Whitcomb: Our Amazon Basin; Letter for Spreaders; More Melting, Please; Churchillian Psychodrama

Sunday, September 12, 2021

Robert Whitcomb, Columnist

 

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Robert Whitcomb, Columnist

 

“Real friends offer both hard truths and soft landings.’’

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-- Anna Quindlen (born 1953), American journalist and book author

 

 

“God seems to have left the receiver off the hook and time is running out.’’

Arthur Koestler (1905-1983), Hungarian-British journalist and novelist, probably most famous for the novel Darkness at Noon

 

 

“The sopping open spaces

of roads, golf courses, parking lots,

flail a commotion

in the dripping treetops….’’

-- From “A Poem About People,’’ by Robert Pinsky (born 1940), a former U.S. poet laureate. He lives in Cambridge, Mass.

 

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Amazon Warehouse

The Blob Off Route 6

Amazon wants to build a gigantic, nearly 4-million-square-foot distribution center on 195 acres off Route 6 in Johnston, whose leaders seem to love the idea, even with the 20-year property-tax break involved. After all, there would purportedly be 1,500 full-time jobs (at least until more Amazonian automation eliminates some of them), and the enterprise is offering some specific goodies to Johnston and the state as sweeteners, though they’re minuscule considering the profit that the company would make from this huge operation in densely populated and generally prosperous southern New England.

 

This project would mean hundreds of tractor-trailer trips in and out of this behemoth every day, and so the area’s traffic and the environment (lots of fragrant truck exhaust!) would, to say the least, be affected big time, and probably so would be the region’s small retailers, who would find it even harder to compete with the Amazon octopus as it gets more stuff to local customers even faster.

 

But, hey, all those jobs! And the facility would be good news for southeastern New England’s many fine orthopedic surgeons and physical therapists since Amazon is well known for its high rates of worker injuries suffered as a result of its grueling work demands enforced via Orwellian surveillance.

 

Here’s an interesting Amazon controversy that folks around here might want to read:

 

“A: I play it the company way

Where the company puts me, there I'll stay.

B: But what is your point of view?

A: I have no point of view!

Supposing the company thinks... I think so too!’’

-- From “The Company Way,’’ in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, by Frank Loesser (1910-1969), Broadway lyricist and composer

 

 

Communitarian COVID

The majority of the public, who are responsible citizens and have been receiving their COVID-19 shots, are rightfully becoming increasingly angry that their health and freedom are being compromised by people who refuse to be vaccinated. Getting COVID, and fear of getting it can really limit your freedom! And the economy is also being hurt by these spreaders/new-virus-mutation machines.

 

Of course, no one should/can be physically forced to be vaccinated, and there are rather rare cases when individuals need to be exempted because of health conditions, such as certain allergies. But employers are well within their rights to fire people to protect others, including fellow employees, patients, customers, and the general public. Fired refuseniks could find something else to do. It’s a big country.

 

The most egregious and dangerous are probably healthcare worker refuseniks. And now some Rhode Island state legislators are grotesquely pandering to these menaces to public health by, as their letter to Gov. Dan McKee states, seeking to “Amend the October 1st deadline for the termination of employment for those licensed professionals choosing not to be vaccinated, and to direct the Rhode Island Department of Health to develop appropriate guidelines for those individuals to retain their employment while maintaining the public health.’’ The healthcare workers at issue are those at Eleanor Slater Hospital and the state Veterans Home.

 

Vaccination is far more effective against COVID infection than masking and social distancing, though they, too, are important weapons in the fight.

 

The 33 legislators who signed onto this assault on public health included 24 Democrats,  at least some of whom seem to be pandering to the workers’ union, another reminder of why public-employee unions are a bad idea. And nine of the chamber’s 10 Republicans also signed the letter. Large parts of the GOP have been taken over by anti-science cranks and those embracing an extreme form of “libertarianism”.  (Rep. Ray Hull, who was among the 24 Democrats who signed the letter,  later asked that his name be removed.)

 

Tellingly,  the only Republican rep who refused to sign this irresponsible letter was the independent-minded Barbara Ann Fenton-Fung, who’s in the health-care sector (she’s a physical therapist) and had COVID-19 early in the pandemic, as did her husband, former Cranston Mayor Allan Fung.

 

If healthcare workers refuse to get vaccinated for dangerous, highly contagious diseases such as COVID-19 they should be fired. Thank God we don’t have smallpox or polio epidemic underway.

 

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If only Gov. McKee could have hired a wider range of people than the 350 retired unionized teachers he’s trying to lure back to the troubled Providence Public Schools. There are a lot of people out there who would be fine teachers, and some have never been public school teachers.

