Whitcomb: Port Opportunity? Food-Sector Engine; Disorganized Democrats; Accents
Sunday, October 17, 2021
“backroad leafmold stonewall chipmunk
underbrush grapevine woodchuck shadblow’’
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLAST-- From “Silent Poem,’’ by Robert Francis (1901-1987), a poet who lived most of his life in Amherst, Mass., in the Connecticut River Valley, whence came many of his nature themes.
“Self-consciousness is the enemy of all art. Be it acting, writing, painting, or living itself, which is the greatest art of all.’’
-- Ray Bradbury (1920-2012), American writer
“Religion consists in a set of things which the average man thinks he believes and wishes he was certain.’’
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
Spread It Around
There are traffic jams of container ships, amidst the international supply-chain crisis, at a few huge U.S. ports, such as Savannah, Ga., and Long Beach, Calif. That suggests that the world economy would be better off if more goods were shipped via a large number of smaller ports. These could include Quonset and the Port of Providence. Economic-development promise for Rhode Island?
Speaking of harbors: Various constituencies are researching, discussing and debating what a multi-decade plan for Boston Harbor should look like, considering the needs/wants of business (more high-end residential and corporate-office high rises along the waterfront?) as well as recreational opportunities all while confronting rising seas.
Abandon some low-lying areas? Ban housing and utilities from ground and basement floors but allow higher buildings as a sop to developers? More parkland? More ferries and recreational boating? Wind turbines and solar panels, maybe on platforms in the water?
What’s happening with long-term plans for Providence Harbor along these lines?
Autumnal Annals
The woods are belatedly (because of global warming and, especially, warmer nights) turning muted crimson and gold in preparation for the winter’s sleep they need to prepare for next spring’s growth, and condensation is thick on windshields in the morning. Meanwhile, let’s celebrate apples, the semi-official fall fruit, that can taste simultaneously tart and sweet.
California will ban the sale of those shrieking, polluting, wildlife-killing, pet-terrifying gasoline-powered leaf blowers favored by yard companies employing hard-working illegal aliens who often don’t have ear protectors. I’ll bet that if such a ban were put up for a vote around here, it would pass. Something to think about as we move into the heart of the falling-leaf season.
Last week’s long stretch of days without wind was lovely but eerie and unusual.
Food Center
As the regional food business, including the pandemic-ravaged restaurant sector, looks ahead, they’ll find much guidance, encouragement and many ideas from what may be Rhode Island’s most important food center: the nonprofit Hope & Main, in Warren. (The national prestige of Rhode Island’s restaurants has slipped in the past couple of years. How much is that at least partly COVID-related? They could presumably use an infusion of innovation.)
Hope & Main hosts more than 50 independent food-related enterprises trying to expand their operations, or start ones. As Hope & Main says: “We help ‘incubate’ these firms and connect them with customers’’.
Among other things, the organization says, it provides access to “low-cost, low-risk shared-use commercial kitchens to local entrepreneurs jump-starting early-stage food companies’’.
I’ll be particularly interested to see how Hope & Main works with the growing number of locals raising vegetables through the winter in big greenhouses, so that less stuff has to be brought in from far away (Florida and California, etc.), thus giving us fresher food through the year, keeping more money around here and reducing fossil-fuel pollution.
Will global warming, whatever its many destructions, boost New England agriculture?
Who Counts for Manchin and Sinema?
“Democrats never agree on anything, that’s why they’re Democrats. If they agreed with each other, they’d be Republicans.”
-- Will Rogers (1879-1935), humorist, actor and writer
Why would West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin (that tribune of the coal industry) and Arizona Sen. Krysten Sinema, both at least nominal Democrats, be so resistant to much of Joe Biden’s New Dealish plans, which would particularly benefit the people of their states, which have many very poor people?
That’s not to say that some of the social-service stuff in the Biden program isn’t too ambitious and expensive, at least for now. For example, expanding Medicare to include vision and hearing coverage (the elderly already have much better health insurance than most Americans) can be put off, and the usefulness of free community college is far from certain. And some of the expensive child-care provisions can be cut back and still leave many poorer families in much better shape than they are now.
(It would be nice if sometimes a new federal measure would
encourage marriage, which is one of the strongest anti-poverty institutions.)
The two senators don’t want to displease their big and increasingly avaricious donors, who though richer and so politically more powerful than ever (as is Manchin himself) don’t want to pay higher taxes to pay for long-overdue improvements in government services and physical infrastructure. The ideological rigidity of a few on the Democrats’ left, led by New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, also imperils the whole Biden program --- indeed threatens to bring down the whole party.
If Biden doesn’t get the bulk of his program (popular in the polls) through, the increasingly fascist GOPQ will probably take back Congress in 2022. Then Congress would be in a position to throw the 2024 election to Trump, and farewell America’s already battered democracy as it becomes a full banana republic.
