Whitcomb: COVID Brews New Colossus; URI’s Art Censorship; Danger to Data

Sunday, September 13, 2020

Robert Whitcomb, Columnist

“Late in the season the world digs in, the fat blossoms

hold still for just a moment longer.

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Nothing looks satisfied,

but there is no real reason to move on much further….’’

-- From “Over and Over Stitch,’’ by Jorie Graham (born 1950, and a professor at Harvard)

 

“The slander of some people is as great a recommendation as the praise of others.’’

-- Novelist Henry Fielding in 1730

 

“There’s a lot of stuff that traditionally ends up in the ER, or in the hospital, or in the doctor’s office that isn’t ending up there. It’s because people aren’t moving around the same way, they’re treating each other different, and germs don’t have the ability to travel the way they have in years past.”

-- Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker, elaborating last Wednesday on why overall health-care costs have been dropping in the state.

 

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The financial losses stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic will apparently speed up something that has often seemed inevitable over the past two decades, in fits and starts, for years: a merger of Rhode Island’s two big hospital groups – Lifespan and Care New England (CNE) – which include Brown University’s Warren Alpert Medical School teaching hospitals. The two groups have been swimming in deep red ink in recent years, which has only worsened in the pandemic, and so naturally, they seek more efficiencies of scale, and to reduce wasteful redundancies, in Rhode Island’s health-care “system’’.

 

Such a merger, in creating a much more powerful entity, might keep the Ocean State’s health-care system out of the control of Boston-based hospital giants, particularly Mass General Brigham (formerly Partners HealthCare). But an unsettling question will be whether the new Rhode Island entity will use monopoly pricing power to jack up its prices, big time.

 

State regulators will have their hands full in dealing with such a behemoth. And it will be interesting to see the bright golden parachutes of hospital executives made redundant by the union of these “nonprofits’’ as the parachutes waft them down to the ground in, say, Palm Beach. Since Lifespan is bigger than CNE, and therefore would in effect be the purchaser, I assume that the execs of the latter would be more likely to go.

 

But then, there will probably be lots of layoffs of those with administrative jobs if the merger goes through, as seems very likely.

 

On a happier side, a merger would probably strengthen Brown’s medical and public health schools, including their research capabilities, by uniting them with a stronger organization.

 

Still, given the size and fame of the medical center in Boston, only about 50 miles away, even the big new Rhode Island group will probably be hard-pressed to compete with “The Hub’’  in some specialties.

 

Art’s Art for History’s Sake

The University of Rhode Island’s decision to cover up, or maybe destroy, the charming folk-arty murals done in the 1950s in its Memorial Union (the “Memorial’’ being to URI’s World War II war dead) is wrong. URI’s argument is that the murals inadequately “depict today’s URI, its people, and its mission.’’ Indeed, but so what?

 

The problem (to URI’s PC police) is that the people pictured in the whimsical murals are mostly white (I also see some figures of indeterminate race in it) and male. But then, that was the composition of URI student body, faculty, administrators and staff back in the ‘50s.

 

There’s great value in having art from various eras on the walls of such public places; among other things, it helps show the evolution of society through history. As long as signage explains the dates and context of art such as these murals, keep them up.

 

The most important context of these murals, painted by Art Sherman, who is now 95, is the veterans who flooded URI and other campuses after World War II and the Korean War, aided by the GI Bill. Mr. Sherman himself was badly injured in World War II, sometimes nicknamed “The Good War.’’ The rather goofy murals reflect a time that people then and now would like to have considered as basically benign. It wasn’t particularly benign but that people wanted to think so is useful to know.

 

As Norman Rockwell (1894-1978), the great illustrator and painter best known for his magazine work, especially for the old Saturday Evening Post, said:

 

“The view of life I communicate in my pictures excludes the sordid and the ugly. I paint life as I would like it to be.” That’s what his adult fans in the ‘50s wanted/needed then. They had gone through the Great Depression and World War II and were happy to be transported to bucolic and cheery places. (My own family subscribed to the Saturday Evening Post and many other magazines. Their arrival every week provided great pleasure.)
 

Thus it is with Mr. Sherman’s murals, which provide lessons in American wishful thinking about his times, maybe in spite of, or partly because, he had suffered much from the war.

 

(Mr. Rockwell had seen plenty of ugliness in his personal life but usually chose pleasant subjects.  In the ‘60s, he got more serious, with illustrations about the Civil Rights Movement.)

