Whitcomb: Kids Need Some Microbe Exposure; Fung Should Disavow Trump

Sunday, December 06, 2020

Robert Whitcomb, Columnist

 

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Robert Whitcomb, columnist

“You keep entering empty cities.

Birds fly out of open doors.

 

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whisper to the leafless trees.’’

-- From “Lonesome Is a Curious Word,’’ by Lesley Dauer (born 1965), a Massachusetts-educated poet and teacher

 

“Humanity is waging war on nature. This is suicidal. Nature always strikes back – and it is already doing so with growing force and fury. Biodiversity is collapsing. One million species are at risk of extinction. Ecosystems are disappearing before our eyes … Human activities are at the root of our descent toward chaos.

The past decade was the hottest in human history. Apocalyptic fires and floods, cyclones and hurricanes are increasingly the new normal."

-- U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Gutteres last week

 

Young people are generally much more concerned about these things. But then, they’ll have to live in this mess for long time.

 

Hats off to Nico Gentile, a 17-year-old Sandwich (Mass.), High School student who last year helped bring together 100 students from 10 schools for the first Cape and Islands Youth Climate Action Summit, noted the New England News Collaborative. And last April, Mr. Gentile started the Massachusetts Climate Education Organization (MCEO),  recruiting students statewide, from urban areas to suburbs and from public and private schools.

To read more, please hit this link:

 

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the need for children to build their immunity system

Bring on the Exposure

Keeping children out of in-person school has been a disaster for many kids’ learning, especially the poorer ones who don’t have adequate technology and/or supervision at home. But there’s another little noticed long-term disaster summed up here in a New York Times essay by two physicians at Columbia University – Donna L. Farber, an immunologist and surgeon, and Thomas Connors, a pediatrician:

"The longer we need to socially distance our children in the midst of uncontrolled viral spread, the greater the possibility that their immune systems will miss learning important immunological lessons (what's harmful, what's not) that we usually acquire during childhood.

“There is already well-justified concern about the impact of prolonged virtual learning on social and intellectual development, especially for elementary and middle-school children. The sooner we can safely restore the normal experiences of childhood, interacting with other children and -- paradoxically -- with pathogens and diverse microorganisms, the better we can ensure their ability to thrive as adults.”

This recalls the growing scientific realization that “playing in dirt is healthy” for kids. Exposure to it builds up their immune systems.

To read The Times’s piece, please hit this link:

 

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Who will get vaccinated first

Right now, the ranking and timing of who gets vaccinated for COVID-19 looks like it will be, generally: Health-care workers and nursing-home residents – in December and January; then the rather vague mass of “essential workers” (from teachers to garbage collectors), in February; then old folks and those with serious underlying illnesses, such as cancer and heart disease, maybe as early as February but certainly by March sometime, and finally the rest of us (but not including millions of Trumpian/QAnon anti-vaxxers) over the spring and early summer. Maybe things will go faster than this, but with people having to get two shots, several weeks apart, I doubt it.

 

I can foresee affluent elderly folks casting off their year-long claustrophobia and traveling like crazy next spring, as others look on with intense jealously.
 

Meanwhile watch out for bogus stuff in the great cesspool called the Internet, especially Facebook:

 

“As governments are preparing to roll out vaccines, criminal organizations are planning to infiltrate or disrupt supply chains. Criminal networks will also be targeting unsuspecting members of the public via fake Web sites and false cures, which could pose a significant risk to their health, even their lives.’’

-- Interpol Secretary Gen. Juergen Stock

 

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Something to brood on in the wake of COVID-19? Did we close too many hospitals in recent years? What about the inevitable future pandemics and natural disasters?

 

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GE Turbines off the Vineyard

Here’s another example of how offshore wind power can be an economic boon for New England:

Vineyard Wind LLC  has picked Boston-based General Electric to provide the turbines for its project south of Martha’s Vineyard – in what will be the first large-scale offshore wind farm in the United States. European nations are far ahead of us!

The wind-farm developer, a joint venture owned by Avangrid and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, had originally planned to put up turbines made by the Danish-Japanese venture MHI Vestas (soon to be entirely Danish).

But permitting delays led Vineyard Wind to change the wind farm’s layout and equipment. So there will be 62 GE turbines instead of the 84 planned with MHI Vestas. But those General Electric turbines are the world’s most powerful.  It’s nice to think that a Massachusetts company will provide this gear for this massive New England project.

And the news may suggest a brighter future for GE, which has faced hard times the past few years.

 

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Illuminating murals one of the ways to keep the city alive

City Spots of Color and Light, Even Now

A friend of my elder daughter recently took pictures of nighttime pandemic life in downtown Providence – movies projected on walls, brightly lit murals, outdoor drinking and dining in the cold, assisted by portable heaters. I wonder how much of that will continue after the pandemic. It sure looked cheery – in spots.

