Whitcomb: Free-Form Clamming; the Maine Question; Why Big Bettors? Trump Stormtroopers Invade
Sunday, July 26, 2020
“The quality of these trees, green height; of the sky, shining, of water, a
clear flow; of the rock, hardness
And reticence: each is noble in its quality. The love of freedom has
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTbeen the quality of Western man.’’
From “Shine, Republic,’’ by Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962)
“The men with the muckrakes are often indispensable to the well-being of society, but only if they know when to stop raking the muck.’’
Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919), in 1906, during his second term as president
“All that we do is touched with ocean, and yet we remain on the shore of what we know.’’
Richard Wilbur (1921-2017), American poet and professor. He spent most of his life in New England.
In one part of my brain it’s endless summer, as I was reminded by Dr. Ed Iannuccilli’s recent column in GoLocal about crabbing as a kid on the Rhode Island shore. (Hit this link to read the doctor’s sweet essay here.
My paternal grandparents lived in a gray-shingle house on West Falmouth Harbor, on the Cape side of Buzzards Bay. (The house has since been torn down and replaced by a monstrosity twice as high.) The harbor once had vast numbers of quahogs and more than a few oysters, too. We kids would wade out on the flats, collect the shellfish in a bag and bring them back to a stone dock, where we’d smash them to get at the meat, over which we’d squeeze a lemon, and eat right there. Very messy and unprofessional. This was before our father showed us how to open them with a special knife, which I don’t think I could do now. I fuzzily remember that he could do it with one hand, and with a cigarette dangling from his mouth.
On those seemingly open-ended days, a southwest wind was always blowing off Buzzards Bay, the air was always about 76 degrees, as was the water, and the haze turned into a purple fog in the late afternoon as the catboats and the bluefish and striped-bass seekers returned to the harbor from the usually choppy open bay.
A big oil spill in 1969 closed the harbor to legal shellfishing for decades. (Still, people, especially poor immigrants from Southeast Asia, would come clamming anyway and probably lied to the stores and restaurants about where their shellfish came from). But something good came from the disaster: West Falmouth Harbor became an internationally known place for research into the effects of oil spills and how to remediate them, in large part because the Marine Biological Laboratory was just down the road, in Woods Hole.
I’ll always remember the late ‘50s under a hazy sun as I dug into the sand to pull out a delectable quahog.
New England Confusion
Most of us are getting pretty claustrophobic these days and can’t travel long distances. But at least we New Englanders have plenty to see in our compact region – beautiful mountains and coasts, lovely lakes, innumerable historic sites, great food, bucolic empty COVIDized college campuses….
The biggest regional travel hurdle at this point: Maine Gov. Janet Mills fears people from Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Citing the high percentage of people from those two states who have tested positive for COVID-19, she has ordered that Rhode Islanders and Bay Staters must quarantine for two weeks or present proof of a recent negative virus test to be legally in the Pine Tree State. The effect is to discourage many, perhaps most, of these people from going to Maine – a big blow to its tourist industry, though many ignore the order, with some anxious “illegals’’ sneaking into the state via back roads from its deeply rural western side.
Vermont also has tough rules, but somewhat different – they want to know what county you come from, not just the state, in determining whether you need to quarantine.
Has there been a lot of sneaking across state lines? Complex times indeed. Maybe we need a special meeting of New England governors – three un-Trumpian Republicans, three garden-variety Democrats -- to sort out the confusion and come up with a truly regional plan. All the region’s governors are calm, competent and respectful of science. It’s curious that the most liberal part of the country has three GOP governors, though they would hardly be considered in the mainstream of the party, though New Hampshire’s Chris Sununu comes rather close.
Anyway:
Harvard’s Dr. Ashish Jha, incoming dean of Brown's School of Public Health, has famously praised Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo’s tough response to the pandemic: "Rhode Island has done a fabulous job -- I would say one of the kind of standouts in the country, a model for how we should be doing this," Dr. Jha told WPRI TV. "If the rest of the country had done what Rhode Island has done, we'd been in a very different place as a nation." And yet Rhode Island testing data led Governor Mills to her rather draconian order. Without a unified and coordinated federal response to the pandemic, including how to conduct and promptly report test results and do speedy contact tracing, the policy confusions will continue as everybody tries to interpret the latest data, based on different states’ practices. To read Dr. Jha’s remarks, please hit this link:
For a good review of America’s COVID-19 testing failures, please hit this Bloomberg link:
The article notes:
“Test results, to be useful, should arrive in less than two days. If they take longer, opportunities to isolate infected people and trace their contacts with others wither, undermining broader containment efforts. So why can’t the wealthiest and most innovative country in the world have more rapid-fire testing during a pandemic?’’
