Whitcomb: Schools Shouldn’t Be Sex Therapists; Outrage in Ottawa; New Kind of Lobstering

Sunday, February 13, 2022

Robert Whitcomb, Columnist

 

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Robert Whitcomb, Columnist

“How strange it seems! These Hebrews in their graves,

      Close by the street of this fair seaport town,

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Silent beside the never-silent waves,

      At rest in all this moving up and down!”

 

-- From “The Jewish Cemetery at Newport,’’ by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)

 

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“We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.”

 

-- Joan Didion, novelist, essayist and memoirist  (1934-2021), in Slouching Toward Bethlehem

 

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“God gave me my money.’’

 

-- John D. Rockefeller Sr. (1839-1937), the leading founder of the Standard Oil Trust and considered by some economists to have been the richest man in American history

 

 

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PHOTO: file

Schools are being asked to do too much that families and other parts of society should attend to. Of course, the breakdown of family stability with the decay of marriage and the disappearance of fathers from so many homes, especially low-income ones, is a major reason. Anarchy!

 

In too many places, schools are ordered to take on the role of, for example, sex education or even sexual-activity promotion, as if the teachers are expected to be social workers and therapists instead of educators.

 

Consider Rhode Island state Sen. Tiara Mack’s plans to introduce a bill in the Senate to change the state’s sex-education law to order that public-school teachers discuss “gender” (that vague and problematic word) and sexual orientation and to support “pleasure-based sexual relations”. (I thought that sex was already for most people “pleasure-based.”) State Rep. Rebecca Kislak, has already introduced the legislation in the House.

 

Many public schools, especially those serving low-income and minority communities, find it hard enough to deal with the effects of the erosion of family structures and a gyrational, media-saturated society where many people, but especially the young, find it increasingly difficult to concentrate.

 

Schools should focus on teaching reading, math, history, civics and (one can hope) foreign languages and not divert precious teaching time to promoting the latest trendy ideas about sex suffused by identity politics. As it is, far too many kids leave school nearly illiterate and ill-prepared to achieve economic self-reliance and become good citizens.  Of course, encouraging the formation and preservation of stable two-parent families would help alleviate this problem.

 

The obsession with sexual identity is getting really boring. As a lady friend of mine quipped, “I’m not interested in people’s sexual preferences unless I plan to sleep with them.’’

 

 

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PHOTO: file

Northern Exposure

The anti-vaxxer Canadian truck drivers who have wreaked havoc in Ottawa and screwed up transport of goods between our northern neighbor and the United States with their blockades are selfish, ignorant and deluded by the anti-vax lies coming from the likes of American Trump cult media. (The blockades will inevitably add to U.S. inflation by causing new shortages.  The GOP/QAnon/Trump tribe will blame it all on Biden.)

 

The protest also have received funding from far-right Canadian groups. And I wouldn’t be surprised if Putin’s people were helping out, too. Anything to undermine a Western democracy.

 

I wish that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had called in troops to break the siege of Ottawa. His failure to do so may encourage similar brazen attacks on public safety.

Meanwhile, most Canadians understandably worry that  “populist” lies and political strife in the United States threaten their security and economic growth. They resent the nihilist Trump and his cultists for praising the protest that has paralyzed Ottawa.

 

In any case, the truckers’ outrageous actions are also a reminder that the world is reaching a critical mass of impatience about COVID restrictions, including among those still trying to be responsible after two years of pandemic. Yes, people will get sick and some will die as a result of loosening vaccine and masking mandates.  (Unvaccinated truckers are well-positioned to drive  around and infect people.) But the loosening is what must happen to cool emotions and discourage civil disorder and the medical and other pathologies associated with them.

 

(And wouldn’t it be pleasant to hear voices clearly again, without their being muffled by masks? Depends on who’s talking, I guess.)

 

No wonder governors around America are rapidly dropping COVID rules, albeit most are making these decisions more based on political pressures than on medical data.

 

And yet, another COVID variant or maybe an entirely new virus (with no immediate vaccine) may force the authorities to crack down again, perhaps soon. I  hope we’ve learned enough from the COVID-19 nightmare to handle it without insurrections. Among other things, we need to beef up the under-funded U.S. Public Health Service and increase collaboration with the World Health Organization. All viruses are international. And have we closed too many hospitals in recent years to deal with new pandemics – e.g., Pawtucket’s Memorial Hospital?

