol of progress through technology and respect for traditional values, he forged a bond with millions of Americans that “transcended all reason.” But over time, Ford’s populism mutated, from a “positive, idealistic form … into a negative doctrine that searched for enemies and subversive agents, an impulse that created a mindless anti-Semitism and a hostility to labor unions.”

As Mr. Watts suggests, Ford’s conservative behavior and beliefs and his much-ballyhooed affinity for ordinary folks resonated with Americans as they grappled with modern urban, industrial life. When he said he would rather distribute money to the boys in the factory than leave it to relatives, newspapers canonized him for bridging the chasm between workers and owners. A skilled self-promoter, Ford encouraged a cult of personality. “Into his car,” a publicist proclaimed, “Ford has put the truth, integrity, simplicity, sanity, and commonsense which he himself possesses.”

Ford extolled the virtues of farming, foot races, fence-jumping and ice-skating; he went on camping trips as one of “The Four Vagabonds” (the other three were Thomas Edison, Harvey Firestone and the naturalist John Burroughs). He didn’t smoke, drink, gamble or go to the movies. He abjured coffee, tea, sugar, red meat and pasteurized milk. Even his quixotic pursuit of peace during World War I had its endearing side. Blaming the conflict on perfidious politicians and profiteering parasites, insisting on a referendum as a precondition for a declaration of war, he lent his prestige and pocketbook to a “Peace Ship” to bring mediators to Europe. Ford was, the New York Tribune declared, a “gentle fool who lives and feels and believes with the common man.”

His reputation was tarnished—and in many quarters destroyed—by revelations about anti-Semitism and union-busting behavior. The Dearborn Independent, the platform for Ford’s public pronouncements, endorsed The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and printed piece after piece about Jews as “The World’s Problem.” He was sued for libel, feigned ignorance about the content of his own newspaper, and then threw in the towel with a cash settlement and an apology.

During the 1930’s, Ford believed that a cabal consisting of the DuPonts, Jewish bankers and Franklin Roosevelt had created unions to control industry. He refused to cooperate with the National Recovery Administration or to negotiate with the U.A.W.; he hired an anti-union thug as his chief of security and gave him authority over labor relations. Not surprisingly, the Ford Motor Company became the site of strife and strikes.

According to Mr. Watts, most Americans “preferred to remember the earlier Ford,” the man of modest tastes, partial to proles, the “loyal friend and defender of ordinary citizens.” Did they? And was there really “an earlier Ford”?

Except for an over-the-top animosity toward Wall Street, Henry Ford was never much of a populist. Nor did his views change substantially during his long life. Success didn’t spoil him: He was always, the evidence suggests, a “history is bunk” bigot—a know-nothing, anti-union, anti-government paternalist, self-absorbed, autocratic and often mean-spirited. Ford, we can agree, deserves the title Fortune magazine bestowed on him (“Businessman of the Century”), and he deserves the respectful, if unblinkered, treatment that he receives in The People’s Tycoon. But we don’t have to swallow the Watts line that he was a progressive good guy gone (far) right.

Glenn C. Altschuler is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Professor of American Studies at Cornell University.

"It was a beautiful piece of land in the estate area on Lake Agawam," said Joan Abrahams of Sotheby's International Realty when asked to describe the new property she sold to Ms. Ford.

It's a lot smaller than the lavish estate in Southampton she's selling now. That house, a 1970 French stucco-style mansion, sits on 7.4 acres with private beach access on Squabble Lane and features six bedrooms, five and a half bathrooms and a separate two-bedroom guest cottage. Other amenities include a tennis court, swimming pool with a pool house, garden, eat-in kitchen, three fireplaces and a three-car garage.

Peter Hallock, the president of Allan M. Schneider Associates, which is selling Ms. Ford's Squabble Lane spread, was not available for comment.

When Ms. Ford finds a buyer for her Squabble Lane home, they will share the same Southampton block with tennis-heckler-turned-sports-commentator John McEnroe, who bought a neighboring two-acre, eight-bedroom perch for $4.2 million in 1999.

Ms. Ford's new property, which was subdivided from a two-acre plot, features private access to Lake Agawam, and is known for its meticulously maintained gardens. Brokers familiar with the property say that Ms. Ford plans to build a new residence.

Ms. Ford was unavailable to comment on her Southampton Village purchase.

