Whitcomb: Don’t Expect Many New Arrivals; Casino on Vineyard; Walnut War; Granite State Glories

Sunday, October 04, 2020

 

View Larger +

Robert Whitcomb, columnist

“Even if it feels unusually futile

To wait here for what we know

will not sort itself out,

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

some great suspense holds us.’’

-- From “Rocky Shore,’’ by Nancy Nahra, a poet in Vermont

 

“Health in all lands is among the indispensable guarantees of human progress.’’

-- Helen Keller (1880-1968), a deaf and blind American author, political activist and lecturer. She became an inspiration to millions.

 

 

 

View Larger +

Downtown Providence PHOTO: GoLocal

There’s hope that downtown Providence, especially its newer office buildings, can grab business refugees from big cities, especially Boston and New York, to help fill some of its COVID-emptied space. The pitch would include, among other things, the area’s shorter commuting times and, of course, the compact city’s walkability and visual charms.

 

Well, maybe a little. But it will be hard to fight a technology-fueled work-at-home movement that was underway well before COVID-19 arrived and that affects all cities. Yes, having so many employees working from home erodes teamwork, loyalty and esprit de corps. But the savings to employers in office expenses may seem to many enterprises to more than offset those drawbacks.

 

The savings may soon come to include lower pay (never including senior executives, of course) for many, which employers would justify by pointing to the partial (if workers only come to the office, say,  two or three days a week) or full (if they work entirely at home) disappearance of employees’ commuting costs, which for most workers total thousands of dollars a year.

 

We’ll see. But what does seem clear is that there will be fewer, perhaps far fewer, restaurants and hotels in most city centers in the next few years. Maybe more happily, at the same time rents will tend to fall downtown as more apartments go vacant, drawing in more people of modest means to live there even as suburbia becomes more expensive. And many of the remaining restaurants will be less expensive than before COVID. I hope that this means a revival of the old-fashioned diners. “Breakfast all day!”

 

View Larger +

GE wind propjects

Awesome Offshore Wind Turbines

This is amazing: Boston-based General Electric will supply 190 Haliade-X wind turbines for a wind farm off the eastern coast of England each of which will have blades longer, at slightly more than 351 feet, than a football field. This is part of GE’s joint venture with SSE Renewables and Equinor for what will be the world’s largest wind farm.

GE also has contracts to provide Haliade-X turbines for wind farms planned for off New Jersey and Maryland. Good news – for GE and for green energy in general. And the more offshore wind, the less need for those solar-energy arrays in suburban and exurban areas that many people there dislike. The waters off the Northeast and Middle Atlantic states have often been described as having the potential of being to windpower what Saudi Arabia (and parts of America) are to oil.

What with the mall-and-retail apocalypse, there will be a lot more space in which to install big solar-energy arrays in long-developed urban and suburban areas. All those empty parking lots and flat roofs of shut big box stores! Meanwhile, homeowners should realize that after a modest initial expenditure they’ll save many thousands of dollars on electricity costs by putting solar panels on their roofs, and do their little part to slow global warming.

 

Ah, Nuts!

I’ve been amused by a minor controversy about, it is alleged, a population explosion of squirrels in Providence’s gentrifying Fox Point neighborhood. The weird thing is that the busy little rodents are accused of leaving walnut shells all over the place, though there are few walnut trees in our area. Does that really present a serious hardship for residents? There are lots of oak trees, which this year – perhaps because of the drought? – are dropping impressive supplies of acorns.

 

Locals are arguing about such solutions as poisoning, which I hope is avoided. It would kill other creatures, too, including dogs and cats.

 

View Larger +

Martha's Vineyard

Casino on the Vineyard?

An article in Commonwealth Magazine argues that the Aquinnah Wampanoag Tribe based in what we used to call Gay Head will in the fullness of time get a casino – in the form of high-stakes bingo operation there. (More revenue than from the brightly colored clay ashtrays that the tribe at least used to sell!) Commercial gambling is always a sleazy business but I confess some pleasure at the prospect that such an operation will discomfit the rich and sometimes arrogant summer people “from away” in the area.

 

This might worsen the already anger-inducing parking problems near the famous cliffs that give Gay Head its name.

 

Please hit this link:

 

 

View Larger +

Live Fee or Die

The Good of the Granite State

“It’s restful to arrive at a decision,

And restful just to think about New Hampshire.

