Whitcomb: Budapest Bellwether? Less Housing in Providence, More in Amherst; Copy Desk Czar

Whitcomb: Budapest Bellwether? Less Housing in Providence, More in Amherst; Copy Desk Czar

 

 

O CAPTAIN! my Captain! our fearful trip is done;

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The ship has weather'd every rack, the prize we sought is won;

The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,

While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring:

    But O heart! heart! heart!

      O the bleeding drops of red,

        Where on the deck my Captain lies,

          Fallen cold and dead.

 

O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;

Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills;

For you bouquets and ribbon'd wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding;

For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;

    Here Captain! dear father!

      This arm beneath your head;

        It is some dream that on the deck,

          You've fallen cold and dead.

  

My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still;

My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will;

The ship is anchor'd safe and sound, its voyage closed and done;

From fearful trip, the victor ship, comes in with object won;

    Exult, O shores, and ring, O bells!

      But I, with mournful tread,

        Walk the deck my Captain lies,

          Fallen cold and dead.

 

-- “O Captain! My Captain,’’ by Walt Whitman (1819-1892),  written in response to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, on April 15, 1865, by actor and fanatical Confederate supporter John Wilkes Booth (1838-1865,) a character who sounded a lot like those we see/hear now, especially online.

Is this poem florid enough for you?

 

 

“Jesters do oft prove prophets.’’

– William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

 

 

 

“Written laws are like spider webs: they will catch, it is true, the weak and poor but would be torn in pieces by the rich and powerful. ‘’

-- Anacharsis  (6^th Century B.C.)  Scythian philosopher

 

 

“In Washington, the first thing people tell you is what their job is. In Los Angeles you learn their star sign. In Houston you’re told how rich they are. And in New York they tell you what their rent is.’’

-- Simon Hoggart (1946-2014), English journalist (writing in 1990)

 

 

The explosion of plant life on warm April days can be astonishing! Meanwhile, the leaf-blower nightmare seems a bit weaker this year. Perhaps more people are accepting that they’re a public-health and environmental nightmare.

 

Many people seem to be in a great rush to get to summer. You see them walking around in T-shirts and shorts when it’s only 55.

 

 

A Second Wind for Democracy

“President Trump, like Mr. Orbán, no doubt believes that everyone can be bought.”

-- David Pressman, human-rights lawyer and U.S. ambassador to Hungary in the Biden administration

 

Hungary’s quasi-fascist prime minister Viktor Orban has done a great deal to try to stifle dissent by taking over much of the country’s media, eroding judicial independence,  suppressing universities whose people might criticize him, and by implying that his ally (or boss) Vladimir Putin might do nasty things to Orban's foes. But thankfully, he and his thugs had not yet reached the level of dictatorship where free elections could be prevented from removing his larcenous Trump-style regime from power.
 

(The Open Society Foundations (OSF),  a pro-democracy, anti-corruption and human-rights network and its founder, American investor, Hungarian native and Holocaust survivor George Soros, have been particular targets of Orban. Orban drove the OSF out of Hungary, as well as the prestigious Central European University, which Mr. Soros founded in Budapest in 1991 as part of his effort to promote democracy and a well-informed civil society after Eastern Europe cast off  Soviet control. The university moved to Vienna. Brown University has a Soros Fellowship for New Americans.)

 

What happened in Hungary has been mirrored in America as the Trump regime has sought to punish philanthropies whose missions it opposes with such weapons as threatening to yank their nonprofit IRS status;   gone after judges whose decisions they dislike, and threatened and punished news media whose accurate reporting the regime fears.
 

The victory of Peter Magyar’s center-right party in last week’s election gives hope that the increasingly unhinged Trump’s traitorous, thieving and lie-based regime can one day be stopped from doing further damage to America’s semi-democracy. 
 

Lessons of  the victory of Mr. Magyar’s Tisza Party  include the fact that his campaign very effectively and overwhelmingly focused on the Orban regime’s corruption and growing tyranny. The new prime minister  summoned up Hungarians’ courage and pride in the face of threats by the Kremlin-connected regime: “Be not afraid’’ was his rallying slogan.

