Whitcomb: Newport Spring; Order a Tree; Read While Traveling; Immigrant Solutions

Sunday, May 21, 2023

Robert Whitcomb, Columnist

Robert Whitcomb, columnist

Who has not felt how sadly sweet
The dream of home, the dream of home,
Steals o'er the heart, too soon to fleet,
When far o'er sea or land we roam?
Sunlight more soft may o'er us fall,
To greener shores our bark may come;
But far more bright, more dear than all,
That dream of home, that dream of home.

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-- From “The Dream of Home,’’ by Thomas Moore (1779-1852), Irish poet

To read the whole poem, please hit this link:

“Let us forget with generosity those who cannot love us.’’

-- Pablo Neruda (1904-1973), Nobel Prize-winning Chilean poet and diplomat

“Tact is after all a kind of mind-reading.’’

--Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909), Maine-based writer, in her novel The Country of the Pointed Firs

“{W}hen the same or closely similar circumstances occur again, sometimes in only a few years, they are hailed by a new, often youthful, and always supremely self-confident generation as a brilliantly innovative discovery in the financial and larger economic world. There can be few fields of human endeavor in which history counts for so little as in the world of finance. Past experience, to the extent that it is part of memory at all, is dismissed as the primitive refuge of those who do not have the insight to appreciate the incredible wonders of the present.’’

--- John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006), Canadian-American economist, writer and diplomat.

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RENDERING courtesy Newport Spring Historic

Make the City Some Money

One of the most interesting land-use issues in a city full of them is what to do about the Newport Spring parcel, in the middle of the oldest part of The City by The Sea.

The city wants to take it over and impose severe limits on its use. Others, most notably Newport civic leader, philanthropist, journalist and photographer Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince, suggest allowing some low-key commercial features at the site -- ones that could bring some revenue to the city. She suggests, for instance, installing electric charging stations for bikes and cars, putting up a small café and self-cleaning toilets.

The city could use all of those features, especially, of course, in the high tourist season, from May to late October.

Meanwhile, are Newporters ready to welcome those huge Petri dishes called cruise ships for a new season?

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PHOTO: Jan Huber, Unsplash

Plant a Tree and Save Energy

What a great program!

GoLocal reports that the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management – with support from the Rhode Island Tree Council, Rhode Island Nursery and Landscape Association and the Arbor Day Foundation – has more than 1,000 trees to give away to Rhode Islanders this spring through the Energy-Saving Trees program.

“These additional trees will be mailed directly to Rhode Islanders who reserve them. Now in its seventh year, this popular initiative helps homeowners save energy and lower their utility bills by strategically planting trees on their property,’’ GoLocal reported. They keep nearby houses warmer in the winter and cooler in the summer.

Trees also help clean the air, slow global warming and provide food and shelter to birds and other wildlife.

To see how to order your trees, please hit this link:

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PHOTO: Aaron Doucett, Unsplash

Read While You Ride

Boston has started a program in which travelers at 20 bus stops can use a QR code to browse and borrow audiobooks, eBooks, e-newspapers and e-magazines.

The publications are mostly in English and Spanish and focus on items particularly easy to read on the go, such as poetry, short stories and short audiobooks, and other material for all ages.

This is good news for literacy promotion and probably for journalism, too. With the very sad disappearance of so many physical newsstands at train and bus stations, accelerated by the pandemic, the public’s access to many publications’ information and entertainment has plunged.

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There seem to be more doves than usual around this spring, with their soporific-to-us-and-sexy-to-doves cooing and remarkable tameness.

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It’s slightly eerie as you notice that your routines and social circles recall those of your parents and even grandparents. You see yourself for a few seconds here and there as them – you circle in time as you see yourself as both child and your long-dead parents and their contemporaries.

It’s as if the years were a loop in a mirage.

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VW Bug PHOTO: Giovanni Ribeiro, Unsplash

Vehicular Vertigo

Dr. Ed Iannuccilli’s hilarious column last week, about a sports-car misadventure, reminded me of my family’s cars in my youth – the wooden-sided beach wagons; the hideous Chevy Impala convertible that my mother drove into a telephone pole after a few drinks; the red Jeep Wagoneer that was painful to convert into four-wheel drive before the winter storms; my own first car, a used VW bug – with the beloved stick shift -- that I bought by selling a few shares of Texaco that my grandmother had given me (the joy of popping the clutch!) and other vehicles of various nationalities and conditions.

For a few years, it seemed as if my parents were buying a new car every year or two. Wear and tear? My father, like most of the World War II generation a smoker, would joke “the {car’s} ash tray is almost filled, time for another car.’’

Far and away the most exotic vehicle I knew was my father’s Messerschmitt KR200, a three-wheeled bubble car designed by the aircraft engineer Fritz Fend and produced by the German jet aircraft maker Messerschmitt from 1955 until 1964. He bought it used for $400. It was usually just to get around our small town, though my father drove it into Boston a couple of times on the new Southeast Expressway, soon to become one of America’s longest parking lots twice a day Monday-Friday. It must have been terrifying.

Despite its German engineering, it often malfunctioned, leading me to hear my father swear (just ‘’damn”) the one and only time I can recall when he was in my presence. (I trust that he swore in the Navy.)

Driving today? Much better cars, much worse drivers.

Here’s Dr. Iannuccilli’s car story:

What Might Work Some Day

It’s hard to see any breakthrough in crafting a practical U.S. immigration system while control of Congress is so evenly divided.

Many (but far from all) Democrats tend to take an excessively pro-new-immigration stance, for practical political as well as philosophical reasons. Their key constituencies include immigrant populations, and the party as a whole takes a humane stance toward poor people in general.

