Whitcomb: Interrupt Invasions; Kill Quarantine Rules; COVID Social Paradoxes; Court Packing

Sunday, October 25, 2020

Robert Whitcomb, Columnist

 

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Robert Whitcomb, columnist

“There comes the strangest moment in your life

when everything you thought before breaks free –

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what you relied upon, as ground rule and as rite

Looks upside down from how it used to be.’’

-- From “There Comes the Strangest Moment,’’ by Kate Light (1960-2016), violinist and poet

 

 

“To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.’’

-- Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894), Scottish novelist, poet and travel writer; author of Treasure Island and other classics

 

 

“A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of.’’

-- Jane Austen (1775-1817), English novelist, including Pride and Prejudice

 

 

When I was a kid and sometimes walked home from school instead of taking the slow bus ride, I’d often take a short cut through the woods.

 

At this time of the year most of the leaves had fallen; only the oaks had held onto many of their boringly brown leaves. So, there was plenty of light as I walked between the bayberry and other shrubs. Deep in the woods you could find crabapples, smaller than the ones in orchards, which contrary to myth, you could eat. There were also some edible wild grapes left, amidst the enveloping breezy barrenness

 

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Illegal Bikes in Providence PHOTO: GoLocal

Stop These Invasions

It’s a big challenge, but Providence and the Rhode Island State Police need to do a better job monitoring the sort of   flood of  riders of ATV’s, mopeds,  motorcycles and dirt bikes (sounds like a Trump rally) that assaulted parts of Providence last Sunday, ruining the day for thousands of residents. The police need to have a better idea of when and where these people, many from outside the city, are grouping before they can sweep through Providence’s streets,  with many participants dangerously ignoring traffic laws. Roadblocks and the credible threat of mass arrests are needed to stop therm.  

 

Trying to control these invasions, of course, poses dangers in themselves, as

witness a very troubling crash involving a police car and a young man riding in this mob  last Sunday, who, as I write this, was in a coma. But it’s far more dangerous to let these riders disrupt the city than to let them roam at will in their packs. They need to be made very afraid of law enforcement. Unfortunately, Providence Mayor Jorge Elorza is seen as weak, which encourages their dangerous activities. Engendering a little fear of the mayor would be a good preventive.

 

These mobs don’t belong in the city. See and read more here.

 

 

 

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New York’s Realistic COVID Rules

Massachusetts and Rhode Island should follow New York State’s example on the movement of people from neighboring states as the COVID-19 pandemic rages on. Gov. Andrew Cuomo has decided not to add Connecticut, New Jersey and Pennsylvania to states from which travelers must quarantine for 14 days or show proof that they’ve tested negative within the previous 72 hours. That decision comes even as COVID cases continue to spike in the three states.

 

The Empire State declared that because of the interconnectedness of the Greater New York City region, a quarantine on those states “is not practically viable.” 

 

“There is no practical way to quarantine New York from Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Connecticut,” Governor Cuomo said. “There are just too many interchanges, interconnections, and people who live in one place and work in the other. It would have a disastrous effect on the economy, and remember while we’re fighting this public health pandemic we’re also fighting to open up the economy.”

 

(It’s good to read that Connecticut may similarly open up things with Rhode Island and Massachusetts.)

 

Well, Rhode Island and Massachusetts are also tightly connected, especially the northern Ocean State, which to some degree is part of Greater Boston. Recently, Massachusetts imposed quarantine and testing rules on Rhode Islanders, but COVID cases are climbing in both states. And enforcing quarantine and testing rules on people going back and forth between the two states is virtually impossible.

 

Quarantine and testing rules between the two states need to be removed to boost their economies even while the public should continue to be ordered to wear face masks and practice social distancing in indoor places and confined outdoor spaces. People who refuse to comply should be kicked out of stores, restaurants, offices, etc. and off public transit.

 

 

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Apex Building in Pawtucket

Tough Finding Customers

So Pawtucket is eyeing taking the Apex site by eminent domain for redevelopment purposes. But what sort of uses would be economically viable there? Hard to think of anything other than, perhaps, condos marketed to people unable to afford housing in Greater Boston and drawn to “The Bucket” by the prospect that the new Pawtucket-Central Falls MBTA station scheduled to open in 2022 will make it easier to get there.