 

Some leaders of Hungary’s civil society showed a lot more courage than have many leaders of such American institutions as major law firms, corporations, universities and philanthropies.  They knuckled down when Trump and his crew threatened them. The bribes (campaign donations) and other appeasement by U.S. big business recall the support that German companies gave to Hitler.

 

The  Tisza Party also wisely avoided such divisive social issues as gay and trans rights, and spent considerable resources in campaigning in rural areas with “low-information” voters (like many Trump voters) that have been Orban’s base.  Again, they kept their campaign themes simple – stop corruption and tyranny!

 

Mr. Magyar is a strong backer of closer ties with Hungary’s fellow members of the European Union and NATO. Orban sabotaged many initiatives to build up Western defenses, especially regarding Ukraine, even as the E.U. was heavily subsidizing Hungary, whose economy has suffered grievously from Orban’s mismanagement and corruption.

 

Thus the election was very good news for the West as European nations seek to strengthen themselves in the face of threats from Russia and elsewhere with the realization that  they must swiftly move away from an increasingly bizarre and unpredictable America.  Speaking of corruption, after Mr. Magyar’s election, the Hungarian foreign ministry was reportedly found to be destroying many documents. My guess is that these documents included information about Orban-Putin-Trump deals.

 

Interestingly, Trump has assailed Western (former?) allies for not joining his war on Iran but not its ally Russia for sharing intelligence with it to target U.S. bases in the war. So who’s the ally?

 

It’s edifying to see such small  European nations as Denmark taking steps, militarily and otherwise, to defend themselves from Russia, both individually and as part of NATO and the U.N. But the Danes probably couldn’t do much if Trump tried to seize Greenland.
 

 

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The appeal of the likes of Orban and Trump to certain kinds of people is based on the soothing hope that a demagogic leader marketing a simple set of strong, often hate-soaked opinions and policies (including smiting real or perceived enemies) will resolve everything and do away with supporters’ anxieties.

 

But the world, in its infinite variety, is too complicated for that. Policies must be constantly adjusted to address new realities and ideological rigidities must be avoided. And compromise, compromise!

 

That’s why democratic center-right, center, and center-left governments are not overly vulnerable to the power drive and mental and emotional health of leaders, which are the best for a country’s long-term political and economic health.

 

As H.L. Mencken famously wrote:

 "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong". 

 

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Meanwhile, many Americans’ widening ignorance of civics and history continues to do great damage to the country, and helps explain such abominations as Trump’s violent attempted coup of Jan. 6, 2021. It’s distressing how many people have virtually no knowledge of the origins of their governmental systems and how they’re supposed to work.

Here’s a good article on the problem and how to address it: READ HERE

 

 

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You may well be getting a tax refund this year, which not coincidentally includes a congressional election. Enjoy it! But you might mull how much such refunds, geared to favor the rich, and Trump’s war on Iran will swell the national debt, and so eventually interest rates.  The fun will eventually end. Then there are such pricey incidentals as the regime’s effort to erect imposing new federal buildings and monuments in Washington, D.C., to project power in ways similar to what Hitler asked his favorite architect, war criminal Albert Speer, to do in Berlin.

 

 

College Chronicles

So Brown University plans to tear down four undistinguished old multi-family houses  it owns on Brook Street, in Providence’s Fox Point neighborhood, as a continuation of the school’s old-house demolition derby of many years. It wants to replace them with a five-story building for its economics department.

 

The demolition will tend to raise rents in the area by reducing housing supply, unless the ever-expanding university offsets the loss elsewhere.

 

Another concern is that Brown, well known for putting up cold, sterile and out-of-neighborhood-scale buildings, will do the same thing with the economics building. Much of upper Brook Street is already grim because of the stark buildings that the university has put up on the west side of the street. But look at the bright side: The new economics building will help churn out more private-equity and hedge-funders! Just what America needs!