 

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Immigration reform in the RI State House in the State Room PHOTO: GoLocal

Managing a Melt

A surprisingly good definition of the “melting pot” idea from Wikipedia:

 

“The melting pot is a monocultural metaphor for a heterogeneous society becoming more homogeneous, the different elements "melting together" with a common culture; an alternative being a homogeneous society becoming more heterogeneous through the influx of foreign elements with different cultural backgrounds, possessing the potential to create disharmony within the previous culture. Historically, it is often used to describe the cultural integration of immigrants to the United States.” 

 

As we welcome Afghan refugees, we’re all, as usual, reminded that America is a nation of immigrants (including those Siberian-Americans we call Native Americans). And, of course, these people from around the world enrich the nation culturally. But we must deal with the fact that massive immigration flows can destabilize nations and bring political, economic, and cultural stress and conflict.

 

Consider the 1965 U.S. immigration law, which opened the country to much more immigration from places whose cultures were dissimilar in many ways to the modified northwest Europe culture that has been the core of the American system. Then there are the recent floods of illegal aliens fleeing tyranny (which has been expanding around the world), violence, natural disasters and economic collapse.

 

There was, of course, a Niagara of immigration into America during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But that came to a halt with the restrictive immigration law of 1924. That led to a period of what you might call the “Americanization/ homogenization’’ of immigrants and their offspring, mostly from southern and eastern Europe, which explains some of the relative social peace in the U.S. from the ‘20s to the mid ‘60s.

 

We can’t let everyone come here who wants to come, and we need to manage the flow so that newcomers can be more carefully and effectively integrated into American society.  This means providing more foreign aid to nations whose cultures are at least somewhat similar to those of the places the refugees are fleeing. The idea, of course, is to encourage the refugees to stay there. Consider, for example, aid to Turkey to host Afghan refugees and a Marshall Plan for Central America to reduce the rush to the U.S. border from that impoverished and violent region. (We have a moral obligation to admit into the U.S. all those Afghans who worked with us in the last 20 years and want to come here.)

 

Western culture has provided more freedom, human rights, prosperity and innovation than any other culture. We must protect these things in America, and that includes a more careful approach to immigration to encourage those who come here to learn American values, which are part of Western values. There hasn’t been enough melting in the famous melting pot in the past few decades, and long before Trump said it, thoughtful Americans were noting “no border, no country.’’

 

The rise of identity politics, in which  too many people classify themselves primarily by one characteristic, be it ethnicity, sex, religion and so on, has also tended to encourage social fragmentation.

 

Without a true “common culture,’’ it’s hard to see how to keep America from splitting apart. And wouldn’t it be nice if our schools seriously taught civics again?

 

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This is so preposterous that it may have gone away by the time you read this:

 

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Mike Stephens and Mayor Jorge Elorza

Providence Mayor Jorge Elorza has famously named the city’s recreation director, Mike Stephens, to be a major in the Providence Police Department. Mr. Stephens may be a very fine fellow but he is not a police officer and indeed doesn’t have any police experience. His appointment is something of a demoralizing insult to the city’s real police officers.

 

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With increasingly expensive storms, lots of us who don’t live right along the coast or in other flood zones wonder how long we must pay taxes to restore areas where people (increasingly the affluent) shouldn’t be living in the first place.

 

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I wonder how many years it will take for the mass of the population to ignore the anniversaries of 9/11 as they now mostly ignore Pearl Harbor.

 

 

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I was down at a spectacularly beautiful stretch of Buzzards Bay coast near New Bedford the other day and was taking some pictures when a soft-spoken lady of a certain age said to me: “Please don’t tell people where you took those pictures; they’ll come and ruin the place.’’

 

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Chinese dictator Xi Jinping’s relentless tightening of power will reduce innovation and squeeze China’s economy.

 

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Forget global warming, COVID, and Afghanistan. Clearly, the great crisis of our time is the Britney Spears Conservatorship Crisis.

 

 

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Sir Winston Chuchill

Father-Son-Grandson Psychodrama

Churchill & Son, by Josh Ireland, is the sad but often engaging tale of the relationship of Winston Churchill and his only son, Randolph, a man with considerable talents but in large part an obnoxious and self-destructive figure.

 

He was selfish,  rude, a drunk, a notorious womanizer, a  compulsive gambler and often wallowing in debt because of his industrial-strength extravagance. (Winston and his friends keep bailing him out.) But his father kept forgiving and indeed cosseting him. It would have been far better for both of them if “The Greatest Englishman’’ had given  Randolph the boot in his twenties.

 

However, the author argues that didn’t happen because Winston was always playing out a  psychodrama with his brilliant, often cruel, and ultimately crazy father, Lord Randolph Churchill, who died young, at 45 in 1895, after a highly dramatic political rise and fall. While Winston strangely (to me) revered his father, he wanted to treat his own son in the opposite way he was treated. So he showered Randolph with extreme affection and tolerance. That helped ruin Randolph.

 

The Churchill and Lincoln biography industries show few signs of abating.

 

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