Whitcomb: February Not All Bad; Simplify Vaccinations; Another Reason for Term Limits

Sunday, January 31, 2021

Robert Whitcomb, Columnist

 

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Robert Whitcomb, columnist

“Happiness. It comes on
unexpectedly. And goes beyond, really,

any early morning talk about it.’’

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From “Happiness,’’ by Raymond Carver (1938-88), American short-story writer and poet

 

“When the capital development of a country becomes a byproduct of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done.”

-- Economist John Maynard Keynes in remarks on the stock markets in 1936. See the GameStop frenzy. It has been comforting to see the hedge funders unhappy and confused.

 

February landscapes look more like drawings than paintings.
 

I’ve noticed  in the past few days far more Christmas wreaths still hanging on front doors than last year at this time, and holiday lights are lingering later, too. A way to ward off evil spirits or at least viruses?

 

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Joseph Wood Krutch (1893-1970), the nature essayist, famously wrote that “the most serious charge which can be brought against New England is not Puritanism but February’’, that paradoxically short but seemingly long month. And yet, its sun is warmer than January’s, its days are noticeably longer and you get from time to time a cold but dry and windless day that can be exhilarating – a perfect day for the season. And in some years, you see snow drops and other early flowers popping out along the strips of road with a southern exposure and smell warming earth.

 

A couple of nice things about snowstorms, for all their inconveniences: the muffling of harsh sounds and that you can walk in the middle of the street.

 

 

Too Complicated Against COVID

“The ongoing public health crisis continues to weigh on economic activity, employment, and inflation, and poses considerable risks to the economic outlook.’’ –

-- The Federal Reserve Board last Wednesday. In other words, to boost the economy we must reverse the pandemic.

 

Government too often tries to address the demands of so many politically important groups, and to cover any eventuality, that paralysis (or at least impressive inefficiency) and confusion result. I’ve thought of this when seeing the efforts of some states, including Rhode Island, to surgically target -- by occupation, ethnic groups, neighborhoods, etc. -- its COVID-19 vaccination priorities. This leads to a mess as virtually every group claims to be “essential” and/or under extreme danger and therefore deserving of fast vaccination, ahead of everyone else if they can get away with it.

 

Based on sickness and mortality rates, I would have put old people at the head of the line from the start, first 75 and over and then 65 and over. Period.  Common sense. (That would normally include me, but I am already in a vaccine trial.) Then move on to other groups. The elderly are overwhelmingly most at risk)

 

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President Biden vaccination

Keep it as simple as possible, or at least simple enough for most people to understand when and where they can expect to get their shots.

 

Late last week, it was good news indeed that Rhode Island is starting to vaccinate people 75 and over and plans to do so with those 65 and over in February. But there’s still plenty of confusion about how and precisely when this would actually work.

 

My old friend and occasional colleague Philip K. Howard, a lawyer and author who runs Common Good (commongood.org), a legal- and regulatory-reform organization, had a fine piece on government getting far too “granular’’ in a recent piece in The Yale Law Review called “From Progressivism to  Paralysis’’. Hit this link to read it:

 

He wrote that contemporary government “is structured to preempt the active intelligence of people on the ground. This is not an unavoidable side-effect of big government, but a deliberate precept of its operating philosophy. Law will not only set goals and governing principles, but it will also dictate exactly how to implement those goals correctly.” The result is paralysis because “The complex shapes of life rarely fit neatly into legal categories.”

 

Bureaucracies and the elected officials they report to have become “preoccupied with avoiding error without pausing to consider the inability to achieve success.”

 

We’ve seen this in some states in the COVID vaccination confusions.

 

Or as conservative (but anti-Trumper) writer George Will noted in a column last week animated by Mr. Howard’s piece:

 

“The COVID-19 tragedy teaches this: Government is more apt to achieve adequacy when it does not try to achieve purity.’’

 

Citing Mr. Howard on the pandemic, he noted, in just one example:

 

“Then the pandemic arrived. Red tape prevented public health officials from using tests they possessed or buying tests overseas. To function, hospitals had to jettison myriad dictates about restrictions on telemedicine, ambulance equipment and many other matters.’’

 

To read his column, please hit this link:

 

The pandemic will be around for a long, long time as vaccinators battle with new strains of the constantly mutating virus. Life will not return to pre-pandemic “normal’’ for years.

 

 

Green Energy in Little Places

I think  that much of the future of alternative green energy will be in small-scale, “distributive energy” projects, such as the small wind turbines that the Bank of America wants to put up at 3400 Pawtucket Ave., in East Providence. As these proliferate, electricity-generation by big regulated utilities will become less important.