 

Maybe the COVID crisis is giving lasting lessons on maintaining nighttime urban excitement.

 

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There’s something exhilarating about walking around on a  breezy cool morning after a big storm.   (Last Monday’s tempest seemed more like a tropical storm than something we’d get on a Nov. 30.) That’s what I did last Tuesday. Everything was so sharp, as in a super-realist painting. I noticed that there were still some flowers out, even after some freezing nights. Dandelions are particularly tough: a couple of mild days in the sun and they bloom.
 

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Eight family members, from across America, got on a Zoom call on Thanksgiving. It was fun if a bit gyrational, along the lines of “Hi, now who is that?” “Oh, there you are; you got in.” “What’s that on the wall?” “Cute!”) I’m glad that no one made a pretense of eating and drinking during the call. But it needed an MC. Maybe one will be assigned for a Christmas show. It’s strange that we have never gathered all together like this before in person.  Could this lead to a real, in-person holiday celebration with everybody next year, what with pent-up demand for nonvirtual social interaction? No. Too complicated.

 

Heyday of Car Culture

I’ve been binge-reading (but will soon stop, getting to overdose levels) novels and short stories by John O’Hara (1905-1970), that  hard-nosed chronicler of American society, from the 1930s to the ‘60s. Few people have  written about U.S. social mores and the roles of class and money as well as O’Hara. And few have written such superb dialogue. (He also wrote accurately, but too much, about sex.) O’Hara can be addictive. But then in my case that’s partly because I’m old enough to remember some of the historical context in which he wrote.

 

Here I tell of O’Hara’s wonderful description of America’s car culture. He describes the various species of cars, some very exotic and most now long extinct, and their relationship with their owners, like a zoologist.  Those grandiose Pierce-Arrows and Duesenbergs! Consider that O’Hara’s most famous -- and first – novel, Appointment in Samarra (1934) is about the downfall of a car dealer in the fictional town of Gibbsville, Pa.

 

That reminds me of how much more obsessed we seemed by cars in the ‘50s and ‘60s than now.

 

In our family the arrival of a new vehicle was a big event, with, it seemed, often more emphasis on how it looked than   on how well it drove or how sturdy it was. Color was very important.

 

We had DeSotos, a Pontiac station wagon, a Jeep, several Chevy Impala convertibles (which my mother tended to wreck after some drinks), wooden-paneled “Beach Wagons” (aka “Woodies”) and a Rambler (bad move), among others. The most memorable was the three-wheeled (two on front, one in back) Messerschmitt (made by the German airplane company). My father mostly used it to drive to the train station, but a few horrifying times he drove it into Boston.

 

Ah, the new-car smell, soon to be overtaken by the acrid scent of our parents’ cigarettes.

 

Cars are much better now – much safer, much more fuel-efficient -- and clean electric cars may be dominant within the next five to 10 years. But there’s much less excitement when new cars are introduced than 60 years ago, and you’re less likely to read new fiction in which cars play the major roles they had in short stories, novels and movies of decades ago. The vertical front-grill disaster of the Ford Edsel (1958-1960) was a big story.  The romance has faded.

 

(Tires – radials -- are sure a lot better now. Fifty years ago, it seemed we’d have to change flat tires several times a year if we drove a lot, which we did most years.)

 

The car culture was something of a national unifier as the terrible roads of the early 20th Century were improved, and then came the Interstate Highway System, starting in the late ‘50s.

 

Consider all those “road books’’ – e.g., Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and even Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita – spawned by America’s golden auto era. Americans are less mobile now, but a latter-day road book called The National Road: Dispatches From a Changing America, by Tom Zoellner, has just come out. I’ll read it.

 

 

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Cranston Mayor Allan Fung

Farewell to Fung, for Now

Allan Fung, a smart, good-humored and moderate Republican, has been a fine mayor of Cranston, leaving it stronger than when he arrived in City Hall. He governed as a thoughtful middle-of-the-roader and always with an eye toward long-term improvements. The spiffing up of the Garden City area might be the best example.  And he dealt calmly with a remarkably complicated city, for a community of 81,000 – with rich and poor neighborhoods, a wide variety of ethnic groups, a waterfront on Upper Narragansett Bay and an interior exurbia.  Another big challenge was that the mayor’s tenure began on Jan. 1, 2009, in the midst of a deep recession.

 

What a difference Mayor Fung’s tenure has been from so many Trump-terrified fellow Republicans on Capitol Hill. Rather than spouting empty rhetoric and lies, and avoiding responsibility 24/7, he got things done. But then, legislators, especially on Capitol Hill, can just talk while mayors and governors have to actually do things things – they have to govern, every day.

 

They have to answer to the Real World, to citizens’ practical concerns.

 

I hope that Mayor Fung stays in politics. But, sigh, I do wish he’d denounce the depravities of  the national leader of his party.

