Whitcomb: Buddy’s Cologne; Care New England’s Ego; the Fading Church; 4 Ways to Fight Fake News
Monday, September 23, 2019
“It’s all a farce—these tales they tell
About the breezes sighing,
And moans astir o’er field and dell,
Because the year is dying.
Such principles are most absurd,—
I care not who first taught ’em;
There’s nothing known to beast or bird
To make a solemn autumn.
In solemn times, when grief holds sway
With countenance distressing,
You’ll note the more of black and gray
Will then be used in dressing.
Now purple tints are all around;
The sky is blue and mellow;
And e’en the grasses turn the ground
From modest green to yellow.
The seed burrs all with laughter crack
On featherweed and jimson;
And leaves that should be dressed in black
Are all decked out in crimson.’’
-- From “Merry Autumn,’’ by Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906)
“The people are that part of the state that does not know what it wants.’’
-- George Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel (1770-1831), German philosopher
Smells Burnt Into Memories
As we slide into fall and the rays of the sun slant lower, I’ve been thinking of the past more, and especially about New York City, where I lived in 1971-75. I especially remember the smells, such as the unexplained (to me) whiff of old wet bread almost every day when I walked up and down Riverside Park, on Manhattan’s West Side. The park is dramatically sited along the Hudson River, but in my time could be a tad dangerous and “exotic’’ (Haitian Voodoo specialists sacrificed animals there.) I always walked fast. Other New York smells: rotting garbage during sanitation workers’ strikes, the stink in hot weather of the East River, which is now much cleaner, and hot dogs and pretzels at those food carts.
Indeed, smells send one back deep into the past. When I smell diesel, I think of Paris in the ‘70s and ‘80s, where most vehicles were/are powered by that foul fuel. When I smell oysters and crabs at restaurants, I think of Delaware, where I worked for a few months and nearby Chesapeake Bay – what H.L. Mencken called “the immense protein factory.’’ Then there’s the smell of wet green leaves ripped off trees in tropical storms in the early fall and, later in the season, the sweet aroma of burning dried-up leaves that we’d raked (creating whispering sounds) into piles – a practice now banned in most places; too much air pollution. And wood smoke takes me back to New Hampshire, especially in those damp, corn snow March days.
As for Providence, I’ll always associate it with the seaweedy scent of Narragansett Bay when the wind starts coming in from the south and Buddy Cianci’s powerful cologne as he walked into my office at The Providence Journal.
Erroneous Alliance
The U.S. has the wrong Muslim “ally’’ in the Mideast. We have tied ourselves to the deeply corrupt and brutal Saudi regime. It presides over what is mostly sand and rock and its only major resource remains oil and gas, even as its fossil fuel is declining in geopolitical and economic importance with expanding sources elsewhere -- fossil fuel and renewable -- and greater energy efficiency. Territorially, Saudi (named after the ruling dynasty) Arabia as we now know it is a post-World War I concoction (with some help from the British), and is held together/justified by an 18th Century theology called Wahhabism, an austere and often brutal form of Islam created in the 18th Century and used as a vehicle for the Saud clan to maintain power.
But Iran – Persia – is one of the oldest countries, with one of the world’s richest and most complex cultures. Its regime, like Saudi Arabia’s, is corrupt and often brutal but Iran would still be a much more useful and natural partner for America and more likely to become more humane.
Iran has around 83 million people; Saudi Arabia has only about 33 million. While the latter has more land – about 830,000 square miles compared to Iran’s about 636,000 square miles – the latter, also a huge oil producer, has a far more varied landscape and climate. It is intrinsically much richer than Saudi Arabia, whose citizens, lest we forget, brought us 9/11. Perhaps most importantly, Iran has a large and well-educated middle class, most of whom are well disposed to the West, including even America, despite its Shiite regime’s anti-Americanism– an anti-Americanism that Trump’s bombast has intensified.
Trump’s threats, real and implied, to attack Iran are unlikely to force Iranian concessions; it’s a very proud country. For that matter, the Iranians probably see the threats as mostly empty, as have been our caudillo’s threats against North Korea and Venezuela, and they see Trump’s foreign “policy’’ as too chaotic, impulsive and ill-informed to pay much respect to. Further, America’s Western allies have kept their distance from Trump’s threats.