 

Of course, other rich colleges and universities in dense, urban neighborhoods court controversy as they inevitably expand. But that there is so much architectural beauty and intimate charm around Brown adds an extra level of emotion in opposition.

 

(No word yet on which Wall Street mogul or moguls will pay for the exciting “naming opportunity’’ for the building.)

 

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Hampshire College, founded in Amherst, Mass., in 1965 during the heyday of the creation of such “experimental’’ institutions,  is closing.  Small private liberal-arts colleges in New England and elsewhere in America have been shutting their doors at an accelerating clip, amidst a shrinking pool of applicants and the sense that a college has become less economically worth it.

 

That it is culturally, psychologically and emotionally worth it is another matter; teaching critical thinking would seem to me pretty valuable. And AI will never abolish the value of in-person social skills, some of which can be developed by being at a physical college.

 

In any event, the closing of all these college campuses may well expand New England’s housing stock. Consider all those dorms….

 

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Read the Yale report on what ails trust in higher education: READ HERE

 

 

Come  to My Room and Help Me With My Speech

Are high-level politicians, such as members of Congress, more likely to engage in sexual abuse of staffers than other powerful people? I have no idea except to note that such staffers’ long hours, often extending into the night, and need to travel out of town with their bosses, might make them more vulnerable. And then there’s Henry Kissinger’s line that “power is the ultimate aphrodisiac’’ and Lord Acton’s observations that “power tends  to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely; there is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it," and “despotic power is always accompanied by corruption of morality.’’

 

Copy Desk Czar

Leonard I. Levin, who died on April 6, at 95, was a star of that now fading tribe of newspaper news and copy editors. Usually very calmly,  and often with sardonic humor, he supervised much of the daily editing of The Providence Journal during its last golden decades as a nationally respected newspaper.

 

He strove for maximum factual accuracy, clarity and proper grammar in text and well-targeted, engaging and, when appropriate,  entertaining headlines as he sat in the middle of the copy desk in a job we used to call “slotman” (even if a woman was holding the job) and distributed newspaper stories to the copy editors he was supervising and then checked their work. All this under  deadline pressures.

 

I had a somewhat similar job for some stretches at The Journal and a couple of other newspapers where I worked, and I can attest to the discipline required to do it well. Oh yes, and the hours were often barbaric and the pay far from extravagant. Of course, many of these jobs no longer exist. Social media destroyed much of the advertising-base economics of newspapers while stealing much of their copyrighted material.

 

Len was an avaricious reader on a wide range of topics. (He used to wryly note that after his shift, most of it late in the day, spent reading, he’d go home and read some more, mostly books.) His general knowledge was formidable – a great strength in his job.

 

Journalism, and thus the citizenry, could use a revival of the skills and professionalism that Len brought to his work.

 

I doubt that Len ever wanted to be a writer. As his equivalent at Business Week magazine told me back in 1972, “some people are made to be editors. They just want to make someone else’s stuff better.’’

 

By the way, I suspect he didn’t like such erosion of language as that represented by the replacement of the word “very” with the hyperbolic and usually misleading “incredibly.’’

 

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Outrageous and very funny things could happen at copy desks, as you learn from this little memoir by John Banville, the famed novelist and short-story writer, and his time as a copy editor at the Irish Press:

READ HERE

 

The settings, mostly in mid-20th-century middle-class America in cities and suburbia, are powerfully evocative in themselves for the rapidly shrinking cohort of those of us who were alive then, but the emotional and psychological situations – of disillusionment, loneliness, anxiety, hopes, humor and pockets of pleasure -- are universal in The Collected Stories of Richard Yates. I wish many more people would read Mr. Yates (1926-1992), one of the country’s great 20th-century fiction authors.

 

He’s still best known for his 1961 novel Revolutionary Road, set in suburban Connecticut in 1955. Here’s the trailer of the movie based on it:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjJby_xeE6I

 

I loved the crowd shots in Grand Central Station!