Meanwhile, the limp Vice President Kamala Harris remains a drag on the party’s prospects, especially considering that the president is 78. (The fat Trump is 75.)
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One of the arguments for not raising taxes on multi-billionaires is that they should be infinitely rewarded for the role of some of them in creating and expanding huge enterprises and exploiting new technologies – Jeff Bezos, etc. But that ignores the fact that many, many people besides “The Founder” are necessary to create and expand a big business. To paraphrase the hated-by-the-GOPQ Hillary Clinton, it takes a village to build a company. And remember that many billionaires simply inherited their money.
One reason that so many people have quit their jobs lately is the disinclination of so many bosses and owners to share their good fortune with their companies’ proletariat. Another reason, especially in such public-facing sectors as the restaurant industry, is fear of getting COVID-19, especially in areas with strong anti-vaccine forces led by Trump cultists.
Extreme economic selfishness took off in the ‘80s, encouraged by the Reagan administration, and has been going strong ever since as income inequality has inevitably surged in the continuing Gilded Age. And more and more very rich people separate themselves from their fellow citizens by hiding out in gated communities, etc.
All this has embittered many low-and-mid-level employees, and made them cynical. Of course, some people are just plain lazy, but most folks want to work.
A notable exception to the depressing record of so many U.S. companies when it comes to the welfare of their employees and indeed of the country is Pawtucket-based Hasbro, and a major reason in recent years has been its brilliant, visionary, humane and civic-minded CEO Brian Goldner. He died of cancer Oct. 11 at the age of 58. Very sad.
The Way They Sound
There’s an amusing semi-controversy in the Boston mayoral race. It’s about City Councilor Annissa Essaibi George allegedly leaning into her Boston accent – or, more specifically, her accent from the Dorchester section of that city. That’s where she grew up, in a section of the city usually associated with Irish-Americans, though she herself is of Polish and Tunisian background. The accent has been described as an attempt to appeal to her predominately white base in her run against City Councilor Michelle Wu, who is originally from the Chicago area and whose base includes many people of color. Meanwhile, Boston’s white base continues to shrink.
So far, anyway, Mrs. George’s Dorchester/South Boston accent, which some find grating and some charming (Saturday Night Live has had fun with it over the years) hasn’t seemed to have helped her much: Ms. Wu remains far ahead in the polls.
But the matter got me thinking about accents. Mass media and demographic mixing have tended to dilute old accents, especially in places like Boston, with so many people having come in from around the world to work and/or attend the region’s multitude of colleges and universities.
In New England, the old accents are weakening. I think of the accents of my late father and his father. My paternal grandfather had a pronounced rural Yankee sound, almost a drawl, that recalled natives of the Maine Coast and even Cape Cod a century or more ago. My father had a milder version of the same thing. His five children retain only traces of it, mingled with my late mother’s Minnesota accent. She also had some (fake?) Southern tones from living in Florida half the year as a girl and then going to high school in Virginia. And my siblings and I have picked up fragments of accents and diction from the places we have lived outside New England.
Of course, even among old Yankee accents, there’s variety in the region. Language experts say much of this can be attributed to where the early colonists came from in England hundreds of years ago – say from the West Country, East Anglia or the Midlands.
Sometimes an accent that some might consider off-putting doesn’t bother others. Consider Franklin Roosevelt’s plummy Hudson River squire voice, which he made no effort to modify for political or other reasons. In part because he could express empathy, confidence and ingenuity to the masses, he became their tribune even as many others from his background were seen as greedy, arrogant and unfeeling about the challenges facing the middle class and the poor in the Great Depression.
But FDR’s accent might be an electoral killer these days.
While historic American accents have long been in decline, the waves of immigrants from non-English-speaking countries over the past few decades have added new and interesting ones to our language stew – and words, too. That English is such an avid absorber of words from other languages means that it has the largest vocabulary of any language – probably its greatest strength and something that’s made it the closest thing to an international language. We’re fortunate to have it as our main tongue.
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I write this at our very long, ugly, and solid dining room table, made in the 1920s for a French general stationed in Lebanon, which France ran then as a kind of colony. My wife bought it from his daughter after her divorce in the ’80s, when we lived and worked in Paris. In its almost century, I can only imagine the range of things that were said around it and written on it. Ghosts of family, friends, and foes crowd around the table.
Too Bad ‘Lost Cause’ Didn’t Lose Earlier
Romantics who believe the lies of stuff like Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind about Robert E. Lee and the Confederacy’s somehow chivalric “Lost Cause’’ would do well to read historian Allen C. Guelzo’s new book Robert E. Lee: A Life, about the traitorous, often cruel, sometimes very greedy and yet surprisingly boring Confederate general (in which job he was often a very good tactician but a bad strategist).