Fading of the Church Around Here
Mark Patinkin’s Sept. 18 Providence Journal story, “Father Joe soldiers on: With church attendance down by half, Providence priest fights the good fight,’’ reminded me of how the Roman Catholic Church used to provide so much of our region’s education and social services, including health care, that not only assisted the Catholic population but also benefited all of society in Rhode Island, whose most important religious affiliation remains Catholic. (By the way, I’m not Catholic.) Much of this benefit stemmed from the church’s promoting such basic behaviors/institutions as marriage, which help stabilize society. (The stark negative results of the decline in marriage and other societal glues/disciplines in recent decades can be seen in our schools and other parts of society.)
What a change! Consider, for example, that the Rhode Island Catholic recently reported that “while the number of students attending Catholic high schools across the diocese declined by nearly 12 percent, from 5,449 in 2000 to 4,806 in 2018, the number of students attending Catholic elementary schools suffered a more precipitous decline, with enrollment dropping about 56 percent, from 13,541 students reported in 2000 to 5,911 in 2018.’’ To read the publication’s article “Pastoral Profile provides a view of the landscape ahead for the Diocese of Providence,’’ please hit this link:
My wife, a painter, taught art in a now-closed Catholic elementary school associated with St. Matthew’s Church in Cranston, where we observed the good works that the church performed in a mostly lower-income parish with great ethnic diversity. It was an anchor of the neighborhood.
The scandals involving sexual abuse of children by some priests are horrific but they should not be allowed to obscure the great good that Catholic institutions have done. They’re likely to continue to decline, and we’ll miss them more and more, for all their human flaws
Pro Soccer Venues
An article by John Ward in Commonwealth magazine suggests bringing professional soccer to Boston by having the Kraft family, which owns the New England Patriots, collaborate with Harvard University in a privately funded plan to renovate old (opened in 1903) Harvard Stadium, in Boston’s Allston section, to make it the home of the Krafts’ New England Revolution, now based in Foxboro’s Gillette Stadium. That arena has 65,878 seats but most of those seats are empty when the Revs play. Harvard Stadium, for its part, has 30,323 seats. The capacity seems about right for pro soccer, assuming that it will continue to grow, fueled by Millennials’ love of the sport. Of course, Harvard would continue to play Ivy League football and have other activities there, too.
To read Mr. Ward’s article, please hit this link:
All this gets me back again to turning McCoy Stadium, to be vacated in a year by the Pawtucket Red Sox, into a venue for soccer. It might be too small for Major League Soccer, with 10,031 permanent seats (but up to 11,800 seats if you include the grass berm, bleachers and standing room sections) but more than big enough for some professional soccer teams. That southeastern New England has many people – especially Hispanic Americans and Asian Americans – whose favorite sport is soccer would help a lot, especially considering the promotion from the televised excitement of the World Cup and other big competitions.
Mr. Ward reports that Major League Soccer’s Atlanta United draws “50,000 screaming fans per contest and boasts a $330 million market valuation.’’
Transforming McCoy into a soccer venue wouldn’t be easy but the market suggests that might be the best hope for it.
Those Local Carbon Sinks
There’s a charming recent article in the Portland Press Herald about managing woodlots to maximize their capacity to trap carbon dioxide while improving the woodlands’ ecological health/diversity. We sure didn’t think about such things more than 50 years ago when cutting logs, with a very loud chainsaw, for firewood in my parents’ woodlot, composed of such post-pasture, second-growth trees as oak, swamp maple and beech, but we did appreciate what a variety of wildlife the woodlot sheltered – including foxes, deer and raccoons. As the article notes, nurturing such woodlots is a way to start to chip away at the climate damage from the massive loss of forests in other parts of the world. Maine has the highest percentage of forest land of any state in America.