 

COVID-19 and the recession have made the prospects for new retail stores, restaurants and other commercial gathering places in downtown Pawtucket seem even more distant.

 

 

The New ‘Real Life’?

It’s an understatement to say that the pandemic has had some paradoxical effects.

 

It has cut off many of our in-person encounters, and we’re often stuck with ZOOM, Skype and other such platforms to communicate visually as well as orally with many people outside our households.

 

But in dispersed America, many of our friends and relatives live far away, and so we usually didn’t see them much before the pandemic. Now we see them more because we’ve learned the ease of jumping on screens. It’s far from the same thing as “real” meetings, but it’s good enough for now.

 

Meanwhile, living on electronic devices has enabled timid, socially anxious people to avoid the stresses of real-life meetings, unfortunately letting them avoid strengthening themselves to deal with people in the flesh. Over the last few years, HR and other folks charged with interviewing job applicants have told me that more and more applicants can’t look them in the eye. Being in proximity to a person is too anxiety-provoking, especially one in authority.  Anyway, there can be something deadening about virtual living.

 

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Another result of the virus is that we can watch and hear musicians and other artists driven by the pandemic off stages, galleries, etc., easier than before because so many have been forced onto ZOOM, etc.   Not that the pandemic hasn’t been an economic and psychological disaster for most of them.

 

An example is a young musician friend of ours who now stages frequent online concerts, either alone or with groups. Before he plays, he discusses the historical and other context of each piece.

 

We fans send him a few bucks before each performance, which of course doesn’t nearly make up for what he’d  have made in a “real” concert but it  does provide some needed financial relief, and his audience may sometimes be bigger than were some of his in-person performances.

 

An acquaintance who now does most of his teaching of drawing  at the Rhode Island School of Design on a remote basis (with technical help from a teaching assistant) says he prefers to teach this way because he finds it easier to see how his students are doing as he focuses  on  close-up  video shots of their hands  at work.

 

Order the Hot Buttered Rum

Richer, high-end restaurants can afford to buy those propane-fueled outdoor heaters to lure enough outdoor diners during the coming pandemic winter to survive -- perhaps -- until spring, when, just maybe, a COVID-19 vaccine will start to become widely available. And some have already set up tents or little cabins as eating pods. Maybe some will buy heated tables. But most restaurants can’t afford those partial solutions. They’ll have to settle for simple wind barriers and encouraging lots of drinking.  Many more will just go out of business.

 

We might get a little help from the weather: NOAA predicts that most of the United States will again be warmer than “normal’’ this winter  -- whatever “normal’’ means these days as global warming accelerates.  Warmer in New England reflects something bad for the world.

 

In any event, I recommend that we patronize locally owned, not chain, restaurants, lest we’re stuck with only the latter as the pandemic and its economic damage grinds on.

 

 

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U.S. Supreme Court PHOTO: Official

Wait a Few Months Before ‘Packing the Courts’

I think that Charles Fried, a professor at the Harvard Law School and solicitor general in Ronald Reagan’s second term, has the right idea about the idea  of a President Biden and a Democratic-controlled Senate “packing the federal courts.’’: Wait to see what happens in the next few months.

 

Mr. Biden must at least consider trying to offset the fact that Trump has packed the Supreme Court, and much of the rest of a judiciary, with far-right tribunes of corporate interests and devoted to an increasingly neo-fascist national GOP antipathetic to protecting voting, employee and other individual rights, as well as environmental and other protections of the citizenry. Note that I write of the “national GOP.’’ Some Republican governors are responsible moderate conservatives who have run their states well. The Trump cult is not conservative in the classic sense of the word.

 

Professor Fried, an old-fashioned conservative who finds Trump’s regime repellent, suggests waiting to see if the court, after a Democratic victory, continues to undermine the welfare of the majority of Americans by supporting the secretive, “dark money’’-financed Federalist Society positions in pretty much every controversial case. It they do so, then the court should indeed be expanded to better represent America and not just the likes of, for example, the Koch Brothers and TV evangelical con men.

 

The old line was that “The Supreme Court follows the election returns.’’ Let’s see what happens in the time from now until next June, when the court’s current session adjourns for the summer.