Her most recent real-estate move is part of a long Ford family history in the Hamptons. In Southampton, Henry Ford built his sprawling, 16,000-square-foot beachfront compound, Fordune, which originally spread across 227 prime beachfront acres before the family sold off the property in 1975. The massive European chateau-style home was known as one of the most exquisite properties in the Hamptons and featured a 48-foot living room with French parquet floors, molded ceilings with chandeliers and Italian marble fireplaces, and landscaped gardens on the beachfront grounds.

In January 2002, Carlo Traglio, an Italian businessman who bought the mansion in 1975 from Mr. Ford's ex-wife, Anne McDonnell, for an astonishingly low $1.8 million, sold the former Ford residence for $21.7 million-well below the $35 million asking price.

Tommy Mottola, the venerated pop-music hit-maker, former Sony Music chief and ex–Mariah Carey beau, is used to churning out chart-topping acts-except when it comes to Manhattan real estate. In his beleaguered attempts to sell his lavish 9 East 64th Street apartment, which occupies four floors of a 35-foot-wide townhouse, Mr. Mottola bombed. While the quadruplex apartment was rumored to have sold for more than $20 million, city records show that in September, Mr. Mottola sold his 11,000-square-foot condo for $13.8 million-well below its original stratospheric asking price of $34 million. In 1999, Mr. Mottola purchased the former apartment of DreamWorks co-founder David Geffen for $13.3 million, before he dramatically renovated the apartment with shining marble and a new high-tech security system. Brokers familiar with the apartment say that Mr. Mottola invested more than $10 million in the renovation, which included a new kitchen, imported marble and a landscaped rear garden. The new owner of Mr. Mottola's 64th Street mansion purchased the apartment through a corporate name, city records show.

Mr. Mottola, the head of Casablanca Records, first put the mansion on the market for $34 million back in November 2002 with celebrity broker Deborah Grubman. After failing to garner interest from prospective buyers, Mr. Mottola reduced the price to $29 million in November, and then down to its final asking price, a modest $27 million, in January.

Ms. Grubman of the Corcoran Group, who had the exclusive listing, declined to comment. Through a spokesperson, Mr. Mottola declined to comment on his 64th Street tank.

The four-floor apartment covers more than 11,000 square feet and features eight bedrooms, nine and a half baths and an open country kitchen. Monthly maintenance charges run to more than $10,000.

"For that amount of money, potential buyers didn't want somebody sharing the elevator," said a broker who had recently shown the spread. "The price was outrageous."

But Mr. Mottola's recent real-estate transactions should have numbed him to the sting of selling at more than a 50 percent loss from his asking price. Mr. Mottola took advantage of a soft market last November, when he landed ex-Tyco executive Mark Swartz's duplex penthouse at 30 East 85th Street for $9.25 million-much lower than the apartment's $15.9 million asking price. And after scoring that steal, Mr. Mottola just sold his 19,500-square-foot Miami estate to Sean (P. Diddy) Combs, the hip-hop impresario turned marathon runner, for a reported $20 million. Back in 1999-one year after his split from Ms. Carey-Mr. Mottola unloaded his unfinished Central Park West condo to Amazon.com chief Jeff Bezos for $7.65 million, which was $350,000 less than what Mr. Mottola had paid for the three conjoined condos four months previously. Mr. Mottola's vast real-estate holdings, which span from Florida to Westchester County, have been hit by the fluctuations at the highest end of the luxury real-estate market.

At East 64th Street, Mr. Mottola's lavish quadruplex sits on one of the most exclusive-and expensive-blocks in Manhattan. In the past two years, more than $100 million in real estate has hit the market on 64th Street on the blocks between Fifth Avenue and Park Avenue: most notably, the townhouse for Edgar Bronfman Jr., the new Warner Music chief (asking price: $40 million), and Guy Wildenstein's double-wide mansion at 11-13 East 64th Street (asking price: $35 million). Both properties have since been taken off the market, but 22 East 64th Street, the 25-foot-wide mansion owned by the estate of the late Lillian Berkman, is still up for grabs for a paltry $19.5 million. Fred Williams, of Sotheby's International Realty, has the listing.

Recent Transactions in the Real Estate Market

UPPER EAST SIDE

443 East 87th Street

Five-bedroom, seven-bathroom townhouse.

Asking: $3.75 million. Selling: $3.45 million.

Time on the market: seven months.