 

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Joe Rogan PHOTO: DO512 CC: 2.0

Why do smart right-wing media people like Joe Rogan spread lies and conspiracy theories so readily? Because they are amoral, without conscience and lust for the money they get from luring the maximum number of fact-averse, conspiracy-obsessed listeners and viewers. Rogan, Fox News folks, et al., well know they’re spreading lies and laugh all the way to the bank.

 

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You might look at social media, particularly that malign creature Facebook, as well Google and other search media, as “surveillance capitalism’’ that make billions from collecting personal data. And Facebook, Twitter and so on are geniuses at manufacturing mass distraction, helping to create a dangerous shortage of developed thought around the world but especially in America.

 

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Can any of that federal infrastructure law money be used to fill this year’s bumper crop of potholes?

 

 

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PHOTO: GoLocal

New Kind of Lobstering

A group of Massachusetts lobstermen may have a way to be allowed to resume fishing in areas that have been closed off to such fishing because the vertical lines to traps (aka “pots”) at the sea bottom can entangle, injure and kill North Atlantic Right Whales and other whales, too.

 

The group would use remotely controlled balloon-like devices to bring the traps to the surface without lines. I wouldn’t be surprised if regulators mandate such arrangements, though naturally, some other lobstermen are angry about the potential high expense.

 

Besides the fact that whales are big, highly intelligent, “charismatic” fellow mammals, why should we care if they go extinct? It’s because all species are connected. If you kill off one species, it has a knock-on and usually damaging (even lethal) effect on some others. The “web of life” and all that.

 

 

Fly a Kite Instead

I have to fly soon to Florida to give a talk on “working waterfronts” and am dreading it. It’s not because I fear getting COVID inside a plane, or, more likely, while waiting in a long line at airports.

 

No, the problem is too many angry, frustrated and non-civic-minded passengers, refusing, for example to wear masks in such crowded places. And a few get violent about it.

 

But then, except for travelers rich enough to fly first class, air travel is very unpleasant. 9/11 added layers of time-consuming security, including some useless “security theater,” and C0VID-19 was the coup de grace.

 

But the foundation of the mess was, I suppose, benign. Airline deregulation back in the ’70s led to lower fares for most airlines’ coach seats and thus far more customers. (The most famous low fares before then were offered by the East Coast “shuttle” service offered by Eastern Airlines. No reservations needed! If one plane was filled, you’d just wait for the next one to be quickly provided. I took the shuttle many times.  Passengers could pay on board for their tickets with cash, order a drink and soon after takeoff  light a cigarette.)

 

While cheap fares let millions of people who had never flown before enjoy trips to faraway places that before were out of their reach, they also turned airliners into cattle cars.

 

How much more pleasant, calmer and more civil it was before deregulation.

 

I also remember all those long-dead little airlines such as Mohawk and North Central that would take you to little cities in Upstate New York and the Upper Midwest. (North Central seemed to have an affinity for flying its sturdy DC-3’s into thunderstorms over Wisconsin. Very exciting.)

 

Most little airlines have since mostly been absorbed into a few behemoths.

 

They, like the big airlines, offered very pleasant service.

 

I remember as a kid being particularly impressed by Northwest Orient Airlines (what romance in the name!), once huge and now gone, having Pullman railroad car style sleeping quarters for those flying the long, long pre-jet trips to Asia. Alas, our trips to Minnesota were far too short to use them.

 

Before 9/11 things could be pretty relaxed on big planes. Back in 1982 I was flying back on a KLM 747 (the Dutch national airline)  to Boston from Paris, where I had a job interview. I was sitting in business class, which, like the rest of the plane, was remarkably uncrowded (this during the “Reagan Recession of 1981-1982), when the pilot went for a stroll in the plane and on his way back, said to me: “Why don’t you join us (him and co-pilot) up front for a chat?’’ So I spent most of the rest of the trip (about three hours) talking with them and, from time to time, a stewardess, who also brought me a delicious meal and Heineken beer as I learned a little bit about how the huge plane worked.

 

Another memory:  Some decades ago most passengers dressed up a bit to fly. Many men, for example, wore a jacket and tie. There was a certain dignity about it.  After all, you were in a public place. Now it’s Slobovia.

