Whitcomb: Time Sort of Suspended; Don’t Get Trapped; 3 Better Candidates; Plague Years

Sunday, December 24, 2023

Robert Whitcomb, Columnist

 

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Robert Whitcomb, columnist

“I wouldn’t say I live in this city.

Every day it comes
and collides with me.”

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-- From “Untitled,’’ by Imtiaz Dharker (born 1954), British poet and filmmaker

Here’s the whole poem:

 

 

“A good holiday is one spent among people whose notions of time are vaguer than yours.’’

-- J.B. Priestley (1894-1984), English novelist, screenwriter and playwright

 

 

“Christmas is not a time nor a season, but a state of mind. To cherish peace and goodwill, to be plenteous in mercy, is to have the real spirit of Christmas.”

-  Calvin Coolidge  (1872-1933), U.S. president, 1923-1929,  vice president, 1921-1923, Massachusetts governor 1919-1921. Coolidge was famously laconic but far from the curmudgeon he was made out to be.

 

 

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PHOTO: GoLocal

This week will feel weird to many people. While many of us must go to work, many take the week off. Even for those who go to work, there’s a sense of time suspended. Workplaces tend to be quiet, with the bosses usually giving themselves the week off. That can mean more work, but less stress, for those manning offices and factories during Christmas week.

 

Many of us feel a certain languor after the ridiculous commercial and social frenzy leading up to Christmas. Should we use the time to try to clean up our acts for the new year, such as by jettisoning stuff, including by secretly regifting presents we just got? Take long walks (with the deciduous trees mostly leafless, the views are open), call or go see people we may not have spoken with for a year and don’t plan to for another year? Create a fill-in-the-blanks form for thank-you notes.

 

Got behind on your Christmas cards? New Year’s cards are a fine way of making amends in an ecumenical way. (Okay, New Year’s Day is also the Christian  Feast of the Circumcision.)

 

Maybe you mostly ignored Christmas, like an old friend of mine, now a widower, who told me when I asked him what he was doing for Noel: “I’ve been through more than 70 Christmases. That’s enough.’’

 

Why not move your Christmas tree to the yard, if you have one, on Tuesday? The birds will find it good shelter and you’ll no longer have a fire hazard. It still astonishes me that so many people used to have real candles burning on their Christmas trees, which after a couple of weeks of drying inside can burn with almost gasoline-like fervor.

 

We noticed some very green iris leaves popping up the other day after what was a highly theatrical sort of tropical storm last Monday, in December!

 

 

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RIDOT Peter Alviti PHOTO: GoLocal

Months-Long Mess?

The economic and psychological damage from the ongoing Washington Bridge repair job will, it seems, last for months. I had thought that perhaps the traffic mess would have been smoothed out a lot within a few days. But last Wednesday – in clear weather and not during commuting hours -- we saw a traffic jam extended for miles on Route 195 West as we headed on the highway’s eastbound side, which we got to via a confusing and circuitous route in always-problematical East Providence. Clearer signage, please! We were bogged down for quite a while on Broadway in that speed-trap-rich city,  with its ingeniously confusing signs. Pretty tough to speed there now, not that you should!

 

So we decided to return to Providence from our meeting in Dartmouth, Mass., via 195 West and then 24 North to 495 North from which we got on 95 South. The trip took a little over an hour and a half. The detour was well worth it. Drivers should avoid 195 anywhere near Providence, especially those with heart or other serious health issues. You’d find it hard to be rescued in a miles-long traffic jam. And you might run out of gas.

 

 

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As in much of America, housing in Rhode Island has obviously become far too expensive for many.  This has become a great cause of social as well as economic angst, thus a political issue. The Ocean State’s new housing law is meant to address that. But quirks in the law will result in affluent people building even bigger houses in some places, thus tending to boost housing prices in those jurisdictions. Perhaps the General Assembly can make some adjustments to the law in the next session?
 

God knows we need far more multifamily housing, not more McMansions.

 

One way to greatly increase the housing supply, and thus limit housing costs, is to make more housing with standardized designs, in factories. Basically, make big boxes that then are assembled on site – the modular housing I touted last week.  This is for both single-family and multi-family buildings.

 

The Manufactured Housing Institute asserts that a manufactured house can cost half as much per square foot as an entirely site-built home and can be put up in as little as a quarter of the time it takes to build a regular house. That’s thanks to standardization and the fact that most of the construction takes place inside – away from weather delays.

 

Hit this link:

 

 

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President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump in the 2020 debate

Bathetic Biden

Why, with a very low jobless rate, now at 3.7 percent,  inflation falling to 3 percent from its COVID-related 8 percent, the GDP having risen at an astonishing 5.2 percent annual rate in the third quarter, and the stock market soaring lately, does the Biden administration have such low poll numbers?
 

Here are some reasons:

The GOP/QAnon is much better than the Democrats in marketing negativity – including innumerable bogus conspiracies -- in a media marketplace where the bad grabs more ears and eyeballs than the good. More drama! The rise of cable TV and social media has made this much worse. And there’s always something to complain about in the economy.

