Whitcomb: The Diner Republic; At least a Few Voted; Higher-Price Panorama; Flood Fun
Sunday, October 10, 2021
“….and now sycamore
and sumac edge yellow and red in low sun
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLAST….roads thicken with leaves and the wind
sweeps them fresh as the start of a year.’’
-- From “Long Walks in the Afternoon,’’ by Margaret Gibson (born 1944), poet and teacher. She’s the Connecticut state poet laureate.
“I believe in rules. Sure I do. If there weren’t any rules, how could you break them?’’
Leo Durocher (1905-1991), famed and often controversial Major League Baseball player and manager and author of Nice Guys Finish Last
“Sunny-side up?”
I drove up to Watertown, Mass., with its notably confusing and labyrinthine streets, even by New England standards, the other day to meet the family of a recently deceased friend at the Town Diner there for lunch (or call it late breakfast). It was another sunny and unseasonably warm day. But then, what’s “seasonal’’ these days?
It reminded me of how much I like diners, for welcoming customers across all socio-economic strata, for their lack of pretension, for the simplicity and relative cheapness of their meals, and because a real diner offers breakfast all day. And while you usually get fast service at a diner, most don’t seem to mind how long you hang around.
And there’s something about them that encourages civility, whatever the strong political and other opinions of the customers.
These usually locally owned establishments, with their loyal customers, help maintain a sense of community in our distracted, fragmented world. So many other community-building institutions, such as local newspapers, have died. But many diners hang on, despite the competition from national restaurant chains.
I dropped into a bunch of diners in Appalachia on my way back from a wedding in southwest Virginia in the summer of 2016. Most had the lie-spewing, Trump-heralding Fox “News’’ on, and clearly, most of the customers at the counter liked what they heard. But I chatted in a cursory way with a few folks. I shook my head to indicate what I thought about their hero on the screen but they remained friendly.
The only diner where I sometimes witnessed obvious antagonism was, a half-century ago, at the Polka Dot diner, in White River Junction, Vt., where long-distance truckers off Routes 89 and 91 would sometimes get into shouting matches and near-brawls with the local “Commie” college students.
Anyway, as we four sat last week in our cozy booth swapping anecdotes and sharing opinions, I thought that this was a damn nice way to spend an hour or two. The frequent free refills of our coffee cups may have had something to do with our increasingly good spirits.
As I left, a waitress said to me: “See you next week.’’ Well, it’s a bit far away to be a regular customer, but I liked the thought. For some reason, the waitstaff at diners remains overwhelmingly female, and they’ll call you “Honey.’’
xxx
As Halloween decorations threaten to outpace Christmas ones, I wonder if the “scary” stuff is somehow a bit of “exposure therapy’’ wherein increasing exposure to displays representing death and evil reduces anxiety about them.
Of course, the whole thing is mostly just silly and good for business.
Civic Duty
It was good to see so much interest in the media in the Democrats’ Rhode Island state Senate District 3 (in Providence) race, necessitated by Gayle Goldin’s resignation. Lawyer and former City Councilor Samuel Zurier won, with around 32 percent of the vote in a five-way race. He’ll face Republican Alex Gordon in the Nov. 2 election, but Mr. Zurier’s victory last Tuesday seems tantamount to victory given his party’s huge registration edge in the district.
Still, more people should have shown up to vote in this overwhelmingly Democratic district, with its many highly educated and well-informed people. After all, there are around 27,000 people in an Ocean State Senate district but only 4,054 voted in this race.
We hear people whining again and again about what their local, state, and federal legislators are doing, but so many of these whiners are too lazy to take a few minutes to vote, even for someone who might support legislation and, say, judicial nominations they’d probably like.
xxx
The obsession with the world-historical and pretty Tom Brady, now an ancient 44 years old, continues. This includes an intense interest in his bizarre or at least unusual diet, to which is given some of the credit for the length of his career.
But “time’s winged chariot’’ will come for him, too, and perhaps faster than you might think. One minute you’re well, the next minute you aren’t.