At present I am living in Vermont.’’

 -- The last lines of Robert Frost’s long poem “New Hampshire’’

 

I’m off to the White Mountains for a couple of days, leaving my family and vicious guard dog behind. It’s always cheering to travel into the (relatively) wide open spaces of New Hampshire. The sight of the Presidential Range, the highest mountains in the Northeast, and often dusted with snow above 4,000 feet at this time of year, is a tonic. It’s as pleasant as seeing the sea after a long absence from the shore.

 

And New Hampshire’s cultural and political climate is often heartening, too. It’s fiscally careful, socially tolerant/libertarian, has streamlined regulations and somewhat limited in number but efficiently provided public services, serving an engaged and quite well-informed citizenry, as you  can see at its town meetings.

 

I lived in New Hampshire in the wild year of 1968, when I enjoyed the drama/circus of its first-in-the-nation presidential primary and the nationally televised show from those little villages in the northern part of the state that become famous for an hour or two every four years for being the first places to report the presidential vote. 1968 was, of course, a volatile and acrimonious presidential-campaign year, mostly because of the Vietnam War and the racial divide.

 

After the conventions, the campaign pitted the ruthless Republican Richard Nixon, dishonest but able and, as it turned out, rather moderate and innovative in policy as president, against the very honest and idealistic (maybe to a fault) New Deal Democrat Vice President Hubert Humphrey and Alabama Gov. George Wallace, a white supremacist. This was in the early years of the GOP’s evolution toward becoming a version of what used to be called “Southern Democrats.’’

 

That was an alarming year, but this one is much, much worse for those who worry about the future of our country.
 

 

View Larger +

Chris Wallace, moderator for 1st presidential debate

A Racist Demagogue’s Diatribes

Poor Chris Wallace, the moderator of the Sept. 29 “debate’’ between Trump and Joe Biden! How do you moderate such an encounter when one of the protagonists, Trump, is a shouting pathological liar about, well, pretty much everything, and who thinks that the best way to win is to drown out everything that his opponent says with ever-bigger fabrications and obfuscations?

 

America has never before had a gangster as president. And many Americans, including Joe Biden himself, don’t really know how to deal with it. (By the way, Biden wasn’t my choice as Democratic nominee. As I have often written, I much preferred Montana Gov. Steve Bullock this year; in 2016, I wrote in the name of former Virginia Senator and Reagan Navy Secretary Jim Webb. But old Biden will do, considering the alternative!)

 

The most depressing thing is that perhaps 35 percent of the population supports a man as profoundly sociopathic as Trump, despite public and private corruption of almost half a century. This shows a deep erosion and coarsening of our civic culture. After all, the record shows that he’s a traitor, thief, swindler, pervert and boss of what is, in effect, an organized-crime operation.

 

For the fact that millions avidly support him we can blame a decline in public education, especially in civics and history, and in reading in general, and the rise of far-right-wing  conspiracy salesmen on radio and cable TV, along with  the cesspool of social media. They are all highly fertile spaces for crooks, be they selling fascism, bogus cures or a lucrative (for the preachers/con men) versions of a “Christianity’’ you wouldn’t see in a close reading of the New Testament. (I had to read both testaments in school and went to church weekly until my late teens.)

 

Most of the suckers who buy this crap don’t go beyond watching/listening to the sleazeballs, like Trump, who are most adept at pushing their buttons of hate and resentment. They don’t fact check, and hardly read. For interpretation of events like the “debate’’ they listen to such highly practiced mega-liars as Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson, each of whom have made millions peddling easily ascertainable falsehoods to the gullible. (A few of their followers are reliable residents of the Facebook comments operation at the bottom of this column every week.) And yes, some others – especially the affluent – are not gullible and may say they don’t like Trump’s “tone’’ but like that he cut their taxes; that’s good enough for them, whatever happens to the country.

 

In the “debate’’ last Tuesday, Trump, of course, pitched mostly to his base, its most loyal members being white supremacists and gun nuts, whom he encouraged to use violence if he doesn’t win (or at least steal) the election, continuing his treasonous tradition in foreign and domestic affairs.

 

Our would-be dictator’s political success, of course, is strongest in the Old Slave states, where ignorance and bigotry are most entrenched, and elsewhere where the level of education is low and ignorance is most intense. Welcome to QAnon/Proud Boys Land.  Loyal citizens of Post-Fact America.

