Whitcomb: Transitions; Imperiled Town Meetings; Cancellations; Texas Trial; and Feeling Chipper

Sunday, March 07, 2021

Robert Whitcomb, Columnist

 

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Robert Whitcomb, columnist

“When the loons cry,

The night seems blacker,

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The water deeper.’’

 

-- From “New Hampshire,’’ by Howard Moss (1922-1987)

 

 

 “In a true democracy, everyone can be upper class and live in Connecticut.’’

 

-- Lisa Birnbach (born 1957) in 1980. She’s, unfortunately, best known as the author of  The Official Preppy Handbook

 

 

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Gina Raimondo and Dan Mckee

Good luck to new U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, a smart former venture capitalist and Rhode Island governor who was most successful in the pre-pandemic part of her term, and her successor, Dan McKee, a soft-spoken former Cumberland mayor, education reformer and businessman. He’s taking over at a difficult time, of course, but, knock on wood, he’s probably escaped the worst crises of COVID-19, now that vaccinations are rapidly accelerating and the economy, in fits and starts, is reopening.

 

Mr. McKee, like Ms. Raimondo, is a moderate Democrat, which probably best fits today’s public-policy needs, at least until the national Republican Party pulls itself back from neo-fascism and orange-idol-worship.

 

 

 

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Raimondo with Major General Christopher Callahan

All hail the help of the National Guard and others in keeping things orderly and courteous at Rhode Island’s mass-vaccination sites.

 

 

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Let medical science, and not the teachers' unions, determine the reopening of the schools.

 

 

They’re Bad Even if Legal

Providence Mayor Jorge Elorza has an idea for addressing the sometimes outrageous use of ATVs on city roads, where they are illegal to drive. He suggests that they be permitted on the streets under new rules that would require that owners have registration and insurance for them, as well as well-functioning mufflers. The idea is that this would make users more responsible and easier to regulate.

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ATV in Providence PHOTO: GoLocal File

A well-intentioned idea, but the fact is these vehicles should not be allowed on city streets, period. They pose serious dangers.  With warmer weather on the way, police should prepare to crack down on these riders.

Maybe somebody can find some dedicated sand pits for ATV riders to frolic in.

 

 

Town Meeting Tradition Zooming Away

March is New England town meeting time, but this year many – most?  -- such proceedings have been virtual, by Zoom, etc. I suppose that in some towns the in-person meeting may never come back. That’s in part because so many people have gotten so used to inter-acting most of the day on screens, and attending virtual meetings is easier for many people than going there physically. But easier doesn’t necessarily mean better. (Is the  long lack of in-person encounters making some people more timid?)

 

I’ve attended town meetings over the years in various communities. It’s hard to beat the up-close-and-personal encounters and voting in person, if you’re looking for basic democracy. At many of them, votes are taken by voice or a show of hands. Seeing the body language, and hearing the informal chats before and after the meetings, the often entertaining free-form debates, the droll, sardonic remarks of the town moderators, and reading the paper documents explaining the proposals to be voted on – all good stuff.

 

And there’s something seasonally heartening about town meetings. They come as winter is losing its grip, there’s a smell of thawing earth in the air and the sunlight is brighter. They’re a marker of spring.

 

 

Cancellation Policies

“Cancel culture’’ is at least as much a characteristic of the right-wing as of the left.  Indeed, it’s part of human nature.

 

Consider Trump’s and his followers’ demand that media people, to note just one group, be fired for criticizing The Leader. Consider McCarthyism; right-wing attempts to stop the publication of books, or to keep them out of schools – e.g., To Kill a Mockingbird -- Confederates’ attempts to cancel a United States that didn’t defend slavery, “conservative” cancel culture has remained alive and angry.

 

See Here

 

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"I've published any number of great writers, from William Faulkner to John O'Hara, but there's only one genius on my authors list. His name is Ted Geisel."

-- Bennett Cerf, Random House co-founder (with Donald Klopfer)

 

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Dr. Suess

And now we have the renewed controversy over some racist images in the children’s books of Dr. Seuss (whose real name was Theodor Seuss Geisel, 1904-1991).  Concern about them has become loud enough for Dr. Seuss Enterprises to decide to stop publishing six of these works. I don’t think they should stop publishing them: In their ways they’re brilliant art. But…. read below.

But first, the titles are:

And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street (one of his most famous books)
If I Ran the Zoo
McElligot's Pool
On Beyond Zebra!
Scrambled Eggs Super!
The Cat's Quizzer

 

You can still get these books in libraries and used-book stores, as well as on eBay, Alibris and Amazon. They’re just not printing any new ones. At issue in the six books are, er, “racially insensitive images’’ – mostly of Chinese, Arabs and Africans.

 

Geisel’s political cartoons in World War II contained racist images, of Japanese, and some of the pictures with the many ads he created earlier in his career also had nasty tropes typical of the times.

 

During the first part of Geisel’s long career, racism and other forms of bigotry were far more publicly accepted than they are now.  And this Dartmouth College and Oxford-educated man, who considered himself a liberal Democrat and grew up in a comfortable upper-middle-class family, himself apologized later in life for some of his images as he became famous and more aware of the realities of other groups and the lethally toxic nature of racism in all its manifestations.

 

It’s up to parents, of course, but it would be best for kids growing up in our multi-ethnic society that they see other books than the Seuss books above until they’re old enough to recognize the bigotry as reflecting typical white American attitudes when they were created. You can’t cancel history. It happened! Study it. Don’t try to hide it.

