Whitcomb: Ambiguities of Patriotism; Nonstop Nimbys; When Gangsters Reign; ‘Social Housing’

Sunday, July 02, 2023

Robert Whitcomb, Columnist

 

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Robert Whitcomb, columnist

“What luxury, to be so happy

that we can grieve

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over imaginary lives.’’

-- From “Late Hours,’’ by Lisel Mueller (1924-2020), German-American poet

 

 

 

“What I remember

hardly happened;

what they say happened

I hardly remember.’’

-- Linda Pastan (1932-2023), American poet

 

 

 

 “A real patriot is the fellow who gets a parking ticket and rejoices that the system works.”

-- William E. (“Bill”)  Vaughan (1915-1977), American newspaper columnist 

 

 

 

Problematic Patriotism

Especially on “The Glorious Fourth,’’ we’re all supposed to say we’re proud to be Americans, though most of us became citizens through the accident of birth; we didn’t choose to be here, however much we like it or not. Of course, there are some American things to be “proud of’’’ and some to be ashamed of.  (I’ve never quite gotten all this “proud” stuff – “proud to have blue eyes,’’ “proud to be black and gay,”  “Pride Week,’’ etc.

 

 

“Proud to exist”?

(It’s one of those quirky things, such as religious believers and their clergies saying that they firmly believe such and such dead person is heading to eternal joy in heaven even as they call the death a tragedy.  And why have so many people become so afraid of death that more and more of them say someone “passed’’ instead of died? That reminds me of when writers of newspaper obituaries were warned by survivors, funeral homes and editors not to give “cancer” as the cause of death. Too scary. It was almost as if  they feared using the word would give them the disease.)

 

 

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PHOTO: File

I’ve never been particularly patriotic in the “my country right or wrong’’ way. Rather, I’m “proud’’ to say that I support the principles of liberal democracy and open societies that originated in Western Europe and are always under attack, including, increasingly, in the United States in the past few years.

 

To me, the real patriots are those who openly recognize America’s good and bad elements and try to help make the nation more just, fair and prosperous, not those who wrap themselves in flags and yell “USA! USA! USA!’’.

 

Don’t blow off your fingers with an illegal M-80 on Tuesday! When I was a kid, we often set off our July 4 explosives on a beach -- less chance of starting a conflagration. I still can smell the rich mingled aromas of black powder and seaweed.

 

 

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Vineyard in Newport PHOTO: GoLocal

A Newport friend, responding to my recent remarks about making New England more self-sufficient in food by expanding the number and size of the region’s farms, made a good point I should have included: Worsening climate change threatens food production in such agribusiness regions as the Midwest, California’s Central Valley and Florida. So we might have to grow more of our own food. Happily, New England’s climate is predicted to be generally congenial for farming in the coming decades.

 

 

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I wonder if the Supremes’ banning the consideration of race in college admissions will lead to young people of color being denied admission because of their color.

 

 

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The soothing whirr of a distant prop airplane as I sleepily sit outside on a summer day takes me back to the ‘50s.

 

 

 

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Offshore Wind PHOTO: Deepwater

The Precious Cape

There ought to be more focus on the general public interest and less on taking orders from local groups.

 

Consider a few foes of transmission lines from long, long, long delayed offshore wind-power projects off Martha’s Vineyard. The plan is to lay these transmission lines from underwater to shoreline points on the Cape, from which the electricity would be fed into the New England grid. The cables would be buried deep under the beaches. Vineyard Wind would send juice to under Covell’s Beach (residents-only parking!), in  Craigville; Commonwealth Wind to under Dowses Beach (residents-only parking!), in Osterville, as well as to under Craigville Beach, and SouthCoast Wind to under a beach in Falmouth after it first lays a line to Brayton Point, in Somerset.

 

 

These routes make engineering, economic and environmental sense, allowing the use of less expensive transmission lines to the Cape’s recently improved grid infrastructure because the peninsula is so close to the wind farms. Most importantly, these wind farms would make New England more energy-independent (finally!) and take a bite out of the global warming caused by fossil-fuel burning. (Enjoying the Canadian smoke?) And it indirectly means less money for such fossil-fuel despotisms as Russia and Saudi Arabia.

 

The higher the construction costs pumped up by Nimby opposition, the higher the electric rates for everyone. (Should people near new transmission lines be bribed with free electricity? Just kidding?)

 

It’s the same old Nimby rhetoric. For example, Susanne Conley, of the rich summer resort town of Osterville,  is leading a bunch of people seeking to block the line coming under Dowses Beach, telling Commonwealth Magazine (link below): “Let’s slow this down. Let’s do it right. It’s just a beautiful Cape Cod treasure.’’ Slow it down?! Offshore wind projects off southern New England have moved with the speed of molasses in a freeze amidst relentless environmental and other reviews.

 

Then there’s Dave Buzanoski, president of the Falmouth Heights-Maravista Neighborhood Association, who told Commonwealth: “There are better sites. This power is needed basically on the mainland and there is no reason for it to come via Cape Cod.’’ Yes, there are very sound reasons for the lines to come into the Cape, as anyone who looks  at the engineering, economic and environmental aspects of these projects well knows. And Nimbys like Mr. Buzanoski  assert that “there are better sites,’’ without getting very specific.