 

Planes, like cars, are safer now, and airlines don’t allow smoking. But airline passengers, like drivers, are worse, and the prospect of flying has become a real downer.

 

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SOURCE: NRC

Fusion Can’t Come Fast Enough

French President Emmanuel Macron, in a desperate effort to be a player, has used appeasement rhetoric to try to placate murderous Russia dictator/kleptocrat-in-chief Vladimir Putin. Macron, who looked pathetic as a Neville Chamberlain-style supplicant at the Kremlin, made noises about wanting to satisfy Russia’s “security concerns”. In fact,  geographically gigantic Russia is the aggressor as it strives to take over all of Ukraine and then other parts of eastern Europe and to threaten European democracies in general. He knows that prosperous democracies provide a model that undermines his tyranny, especially when they’re relatively nearby. And Putin, like all gangsters, can sniff weakness  and uncertainty in his real or potential adversaries

 

It’s the West (which Ukraine wants to be part of) that has 100 percent of the valid “security concerns.’’  Circle the wagons.

 

Indeed, a major aim of Putin’s now more formal alliance with  China’s Xi Jinping is to intensify his war on liberal democracy. Xi doesn’t want his rule undermined by democratic examples either.

 

Let’s hope that the U.S. Senate comes up with a quick raft of very sharp sanctions against Putin and that the U.S. imposes them immediately without waiting for a fresh Russian invasion. After all, the intense Russian troop buildup and menacing maneuvers (with the help of Putin’s Belarus lackey) is already doing great damage to Ukraine,  which for weeks has been forced to be on a war footing.  And  Russia is also blocking Ukrainian shipping on the Black Sea. Putin is trying to economically and psychologically bankrupt its neighbor to bring it to heel.

 

How much do  Europeans realize that the money they send to Putin for what are Russia’s only major exports – gas and oil – pays for the regime’s nonstop threats against them, be it cyberwarfare or 24/7 disinformation campaigns in social and other media?

 

It will cause some short-term pain but killing the Nord 2 gas pipeline from Russia to Germany would be the right thing to do to help protect Europe’s security  -- including economic security -- against Russian aggression. It’s not much fun being beholden to a blackmailer.

 

Let’s hope that growing wind and solar energy and gas supplies from allies will help bridge the gap, even as excitement grows that recent breakthroughs in fusion energy will get us off fossil fuels earlier than expected, partly declawing thugs like Putin.

 

Hit this link for the most important news of the week:

and this for the New England angle:

 

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Many of us have reservations about affirmative action, say for nominees to the U.S. Supreme Court. But, of course, there’s usually been affirmative action for white nominees and in recent years for members of the right-wing Federalist Society, too.

 

 

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PHOTO: file

Designing Beautiful Buildings and  Land Around Them

Many people have seen the great Gilded Age architect Henry Hobson Richardson’s (1838-1886) famous public and private buildings around America, with Boston’s grand Trinity Church still the most famous. Richardson invented a kind of stripped-down Romanesque Revival style with ingenious massing and use of stone, and he was also a pioneer in developing the remarkably modernist “Shingle Style” houses so popular in New England.

 

And yet while Richardson was very well known in his fairly short lifetime, few people now know his name, even though many historians consider him a founder of modern American architecture.

 

But Hugh Howard has come along to help rectify that with his duel biography Architects of an American Landscape: Henry Hobson Richardson, Frederick Law Olmsted, and the Reimagining of America’s Public and Private Spaces.

 

Olmsted (1822-1903), unlike Richardson, remains famous, as the co-designer of Central Park and designer of many other famous parks, such as those in Boston’s “Emerald Necklace,’’  across America. Many see him as the father of American landscape architecture.

 

Richardson and Olmsted, despite very different backgrounds and personalities, worked very closely on dozens of commissions for cooperative designs for parks, railroad stations, public libraries and houses. Their projects integrated the built and natural environments. Many of these collaborations resulted in Richardson’s buildings looking comfortably settled into Olmsted’s landscaping.

 

Olmsted said of Richardson:

 

“He was the greatest comfort and the most potent stimulus that has ever come into my artistic life.” 

 

This is a terrific book, elegantly written. It would have even better with bigger and clearer pictures.

 

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