The Republican leadership, for its part, takes a harsher stance because one of its main constituencies are older white folks in rural and exurban areas, many of whom are unsettled by the large number of people coming into the U.S., and trying to come in, via our southern border who don’t look like them and don’t speak English. Many of these GOP folks resent that most people trying to enter the U.S. don’t have proper documents to do so, rather like many of their own ancestors. (My own English and Scottish immigrant ancestors, who arrived here from 1630 to about 1870, didn’t need passports to come here.)

They also worry about immigrants taking their jobs, though many Americans don’t want the low-paying and often very physical work that many immigrants, illegal and legal, readily accept. And note that U.S. unemployment has generally been low for the past 40 years, with the biggest exceptions the Great Recession of 2008-2009 and the pandemic recession of 2020. However, artificial intelligence may soon destroy many white-collar jobs, though some service work – nursing, etc. – and those requiring manual labor, such as public works and agriculture, should be okay. Note that while the general thrust of GOP rhetoric tends to be anti-poor-immigrant, some big Republican donors/businesspeople like heavy immigration, legal and illegal, because it tends to keep overall wages low and profits high.

When oh when will there be a crackdown on businesses knowingly hiring illegal immigrants?

All of this is made more complicated by the wildly divergent ways in which states and localities treat their immigrant communities, some harshly and others setting themselves as “sanctuaries.’’ Our federal system is not set up to efficiently handle floods of immigrants.

I think that the best approach would be a massive increase of Border Patrol staff, supplemented by military personnel, as well as many more immigration judges and related staff and other immigrant monitors around America. The backlog of people seeking legal residence is years long. At the same time, it would be a false economy not to provide more well-targeted aid for people in the impoverished nations whence come most of the folks trying to get into the United States. That would at least modestly tend to slow the flow to our southern border.

Of course this would require spending billions of dollars a year more than we’re spending now on immigration matters, but that would more than pay for itself in encouraging socio-economic stabilization and in reducing political tension in our country as well as abroad. But with rich political-campaign donors obsessed with paying lower taxes a key part of the GOP coalition, spending a lot more money to address the immigration mess is probably off the table.

(Consider that in last week’s debt-ceiling talks the GOP excluded removing such loopholes as letting investors claim a loss on an asset that they then quickly rebuy and another that lets real estate investors -- hello, Trump Organization! -- defer taxes on swaps of property.)

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Presidents Biden and Trump

There should be a constitutional amendment barring anyone 80 or over from holding federal elected office. That sure would freshen up our politics and policies. Of course, such an amendment would take many years to enact.

And the following, if it were actually used, would be a much-needed disinfectant, though the last sentence is problematic.

Section 3 of the 14th Amendment provides:

“No Person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.’’

No, Not the Same Thing!

I’m sick of false equivalences.

Some people who complain about American aid to help Ukraine defend itself from the Russian invasion present our invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan as somehow comparable. That’s an obscene analogy. We went into Iraq to overthrow a mass-murdering tyrant who had invaded Kuwait and, previously, Iran, and we went into Afghanistan to overthrow a mass-murdering Islamo-Fascist regime that was harboring international terrorists who attacked us. Yes, we grossly over-extended ourselves but our efforts weren’t evil, however naïve and hubristic they were.

Ukraine, for its part, was attacked by a fascist dictatorship trying to kill its democracy (and its leaders) and turn Ukraine into a Kremlin satellite. It’s all part of Czar Vladimir Putin’s plan to restore the despotic Russia/Soviet Empire.

Then there’s the stuff about pathetic Hunter Biden’s dubious deals abroad. Obviously, that he’s a son of Joe Biden lubricated his (sometimes inept) deal-making during his father’s vice presidency. He and his little company may have made up to $11 million on his foreign deals. Relatives of powerful politicians have often tried to make money by implying they have what could be profitable access to their famous and powerful relatives, whether or not they actually do have that access.

I’ll leave it to the Justice Department and the courts to decide if the troubled and sometimes drug-addicted Hunter, or anyone in his orbit, should go to prison.

Then during the Trump regime, we had Donald Trump’s young son-in-law, Jared Kushner, courting the Saudi monarchy led by the murderer Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The cultivation by Kushner and some of the rest of the Trump crime family paid off with a $2 billion sweetheart investment from the Saudi sovereign wealth fund in young Jared’s new private-equity fund.

(That’s just what we need, another private-equity fund to kill old companies!)

And remember when the Chinese government granted 18 trademarks to companies linked to Trump and his daughter Ivanka during his presidency?

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Oil Spill PHOTO: USCG CC:2.0

Navigating Environmental Disasters

Christopher Reddy, a veteran scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, has just published a very useful, accessible and sometimes exciting guidebook for those navigating the shoals of environmental crises, about which Dr. Reddy, an expert on the effects of oil spills, among other things, has long personal experience. Science Communication in a Crisis: An Insider’s Guide has an engaging conversational voice and should be read by scientists, especially the more public-facing ones, journalists, communications officials, regulators, politicians and, for that matter, the general public.

Much of the expertise displayed in the book stems from the lessons he learned as a participant in efforts to study and mitigate such disasters as the massive Deepwater Horizon spill, in the Gulf of Mexico, in 2010.

Many members of the groups above should keep Dr. Reddy’s book on their desks. And its compact guidebook format makes it easy to take into the next environmental emergency.

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: Newport Spring; Order a Tree; Read While Traveling; Immigrant Solutions

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Whitcomb: Newport Spring; Order a Tree; Read While Traveling; Immigrant Solutions

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