Whitcomb: Maudlin Song Season; Good Local News; Haley and Social Security

Sunday, December 03, 2023

 

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Robert Whitcomb, Columnist

“One day the Nouns were clustered in the street.

An Adjective walked by, with her dark beauty.

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The Nouns were struck, moved, changed.

The next day a Verb drove up, and created the Sentence.’’

-- From “Permanently,’’ by Kenneth Koch (1925-2002), American poet, playwright and professor

To read the whole poem, hit this link:
 

 

 

“From a commercial point of view, if Christmas did not exist it would be necessary to invent it.’’

-- Katherine Whitehorn (1928-2021) British journalist, book author and radio presenter

 

 

 

“One reason a lot of us live here {in Vermont} is probably that surviving and flourishing in this climate is such a good, moral thing to do. It’s decadent to be warm all the time.’’

-- Willem Lange (born 1935)  in Tales From the Edge of the Woods

 

 

Rhododendrons are living thermometers at this time of year. As the temperature rises to around 40 F, the leaves become full. But as it drops to 32, the leaves droop, then curl and eventually become pale green cylinders.

 

 

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PHOTO: Discover Newport

Of course, there are especially vivid colors and bright lights in Christmas decorations at our latitude: It’s to offset the depressing lack of bright color in nature, whose dominant colors now are brown and gray. We want to jazz up things to get us through a month that many would otherwise find intolerably depressing.

 

Meanwhile, the repetition of Christmas songs, including carols and secular works,  having begun weeks ago, around Halloween, intensifies.  They’re generally tedious and even irritating, though I myself have an embarrassing weakness for maudlin, corny Christmas songs from the mid-20th Century, such as “White Christmas”  (1942), “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” (1944) and “The Christmas Song” (“Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire”) (1945). Note that all three were written during World War II, with the last one written only a few weeks before the end of the conflagration. They all appealed to the nostalgia for home and hearth, providing listeners with rose-colored glasses meant to obscure a, well, more nuanced view of past holiday seasons and home in general.

 

Anyway, maybe nostalgia ain’t what it used to be.

 

I still have sharp and not entirely pleasant memories of adults in my parents’ generation singing Christmas songs around a piano with drinks in hand. No more than half of them were drunk. Even back then, in the ‘50s, it surprised me that so many adults played the piano. Apparently not so much anymore.

 

It surprises me that these secular Christmas songs are still popular, even as most other parts of “The Great American Songbook” (stuff written from about 1920 to 1960, much of it for Broadway and the movies) have mostly disappeared from the airways and have become a species of classical music especially favored by the well-educated and affluent.

 

It’s amusing how many Christmas songs were written by people with Jewish backgrounds. But, hey, Christianity started as a Jewish cult, and  the late December holiday originated as a pagan celebration marking the happy fact that the days were no longer getting shorter. Music and show business were more open to Jews than many fields were in those more anti-Semitic times in America.

 

Hanukkah, a relatively minor Jewish holiday (Dec. 7-15 this year), has long been hyped up in the spirit of end-of-year inclusion.

 

 

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Will the Christmas crush of Amazon packages,  some of which are unloaded on the U.S. Postal Service in “last mile” deliveries,  delay deliveries of such important things as checks?

 


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CEO at Edesia Navyn Salem PHOTO: File

Two Pieces of Good News

The Bezos family (of the Amazon empire) will give as much as  $137 million to Edesia Nutrition,  which will let the North Kingstown-based nonprofit double production of its nutrient-rich food to reduce the incidence of malnutrition among children worldwide.

 

The family of Jacklyn and Miguel “Mike” Bezos, the parents of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, will provide $127 million, plus a $10 million matching fund, to Edesia. The nonprofit partners with international aid organizations that distribute its products around the world. Rhode Islanders should be proud to be hosting this organization.

 

 

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And ProvPort, the public-private nonprofit agency, has signed a long-term lease for the South Quay, 33 acres of filled land in East Providence. The plan is for Waterson Terminal Services to build the first phase of a terminal there as a staging and shipping area for offshore wind terminals.

 

Waterson, the company that operates ProvPort,  says it will match a  promised $35 million from the state to develop South Quay, which, I’d guess, could also be used for shipping a variety of other stuff besides offshore-wind-related equipment.

 

This would provide some well-paying jobs (fairly safe from AI) and seems a better investment than, say, a stadium….Oh, yes, and it would take a little whack at global warming, which is causing seas to rise.

 

 

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Nikki Haley PHOTO: Official

Haley Wants Oldsters to Work Longer

Nikki Haley, the slick former U.N. ambassador and South Carolina governor, and now rising-in-the-polls  Republican presidential candidate, wants to increase the age for getting Social Security, arguing that would be justified by the fact that, at least until the last few years, people were generally living longer. She cites the growing cost of Social Security (and Medicare) and waves fear flags that the program will otherwise go “bankrupt’’.

 

But with easy fixes, it won’t. One partial fix is to raise the amount of income on which people pay Social Security taxes. That’s $160,200 now,  scheduled to rise to $168,600 in 2024. The tax is regressive – richer people pay at a lower rate than poorer people. But then, federal taxes in general remain much lower than the post-World War II average, and at least since Reagan the tax system has favored the affluent. For example, the tax on capital gains – money-making money – is much lower than the tax on so-called earned income.

 

Taxes could be raised to prudently pay for the programs citizens need/want without hurting the overall economy. Indeed, certain pricey projects, such as the Biden administration’s $1 trillion infrastructure measure, will make the United States richer by improving efficiencies and convenience.