 

URI and most other colleges and universities now, happily, have much more diverse populations than back in the ‘50s. The way to address that is to commission new art that reflects that fleeting thing called “the present,’’ not to hide or destroy older art that reflects other times. Let there be visible layers of art as visible layers of history. Maybe we need another WPA-style Federal Artists Project to hire artists.

 

The current version of URI will evolve. Works of popular art created to “depict today’s URI’’ will also become dated, and sooner than you might think; life moves faster and faster. Would that art then be torn down or covered up too? As the old cliche goes, “the only constant is change.’’ So leave up the old stuff, with adequate explanatory signage, as cultural and political history lessons. God knows, Americans’ knowledge of history is abysmal enough without removing reminders of it.

 

A rare and only partial exception I add to all this is Confederate statues. Given the extreme racist brutality of the Confederate cause, it doesn’t bother me that many of these statues have been taken down. Some should go into museums with explanatory material providing their historical context.

 

There are no public statues of Hitler in Germany.

 

I grew up in a time when “colored only’’ signs were all over the place in the South (and “The South” extended into Delaware); when anti-Semitism, genteel or not, was rife; when women were heavily discriminated against in many workplaces; when most adults smoked; when heavy drinking was acceptable; when eating bacon was considered healthy, and when corporal punishment was common at home and in schools. Some things have declined, such as education, courtesy and clothing. (There was much less of a slob culture in the ‘50s.)  But many things have changed for the better. Anyway, it’s healthy, if sometimes painful, to have expressions of past times, controversial, or not, around us—again, with explanatory signage!

 

 

More Careful Now

The GoLocalProv story about the dumping of allegedly contaminated soil from Massachusetts at a 6 /10 Connector site in Providence is troubling. But it also reminds me that things are much better than they were before 1970, when the Environmental Protection Agency was created, followed by similar agencies in the states and localities. Before then, individuals, businesses and government entities blithely dumped toxic, often carcinogenic materials into the ground and water all over the place.  I think, for example, of the toxic dumping at Otis Air Force Base, on Cape Cod, which caused very high cancer rates in its region.

 

To read the GoLocal story, please hit this link:
 

 

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“It looks like the Caribbean,’’ said a younger friend of ours on gazing at Buzzards Bay from a beautiful beach in South Dartmouth. Blue-green waters.

 

Though almost adjacent to it, Buzzards Bay is quite different from Narragansett Bay, including that its water is warmer, with a smell in the summer of eddies of the Gulf Stream. And Narragansett Bay can be rather murky and has some rocky shores while Buzzards Bay’s shores are almost all sandy and flatter, though the Elizabeth Islands chain has noticeable hills.

 

How fortunate we are to live in such a beautiful and varied region, where so much good stuff is so close.

 

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The apocalyptic scenes of fires Out West, worsened by man-made global warming, remind New Englanders that we generally have it pretty mild.

 

 

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I’m hearing and seeing more crows now, a harbinger of fall. These very smart birds will be thickly roosting in the trees in the next few weeks and dumping excrement on our cars.

 

 

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I hope that the COVID crisis crashing down on college enrollments, and raising costs, leads them to cut their surplus of expensive vice presidents and deans, whose numbers have proliferated wildly in the past few decades with little improvement in education to show for it.

 

 

Danger to Data

The Trump administration pollutes everything it touches. Consider how much it has tried to politicize the Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which used to be allowed to be completely science-based. The regime wants to manipulate reports from these agencies to better survive the political fallout of its vast failures in confronting COVID-19.

 

And now we must be leery of federal government economic data, the reporting of which during my times as business editor at three newspapers over the past 50 years was always rigorous and trustworthy. The data were usually adjusted as later information came in but people in the financial markets and elsewhere could safely trust them as solid actionable material. But that’s less so as long as the Trump regime is in charge.

 

Consider the August U.S. jobs report, which showed unemployment falling to 8.4 percent from 10.2 percent in July. I noticed that, adjusted for the misclassification of workers who should have been labeled as unemployed, the jobless rate would have been 0.7 percentage point higher in August.  Innocent error? The employment number was also inflated by the inclusion of 238,000 very temporary Census jobs. Indeed, some labor economists think that the real jobless rate is  at least 11 percent.