I love that he does ads for Subway, the sandwich-shop chain, though he won’t eat them himself. The money, anyway, is delicious.
Inflation Spirals
Prices are rising because of “snap-back” demand as the pandemic-caused world recession ended earlier than expected; higher tariffs persist on Chinese goods; production problems there, and other assorted international supply-chain problems, much of them caused by COVID-19. Other factors include global-warming-related issues – droughts, floods, etc.
No, the inflation isn’t Biden’s fault, though with the media’s over-focus on presidents he’s blamed.
The biggest inflation victims for the next few months will probably be Europeans, who have made themselves far too dependent on Russian gas exports even as they’ve closed down more nuclear plants and otherwise failed to move to non-fossil-fuel sources in carefully phased and coordinated ways. Vlad Putin will enjoy squeezing them as much as he can.
The quicker that European nations can wean themselves from Russian gas the better, for immediate national-security reasons as well as longer-term environmental ones.
Save the Seas
An estimated 30 percent of all people-caused carbon-dioxide emissions and more than 90 percent of the excess heat caused by this pollution is absorbed by the oceans, but this is doing great damage to them, too, especially from acidification. God knows what life on land would be like now without this oceanic buffering.
But there may be tools to at least curb this, such as growing vast amounts of seaweed (which has many uses), which can remove excess carbon dioxide from the seas, and perhaps sequestering CO2 on the seabed.
Let’s see what our friends at URI’s Graduate School of Oceanography and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution come up with.
xxx
Ecologists are telling us to go easy on the leaf-raking and removal. The fallen leaves provide nutrients for the soil, homes for bees and other pollinators and food for birds and small mammals. And skip the leaf-blowing.
xxx
As global warming intensifies and New England’s autumn generally stays warmer later, foliage is tending to dim a bit. Leaves are dropping off trees with muted colors, and the boring, sadness-inducing brown fall foliage of oak trees will become more dominant.
xxx
What have Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell, that cold, rich, amoral guy from a very poor state who’s the U.S. Senate minority leader, and his minions been up to in pushing America toward a debt default? Simple. He wants to create crisis and chaos that he thinks will ruin the Biden administration and in so doing keep big GOP donors happy with low taxes and lack of environmental and other regulations and make him majority leader again.
He also fears that Democratic spending plans (some of which are too big and complicated), if they get enacted in anywhere near their current forms, would be so popular that Biden’s party will triumph in the 2022 and 2024 elections.
It’s all about power and money. Period.
Spending for wars, economic and other domestic crises and mandatory government programs, such as Social Security, along with a series of tax cuts –since George W. Bush mostly favoring the rich -- has made national-debt expansion a bipartisan project.
But much of the recent increase came from Trump’s and the then-GOP-controlled Congress tax cuts in 2017. Instead of spurring enough economic growth to make up for lower tax rates (the almost always wrong “supply-side” argument), the cuts in fact increased the debt by about $500 billion by 2019. And that was before the COVID-19 emergency necessitated massive federal relief spending.
xxx
Ah, American education! Some public schools are using COVID-19 federal relief money to build sports fields with Astroturf, replace indoor tracks and renovate weight rooms. Meanwhile, there are shootouts in high schools (study the Second Amendment’s “well-regulated militia”)?_
Face It!
Too little in the news about the evils of Facebook, which has damaged democracy, undermined public health and indeed ruined many lives, especially in this pandemic, mentions the best way to address the problem: Break up FB (and other big tech) into much smaller companies so it has much less power to do damage. I’ve asked for years: Where is the damn Antitrust Division of the U.S. Justice Department? Facebook, et al., have become ruthless anti-competitive operations recalling the first Gilded Age’s Standard Oil Trust.
Yes, the Federal Trade Commission's antitrust lawsuit against Facebook might force it to sell off Instagram and some other holdings, but it wouldn’t compel a major reduction in Facebook’s menace. Only breaking up the core company can do that.
A key part of Facebook's strategy has been to buy potential rivals before they can get too big and compete with it.