 

I can see the widening political and cultural divisions between Trump Land and the rest of the country presaging an eventual breakup of the United States. Certainly, what we used to think of as humane American values don’t seem to apply in large parts of the country.  Maybe the damn thing should break up. I’d be very happy if much of the South, in particular, went its own way. The Blue States are tired of subsidizing them anyway. (And why do they treat dogs so badly?)

 

American democracy will go into a black hole if Trump retains power, which he will try to do by any means possible, through voter suppression, including  diversion and destruction of mail ballots (except for his own and his allies’;  his immediate entourage votes by mail), getting his political accomplices to close as many voting places as they can in places with lots of minority voters, sending his thugs out to scare voters at voting places and constant disinformation assistance from his handler Vladimir Putin, who was so helpful to him in 2016.

 

Trump knows that if he is forced from office, he may well spend time in prison for his innumerable offenses. So, he will get even more frenzied as Nov. 3 approaches.

 

Pray for The Republic.

 

And watch the Oct. 7 debate between vice-presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Trump’s super-sycophantic valet Mike Pence. Given the age of the presidential candidates (Trump 74 and very fat; Biden seemingly fit but almost 78), actuaries would suggest that the vice-presidential candidates are more important than ever. There might be a, say, 30 percent chance that Trump or Biden will die in the next four years. Ms. Harris is a former prosecutor, which may come in handy.

 

Denationalize Abortion

Of course, abortion continues to be a big issue, and done-deal, rushed-in Supreme Court nominee Amy Barrett is against it. But then, who likes abortion as opposed to abortion rights? It’s certainly the worst form of birth control. More than a few Trumpians oppose any birth control, at least that’s what they say.  (I have long wondered how many abortions Trump may have financed, given his squalid personal life….)

 

Anyway, the very bright and very right-wing Judge Barrett would like to get rid of Roe v. Wade, which nationalized abortion rights. That nationalization was a big mistake, in my view. Abortion seems to me to come under the heading of domestic law, which is usually the states’ domain. By nationalizing “abortion rights,’’ the then-liberal Supreme Court went too far. They should have stayed out of it.

 

Of course, this will be very unfair to women in states that ban abortion; they’d have to travel to states that permit the procedure. But the greater good, it seems to me, is to somewhat detoxify the issue by making it a state-by-state matter. And states that would continue to respect abortion rights generally have better, safer health care. Perhaps some health-insurance policies can be crafted to pay for the travel needed for women to get to states with abortion rights.

 

Roe v.  Wade helped energize the far-right-wing politics (evangelicals are key players) that has taken over much of the national GOP – a politics that was also very helpful to certain businessmen who may have had no particular opinion on abortion one way or the other; they rode the energized, anti-abortion-rights party to riches beyond all the dreams of avarice by getting big tax cuts and deregulation. Indeed, Roe v. Wade was one of the worst things that happened to the Democratic Party!

 

All this reminds me of former Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank’s quip that anti-abortionists “believe that life begins at conception and ends at birth.’’

 

On regulation, I agree with my old friend Philip K. Howard, that we need a whole new – and bipartisan -- approach to it, based on simplification and personal responsibility. Hit this link:

 

View Larger +

Christopher Hitchens PHOTO: meesh CC 2.0

The Great Christopher Hitchens

The Anglo-American writer Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011) was one of the most exciting essayists of the last half-century, as you can see in his collection Arguably. He wrote about many things, but especially about politics, history, literature and high and low culture in general. A brilliant exposer of fraudulence and hypocrisy, he could also be very funny. That he was able to do all this even with a reputation for over-enthusiastic and often public drinking (which probably shortened his life) makes his achievement all the more impressive.

 

Even his essay titles are delightful, such as “JFK: In Sickness and by Stealth,’’ “In Defense of Foxhole Atheists,’’ “Graham Greene: I’ll be Damned,’’ “The Other L-Word,” “Why Women Aren’t Funny,’’ “As American as Apple Pie” (for adult audiences only) and “Isaac Newton: Flaws of Gravity’’.

 

Oh, if only Mr. Hitchens, and H.L. Mencken, for that matter, were around to comment on America’s current nightmare comedy.

 

Related Articles

 

Enjoy this post? Share it with others.

 
 

Sign Up for the Daily Eblast

I want to follow on Twitter

I want to Like on Facebook