 

It recalls the late Louisiana Sen. Russell Long’s famous poem:

 

“Don’t tax you,
Don’t tax me,
Tax that fellow behind the tree.’’

 

 

By the way, I find assertions by some Nimbys that Cape Cod is some sort of a pristine and of course quaint paradise that would be ruined by a few buried transmission lines hilarious. Part of my family has lived on the Cape (mostly in and around Falmouth) since the mid-17th Century and I’ve been going down there all my life. I’ve watched it go from rural to exurban and suburban sprawl, in part because of the influx of full- and part-time residents like some of today’s Nimbys.

 

Because of Americans’  sometimes pathological litigiousness and excessive power granted to localities, state and federal governments have far too often let infrastructure projects important for the general welfare be killed or delayed for ages by local interests, especially including the affluent and politically connected people thick in coastal resort towns. Some in state government forget or ignore that towns and cities are legal children of the states, whose leaders are supposed to make addressing their states’ broad public interest paramount.
 

Thus America has slipped in infrastructure quality in recent years, with the World Economic Forum's Global Competitiveness Report ranking it the 13th in the world in a broad measure of infrastructure quality—down from fifth place in 2002.

 

“Liberal” southern New England has been a particularly difficult place to build big stuff, including renewable-energy projects. The last big infrastructure work was Boston’s “Big Dig” highway project, built in 1991-2007.

 

Hit this link to read the Commonwealth Magazine article:

 

 

 

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IMAGE: US DOT

More happily, consider the recent collapse of a section of Interstate Route 95 in Philadelphia. That disaster, on the main street of the East Coast, presented such urgent inconveniences and costs that strong state and federal leadership has led to remarkably fast rebuilding.   Kudos to  U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro for their leadership in this situation. Can the country regain its reputation as a country where big projects can be done? Its future prosperity depends on it. Hit this link:

 

 

 

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Putin IMAGE: Russian News Feed

When It’s Government of Men, Not Laws

Consider the brief mutiny led by Yevgeny Prigozhin, the mass-murdering kleptocrat who has led Russia’s notorious Wagner Group mercenary army.  Prigozhin’s mutiny, or revolt, against Vladimir Putin’s homicidal regime, or maybe just against the Russian military,  vividly displayed what Russia is: a mafia state, without true constitutional law and order, with Chief Thug Putin ruling through a mix of fear (intensified by his propensity to murder political foes) and money.

 

These are deeply evil people.

 

A weakness of such dictatorships is that they don’t bend, as well-established democracies usually do, amidst jarring events and such shifting winds as public opinion, but rather crack when under extreme stress. Then often comes violent chaos. That’s what might have happened during and after the mutiny,  when it seemed that civil war was possible. Wishful-thinking Americans drawn to our own would-be autocrats might reflect on that.

 

I suppose that there’s a good chance that Putin will have Prigozhin murdered in Belarus, where the Wagner chief has reportedly moved in a mysterious deal with Belarussian tyrant Alexander Lukashenko, a Putin vassal.

 

 

‘Social Housing’

Massachusetts state Rep. Michael Connolly has an interesting proposal to help address the housing crisis: state government-funded mixed-income development. Mr. Connolly would have the state set up a $100 million “social housing’’ fund, raised through a state-issued bond sale. The money from this would help localities build housing that would be available to lower-income, middle class and affluent people. The higher-income folks’ bigger rents would provide money to send back to the state, which would then go on to finance the construction of more housing, in a virtuous circle.

 

“These projects could target one-third of the units for lower-income residents, one-third for more of the middle income and maybe one-third for more of that market-rate or higher income type of tenants,’’ he told WGBH radio.

 “If the public builds mixed-income housing, there is more money on the balance sheet and so that can allow for programs that are more sustainable and more scalable,” he said.

 

Here’s the WGBH interview:

 

 


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Trump said last week that his older daughter, Ivanka, and her husband, Jared Kushner, both mega-grifters, won’t be working for him again in the White House if the galactic-scale grifting orange monster regains power. But with all that money coming to the couple from the Saudis, etc., as a result of their 2017-2021 influence-peddling why bother to return to the embarrassments of an Oval Office occupied by a sociopath? I  assume that the glamorous duo will share some of their foreign loot with others in their clan and their retainers.

 

 

 

How to Do History

The late great popular historian Barbara Tuchman’s (1912-1989) book Practicing History: Selected Essays offers very engaging commentaries on what a historian’s craft involves mixed with her reflections on some of the historical events, eras and personalities she wrote about so eloquently.

 

I’m thinking about her now because it’s the time of year when World War I broke out, leading to cataclysmic change. Her book The Guns of August is one of the most memorable narratives about the catastrophe.

 

You’ll understand that work better by also reading what you might call Ms. Tuchman’s prequel to it: The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914. The  title of the book comes from Edgar Allan Poe’s poem "The City in the Sea,’’  two chilling lines of which are "While from a proud tower in the town/ Death looks gigantically down."

Robert Whitcomb is a veteran editor and writer. Among his jobs, he has served as the finance editor of the International Herald Tribune, in Paris; as a vice president and the editorial-page editor of The Providence Journal; as an editor and writer in New York for The Wall Street Journal,  and as a writer for the Boston Herald Traveler (RIP). He has written newspaper and magazine essays and news stories for many years on a very wide range of topics for numerous publications, has edited several books and movie scripts and is the co-author of among other things, Cape Wind.


 

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