 

 

Put It on Our Tab

Even for this regime, this is something: Atty. Gen./Trump-protector-at-any-cost William Barr is trying to move Trump’s defense in a defamation lawsuit brought by E. Jean Carroll to federal court and have us taxpayers, via the Justice Department, pay to defend the Orange Caudillo. Ms. Carroll’s lawsuit is in connection with her very plausible accusation that Dear Leader sexually assaulted her in the mid-‘90s.

 

Trump is ruthless in using other people’s money for himself.  He’s been illegally using his campaign funds to pay his legal bills and to benefit the Trump Organization and of course his Mafia-style family. And throughout his presidency, he’s been sending taxpayers some of the bills associated with big events that he makes sure are held at his properties.

 

This is looting. But then, as a “businessman,’’ he was famous for cheating virtually everyone except members of his immediate family. Employees, vendors, bankers, business partners, etc., all took it in the ear. That’s one of many reasons why few people in his native New York want anything to do with him.

 

The national “Republican Party,’’ which is neither “conservative’’ in the classic sense nor even a real political party anymore, but rather a neo-fascist personality cult presided over by a treasonous gangster,  looks on at Trump’s relentless thievery with a shrug.

 

Will any outrages diminish Trump’s white “base”? I doubt it. Like any successful demagogue, he helps give their lives meaning and coherence by relentlessly attacking people they have been taught by Fox News, etc., to resent, hate and even fear in an era of mass-anxiety-provoking social, economic and technological change. He especially speaks to their feeling that better-educated people – especially the “Coastal Elites’’ -- look down at them.

 

Humiliation breeds rage and support for demagogues. Biden, et al., must talk with these people, many of whom used to be Democrats, as much as possible. The former vice president, with a middle-class background much closer to most Americans than Trump, who was born into a very rich (and corrupt) family, needs to use all his empathy to persuade Trump people that he understands their hopes, fears and need for respect. Throwing facts at them that show that “populism’’ is a cynical method by which certain rich and powerful people get the unrich and unpowerful to make the former even richer and more powerful goes nowhere.

“Trump was elected by tapping a wellspring of anxieties, frustrations and legitimate grievances to which the mainstream parties had no compelling answer,” grievances that “are not only economic but also moral and cultural; they are not only about wages and jobs but also about social esteem.”

-- Michael Sandel, in The Tyranny of Merit: What’s become of the Common Good?

Interesting piece here by Tom Nichols of the U.S. Naval War College about the future of the Republican Party. Please hit this link:

 

 

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Celebrity journalist Bob Woodward’s failure to report Trump’s knowledge of the severity of the oncoming pandemic last winter as Trump was lying about COVID-19 is sad. Woodward was saving the bombshells from his interviews with The Leader for his book, Rage, coming out now, soon before the election.  Book sales trump public health!

 

 

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The troubled backgrounds and present psychological and other problems of most of the Black people recently killed or injured in the hands of police are of course grist for the Trump mill.

 

She Wanted to Be Alone!

Philosopher, with a PhD, and writer (mostly as a kind of memoirist) Alice Koller, who died July 21 at 94, was the author of two books that continue to have a following.  These are An Unknown Woman and The Stations of Solitude. Parts of them recall, slightly, Thoreau’s Walden.

 

Ms. Koller may have often been an impossible person to be around for long. And so her painfully reached decision, in lieu of the suicide she considered, to hereafter live, but alone, and stop wasting time and energy trying to meet her own outdated or false expectations, and those of others,  was good for all concerned. She came to the decision in winter of 1962-63 while living alone, except for her German Shepherd puppy, on the easternmost shore of Nantucket, an experience that’s the core of An Unknown Woman. That dog, Logos, and her two other dogs that followed played key roles in her life, becoming her family.

 

Her rigorous self-analysis as she explored the sources of her misery has lessons for everybody seeking to live with more integrity, independence and creativity, though few will want to emulate her life, which had much poverty and other challenges, some caused by things out of her control and some by her own eccentricity and willfulness. Oddly, her self-involvement doesn’t come across as narcissism but rather as honest, hard-working attempts, informed by curiosity, to come to terms with the reality of her past and present.

 

Ms. Koller was also a fine writer about nature – the landscapes, creatures and weather -- in the various places she lived, from the moors and beaches of Nantucket to the woodsy exurban towns where she mostly lived afterwards.

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