COMMUTER SCIENCE Buyers in Manhattan usually factor in their commute when they decide to purchase new real estate, and close proximity to work is a big selling point for apartments near midtown's office towers. So when these two therapists found this Upper East Side townhouse, where they could run their practice on the ground level and live on the upper floors, the short "commute" had them sold. "The fact they could put their practice downstairs was a big plus," said Lydia Rosengarten of Leslie J. Garfield, who represented the sellers, a stockbroker and a fashion designer in their 40's. "We had a long contract period while they sold their midtown office, but in the end, they really wanted the new place," Ms. Rosengarten said. Paula Del Nunzio of Brown Harris Stevens represented the buyers, who had been living in midtown near their psychology practice. The couple, both in their 50's, will see patients in the comfort of their recently renovated 5,200-square-foot townhouse. The five-bedroom home on a tree-lined block near First Avenue features hardwood floors, four wood-burning fireplaces, a modern open kitchen on the parlor floor, high ceilings, open sliding glass windows and a landscaped rear garden.

UPPER WEST SIDE

200 Riverside Boulevard

Two-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bathroom condo.

Asking: $1.2 million. Selling: $1.21 million.

Time on the market: 61 days.

VIEWS TRUMP ALL Residents of the Upper West Side are known for being ardent boosters of the leafy neighborhood's convenient amenities, such as close proximity to two parks and prime shopping along Broadway, not to mention the smoked salmon at Zabar's and the deli counter at Barney Greengrass. So when this newly married couple in their 30's was about to start a family, they knew they didn't want to move far from their one-bedroom condo near Broadway. The Wall Street husband and his attorney wife found their answer in a two-bedroom condo at the newly built Trump Place on the corner of Riverside Boulevard and 70th Street. "They needed a bigger place, but the real draw for them at Trump was the views from their 43rd-floor apartment,"said Lawrence Schier of the Corcoran Group, who had the exclusive. The seller, who's in his late 20's and works in finance, had relocated to California and needed to unload his Trump spread. The newlyweds will now enjoy direct views of Central Park, the George Washington Bridge, downtown Manhattan and the Empire State Building. The 1,350-square-foot apartment also features nine-foot ceilings, herringbone-patterned hardwood floors, a windowed kitchen and marble baths-and, like all of Mr. Trump's hotel-like developments, the building offers access to the building's health club and a concierge service.

GREENWICH VILLAGE

2 Horatio Street

One-bedroom, one-bathroom co-op.

Asking: $549,000. Selling: $540,000.

Maintenance: $1,037; 57 percent tax-deductible.

Time on the market: nine months.

bing- bling ! With cutting-edge design stores such as Marc Jacobs and the Italian furniture-maker Vitra in the nearby meatpacking district, this artistic interior designer in her 20's felt right at home in this, her new West Village one-bedroom. And her design studio is in the West 20's, only a short subway ride away. "She had a friend in the building, so it was a perfect match for her," said J. Arnstein of Douglas Elliman, who represented the buyer along with fellow Douglas Elliman broker Frank Lemann. In addition to being in the heart of the hip West Village, the young designer also scored a spread in the sought-after Bing and Bing building, one of the neighborhood's residential landmarks. The storied Bing and Bing development company, one of the icons of Manhattan real estate from the early 20th century, built hotels and apartments after its founding in 1906, including tony buildings on Park Avenue, along with four properties in the West Village like this Art Deco number. The 800-square-foot apartment at 2 Horatio features a wood-burning fireplace, beamed nine-foot ceilings, oak floors and three walk-in closets, and the designer plans to renovate the kitchen to match her refined tastes. Edward Korn, also of Douglas Elliman, represented the seller.

And there will be nods to the hundreds who've followed, as if that were something to boast about.

Fifty years is actually a very long time to an ingenious race. Fifty years after the internal combustion engine, Henry Ford perfected the Model T. Fifty years after the Wright brothers, ordinary Americans could cross the Atlantic on a whim. Fifty years after the double helix, we have miracle cures and Dolly the sheep.

Nothing like that can be said of Everest. We might have expected a river of humanity to follow the brave climbers-there's been barely a trickle. Base camp is barred to all but a handful of the enterprising rich, and the trail up from there remains chancy and vertiginous. When postman Doug Hansen dared to reprise Sir Edmund's feat in 1996, he slipped woozily to his death from the summit, even as eight others died in a horror show of reckless guides and sudden weather. Everest's slopes are littered with corpses in various states of glaciation, and the South Col has become a landfill for oxygen bottles, crampons, and excrement.

