Whitcomb: Blind Attacks; Toxic Melt; Too Slow on Housing Option;  Spring Wet-Pollution Peril; Undertones on Ski Trip

Whitcomb: Blind Attacks; Toxic Melt; Too Slow on Housing Option;  Spring Wet-Pollution Peril; Undertones on Ski Trip

 

“the first glimmer comes, then a glow
filters through the misty trees,
then the bold sun rises, then
everyone starts bustling about.’’

From “For the Bird Singing Before Dawn,’’ by Kim Stafford (born 1949), American poet and essayist

GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLAST

 Here’s the whole poem:

 

 

Here’s a reading of “Last Patch of Snow,’’ by George Abbe (1911-89),  American poet and novelist

 

 

“I rather think the cinema will die. Look at the energy being exerted to revive it—yesterday it was color, today three dimensions. I don’t give it forty years more. Witness the decline of conversation. Only the Irish have remained incomparable conversationalists, maybe because technical progress has passed them by.’’

 -- Orson Welles (1915-1985), American filmmaker and actor, in 1953

  

 

“Civilization, as we know it, is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbor. ‘’

-- Arnold Toynbee (1889-1975), English historian

 

  

“A Jewish man with parents alive is a fifteen-year-old boy,  and will remain a fifteen-year-old boy till they die!’’

-- Philip Roth (1933-2018),  American novelist

 

 

How nice to feel the sun warming your face, hear birdsong and even the tickling of an early-spring insect landing on your forehead.

 

 

Once wars are started, we enter a world of deep uncertainty and unpredictability, whatever the assertions/predictions of those, such as the bombastic and often astoundingly ignorant Donald Trump, who start them. We enter what the great Prussian army officer and military  theorist Claus von Clausewitz (1780-1831) called “the fog of war.’’

 

Winston Churchill (1874-1965), who fought in the Boer War and World War I and led Britain during most of World War II, called war a “strange voyage” in which political and military leaders become “slaves of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events,’’

 

Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969), who led D-Day, said: “I always remember the observation of a very successful soldier who said, ‘Peace-time plans are of no particular value, but peace-time planning is indispensable,’’ meaning that once troops hit the beach., anything can happen, but the act of planning  -- centering on the consideration of options and contingencies -- makes leaders better prepared to adapt amidst the often chaotic variables of war.

 

What does Trump want from the war on Iran he launched last weekend? I’d guess the installation of a nonterrorist dictator, Islamist-Fascist or more secular, with whom America, or at least Trump and his circle, can do highly profitable business and who won’t physically threaten us.  Then it would be Trump hotels and casinos lighting up the skies over Tehran!  Tyrants are much simpler to deal with than a messy democracy.  Indeed, Trump prefers to deal with dictators, in fact is trying to become one himself, with some success.

 

And I wonder how the war will affect the Orange Oligarch’s ties with his highly disciplined and murderous colleague Putin:  After all,  Russia has been a long-time close ally of its fellow tyranny Iran, which has been selling the Kremlin missiles and drones with which to kill Ukrainians.

 

Our regime has floated the idea of sending Kurdish separatists into Iran to stir up things, say by cooking up a civil war. The Kurds have long fought to have their own independent, or at least strongly autonomous, state in their homeland – which comprises parts of Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran. From time to time, we’ve helped them battle regimes there – and then abandoned them.

 

This doesn’t look like a fine way to win the hearts and minds of the general Iranian population, already sharply divided, such as between urban residents, who are relatively secular, liberal and democratic, and rural people, who tend to the biggest supporters of the Islamo-Fascist dictatorship that has brutally misruled Iran since 1979.

 

How many U.S policymakers really understand the ancient nation of Iran/Persia? Not many. Certainly not our leader. People who used to work for him have reported that even a one-page executive summary is usually a bit too much for him.  He doesn’t read books and knows little history.  His favorite activities are watching and being on TV and putting chaotic, bragging and hate-and-lie-filled messages on the Internet in the middle of the night. (He may be evil, but he sure has manic energy!)

 

Meanwhile, news that FBI Director Kash Patel fired members of an elite counter-espionage unit that specializes in Iran has lowered our confidence further.