Stay Away, Foreign Freshmen (or is it Freshpersons?)
Oh, oh. The Trump administration, which had seemed to back off entirely from its ban on foreign college students coming to study in America if they were only to take courses, at least to start, online, is now changing policy yet again, saying that the ban will apply to freshmen. This will hit the U.S. economy, especially in New England, whose prestigious colleges and universities draw many young foreigners, most of whom are paying full freight.
As for how to reopen the public schools, things are far too murky now for me to have a settled opinion, except that staying with mostly remote learning would be huge disaster. Whatever happens in the fall won’t be pretty. All we can do is to try to mitigate the mess for students, teachers and parents and hope for a vaccine sometime later in the school year.
Private Profit, Public Poverty
The Portland Press Herald reports that some letter carriers in Portland, Maine, are accusing that city’s postmaster of, in the paper’s words, “deliberately delaying the delivery of first-class mail and priority mail by ordering clerks to sort Amazon packages first, ensuring that carriers deliver Amazon's packages on time.’’ COVID-19 has, of course, been a gold mine for Amazon.
If the Portland story is true, this would be yet another example of the triumph of big business over public service. I strongly agree with Trump that Amazon is too big, but his main interest is in sticking it to Amazon CEO/founder Jeff Bezos because The Washington Post, which the mogul owns, has covered the most corrupt White House in history with the rigor it deserves. (I do give The Post and Mr. Bezos credit for the fact The Post covers Amazon itself with rigor.)
The U.S. Postal Service, as an agency that’s supposed to serve all Americans, deserves priority over private companies. It seems that Republicans are determined to destroy the USPS. Consider that back in 2006 the then-GOP controlled Congress and the G.W. Bush administration pushed through a law that required the USPS to create a $72 billion fund to pay for the cost of its post-retirement health-care costs, 75 years into the future! This is the sort of burden that applies to no other private corporation or federal agency. At the time, many considered it a gift to Fedex and UPS, run by loyal Republicans.
Sidewalk Show
It’s cheering, for people and birds, to see those tall, vivid sunflower plants that so many people have planted in front of their houses; they’re especially cheering along sidewalks in the cities.
xxx
Whether it’s because of the weather or simply that house-bound people are paying more attention to their yards, we’re getting reports of a big increase in the skunk population this summer. How appropriate for 2020!
As China Grows Stronger
With the mess here, most Americans are probably not watching China very much.
Which is too bad, since the dictatorship in Beijing is well on its way to making China the world’s dominant power in place of America. The Middle Kingdom is gradually taking over the vast international waters of the South China Sea; has totally absorbed Hong Kong; is interfering, like Russia, in the politics of democracies; is trying to bite off more chunks of Indian territory, and, of course, continues to steal vast quantities of Western intellectual property. As for real and potential dissidents within China, the regime, led by dictator-for-life Xi Jinping, whom Trump last January called “a very, very good friend of mine,” has those nifty concentration camps. And while their cybercrime capabilities aren’t up to the level of the Russians yet they’re making fast progress.
They’re taking advantage of Trump’s ignorance, administrative incompetence and extreme vanity and selfishness, as well as his lack of interest in maintaining alliances against dictatorships or promoting human rights. Then there are his financial conflicts of interest. (Hello Ivanka!). They know how to play him. The damage that Trump has done to America’s international position may not be reparable in the face of China’s growing economy, military and intelligence capability and ruthlessness. Dramatically throwing out a few Chinese spies and closing a few consulates won’t do the trick.
xxx
The ability of the leaders of the European Union’s 27 member nations to craft a big COVID-19 economic-recovery program despite how different many of these nations are from each other is a marvel that should give Americans some hope than even their own divisions can be bridged with hard work, ingenuity and goodwill. But that can’t happen this year….
Meanwhile, let’s hope that Western European nations can work together to promote democracy and push back against Russian and Chinese aggression and fill the vacuum left by the U.S.
Ginning It Up
“Images of ‘Naked Athena,’ as the {Portland, Ore.} protester has been labeled, have gone viral, her unclothed confrontation with police earning her accolades as a brave ally of the cause. But I see something else: a beneficiary of white privilege dancing vainly on a stage that was originally created to raise up the voices of my oppressed brothers and sisters. In this, she is not alone. As the demonstrations continue every night in Portland, many people with their own agendas are co-opting, and distracting attention from, what should be our central concern: the Black Lives Matter movement.’’
