Whitcomb: More Shelter; Stick With the Sand; Keep Those Tests; Dark Author

Sunday, March 03, 2024

Robert Whitcomb, Columnist

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Robert Whitcomb, columnist

“I never intended to have this life, believe me –
It just happened. You know how dogs turn up

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At a farm, and they wag but can’t explain….”

-- From “The Resemblance Between Your Life and a Dog,’’ by American poet and essayist Robert Bly (1926-2021)

Here’s the whole poem:

‘’Southerners are probably not more hospitable than New Englanders are; they are simply more willing to remind you of the fact that they are being hospitable.’’

-- Ray L. Birdwhistell (1918-1994), American anthropologist

“Our March entertainments have a desperate, hysterical quality.’’

-- From “March Madness, ‘’ by Tim Clark, in the March 2002 Yankee magazine

Ah, March. Swelling buds, greening grass strips along the roads, the smell of wet dirt, daffodils, March Madness, tax anxieties, frost heaves, town meetings, a clearer view toward the end of school. And maybe one or two last snowstorms, whose deposits will quickly disappear in the now-strong sun.

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Pallet Houses in Providence PHOTO: GoLocal's Richard McCaffrey

It’s good that authorities in Rhode Island and some other states are looking for new ways to give homeless people shelter, such as the new pallet-house complex in Providence. But I also thought, while looking at these little houses, that they’ll also catch the eye of middle-class people wanting to expand their space, to shelter, say, elderly relatives, by putting pallet houses in backyards.

Such tiny houses may help spur a revival of the multigenerational extended families living together -- parents, their kids, grandparents, uncles, nieces and cousins -- that were so common before the 1950s, when the “nuclear family” (parents and their kids) became so dominant. (It was also when “nuclear” came to mean something quite different – mutual assured destruction.) More people to share household expenses, and maybe less pressure to put Granny in an old folks home. Of course, with so many single-parent households these days, couples having fewer children and more single and openly gay people, it’s hard to make a comparison with multigenerational families of yore.

Anyway, as I’ve frequently written, the more housing options the better.

Retreat and Plant

There’s intensifying debate in many coastal and other areas that are increasingly flood- and erosion-prone in our warming climate on whether we should repeatedly repair or replace flood-damaged structures; have taxpayers pay some or all of the cost to move them to higher ground, and what to put in their place. I think the obvious answer in many places is to retreat and create flood-mitigating parks with (new?) marshes and thick vegetation and other water-absorbing materials that can reduce damage to the higher-elevation properties nearby. Of course, in such densely built urban areas as Newport’s Point neighborhood and Boston’s Seaport District that’s tricky.

I thought about this the other day when reading about the debate in Newport over whether to abandon the idea of rebuilding storm-damaged facilities at Easton’s Beach and stage a retreat. It seems clear to me that given projections of continued global warming and associated sea-level rise, that spending money to rebuild the Easton’s Beach amenities would soon be seen as a waste of money. Replenishing the sand that storms have washed away is expensive enough, though needed to keep the beach as a major attraction for locals and tourists alike.

Forecasts for the 2024 hurricane season are starting to come out.

Hit this link:

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Paul Salen, PHOTO: Prov Equity

Measuring CO2 in the Ocean

Thank you, Paul Salem, for giving the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) $25 million for ocean research in general and, in particular, to study the oceans’ capacity for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, into which we’ve been putting vast quantities of climate-warming CO2 by burning fossil fuels, clear-cutting forests, degrading wetlands and engaging in industrial agricultural practices (especially large-scale livestock production). The heating of our climate is accelerating, and more than 70 percent of the world’s surface is ocean.

Note that this excess carbon dioxide is also acidifying the water, harming sea life.

Mr. Salem, a billionaire, was a partner in Providence Equity Partners, and in 2022, he became chairman of WHOI’s board.

WHOI president Peter de Menocal said: “There is a tidal wave of ‘blue carbon’ solutions to climate change on the horizon, some proven, but most completely novel and in need of testing to investigate their safety and effectiveness. The ocean can help us avert a climate crisis, but we need to also ensure the long-term health of marine ecosystems and the communities that rely on ocean resources. This far-sighted gift {by Mr. Salem} will help us stay ahead of what is already a billion-dollar industry and inject some much-needed reality into the carbon market.”