Far too many businesses have become dependent on FB for their communications and marketing. The company’s massive outage on Oct. 4 was a scary wake-up call about this essential fragility. Diversify! The outage provided a few hours of relief from the digital din but certainly hurt some businesses.
There’s one bit of good news: Facebook’s clientele (if not in the company’s Instagram unit) continues to get older. And younger “social”-media users are much less naïve about what they see in the FB sewer, if they look at it all.
But meanwhile, Facebook, led by its soft-spoken, sociopathic leader, Mark Zuckerberg, continues to thrive by publishing endless click-inducing misinformation and disinformation and churning up conflict to maximize its ad revenue.
More Lanes, More Cars
Officials in some states (in New England, most notably Connecticut at the moment) are talking about using federal infrastructure money (if a bill can get by the Democrats’ circular firing squad and Republican nihilism and actually be enacted) to widen highways with yet more lanes.
Please, no!! Wider highways simply create what transportation engineers call ‘’induced demand’’ – the new lanes attract more cars and after a few months, the congestion is worse than ever. Meanwhile, there’s more pollution and more adjoining homes, businesses and green space are destroyed.
But highway contractors and asphalt and concrete companies get richer.
More mass transit, please. It takes up much less space.
xxx
For downtown Providence, it may be time to consider bringing back electrified trolleys with overhead wires. It’s clean and efficient technology. Such cities as Seattle and San Francisco have been re-investing in versions of this tech in recent years. And some European cities, such as Prague, are re-wiring to make their entire bus networks run on overhead-wire in-motion charging technology, reports Commonwealth Magazine.
The magazine reports that “in-motion charging technology is an incredibly exciting and proven technology that leverages overhead wires to charge batteries while the bus runs under wire to then enable distances of 22 miles off-wire.’’ In other words, well into the suburbs.
Flood Fun
When I was a kid, we much enjoyed the coastal flooding that accompanied Nor’easters in Cohasset, my hometown on Massachusetts Bay. Sometimes the water would cover some stretches of streets from which you couldn’t see the ocean because of the woods in the way. Sometimes we’d get to row on these roads. Cheap thrills indeed.
But a better show was in nearby Scituate, where a densely packed community on a point, with both summer and year-round houses, is massively flooded every few years. The houses shouldn’t be there, but federal flood insurance, which started in 1968, sustains this seeming idiocy even as rising sea level makes places such as North Scituate more vulnerable.
After I got my driver’s license, I’d go to North Scituate alone or with friends to watch the show and take some pictures.
xxx
Making graffiti and other vandalism of public property a felony looks like a good idea around here.
Why These Songs Last
The death at 80 of Mike Renzi, the Rhode Islander who became celebrated as a composer, arranger and pianist, was a promoter of “The Great American Songbook” – the resonant music and lyrics written between about 1920 and 1960 by such luminaries as the Gershwins, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Harold Arlen, Jerome Kern, etc. Most of them were written for Broadway or Hollywood musicals. The songs were usually better than the shows they were in.
The Great American Songbook became the basis for the work of most American jazz performers.
What their songs have, and the rock and other pop songs of the past few decades hardly have, is melody, and often witty, romantic, evocative and even subtle lyrics. That’s why they stick around (though sometimes weakened as “elevator music”) and most rock songs don’t.
Information, Please
I’m looking for information on Scofield Thayer’s (1889-1982) time at Butler Hospital, in Providence, where he was declared “insane” by Dr. Arthur H. Ruggles, M.D., superintendent of that hospital, and put under the guardianship of a partner at the Providence law firm of Edwards & Angell. Contact: [email protected]
Thayer, from Worcester, was a very wealthy American editor, writer (including poet) and publisher, best known for his art collection, now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and as a publisher and editor of the magazine The Dial during the 1920s. Many of his papers are at Yale. He published many emerging American and European writers and visual artists and was a leading figure in promoting what came to be called Modernism, though this complicated man hated much of modern life, especially the noise. Few people know of him, but he was an historically important figure.
Read James Dempsey’s fascinating biography The Tortured Life of Scofield Thayer.
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