 

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The Denial of Death

I noticed a recent big increase in obituaries saying that so and so has “passed away’’ rather than, accurately, “died.’’  I think the euphemism is mostly about the fear and so the denial of death. That terror is behind most religion and some other escapisms, or whatever you want to call our management of existential anxiety.  With a pandemic raging, there’s probably more such escapism around now.

 

It reminds me of the unlikely 1973-74 best-seller The Denial of Death, by the cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker (some might remember that the book appears in the 1977 romantic semi-comedy Annie Hall, co-written and directed by the death-obsessed Woody Allen). Becker discussed the various ways we face or avert our eyes from the inevitability of our demise.

 

That, in turn, reminds me of, for many years, obituary writers’ superstitious avoidance of the word “cancer’’ as if you could catch it by saying it or reading about  it or, especially, by visiting people who had it. There’s a lot more openness about cancer now, but still too many obits vaguely blame “a long illness” instead of calling it by its real name. Ditto with AIDS, in that case probably more because of homophobia than anything else.

 

Reality can be so tiresome!

 

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Roger Mandle, PHOTO: RISD

RIP for Arts Leader

Roger Mandle died of cancer last week at 79. From the time I first met him, in 1993, I always found him disciplined, dignified (quite proper in the old-fashioned sense of the word),  courteous, thoughtful and always looking ahead as president of the Rhode Island School of Design and later jobs. The neat-as-a-pin and ramrod-straight Roger was a terrific promoter of the arts communities of Rhode Island and the Massachusetts South Coast over the years, up to the end. He had impressive energy and boundless enthusiasm. He never seemed to dwell in the past and his accomplishments there but, rather,  looked for new projects  to advance “right-brain thinking’’.

 

But in manner he was a throwback.

 

Too Many Boomers!

Americans would be better served if more of their U.S. senators were younger. Forty-eight of the current U.S. senators are over 65! Most of them in varying degrees have become beholden to economic special interests and act as if they are owed lifetime tenancy. There are far too many Baby Boomers and Silent Generation members; neither generation, as a whole, is known for the vision and selflessness of its members, at least compared to “The Greatest Generation,’’ which preceded them. And the median age of Americans is 38.4 years old.

 

Anyway, it’s past time for term limits.

 

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The national Republican/QAnon/Proud Boys Party continues to wallow in lies, sedition and threats of violence, even as the grifter in the Oval Office continues to pocket money from his fanatic, willfully ignorant and suckered followers. It’s not a “conservative” party. It has become a neo-fascist con for the power-and-money benefit of a sociopath and his family and entourage and enabled by political cowards.


Never did I think that some leaders of a major American political party would descend to trying to reverse a fair election with conspiracy theories immediately ascertainable as utterly bogus and go along with implied and explicit threats of violence.

 

But there have been glimmers of wisdom from past and present Republicans. Consider:

 

“If a political party does not have its foundation in the determination to advance a cause that is right and that is moral, then it is not a political party; it is merely a conspiracy to seize power.’’

-- President Eisenhower in a speech to the Fourth Annual Republican Women’s National Conference on March 6, 1956

 

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"The responsibility for this thing lies squarely on the heads of the Republicans who have been obsessed with the value of {red-baiting Wisconsin Sen. Joseph} McCarthy to the party. We are reaping what they have sown."

-- Vermont Republican Sen. Ralph Flanders {1880-1970}, in 1954, during the McCarthy era

 

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"Mr. President {Trump}, it looks like you likely lost the state of Georgia. Stop inspiring people to commit potential acts of violence. Someone is going to get hurt, someone is going to get shot, someone is going to get killed."

-- Gabriel Sterling, a Republican and the voting-system-implementation manager in the Georgia secretary of state’s office, which oversees elections, speaking last week.

 

If you want to know who the biggest beneficiaries of the GOP/QAnon/Proud Boys Party are, besides Trump’s avaricious inner circle, you only have to look at the Senate candidates representing the party in the crucial U.S. Senate  runoff elections on Jan. 5 in Georgia. They are incumbents David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, who face Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock. The outcome of the election will determine if the ruthless -- but corrupt! – Moscow Mitch McConnell will continue to run the Senate.

 

Both Perdue and Loeffler were rich before entering politics and got richer by profiting from insider stock trading based on confidential information they got as senators, especially in a classified secret Senate meeting last Jan. 24 that provided early information on the gravity of the looming COVID-19 threat to America. Of course, they didn’t tell the public anything about what they learned in that profitable session. That would have cut into their profits. For some people, there’s never enough. Nothing succeeds like excess.

 

Oh yes, in 2019, Perdue bought shares in a submarine-parts manufacturer called BMX Technologies, before voting to give the company a lucrative federal contract, then selling the shares for a big profit.

 

It's government by and for the 1 percent.

 

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