 

We’ll get increasingly used to seeing solar-energy arrays and small wind turbines in parking lots and on roofs of  office buildings,  factories and apartment buildings all over the place.

 

xxx

 

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Mike Stenhouse head Freedom and Prosperity

Inevitably the Rhode Island Center for Freedom and Prosperity seems to oppose any effort to cut back on fossil-fuel use around here, be it the new regional agreement to cut transportation emissions or anything else. But then this outfit is part of a far-right network of “think tanks’’. They are connected to such operations as Koch Industries, which, among other things, is a major fossil-fuel company, and far-right individuals, many, like the Koch crowd, in bed with the fossil-fuel sector. That sector has long been the beneficiary of massive federal corporate welfare. (There’s  far more socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor than most Americans realize.)
 

The Rhode Island outfit is a devoted promoter of heightened  “freedom and prosperity” for billionaires, but not necessarily for the general public. Check out, among other sites, sourcewatch.org, guidestar.org and donorsearch.net for funding information.

 

As we follow the assertions and “research” of so-called think tanks and other advocacy groups, left, right or in the middle, we should always find out which special-interest groups are financing them. Often they do everything they can to hide their funders. You won’t get straight answers from the “think tank’’ beneficiaries. You have to dig. Lots of “dark money’’ out there.

 

Scientific realities are forcing the world to move at an accelerated rate away from oil, coal and gas in order to slow global warming, and  thus the green-energy sector will be where most of the new energy-sector jobs will be created in the next decade. And the costs of generating and using green energy are falling at a faster and faster clip.

 

Elon Musk knows what he’s doing with his electric cars.

 

And note this from the Jan. 28 New York Times:

“General Motors said Thursday that it would phase out petroleum-powered cars and trucks and sell only vehicles that have zero tailpipe emissions by 2035, a seismic shift by one of the world’s largest automakers that makes billions of dollars today from gas-guzzling pickup trucks and sport utility vehicles.”

 

Hit this link to read the story:https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/28/business/gm-zero-emission-vehicles.html?action=click&module=Spotlight&pgtype=Homepage

 

New England, with its famed technology sector and green-energy potential (especially offshore wind power), should be one of the nation’s biggest beneficiaries of the move away from carbon-based energy.

 

Meanwhile, don’t reject nuclear energy, which is clean except for the politically fraught matter of where to put the spent fuel. It must continue to play an important role in electricity generation, and if the waste issue can be appropriately answered, perhaps a growing one.

 

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Memorial Hospital PHOTO: GoLocal

Would Have Been Nice Backup for the Next Pandemic

I’m glad that Lockwood Development Partners doesn’t plan to tear down that part of the former Memorial Hospital complex in Pawtucket it has just bought (for $250,000!). Rather, it will turn it into a veterans housing (200 apartments) and education center.  Still, the pandemic reminds us of how additional hospital space would be a good thing to have around here, especially for the underserved population around the old hospital.

 

Could any of that space have been kept for a hospital?  (Some of Memorial’s old space will continue to be used as a primary-care center.) We need more backup. Memorial’s closing greatly stressed the nearby Miriam Hospital even before COVID-19. In an ever more globalized world, the next pandemic may come earlier than we might think.

 

 

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State Senator Ryan Pearson

Shut Up and Learn

A GoLocal editorial criticized  Ryan Pearson, Rhode Island state senator (from Cumberland) and teachers union backer, for his nonstop yakking (stealing time from other, more knowledgeable people) at a legislative hearing where he displayed his ignorance of Providence schools. He reminded me that many people in Congress  talk and talk about things they know little  about, liberated by the fact that unlike folks with executive jobs in government (e.g., governors and presidents), they don’t have to take responsibility for running anything.

 

Hit this link to read the editorial:

 

Unsung Heroes/Patriots of the Election 

The neo-fascists who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6 call themselves “patriots’’ though they are obviously traitors, as are their deity Donald Trump and the likes of such servants as the cynical Senators Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz. These privileged people got their jobs through the very process they now denounce. The relentless, cynical attacks on the people who run our elections are a cancer on American civic culture.

 

Real patriots in the election were the brave, hard-working people  who helped make the 2020 general elections the fairest in U.S. history  despite the Trump Cult’s relentless (and in some places partly successful) campaign of voter suppression. Applaud the poll workers who had the thankless jobs of checking voter-registration lists, protecting ballot boxes and machines, etc. –  tasks made more difficult by the lies and even physical threats of Trump’s fans, who include lots of gun fetishists. And kudos, also, to some Republican elected officials in hotly contested states who pushed back against efforts by Trump and his lackeys to steal the election and put America on the road to an all-out kleptocratic dictatorship.

