Whitcomb: Sense of Occasion; Continuous Cancellation; Getting Rich at a Nonprofit; Garrahy Part II?
Monday, April 12, 2021
“The friends have gone home far up the valley
of that river into whose estuary
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTthe man from England sailed in his own age
In time to catch sight of the late forests….’’
-- From “Another River,’’ by W.S. Merwin (1927-2019), American poet and occasional resident of Greater Boston
“My memory is a card shark, reshuffling the deck to hide what I fear to know, unable to keep from fingering the ace at the bottom of the deck even when I’m doing nothing more than playing fish in the daylight with children.’’
-- Lorene Cary (born 1956), American writer and educator
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I miss the sense of public occasion you’d get when you’d leave home to go to the movies or other public entertainment decades ago. The Internet world, even before COVID-19, had been keeping us more and more tied to screens, alone or just with our immediate circle. A constricting effect.
Being in the company of others enjoying (or even disliking) the same show was a much-anticipated escape. Sometimes it could be exciting. I remember being taken as a kid “into town” (Boston; “the city” was New York) to see big movies on very wide screens. For a while, there was Cinerama, with three synchronized 35mm projectors and a huge, deeply curved screen. It was realistic enough to induce vertigo in some of the shots, say of being on a roller coaster.
We’d get dressed up to go to these shows, coat and tie for me, and then go to dinner at an “exotic” foreign restaurant – Chinese, Greek, French, Norwegian (ugh – whale meat!), Japanese, etc., only to be found in big cities.
But then, most travel at some distance from your hometown could create a sense of occasion. One would get dressed up to go on a train or plane. It added to the quiet excitement.
This tradition may have disappeared but in some New England towns, a well-known local wit would recite a poem (usually doggerel) every year, say on the Fourth of July, on the town common, where he or she would include the names of many local luminaries. This might follow a reading of part of the Preamble of the Declaration of Independence. Civic sense of occasion.
Outdoor Life
“You know how it is with an April day.
When the sun is out and the wind is still,
You're one month on in the middle of May.
But if you so much as dare to speak,
a cloud come over the sunlit arch,
And wind comes off a frozen peak,
And you're two months back in the middle of March."
-- From Robert Frost’s “Two Tramps in Mud Time”
Meeting outside may be becoming the default for a lot of people. While friends would have sat in living rooms before COVID-19, many of us now automatically gather outside, bundled up. I think that’s a habit that will continue, except for mid-winter around here. We’re learning more and more about layering.
I thought of that last week when I met some friends at their house on a hill in Belmont, Mass., whence you can see the Boston skyline. The sun came in and out of the clouds, radiating warmth and rays of sunlight out of a Bible movie starring Charlton Heston, and then all would be chilly again – New England in April!
It was briefly uncomfortable but the alternating darkness and light was a good show as we sat among the daffodils and the now-wilting crocuses and admired the redbuds starting to pop on some bushes. So potential home buyers are paying more attention to outdoor spaces these days.
GOP Cancel Culture, Redux
The Republicans say big companies shouldn’t get involved in political issues – e.g., Major League Baseball pulling the All Star Game out of Atlanta to protest Georgia’s new voting rules. But the GOP is just fine with getting companies and their execs to give big bucks to GOP candidates.
“My warning to corporate America is to stay out of politics. I’m not talking about political contributions,” said His Highness of Hypocrisy Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader. Eh? Of course, the right-wing Republican majority on the U.S. Supreme Court in the Citizens United decision opened the floodgates of corporate money for candidates. McConnell only favors corporate free speech when it denounces Democrats’ policies.
Meanwhile, I increasingly think that American democracy cannot co-exist with the power of such gigantic Internet companies as Amazon, Google, Facebook and so on. Time for the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Justice Department to get cracking.
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Whatever you think of such concepts as “Critical Race Theory’’ (and I have my doubts about some of it) politicians such as the Trumpist Rhode Island state Rep. Patricia Morgan shouldn’t try to ban courses that they don’t like, such as those that deal with the huge impact of racism in American society (and many others). Representative Morgan, a former teacher herself, wants to do just that with a bill she just filed in the legislature: Banning the teaching of “divisive concepts’’ about race. Who would determine if and how the “concepts’’ are “divisive”? And God knows there are many things divisive in all societies. We can’t hide from them without grievously undermining our understanding of our world.
Ms. Morgan is an advocate of right-wing cancel culture.
Let educators and scholars duke it out and revise their views as research continues to come in.
I note, by the way, that Ms. Morgan, of West Warwick, and the co-sponsors of the bill – fellow Republicans George Nardone, of Coventry, and Sherry Roberts, of West Greenwich, all come from districts with low percentages of minority voters.