I have always had a soft spot for Woods Hole, because this windswept village, basically a kind of college town within Falmouth, is so beautiful and dramatic; because of WHOI and other marine-related institutions based there, and their smart and interesting people, and because an important part of my father’s family lived in and around it. Some moved there in the 17th Century when, as Quakers, they fled Puritan persecution in and around Boston, and others came down from the Boston area as summer people when trains were extended to Cape Cod in the 1870’s. There were more than enough eccentrics among them; some had weird whirligigs on their roofs and some were recluses.

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PHOTO: File

This Ballot Question Flunks

Massachusetts teachers unions are fighting to end the requirement that students pass the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) tests as a requirement for graduating from high school. They hope to achieve this via a Nov. 5 referendum question.

The unions don’t like that the tests can draw attention to apparent teaching failures.

The exams go back to a 1993 reform law aimed at improving accountability and school performance in the Commonwealth. The first tests were given in 1998, and students have been required to achieve sufficient scores to get their diplomas since the class of 2003. But some standards have been watered down – those teachers unions again.

Getting rid of MCAS tests would decrease the value of high-school diplomas in the Bay State. These exams have been an important part of keeping the state ranked Number 1 in the nation in educational attainment. They do this both by imposing certain standards on students, teachers and administrators and by providing statewide comparative information useful for state and local officials to monitor the effectiveness of programs and to help determine remedies for individual schools and systems that come up short.

The ballot question would replace the MCAS with a rule that individual school districts certify that students have obtained certain skills, thus encouraging some districts to lower their standards from what they are now and encouraging “social promotion’’ -- promoting a student to the next grade level regardless of skill mastery in the belief that it will promote their self-esteem (and soothe their parents).

Dropping the MCAS exams would obviously make it more difficult to evaluate how the state as a whole is doing, and how state education resources should be distributed.

The Bay State’s reputation for rigorous public-school standards continues to have big economic advantages – the more highly educated a state’s population, the more prosperous the state is. And this makes it easier to attract and keep talent. That’s why an alliance of businesses is fighting to keep the MCAS requirements. For a state so dependent on technology and other sectors requiring a high level of education, rigor in public education is particularly important.

It's interesting that after many colleges dropped the requirement that applicants take the SAT’s, some of the elite ones have recently decided to restore the obligation. The tests, they find, are pretty good predictors of student success in college. At the same time, they provide the colleges with useful information for analyzing their current and potential applicant pools.

Most Western countries have standardized tests, and for good reason. Of course, they cause stress, but stress is a price you pay for achievement.

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Since a big bay and island take up so much of Rhode Island, with a good-sized city at the head of the bay, you’d think that it would be a fine place for year-round ferry service, including for daily commuting. But ferry service remains minimal. A way to fix that is to create a robust network of RIPTA and private buses to take people to and from ferry landings, with a focus on the state’s most densely populated stretch, along the coast from East Greenwich up through Providence.

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Former President Donald Trump PHOTO: GoLocal

Trump’s Sheep to Be Shorn

Trump’s voter core is white people of modest means, especially men, with information and education deficits. Many of them feel that our increasingly tech-based and multicultural economy and society is passing them by, as it will eventually most of us.

There are millions of people whose insecurity and anxiety lead them to want a fascist (not “conservative”!) leader who will smite the people they fear and/or hate and lead the likes of Trump cultists to a soothingly simple world based on nostalgia for a world that never existed. (Keep handy the 2018 book How Democracies Die, by political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt.)

How many of these people admire Trump because he’s a mob boss? Current and future historians and political scientists can delve into this question.

Another part of Trump’s coalition is powerful, rich people who like the tax cuts and deregulation that he and his congressional allies tailored for them in return for campaign contributions and other goodies.

Other followers simply want to tip over the national apple cart to see what rolls down the street.

In a decades-long phenomenon, Trumpian-style folks often vote against their own socio-economic self-interest. Going back to the New Deal and the creation of Social Security and Food Stamps, and running through the creation of Medicare and Medicaid, in the ’60s, and the Affordable Care Act in 2010, virtually all programs that particularly assist low-and-middle-income people were created by Democrats, though some Eisenhower-style Republicans, of blessed memory, backed them, too.

But much of the current Republican Party trumps, so to speak, all that by highly effective appeals to social resentment, frustration, xenophobia and, yes, often brazen lies. This is fine with many rich donors because the incessant flood of animosity and disinformation serves to distract citizens from the fact that Trumpian tax and regulatory policies favor the rich.