For all those who say that '53 is a monument to human daring, how many will acknowledge that the years since have been a monument to human diffidence?

I believe it's time we commit ourselves to the proposition that even an ordinary person has the right to say, "I climbed Everest, too." It's time that a road is built up the mountain.

It goes without saying that a highway up Everest is a daunting task. "If there's a will, there's probably a way," Jim Spaid, the roadway construction engineer for the State of Washington, concedes. "But it would have to be a very strong will."

Fair enough, but it's not like Ed Hillary woke up one day 50 years ago and decided he was going to climb Mount Everest. The British had sent major expeditions up the hill for more than 30 years before that. A lot of money was spent, several men lost their lives (notably George Mallory, who said, "Because it's there.").

The Times of London was firmly behind the project, as I think the television networks would have to be now if my idea is to gain any traction. "Everyone to Everest" would require the cooperation of several governments, and an international coalition to apply pressure to the balky, backward Nepalis (though if such a coalition did not materialize, America could do it on its own, calling the Brits to their former glory, too).

It's no stretch to say that Detroit is willing. Television ads that show S.U.V.'s navigating absurd terrains would seem to have Everest as a not so-hidden agenda. Bob Wilson of the Colorado Department of Transportation says that cars will sputter in thin air over 16,000 feet, but the answer to that is that Mallory died in, '24 in tweed and hobnail boots; a successful summit involved the perfection of a lot of new gear, from Primus stoves to down jackets to crampons, and this job will demand similar innovations.

The market is huge. What wouldn't Donald Trump, or you or I, pay for a drink at a bar on the South Col with its majestic views? Licensing of Everest and Everest Road images would be tightly controlled, even the sale of bumper stickers saying "This Car Climbed Everest" (or if that's not to your taste, a round white sticker for the rear windshield, with a black circle and the letters EVT).

A doubter says, "It's one thing to get a highway up to Base Camp at 17,000 feet following trekking trails, but after that, there is the Khumbu Glacier and Icefall, a matrix of crevasses in which house-sized pieces of ice tumble hundreds of feet. How do you get a car through that?"

I'm no engineer, but roadmakers have tackled challenges that rival the shoulders of Everest. There are frozen roads on permafrost in Alaska and a cog railway and road to the top of Pike's Peak in Colorado, which is half Everest's height. Shelf roads in Colorado have been blasted on 80-degree slopes, says CDOT's Wilson.

"You could save yourself a lot of trouble by tunneling under the Khumbu," says Rob Buchanan, a contributing editor to Outside magazine. "The French have punched many holes through the Alps, including under Mont Blanc."

As for the knife edge of the southeastern summit ridge, Mr. Buchanan recommends flattening portions of it. "This road could save a lot of lives," he says.

The real obstacle here is not granite, it's a 50-year failure of imagination. Henry Ford was mocked in his time when he dreamed that every household should have a working car, now it is our turn to imagine the schoolgirl in kickpleats and the wrinkled war veteran alike, stepping from the bus, their faces lit up by the highest light the world has to offer.

A blueprint, a blasting cap, a switchback or two, and there you are, atop the Hillary Step.

Let them hump it from there, I say. Let our little road curl to a halt, and the Explorers and Aztecs park on a slant at the overlook. Preserve the summit exactly as Sir Edmund and Tenzing found it, we should commit ourselves to that now, and demand the same commitment from the Chinese, if they build a road from the north, as I expect they will.

Still, this being one of the world's great spaces, one can't help but envision touches that frame the experience: Sherpas in maroon pantaloons and perhaps even some gold braid to accompany people the last hundred feet, white George Segal figures of Sir Edmund and Tenzing outside an educational center something like the natural-looking centers in stone and beams that the Interior Department has helped to build that blend into the landscape at some of the Indian reservations out west, and a gift shop selling black-and-white postcards showing where Mallory sleeps, where Jon Krakauer napped while Beck Weathers froze, where Sandy Pittman did or did not get short-roped.

This is big, I know, this is big big big, this is where big goes when bigger has gone off to bed and biggest is just a littleness on the valley floor. But dream with me, dare, step out, imagine, and for anyone with a breath of discouragement, two words: revolving restaurant.