 

Ms. Haley, who has shown herself a very smart politician adept at tailoring her message to fit her various audiences, suggests that people can just work longer before having access to Social Security. That might be all well and good for many white-color jobs, but what about work that requires a lot of physicality/wear and tear, such as many of the skilled trades (carpenters, electricians, plumbers, roofers,  general construction, etc.) as well as certain manufacturing jobs and mining, fishing and farming?
 

Meanwhile, artificial intelligence will destroy millions of those body-friendly office jobs. AI is far less of a threat to the “blue-collar” jobs above, which as a result will probably comprise a growing percentage of remaining jobs as AI rapidly spreads. All the more reason not to raise the Social Security age!

 

Ms. Haley got some good news last week. The Koch family lobbying group Americans for (Greater Billionaire} Prosperity has decided to throw its many millions of  dollars of political spending into backing her. The main goals of the right-wing group are lower taxes, fewer pesky federal regulations and even more political power for the group’s members.

 

The group fears above all that Trump would lose the general election to a Democrat, even one as boring as Joe Biden.

 

And certainly, Trump’s treason, incitement to violence, brazen thievery, non-stop lying, sexual assaults, record-setting narcissism, etc., etc., are embarrassing to a certain kind of dignified Republican. Ms. Haley, who though she sometimes showed herself outstandingly amoral when she worked for, and sucked up to, Trump, is attractively self-disciplined,  calm, knowledgeable and well-spoken, and would be a highly presentable servant of the  Big Business and billionaire-family interests represented by the Koch group.

 

And, in  her favor, she recognizes the threat to the entire West posed by Putin’s blood-soaked aggression in Ukraine

 

In any event, the most important duty of voters in these fraught times is keeping Donald J. Trump and his fellow fascist kleptocrats out of the Executive Branch. He’s done quite enough damage already. If it takes Nikki Haley to do that, so be it. But I assume she’d endorse him if Trump seemed certain to win the GOP/QAnon nomination, and now may actually be campaigning for vice president under him, or for president in 2028, assuming we still have real presidential elections then.

 

 

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Trump’s most important voting group is white “Christian” evangelicals. Hilarious!  How can avid followers of that creature call themselves “Christians”?  No wonder so many young people are leaving organized religion.

 

 

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Henry Kissinger PHOTO: Official Portrait

Henry Kissinger, who died last week at 100, was right in noting that diplomacy often necessitated deciding among only nasty actions. He had what you’d call a tragic view of life.

 

I have long Iiked the remark of George Mitchell (born 1933), the former diplomat, Maine senator and judge, that “In human affairs, the answer to every problem contains with it the seeds of a new problem.’’

 

 

 

Other Sentient Creatures

I’ve read that new findings about the intelligence and emotions of octopuses are leading some people (me included) to stop eating them and restaurants to stop serving them. As we learn more about nonhuman sentient creatures, who, like us,  endure pain and fear, a small but growing percentage of the human population have decided to forgo eating all or most animals, and people are generally healthier for it.

 

But here’s a good exception: Shellfish! When I was editing a book, Maine Oysters,  a few years ago, we noted that bivalves apparently didn’t feel pain, and so were probably a guilt-free source of high-quality animal protein.

 

Investigative stories detailing the treatment of animals in slaughterhouses has put many folks permanently off eating meat. Hunting, however, raises the fact that most animals in the wild die very painful deaths on their own, usually more painful than being shot by a careful hunter.

 

But, ah, those delicious days of roast beef (with drippings on white bread) and crisp bacon, heart disease and all….

 


Navigating Old Age

‘“Stand aside, old man, and make way for the young’ is the American way.
As an Ancient Mariner of a sort, I want to hold the doubters with my skinny hand, fix them with a glittering eye, and say, ‘I have been to a place where none of you have ever been, where none of you can ever go. It is the past. I spent decades there and I can say, you don’t have the slightest idea.’’’

-- Paul Theroux (born 1941), American novelist and travel writer

 

Those who are old, or close to it, and their families and friends, would do well to read M.T. Connolly’s book the Measure of Our Age: Navigating Care, Safety, Money & Meaning Later in Life. Indeed, they’d do well to buy it and use it as a guide in making innumerable decisions about medical care; where the elderly should live as their health problems accumulate, including how to evaluate the quality, or lack thereof, of nursing homes, assisted-living and other institutions heavily marketed to the old, near-old and their families, and the joys and difficult challenges of letting old people age at home.  Importantly, Ms. Connolly spends a lot of time on the challenges facing care givers, some of whom are quite old themselves.

 

And she takes on the public-policy, and thus ultimately political,  issues that must be confronted in America’s rapidly aging society, particularly as pertaining to its fragmented, inefficient and fiercely expensive healthcare system.

 

 

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Robert Kennedy, John Kennedy, PHOTO: K Mundt

Assassination Mysteries

You can duke it out about its premises/conspiracy theories/conclusions or not, but it’s hard to deny that Four Died Trying, the haunting documentary series about who/what was behind the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, and the long-term effects of their murders up to the present, is a  stunning creation, visually and otherwise.
 

The series, by director John Kirby and producer Libby Handros, a duo who also created such films as The American Ruling Class, includes more than 120 interviews (and counting) and might change many viewers’ ideas about recent American history. One of the major interviewees  is – no surprise --  the intense and hyper-controversial Robert F. Kennedy Jr.  (I’m no fan, but he sure is interesting!)

 

Four Died Trying will make some people angry, both for what it says about who holds power in this country and what they might be willing to do to keep it, and for its makers’ portrayal of that power.
 

 Don’t bring it up at a holiday dinner.

 

Hit this link:

 

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