Tom Frank’s 2004 book, What’s the Matter With Kansas? (his native state), remains one of the best analyses of this phenomenon. This analysis is also worth a look:

One of the intriguing things in the nation’s current political sewer is that many of these Trump cultists claim to be fervent evangelical “Christians” while following a man of seemingly bottomless personal and public corruption who thirsts to return to the Oval Office to stay out of prison, satisfy his insatiable drive for power and attention and to again make many millions off the presidency. The perfect role model for their kids? A look at grasping multimillionaire far-right evangelical “Christian’’ preachers, in their “megachurches” and on their weekly TV spectacles gives some idea of how corrupted so much of Protestant “Christianity’’ has become in America.

But then, why go to the trouble of setting up a religion business if you can’t make a killing off it?

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Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) PHOTO: U.S. Senate feed

In a way, I’ll miss Mitch McConnell’s departure next November as Senate Republican leader. Unflappable, deeply cynical, disciplined and almost always favoring power above principle (with a few exceptions, such as his admirable support of Ukraine and some other foreign-policy positions), the Kentuckian has been a formidable figure in his 20 years as leader, some of it as majority leader. He’s been brilliant in lining up votes. And he was the central figure in packing the U.S. Supreme Court with loyal far-right Republicans. At least one of them, Clarence Thomas, is in the employ of far-right big business campaign contributors, and his wife, Ginni, is a fascist Trump operative.

Mr. McConnell started his political career as a liberal Republican and then moved right as the party did. That was the way to gain and keep power, as we saw when he carried water for Donald Trump’s regime, even though he detests that thug. Whatever it took to stay in the game.

All in all, the Alabama native has severely damaged America even as his public presentations, delivered in a soft Southern drawl, have often been impressive.

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So Hungary’s corrupt and authoritarian prime minister, Putin suck-up Viktor Orban, has finally let Sweden join NATO. No one knows for sure why, but one reason is apparently the prospect of getting some superb Swedish military equipment, particularly jet fighters. Orban also liked being the center of attention during the many months during which he held up Sweden’s accession.

In any event, it’s good news, among other reasons because it will act to strengthen the alliance in around the Baltic Sea, along the shores of which Putin would like to seize the Baltic republics and menace Poland. That offsets a little the fear that a traitorous anti-NATO mobster will become American president again.

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I miss that unpredictable mix of real magazines – on paper! -- you’d find in physicians’ and dentists’ waiting rooms, some you’d never seen before. It was a pleasant diversion to leaf through them while waiting for an outpatient lobotomy or whatever. It beat looking at a cold screen. Tactile is terrific.

The availability of magazines in waiting rooms has been declining for years, but they pretty much disappeared with COVID because of the dubious idea that such paper products were vectors for the virus.

Down and Out

It’s brilliantly written, but Budd Schulberg’s (1914-2009) novel The Disenchanted, based on his attempt to co-write a light romantic movie set in a New England college campus in 1939 with a bitter, broke and alcoholic F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) is very sad, though funny in patches in an absurdist way, and with riveting, sometimes crazy dialogue. It’s also a vivid insider’s look at Hollywood’s golden age and the publishing industry. Schulberg’s father was a major film producer, and his mother founded a talent agency. Budd himself became a famous screenwriter (On the Waterfront, etc.) and novelist.

Fitzgerald had slid into near-obscurity by the late ‘30’s after having achieved fame in the ‘20’s. But during World War II, because of promotion by his friend the critic Edmund Wilson and cheap paperback copies of The Great Gatsby sent to soldiers and sailors, his popularity surged and has remained sky-high, with The Great Gatsby considered by many as among the greatest American novels, along with the likes of Moby-Dick and Huckleberry Finn; and the novel Tender Is the Night and some of his short stories are also considered masterpieces, as many high-school and college students can attest.

I wonder what Fitzgerald would have made of his post-mortem celebrity.

Robert Whitcomb is a veteran editor and writer. Among his jobs, he has served as the finance editor of the International Herald Tribune, in Paris; as a vice president and the editorial-page editor of The Providence Journal; as an editor and writer in New York for The Wall Street Journal, and as a writer for the Boston Herald Traveler (RIP). He has written newspaper and magazine essays and news stories for many years on a very wide range of topics for numerous publications, has edited several books and movie scripts and is the co-author of among other things, Cape Wind.

Whitcomb: More Shelter; Stick With the Sand; Keep Those Tests; Dark Author

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Whitcomb: More Shelter; Stick With the Sand; Keep Those Tests; Dark Author

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