 

xxx

 

H.L. Mencken on democracy:

 

“The worship of jackals by jackasses”

 

(Still, democracy is generally better than the alternatives.)

 

 

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Former President Donald Trump

Of course, most Republican senators are terrified of offending Trump’s “base” (some of whom are sounding increasingly violent) and so the vote to convict him in his Senate impeachment trial won’t reach the 67 needed to convict. But a majority of senators – probably about 55 or a tad more, including, a few Republicans – will vote to convict.

 

That he is guilty of treason is obvious – watch videos of what he said on Jan. 6 and read about his campaign’s role in organizing the  nightmare that day and how his people held back National Guard forces that would have protected the Capitol. But then he was a traitor from Day One of his regime, particularly regarding Russia, which has stuff on him. (I dread to think of what Trump might be doing with the intelligence he got when president and  hope that he no longer receives intelligence briefings. He’s a grave security threat.)

 

But the impeachment trial will serve a good purpose in compiling, ordering and publishing the evidence (including videos) of Trump’s most recent crimes so that the public  (and historians) can better understand his depraved attacks on American democracy. And most intriguingly, the trial might provide some new evidence useful to federal and state prosecutors looking at asking grand juries to indict Trump for assorted crimes.

 

Meanwhile, the idea that the Democrats should seek “unity” and compromise with the Republican/QAnon Party, as if it’s a real, principled  “conservative’’ party instead of the seditious and power-and-money-obsessed neo-fascist syndicate it has become,  is ridiculous. It has to be defeated. Maybe some real, if usually cowering, conservatives will come out of their caves and start a responsible, patriotic and thoughtfully prescriptive right-of-center party. America needs one.

 

More Proof We Need Term Limits

There would be many more individuals in Congress voting their consciences if we had term limits. With so many legislators wanting to stay in office permanently and with so many states and congressional districts (especially Republican-QAnon ones) having become rigidly one-party operations, they increasingly vote in lockstep with their party bases. House districts, gerrymandered into almost totally one-party jurisdictions, especially by Republican-controlled state legislatures, are the worst problem.

 

We might see in the coming Senate trial a bit of  late-career quasi-courage from the often supine GOP senators Rob Portman, of Ohio, Pat Toomey, of Pennsylvania, and Richard Burr, of North Carolina, if they decide to vote to convict Trump for his obvious, videotaped crimes before and during the events of Jan. 6. But that’s because the three have announced that they won’t be running again!

 

But then, they may still be too scared of the  Republican/QAnon crazies nurtured by Trump  to show much spine when the conviction vote comes.

 

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Ed Iannuccilli

Memories of Memorization

Dr. Edward  Iannucilli’s delightful recent column on the value of memorizing poems reminded me of when memorizing famous poems and prose was common in the schools. I wish the’d bring it back because being able to remember passages of great writing can be a lifelong gift, especially writing that can provide solace and/or guidance in difficult times.

Read HERE

 

 

Some of us had to memorize this lesson about the transitory nature of life, from Shakespeare’s The Tempest:

 

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd tow'rs, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

 

Sic Transit, Guano

My favorite dead New England business is the Pacific Guano Co., which had a big factory (exactly where you now get the ferries to Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket) in the Woods Hole section of Falmouth. There it processed bird, er, waste from Pacific islands into high-grade fertilizer by mixing it with menhaden and other fish. It stank, but made some local fortunes in its 1859-1889 life. A shortage of guano and the arrival of new, man-made chemical fertilizers ended the company’s short life and the Yankee owners moved on to other trades, such as building big summer places for the new rich from Boston.

 

Cowardly Good Reading

Noel Coward (1899-1973) was best known as one of the 20th Century’s greatest English-language playwrights,  a writer of songs that are in turn funny and poignant, an actor in plays and movies,  scriptwriter, a cabaret performer (I highly recommend the records made during the shows he did in Las Vegas in 1955) and a fine painter. His wit and clipped speaking became that overused word iconic.

 

He was also a terrific short-story writer, as you can see in The Collected  Stories of Noel Coward. These are 20 stories, about a very wide range of people, poor to rich, sober to drunk, and many ethnicities, around the world, albeit through an English lens. They include shipboard and suburban romances, intrigue in the theater and brilliant descriptions of places, from remote South Pacific islands to cities that are both glamorous and gritty. There is some hilarious stuff in here, but also great empathy as he navigates the beauty, cruelty, kindness, class consciousness and pathos of life in the 20th Century.

 

But warning to the hyper-sensitive: Coward was of his time and there’s some politically incorrect stuff in these stories, in which time is often marked with the lighting of cigarettes and the downing of drinks.

 

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