-- From “Portland’s protests were supposed to be about black lives. Now they’re white lives,” by E.D. Mondainé, president of the Portland branch of the NAACP, in The Washington Post. Hit this link:
A few people have noted in the past week or so how Trump hero Vladimir Putin invaded and seized Ukraine with uniformed Russians who didn’t wear unit insignias and refused to admit who they were before they started shooting. This is what Trump and his secret-police chief, William Barr, have been doing in Portland and plan to do in other “Democrat cities’’ as their masked federal operatives, traveling around in unmarked vehicles, attack and kidnap peaceful as well as unpeaceful demonstrators, only a very few of whom could be called “anarchists,’’ a term Trump uses for anyone who denounces him on the streets.
Law enforcement in America is supposed to be overwhelmingly a local and state power, with governors able to call in state police and/or the National Guard in order to help local cops in troubled places. And certainly, the mayor of Portland and governor of Oregon should have acted more forcefully several weeks ago to better protect property in the relatively small part of Portland where the demonstrations are taking place.
But Trump’s fascistic actions are likely to make matters worse, which is what he wants. Would-be dictators always use localized disorders to try to widen their powers and undermine civil liberties. Before the Trump Troops were sent in, the number of demonstrators had fallen to around 100 in Portland but then increased to 1,000 or more in response to the Trump/Barr assault.
Interestingly, local police in Portland, which has a long history of largely peaceful demonstrations, had been criticized for overreacting to the protests, including firing tear gas, long before the federal forces arrived, uninvited by Portland or state officials. And contrary to Trumpists, Portland is not “under siege.” Most of the property damage is graffiti, and the “weapons’’ of the few protestors who use them are small fireworks. The protestors also seem to enjoy lighting trash fires, worsening local pollution! But the longer the protestors keep their disturbances going, the more they risk a pro-Trump backlash in the election. They should go home – now! Enough!
Trump wants to intensify national tension and anxiety by sending masked operatives to other “Democrat-run’’ cities, such as Chicago and Philadelphia. This will let our lawless leader pose as a “law and order president’’.
Consider this comment from Philadelphia District Atty. Larry Krasner to Bloomberg News:
“My dad volunteered and served in World War II to fight fascism, like most of my uncles, so we would not have an American president brutalizing and kidnapping Americans for exercising their constitutional rights and trying to make America a better place, which is what patriots do. Anyone, including federal law enforcement, who unlawfully assaults and kidnaps people will face criminal charges from my office.”
To read more, please hit this link:
Once again, no one is going to “defund the police,’’ though Trump and his people will keep saying that to boost his polls by worrying voters, especially anxious white people living in comfy suburbs far away from high-crime places. Crime is generally higher in cities than suburbs because, obviously, of their population density and socio-economic complexity. Highly stressful crises such as pandemics and deep recessions can boost crime rates, especially in crowded places. Defunding the police is not a position of the Democratic Party. “Reforming the police,” where necessary, is. As for Joe Biden, he’s a standard, boring old-fashioned Truman-style Democrat. That’s what primary voters wanted.
In any case, prepare for more trouble from QAnon, Boogaloo and other crazy (but well-armed) far-right groups as they join the Trump Tribe and take on that chaotic “group’’ called Antifa.
xxx
In other fighting-fascism news, it was good to see that a federal judge, seeing a violation of the First Amendment, has freed former Trump fixer Michael Cohen from jail, to which he had been sent by the Trump regime to keep him from coming out with a tell-all book about his former boss before the election.
Blue on Coast, Red Inland
Some people wonder why California, by far the biggest “Blue State,’’ has so many COVID-19 cases despite the relatively tough pandemic-control measures taken by the governor and the mayors of the Golden State’s big, coastal cities.
One reason: As you drive east from the coast over the Coast Range and into the interior you get into a lot of right-wing Trump country, where it can be dangerous to tell people to wear masks and engage in social distancing. Kinda like Burrillville.
Lincoln’s Big Train Trip
Yes, yet another book about our greatest president! But Ted Widmer’s latest work, Lincoln on the Verge, about the 13-day train trip that the president-elect took from his hometown of Springfield, Ill., to Washington, D.C., the last leg of it in secret to thwart assassination attempts, is exciting and brings readers to a new understanding of the run-up to the Civil War. The trip strengthened Lincoln as a leader and helped dramatize, at least to Americans in the Free States, what was at stake in 1861 – the very soul of the nation, and the extreme dangers they’d face in trying to save it.
I did find one aspect of the book depressing because of its loud echoes today: The deeply malign influence of the South, now as then, with its still disproportionate political power, on some aspects of American life, as much as I’ve liked some Southern relatives and friends.
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