 

Note President Franklin Roosevelt’s abortive 1937 plan to “pack” the Supreme Court to offset some of the power of reactionary justices after they killed some  key New Deal programs enacted by Congress. The court, perhaps considering FDR’s huge landslide in the 1936 election, decided to approve a spate of New Deal initiatives after the “packing scheme” was blocked in Congress.

 

In his piece, Mr. Fried wrote: “{To} paraphrase Churchill, such a maneuver (‘court-packing’) is a bad idea, except for all the alternatives. Here the alternatives boil down to just one: a predictable, reactionary majority on the Supreme Court for perhaps as long as another generation.

 

“I write reactionary, not conservative, because true conservative judges like John Marshall Harlan are incrementalists, not averse to change, respectful of precedent and unlikely to come into the grips of radical fantasies like eliminating or remaking the modern regulatory-administrative state.’’

 

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It’s good news that the Justice Department is suing Google for being a rapacious monopoly. But so is Facebook, which, with the help of Putin and other bad actors, helped put Trump into office.

 

 

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President Donald Trump

Trump Smoke Machine on Full Blast

John Ratcliffe is a radical-right former Texas GOP congressman with a padded CV and propensity to lie who has been been a supine servant of Trump. For his loyalty, the mobster named him director of national intelligence, a position for which he is grossly unqualified. Predictably, he has utterly politicized that post and turned it into an extension of the Trump re-election campaign.

 

So, ignore Ratcliffe when he tries to convince the electorate that Iran is a bigger threat to our election security than Russia. Better to listen to FBI Director Christopher Wray, who, in the most squalid administration in American history, is trying to do his job in a nonpartisan, patriotic way. Trump will probably fire him after the election for failing to, er, assume the position.

 

The White House is desperately trying to distract voters from Russian interference and create huge false equivalences between Vladimir Putin’s relentless efforts to keep his boy in the Oval Office and Iran. Ratcliffe is also citing Chinese election interference. But all professional intelligence people know that Russia is the big threat.

 

Trump knows that if he loses the election, he will  may well face prosecution in state and federal courts for his crimes. So, he’ll do just about anything to stay in office. The next week will be scary as he flails away.

 

Meanwhile, I repeat that Saudi Arabia, beloved by Trump, is run by a worse regime than Iran.

 

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Mill Building in Pawtucket PHOTO: GoLocal

To a Point, Missing the Mill Towns

Reading Kerri Arsenault’s disturbing new book, Mill Town: Reckoning with What Remains, about her family history and the troubles of two Maine factory towns in paper-making country labeled “Cancer Valley,’’ I thought of the pictures of those heavily tattooed, gun-heavy Trump-backing young men with crazy QAnon ideas. Decades ago, many of these guys would have found stable work in mills/factories in or near their hometowns and been able to establish successful home lives. Now, after decades of maximization of profits above all else, automation, offshoring and ever-weaker private-sector labor unions, most of such jobs are gone, and neither state or local governments nor business has moved in a big way, unlike in Western Europe and Japan, to retrain them for new industries in a digital world.

 

So they feel frustrated and humiliated, making them ripe for the demagogy of crooks like Trump (traitor, thief, pathological liar, con man and pervert, but nobody’s perfect), as with unemployed men in Germany open to the Nazis’ pitches. Their obsession with carrying big guns bespeaks their sense of weakness.

 

A lot of the old mills had plenty of things wrong with them. Many, with fast-moving machinery, were dangerous to work in, and threatened people in their communities with lethal pollution (in the case of Maine paper mills, think dioxin, among other poisons), especially before the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Health and Safety Administration, in the Nixon administration. But not all were dangerous and many long-established mills provided a sense of security and community cohesion now sorely lacking in the towns and cities that they used to economically dominate. Note that some of the mill operators were remarkably paternalistic, providing a wide range of employee benefits, besides good wages, and support for local nonprofit organizations, parks, recreational facilities and so on. They were devoted citizens. Others, of course, were utterly rapacious and selfish.

 

Literary Letters

The Dolphin Letters, 1970-1979, is a collection of letters between essayist, critic and novelist Elizabeth Hardwick (1916-2007) her one-time husband the famous poet Robert Lowell (1917-1977), and their circle. It provides an inside look at literary creativity as well as the social, economic and other stresses of being a writer. In this case, everything was made more difficult by Mr. Lowell’s bi-polar disorder (or, as we used to call it, manic depression).

 

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