 

So welcome to “the fog of war.’’

Good luck.

 

 

More of These Fast,  Please

I was sorry to read in GoLocal that one potentially fast way to address the lack of housing in densely populated Rhode Island isn’t going very fast – the recent streamlining of the process for approving those small accessory dwelling units that can be built in, say, backyards, or converted from garages. Only 82 ADU certifications of occupancy were issued in 2025.

 

These units offer particular benefits to low-and-middle-income people and elderly people who want/need to downsize and/or might want to live next to their children and  grandchildren. In any case, growing economic challenges are increasing the number of multi-generational extended families living together to share expenses. They were much more common before World War II.

 

When I look at our little backyard, the idea of putting a little house there is inviting – a cozy quiet little place in which to read and brood.

 

 

xxx

 

I hope that we get lots of rain in the next few weeks to quickly wash away the snow-and-ice-melting road salt that threatens to lay waste to plants along the roads. But maybe that’s not a good idea?  Much of this salt will end up in bodies of fresh and salt water, whose ecosystems it will damage. Pray for the development of new environmentally friendlier melters that cost no more than salty ones. Made from plants?

 

Snow, however beautiful it can be when fresh-fallen, is  a powerful dirt and pollution collector.

 

The Rhode Island Department of the Environment warns:

 

“As snow melts, road salt, sand, litter, and other pollutants are transported into surface water or through the soil where they may eventually reach the groundwater. Road salt and other pollutants can contaminate water supplies and are toxic to aquatic life at certain levels. Sand washed into waterbodies can create sand bars or fill in wetlands and ponds, impacting aquatic life, causing flooding, and affecting our use of these resources.’’

 

People are supposed to alert the agency if they want/need to dump snow in public waterways.

 

Given the gargantuan snowstorm of Feb. 22-24, Spring will be particularly polluted this year hereabouts as all this stuff melts and is dumped.

 

 

A Semi-Innocent’s Road Trip

This time of year reminds me of spring skiing in Vermont and New Hampshire, bouncing down the mountain on that melting granular stuff, called “corn snow,’’ in the warming sunshine.

 

Back around 1957 I joined several of the kids of a large family and their very vivacious and seemingly very married mother on a trip to Cannon Mountain  (home of such wonderfully named trails as “Polly’s Folly”) and the broader northern New Hampshire/Vermont area.  When we got up there, a dashing man in an MG joined our group. While he was very nice to all, I sensed something, er special, was going on between him and the mother.

 

The mother eventually got divorced and married this rich, apparently charming, and handsome, man; her previous husband was merely rich. But this marriage didn’t last either. I visited her many years later, when she was running an inn she had converted from a mansion near the village center of a beautiful and affluent New England town, apparently with the help of a boyfriend she was living with. She was mellow, still very funny and, in a way, sexy.

 

Another highlight of the trip was our tour of what seemed to  be the world’s maple syrup and maple candy manufacturing capital – St. Johnsbury, Vt. -- during the height of sap season. Rich aromas! (Visit the wonderful Fairbanks Museum in that town: CLICK HERE

 

But my sharpest memory is how we were accompanied by that mysterious man. I thought of it many years later when reading L.P. Hartley’s novel The Go-Between, with its haunting opening:  "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.’’ Or is it more William Faulkner’s line “The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” from his novel Requiem for a Nun.

 

 

xxx

 

Every five or ten years, Rhode Island media recycle the same old stories about those  “colorful’’ days when the state hosted major Mafia operations, especially under the visionary leadership of CEO Raymond L.S. Patriarca. I guess that these reruns are mostly for newer arrivals.

 

That isn’t to deny that Rhode Island mob stories have been profitable,  via TV shows, movies and books, and brought tourist dollars to our area, especially to Providence’s Little Italy – Federal Hill -- and its many fine restaurants, such as Camille’s, a past favorite of crime execs as well as other diners whose appetites might be whetted by proximity to potential trouble. It’s still very good; I had lunch there last week.

 

Still. I’m sick of Rhode Island Mafia stories.