 

 

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Another Texas Experiment

Texas’s far-right Republican governor, Greg Abbott -- pleasing his Trumpian base -- is ending such anti-COVID-19 rules that had been in place in that huge “libertarian’’ state. He says he’s depending on people’s sense of “personal responsibility’’ to lead them to wear masks, do social distancing and so on where appropriate. Based on what we’ve seen in such Red States, this isn’t confidence-building. Many folks will take the governor’s announcement as an invitation to do what they damn well want wherever they want. And for a lot of them, refusing to wear masks has become a sign of their fealty to their divine leader, Donald Trump.

 

The governor’s action may distract attention from his administration’s disastrous role in the recent massive power failures.

 

Abbott’s decision could be particularly dangerous because of the Lone Star State’s low COVID-19 vaccination rate, crummy health systems, high poverty rate and huge population – almost 30 million – even as new variants of the virus swirl. Texas now threatens to be the launching pad for a fourth wave of the disease in America. But maybe the vaccines can head that off.

 

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Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said of distraught utility customers complaining about getting gigantic electricity bills after the power failures in the state’s barely regulated electrical system: “They should have read the fine print’’ when choosing their power contracts.

 

This reminds me of what has come to be called “the tyranny of choice’’ in our economy. This means that so many complicated choices are being offered consumers that it has become almost impossible to know if you’re making the right decision -- that is, if you don’t have the help of expensive advisers. Consider those opaque health-insurance policies or trying to decide on strategies to cope with the world’s most complicated income-tax system or choosing loans or Internet services. More and more choices and complications every year! It can seem paralyzing.

 

Part of the challenge is dense descriptions meant to fend off lawsuits in the Land of Litigation. A minor example: I’ve been in a trial of the new Novavax COVID-19 vaccine, which will probably be available to the general public in the next several months. (There will be a bunch of other new vaccines becoming available, too.) I was asked to read through, in the waiting room of the research center, a couple of dozen pages of boilerplate before deciding whether to proceed. How many people would understand, let alone remember, the document?

 

Trying to navigate the ever-increasing complications of “choice” takes much time from more productive and pleasant activities, and, along with the disappearance of so much real-person customer service, helps explain the sour mood of many Americans.  Those who can afford to hire consultants, lawyers, accountants, etc., can benefit from the choice circus, while those who can’t risk being cheated.

 

For more on the “tyranny of choice,’’ please hit this link:

 

 

The Wood-Chip Challenge

"I should like to have that written over the portals of every church, every school, and every courthouse, and, may I say, of every legislative body in the United States. I should like to have every court begin, 'I beseech ye … think that we may be mistaken.'"

“In the beginning and at the ending let us be content with the Guess’’

 

- U.S. Appeals Court Judge Learned Hand (1872-1961), legendary federal appeals court judge and philosopher of the law.

 

I haven’t liked a plan to build a electricity-generating plant in Springfield, Mass., that would burn wood chips. I have feared that it would lead to cutting down a lot of trees, which absorb carbon dioxide. Maybe I was wrong.

 

The Palmer Renewable Energy Co., which would build the plant, has fired back at its critics. It says that the wood wouldn’t come from cutting down a lot of trees but from the limbs trimmed to protect the power lines, much of which in New England are run through woodlands to avoid residential and commercial areas. But would that provide enough fuel for the plant?

 

The company notes that the linemen grind these limbs into wood chips that they spray into the woods, where they decompose, releasing the greenhouse-gas methane. The company asserts that methane is “25 times more destructive to our atmosphere than carbon dioxide.’’

 

Anyway, burning wood chips would be more environmentally sound than generating electricity with fossil fuels, which, unlike wood, has to be bought from outside New England.

 

I’m sure that the debate over the plant will grind on for a while but the company makes a plausible argument.

Hit this link to learn more:

 

Standing for Something in the World

At least the Biden administration is responding to Russian dictator/mobster-in-chief Vladimir Putin’s attempted murder of democracy activist Alexei Navalny with financial sanctions against some of Putin’s higher-level government henchmen. But the failure to directly penalize Putin himself and the billionaire oligarchs around him makes the response close to toothless. (By some accounts, by the way, the uber-kleptocrat Putin has become the world’s richest man.)

 

The administration is also taking steps to show disapproval of another murderous dictator whom Trump sucked up to: Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who had Washington Post columnist Jamal  Khashoggi murdered.

 

And it’s levying sanctions on the kleptocratic generals who have overthrown the democratic government of Myanmar (which I prefer to call by its old name, Burma) and are now torturing and killing demonstrators.

 

Speaking out for human rights and democracy is not only the right thing to do. It’s also the smartest thing to do for the long term because it puts us on the side of the people suffering under tyrannies. They’ll remember their friends.

 

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It looks like Trump, after inciting his followers’ Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, intentionally let it go on for hours.

 

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Regarding New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo: A cursory look at the major political figures of the past 30 years suggests that Republicans are more tolerant of GOP pols’ real or alleged sexual abuses than Democrats are of theirs. Is that because the Democrats skew female?

 

In any case, my guess is that tough-guy Cuomo is toast. However, the toast may take a while to come out of the toaster.

 

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We’re looking forward to when restaurants hereabouts again serve bread, which seems to have been banned in the pandemic. Something to dip!


 

Rare Hamburger

I take out a lot of long-forgotten books from the library. The latest, which, before I pulled it from a dusty shelf, was last taken out on Feb. 5, 1957, is The Oblong Blur and Other Odysseys, by Philip Hamburger (1914-2004).

 

These 41 richly reported essays/articles, all but two written for The New Yorker, include brilliant takes on the regimes of Hitler, Mussolini, Tito and Peron; the activities of the Norwegian head of the then-new United Nations; now long-forgotten radio personalities, mayors and the charming quirks of Newburyport, Mass. He combines in turn sober appraisal, irony and humor. The stuff he wrote from immediate post-World War II Europe is my favorite, some of it weirdly funny and some dark.

 

Mr. Hamburger deserves a revival.

 

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