Woods are certainly a lot better for the environment than lawns, with all those fertilizers and other toxic chemical products dumped on them to keep them artificially green, lush and pest-free. Lawns also enable flooding much more than far-more absorbent woodlands, which host far more species of animals and plants than lawns can. (Still, I enjoyed the money I made mowing them as a kid, before yard crews of illegal aliens took over that chore and replaced raking with ear-splitting leaf blowers. No wonder people were thinner then….)
To read the article, please hit this link:
Facing Off Against Fake News
We’re now in a world where technology easily permits fraudulent manipulation of text and images, including, increasingly, of video images -- something that artificial intelligence will make much worse, and where relentless lying by our leaders has been normalized; Trump, especially, has taken public lying to a whole new level. This is doing serious damage to our democracy and will, over time, also damage our economy. After all, a certain level of trust is necessary between voters and public officials, employees and employers, businesses and their customers, and by all sides in crafting such transactions as mergers and acquisitions, for a well-functioning nation. That means not only on paper but with such informal signs as handshakes. (The father of a friend of mine who was a senior executive of a big Wall Street firm retired early in his fifties. When he was asked why he gave up the position and money, he said: “Because a handshake doesn’t mean anything on Wall Street anymore.”)
Trust is a key lubricant of democracy and a market economy. When it disappears, the engine seizes up.
Diane Hessan and Josh Bernoff, writing in The Boston Globe, have four big and, I think, practical suggestions to citizens for helping to determine if something is real, especially in the mass media. Diane Hessan is an entrepreneur, author, and chair of C Space. Josh Bernoff is the author or co-author of six books on business strategy and social media.
“*{B}ecome familiar with fact-checking sites like Snopes and Politifact. Be suspicious of what you read, especially if it reinforces your own ideas too strongly or seems extreme. If fact-checkers say its fake, read their justification and judge for yourself.’’
“*{E}xpand your media diet. If you are a fan of Fox News, check out CNN. When it comes to opinion pieces and editorials, balance The Boston Globe’s perspective with The Wall Street Journal’s. …But you won’t even know what the other side is actually saying unless you take a peek.’’
“*{I}f it’s funny, don’t just share it as the truth. In fact, NiemanLab found that people are often fooled into believing articles on parody sites like The Onion or The Babylon Bee.’’
“*Support legislation to hold social media sites like Facebook and Twitter accountable for spreading lies. These organizations host conspiracy theorists: Mark Zuckerberg has stated that Holocaust deniers aren’t violating Facebook policy.’’
Vladimir Putin has given the order for a no holds barred attack on our democracy to keep his pal Trump in office, and otherwise weaken America (especially by sowing discord and chaos). And many, many other players, foreign and domestic, are ramping up their lies-and-smoke machines for political and financial profit. As artificial intelligence rapidly expands the capacity to spread lies in order to manipulate public opinion, following these suggestions will become ever more important, especially in election years.
To read the article, please hit this link:
But Has No Chance?
I increasingly think that Montana Gov. Steve Bullock would be the strongest Democratic presidential nominee. He’s been a successful governor in a very Red state, showing the ability both to manage state government with great efficiency and to get good bipartisan laws enacted in cooperation with the Republican-run legislation. He also very well spoken, indeed eloquent at times, has gravitas and has shown himself a person of great integrity. And at 53, he’s at a good age to run for president. He probably doesn’t have a chance at getting the nomination, but if he did, I think he’d beat Trump handily. I wish that the mass media would stop anointing certain candidates as “serious’’ while ignoring those well-experienced people who might be much better candidates in general elections, have less baggage and, thanks be to God, younger.
{image_6}Cross-Indications
Did Care New England’s putting the kibosh on creating a statewide Rhode Island health-care group including CNE, Lifespan and Brown University happen because CNE wanted its CEO, James Fanale, to be CEO of the new group? Was this all about turf and power and not about the state’s greater good?
Healthcare for Who?
The unhealthy linkage of health insurance with place of employment showed itself again last week in the United Auto Workers’ strike against General Motors. As part of its pressure against its workers, the company suspended health-insurance benefits, showing yet again why insurance and place of employment need to be separated.