 

Prices, which surged in connection with federal COVID stimulus spending, pent-up demand and national and international supply-chain problems, are still high, and mostly won’t return to pre-pandemic levels. Companies have been reveling in their record profits! And COVID seems to have injected massive new quantities of long-term anxiety, depression and suspicion into millions of Americans.

 

Extreme income inequality continues to make many people bitter. That inequality would likely widen in a second Trump regime, which would be run by plutocrats, some of whom are, like their spiritual leader, also kleptocrats.

 

Biden comes across as too mild-mannered, boring and absurdly old. Many Americans, awash in a celebrity culture and impressively uninterested in the facts of the economy, government and history, want to think that a celebrity con man/would-be tyrant like Trump could swiftly, by executive order, solve the nation’s problems, even such vastly complicated ones as immigration and various foreign crises. Or, if he can’t do that, at least he’d put on an exciting, suspenseful show again. Americans want to be entertained.

 

And they’ve lost their sense of agency. Wait until artificial intelligence really gets going!

 

Will Biden’s ego in refusing to retire result in a fascist  (albeit sometimes chaotic)  regime taking power? Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro would be much stronger candidates.

 

Anyway, the former slave states and some other right-wing jurisdictions  -- acting through that 18th-century anti-majoritarian creature named the Electoral College -- may well put Trump back in the White House. His fervid followers can then repent at leisure, but they may have to keep their complaints low key: Dictatorships don’t like public protests, and we know that the GOP/Anon will do virtually anything to stay in power.

 

On what might be the hottest domestic issue,  immigration,  the GOP/QAnon wants to end a president’s power to grant “humanitarian parole”  to those fleeing terrible situations in their home countries. If Congress abolishes this power, there would be more incentive for desperate migrants to hire smugglers to sneak them into the United States.

 

And wait until (mostly Republican) businesspeople start complaining that they can’t get enough low-wage workers because of much tougher immigration laws. Attempts at immigration reform are burdened with one of the most powerful laws – the law of unintended consequences. Of course, the current non-system immigration system does need a massive overhaul. But it may not happen until one of the parties finally has a big margin of power in Congress.

 

 

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“What is striking to me is that even as, again, we hear many countries urging the end to this conflict… I hear virtually no one saying -- demanding of Hamas that it stop hiding behind civilians, that it lay down its arms, that it surrender. This is over tomorrow if Hamas does that. This would have been over a month ago, six weeks ago, if Hamas had done that."

 

 -- Secretary of State Antony Blinken

 

 

Every once in a while there’s a big reminder that our dependence on oil is not only bad for the climate,  but it also threatens the world economy, as witness the effect of Houthi rebels in Yemen, who are Iranian and Hamas allies, attacking oil tankers and other shipping in the Red Sea. This has forced some shippers  to suspend transit through that crucial route, which might wallop the U.S. and world economies with big price increases.

 

The less we depend on oil, the stronger we’ll be. But yes, it will take decades to get off the stuff, as the world cooks.

 

 

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Joe Mollicone, Jr., Embezzler who triggered the RI Credit Union Crisis

The Rhode Island Heritage Hall of Fame is inducting the, er,  disturbed Mike Flynn -- Trump cultist,  Putin sympathizer, a highly successful entrepreneur in the lucrative conspiracy industrial complex, and a relentless liar.


Hit this link:

 

Maybe next year, the Hall of Fame will get around to honoring Joe Mollicone,  the crooked banker who touched off the state’s 1991 banking crisis. The more diversity, the better!

 

 

 

Across Crazy America

The travel writer Matthew Stevenson has written a very entertaining and sometimes hilarious book about the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections called Donald Trump’s Circus Maximus and Joe Biden’s Excellent Adventure. That Mr. Stevenson is mostly based in Switzerland – between reporting forays in America, some, as in this book, cross-country – helps give him a calm zoologist’s perspective.

 

He talks with very wide range of characters –- socio-economically, ethnically, politically and otherwise --   in his  wry and picaresque wanderings, and as a result you’ll get a damn good idea of what it’s like to live in the vast Fantasyland that is America.

 

Mark Twain and Tom Wolfe would have loved this book.

 

Mr. Stevenson  well explains his mission in his preface:

“Keep in mind, too, that in presidential politics, I am a citizen-soldier. I was not embedded in any campaign, and I was not beholden to the dictates of any news organization….

 

“Think of it {the book} more as diary notes from a   cruise gone wrong (yet another ship of fools?) or perhaps something similar to what Daniel Defoe called, in 1722, his Journal of the Plague Year.’’

Robert Whitcomb is a veteran editor and writer. Among his jobs, he has served as the finance editor of the International Herald Tribune, in Paris; as a vice president and the editorial-page editor of The Providence Journal; as an editor and writer in New York for The Wall Street Journal,  and as a writer for the Boston Herald Traveler (RIP). He has written newspaper and magazine essays and news stories for many years on a very wide range of topics for numerous publications, has edited several books and movie scripts and is the co-author of among other things, Cape Wind.


 

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