Reaping Riches at a Nonprofit
The huge, $1.1 million pay package for 2019 (the last year for which figures are available) of Rhode Island Foundation CEO Neil Steinberg reflects the fact that the boards of such organizations mostly consist of rich people, who seem made uncomfortable with the idea that someone like Mr. Steinberg wouldn’t be rich, too. Board members take care of their own. And it’s a reminder of what some have called America’s “winner-take-all” system. I found that the Number 2 person at the foundation, executive vice president Jessica David, made far less than Mr. Steinberg -- $252,278 in 2019.
The foundation has only 45 employees and Mr. Steinberg doesn’t manage its investments.
I have long been surprised by the very high level of compensation of some Rhode Island statewide nonprofit executives in such a tiny, not-rich state, sometimes exceeding pay packages in much larger and richer markets. It probably reflects the incestuous, cross-board nature of the place. “We take care of our pals.’’
In the national for-profit sector, the pay of corporate senior executives has generally far exceeded the value of these executives’ work since the 1980s. Indeed, it’s remarkable how much execs get paid even as their companies go down the tubes. Increases every year way over inflation.
Again, that’s at least in part because of the metastasizing effect of board members’ organizational incest. Many of them are senior execs themselves and sit on various corporate boards. So they reward senior execs in return for those cross-board members handing big raises to them. Mutual back-scratching. But for-profit companies can do what they want. “Nonprofit” tax-exempt organizations subsidized by the taxpayers are a different case.
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More and more, Rhode Island Gov. Dan McKee reminds me of one of his low-key, amiable, not particularly ambition-driven, predecessors, J. Joseph Garrahy (1930-2012), who served as governor in 1977-1985.
Looking for Shot ‘Freedom’
To those who complain about having to be vaccinated as a condition of employment or of attending a school, etc., because of their anti-scientific opposition to specific vaccinations or vaccinations in general and/or simply because it allegedly unfairly impinges on their “freedom’’: Look elsewhere for a job or a school, etc. There are lots of opportunities to find places where you can limit the freedom of others by infecting them. But institutions and
indeed nations have the right to protect themselves from dangerous infectious diseases. (When I worked on a multi-year project in East Africa, a Petri dish of infectious diseases, I had to carry proof of yellow fever and other vaccinations.)
And don’t we want the freedom to assemble without fear of getting a dangerous disease?
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The Feds plan to help pay funeral expenses for poor people who “might’’ have lost a loved one because of (with what proof?) COVID-19. This is an overreach and an open invitation for fraud.
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Some, such as Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby, want to reverse the recent declines in America’s fertility and birth rates, saying these declines threaten economic growth. I think they’re more likely to improve the quality of life and reverse manmade damage to the environment. The problem is not that the world has too few people. Look around.
They’re Back!
Spring and fall are of course the prime seasons for leaf blowers. The gasoline-fueled blowers are monsters, creating explosions of sound and copious pollution and dust. They make life miserable for humans and other animals for blocks around, often for hours at a time, creating dead zones. Some homeowners wield them but those “landscaping’’ firms staffed by our friends from South of the Border, many of them not wearing ear and face protection from the shrieking noise and toxic fumes, are responsible for the lion’s share of the devastation. And some of the leaves end up in the street or in someone else’s property.
Time to ban gasoline-powered leaf blowers; electric ones are much quieter. Then there’s that handy tool called the rake. More reasons to reduce the size of lawns and replace them with much more ecologically friendly ground cover.
Drunk Writers
After watching the often sad and even tawdry representation of the life of Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) on PBS last week, I thought of at least one thing that’s gotten better since Hemingway killed himself, back in 1961: Psychiatric diagnosis and care are much improved and the sort of relentless, destructive drinking that Hemingway engaged in is far less socially acceptable and more likely to draw medical help.
Heavy drinking used to be seen as almost a natural occupational hazard of American writers, and the bad behavior it created was tolerated if the writer was considered brilliantly accomplished. But people tended to forget that over the long run, the good writing came despite the drinking, not as an accompaniment to it. Many writers drink too much because of the loneliness and uncertainty of the trade.
There’s a very good new biography, by Richard Greene, of the great English novelist and screenwriter Graham Greene (1904-1991) in which Greene and most of the people around him seem to spend much of their time drinking. (The two Greenes aren't related.) But Greene never plunged as deep into drink as did Hemingway, and he didn’t suffer the series of head injuries that, combined with a family history of anxiety and depression, doomed the astonishingly accident-prone Hemingway. (I have seen some of the devastation wrought by alcoholism in family and friends. In my family, we can trace the booze problem at least as far back as a Scottish immigrant-to-America great-grandfather. A Celtic curse?)
The book is called A Life of Graham Greene: The Unquiet Englishman. (The name is a play on Greene’s novel The Quiet American.)
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