“Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.’’
-- William Morris (1834-1896), English textile designer, poet, artist, writer and socialist activist
“Can you draw sweet water from a foul well?’’
– Brooks Atkinson (1894-1984), journalist most famous as a long-time theater critic of The New York Times. This quote came from his negative review, in 1940, of the musical Pal Joey
“No time to marry, no time to settle down, I’m a young woman, and ain’t done runnin’ round.’’
– Bessie Smith (1894-1937), American blues singer
March -- mild, sort of sensual, sunny days (eerily reminiscent of Indian summer), interspersed with cold windy ones, sometimes with wet snow weighing down branches of trees and shrubs whose buds are struggling to emerge, the smell of mud. Then there are the potholes produced by our exciting freeze-thaw cycles. It often seems that the roads in northern New England, with its harsher climate than ours, are in better shape at this time of year than the ones around here. Is this simply less traffic, sturdier road building, and repair? Is contractor corruption more common in metro areas?
In any case, we in such cities as Providence and Boston would do well to study how Montreal, which gets much more snow than we do, handles it much better.
Montreal is a very big city, with almost 1.8 million people in the city itself and about 4.3 million for its metro area.
Up there, the city sternly orders residents to move their vehicles from along streets with “no-parking’’ signs that go in effect when the snowfall is predicted to exceed, say, 5 inches. Indeed, police blast sirens to remind them lest they be towed! Montreal also has much more one-sided parking than we do, to facilitate snow removal, emergency-vehicle access, and street cleaning.
It also has more public lots and garages than we do, where residents can take their cars and trucks once an official snowstorm forecast is released, and lots of places around the city’s edges to which the snow can easily be trucked and dumped. And, importantly, it has a more cooperative and more civic-minded population than we do when it comes to following local regulations. The people are basically nicer.
March also reminds us of St. Patrick’s Day, which comes on Tuesday.
Diocese of Providence PHOTO: GoLocal
That in turn reminds me of how, in my youth, there was much more consciousness than now of European ethnicities in America and how individual churches, mostly Catholic, tended to be ethnically based. Some churches were seen as “Irish,’’ some “Italian,’’ some “Portuguese’’ and so on. That was certainly the case in the little Boston suburb I was a boy in.
For a kid, seeing all those parishes was sort of an introduction to the wider world.
(To many of us Protestants, most of whom were not very religious, the Catholic Church seemed exotic, what with such practices as services in Latin, the scary thing called “Saturday Afternoon Confession,’’ no meat on Friday (not so bad in my town, a fishing port), and powerful kindly or harsh local parish priests. And, it seemed, parochial schools everywhere.
Newer groups immigrating to the U.S. since the 1965 Immigration Act have also tended to become associated with this or that parish, as the older groups have mingled and become more diffuse and go to church less. But the churches will probably never be as tightly associated with specific European-origin ethnic groups as they were in America from the mid and late 19th Century to, say, 30 years ago.
As for that declining New England ethnic group called the WASPs: They hardly ever go to any church. In the old days, most went to Congregational, Presbyterian, Methodist or Episcopal churches. Many of them have closed, as have in recent years many Catholic churches, sped up by a general decline in faith and the clergy sex-abuse scandals.
Whatever the loss of faith, we keep asking such big questions as why is there something rather than nothing….
As a sign of the passage of time, and changing politics, consider that people used to joke that the Episcopal Church was “the Republican Party at Prayer.’’ Now the denomination’s members include many liberals. WASP, of course, is a term coined in the 1960’s, standing for “White Anglo-Saxon Protestants.’’ Are there “Black Anglo-Saxon Protestants”?
President Donald Trump PHOTO: White House
Haven’t Learned Yet
It often seems that we don’t see what’s right in front of our noses. Thus it is with many Americans’ and others’ failure to realize the lethality of our over-dependence on fossil fuel. And I’m not just talking about global warming from burning the polluting stuff. (The air and water pollution from the burning oil and gas facilities attacked in the current Mideast war is horrific.)
Trump’s war on Iran has exposed, yet again, the fragility of global oil and natural-gas markets, especially because so much of it comes from nasty and/or volatile places such as the Mideast, Venezuela, and Russia. (Not a squeak of complaint from Trump on Putin helping Iran in the war – wouldn’t want to jeopardize deals with the Trump Organization or dredge up the Orange Oligarch’s activities in Moscow in decades past….)
All this is happening more than a year since Trump, a bribee of the oil, gas, and coal companies, started to try to block any and all renewable-energy projects. This is economically insane for America. Of course, we’ll have to use a lot of fossil fuel for years to come, but we must reduce our dependence on it as fast as we can.
The Wall Street Journal and other publications in the past week have predicted that now that the Iran War has exposed yet again the perils of addiction to oil and gas, there will be a new European boom in renewable-energy projects. Meanwhile, the war, by boosting oil prices, has been a bonanza for Russia, which will use much of the extra money to step up its war in Ukraine and otherwise threaten European security while using its oil and gas as an extortion tool against energy-hungry Europe.
For the lucky few who are partially energy-independent because, for example, they have solar-energy installations and advanced battery storage on the properties where they live -- equipment that they use to light, heat and cool their houses and charge their electric vehicles, the war-caused surge in oil and natural-gas prices is much less of a threat than for most of us. It does boost food and some other important prices they have to pay.
Those who get their electricity from utilities use lots of fossil fuels.
Still, increasingly, the utilities have renewables in their mix, too – in New England, wind, solar, nuclear and (mostly Canadian) hydro – to generate the juice we use to run those energy-efficient heat pumps and charge electric vehicles.
But the all-gasoline vehicles entirely depend on the corrupt and volatile international energy market, as do our oil-and-gas-burning furnaces for heat. (Electric heat generated from rooftop solar panels with battery storage is a joy, among other reasons because it’s so clean.)
LOGO: FIFA
Joyous Traffic Jams?
Will most of us in the Boston-Providence metro area be perfectly happy to put up with the traffic and other hassles produced by the FIFA World Cup competition at Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, June 13-July 9? Maybe, and it will be exciting to have thehighest levels of soccer (the real football!) -- the greatest international sport -- in the neighborhood, providing some cultural and geographical lessons for many of us perilously provincial Americans along the way.
In any event, one big uncertainty has been resolved: Foxboro has settled a dispute with the Kraft Group (which owns the stadium) and notably corrupt FIFA over the town’s demand for $7.8 million -- now! -- to cover its security costs. The town will get the money.
The partial government shutdown has delayed that money, which was to come from the now partly paralyzed (by the congressional/White House standoff) Department of Homeland Security. In any event, preparations for the competition, overseen by a bunch of very rich Boston area business leaders, cannot be said to have been done with what we used to call “Teutonic efficiency; indeed they have been seasoned with occasional confusion and chaos.
Soccer is very popular in southern New England, but I suspect even some of those fans (who include me; I played it a little bit) would breathe a sigh of relief if the World Cup spectacle arrived here in slightly shrunken form. Will there be traffic trauma on Route 95?
xxx
The gorgeous village of Tuthill, Maine, is for sale for $6 million. It reminds me of the mythical Scottish village of Brigadoon in the eponymous 1947 musical.
The Trump regime recalls the “bread and circuses” of ancient Rome meant to pacify emperors’ restless subjects. But it’s mostly just circuses now, as we slide from semi-democracy to full-scale autocratic plutocracy.
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