Also note that a small portion of GM’s billions of dollars in stock buybacks in recent years – buybacks are very alluring to the senior company executives who engineer them, and richly profit from them, because much of their compensation is in company stock – would have settled this dispute.
The money spent on buybacks is money not spent on research and development and other investment to strengthen the company for the long term. But members of the executive suite don’t care: They’ll be retired soon enough in, say, Palm Beach.
GOP-Dominated Electoral College, Redux
The Electoral College is even more skewed to the GOP than we might have thought, says a paper by University of Texas economists Michael Geruso, Dean Spears and IshaanaTalesara. One of their findings is that a Republican has a 65 percent chance of becoming president if the popular vote is close. Note that Hillary Clinton won the 2016 popular vote by 2.1 percentage points. The paper noted that even a 3-percentage-point popular vote victory might result in a GOP victory in the Electoral College. Of course, that’s because each state’s Electoral College membership includes two senators, regardless of a state’s population, as well as the number of (population-based) seats they have in the House. And many of the small states are strongly Republican.
The Electoral College system was created in part to help protect slavery in the Old South. It does have the merit of compelling candidates to campaign all over the country, and not just in a few big states. But with GOP popular-vote losses/Electoral College victories in 2000 (in what might have been a stolen election) and 2016 and the prospect of the same thing happening again, perhaps next year, citizen cynicism and distrust of the electoral system, and of our federalism in general, will rise as more and more Americans come to feel disenfranchised. Dangerous.
For now, all Democrats can do is try to get enough of a landslide in the popular vote to offset a Republican-dominated Electoral College, whose members, although constitutionally encouraged to exercise independent judgment on the suitability of candidates, almost always act as robotic servants of our two major political parties. A simultaneous landslide in both presidential and congressional races would of course give them the mandate to enact major new government programs and policies. But such mandates have been very rare.
To read more, please hit this link:
The ‘Day-O’ Disaster
Could we please move on from controversies involving white politicians innocently, inanely or otherwise wearing blackface in parties years ago – e.g., Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, then 29, in a 2001 “Arabian Nights’’ party in which he wore blackface makeup while singing “Day-O,’’ a Jamaican folk song famously sung by Harry Balafonte, the African-American singer and civil rights activist. Look at the entirety of their lives, but concentrate on what they have done as leaders.
Eggheads Used to Star
Dwight Macdonald (1906-1982), the cultural critic, was one of those American “public intellectuals’’ who could write well on almost anything. For a time after World War II, people like Mr. Macdonald were such public figures they’d go on network TV shows to entertain the general public. Indeed, the voluble Mr. Macdonald regularly reviewed movies on NBC’s Today show. The book Against the American Grain is a fine collection of his essays, and particularly entertaining in writing about great writers and their glories and foibles. I particularly liked his essay in this book on the erratic literary genius and silly show biz acts of Mark Twain, which include this about the older Twain, who became:
“the ghost of a ghost, a Williamsburgian reconstruction of the twinkling, drawling, cigar-puffing old sinner that even in 1885 was synthetic…He stultified his best gifts by playing the provincial iconoclast.’’
Not So Poor After All?
Ted Nesi, of WPRI, reported on some intriguing statistics in his Sept. 14 column:
“It’s a statistic you hear often if you pay attention to local policy debates: Rhode Island has the highest poverty rate in New England. And that’s true — the latest Census data … puts Rhode Island’s poverty rate at 10.2%, slightly higher than the 9.8% rates in nearby Massachusetts and Connecticut. But that’s not the whole story, because the official poverty rate only looks at pre-tax cash income. So in 2011, the Census Bureau started to report a second statistic, the Supplemental Poverty Measure, which takes into account the cost of living in different regions as well as the value of government benefits like food stamps and heating assistance. Those adjustments change the picture dramatically — Rhode Island winds up with the lowest poverty rate in New England (8%) and the fifth-lowest poverty rate in the entire country. By contrast, California goes from the middle of the pack to worst in the nation, and Massachusetts drops from 12th best to 24th.’’
I wonder how such statistics might affect the crafting of future public policy and understanding of the state and national economies. To read Mr. Nesi’s column please hit this link:
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