Whitcomb: Winter Wonderland, for a While; Judeo-Christmas Songs; Masking Not Over; Mini-Warehousing

Sunday, December 12, 2021

Robert Whitcomb, Columnist

 

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Robert Whitcomb, columnist

 

“In the football stadium I also see him,

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He leaps through the frosty air at the maker of comparisons

Between football and life and silently, silently strangles him!’’

-- From “Fresh Air,’’ by  Kenneth Koch (1925-2002), American poet

 

 

“We often forgive those who bore us, but we cannot forgive those whom we bore.’’

-- Francois de La Rochefoucauld (1614-1680), French writer, famous for his maxims.

 

 

“When all else fails, there’s always delusion.’’

-- Conan O’Brien (born 1963), comedian, talk-show host and writer

 

 

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PHOTO: GoLocal

Today is the anniversary of a 1960 blizzard I remember well because I was soon to move to another town, and so I’m thinking about snowstorms as a young person.

 

When my four siblings and I were kids, we loved the drama of big snows. The stillness before the first flakes, which in memory always seemed to come late at night. Then the muffled sound of the snowplows around dawn, as the northeast wind came up, as it did sometimes ferociously where we lived on a hill along Massachusetts Bay

 

Then, school having been cancelled (oh happy day!), we went out in our itchy and water-absorbing woolen snow pants, coats, mittens, caps and vulcanized rubber boots, with buckles, into the white and the wind, taking particular pleasure in the drifts, into which we’d try to make snow caves. With all this activity, a pair of gloves would rarely remain together for more than a week or two.

 

The day after the storm, if we were fortunate enough to again have no school, we’d enjoy what was usually a bright, crisp, crackling-dry and exhilarating day, with sledding and even a little skiing, though the work needed to climb up our little hill soon made that pall. On our way to a higher hill, it was fun to drag a toboggan on roads that the town hadn’t gotten around to plowing yet. The town was ours!

 

I should have known to feel sorry for my father, who had to do most of the snow shoveling (until I was about eight and could seriously help) and often found it very difficult to get to his job in downtown Boston during and after blizzards. But as usual, he never complained. Some years in the future we children, like him, also came to see snowstorms, whatever their brief beauty, simply as irritating inconveniences in obligation-heavy workaday lives.

 

Indeed,  as thaws and rain left a glaze of ice on the snow after cold fronts pushed in, and the snowbanks along roads became filthy with sand and dog poop in a town where most of these creatures ran around unleashed, even we as kids lost the joy of what the radio and TV people insisted on relentlessly calling the “white stuff’’.

 

After a few days, we were happy that a warm, southeast rainstorm would wash away all or most of the snow – until the next nor’easter came up the coast and brought more snow, which we’d enjoy for only a couple of days.

 

Of course, without weather satellites and the many other high-tech forecasting gizmos we have now, predictions weren’t nearly as accurate back then. Every once in a while there would be a surprise snowstorm. I remember one that led Carl DeSuze, a WBZ radio personality, to jovially taunt the station’s chief meteorologist, Don Kent, with:

“Well, Don, I shoveled eight inches of ‘partly cloudy’ off my sidewalk today.’’

 

 

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PHOTO: GoLocal's Richard McCaffrey

Have Yourself a Secular Christmas

Jews wrote all or part of most of the best-known American non-religious Christmas songs, mostly created in the mid-20th Century. Among them:

 

“White Christmas”; “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas” (deliciously maudlin!); “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” (also maudlin); “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town”; (retailers’ favorite?); “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”; “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year”  (revolting song!) and “The Christmas Song’’ (“Chestnuts Roasting Over an Open Fire”). The last could be called cocktail-lounge music, perfect for a wan, cigarette-smoking pianist with a drink by his side.

 

Why? Well for one thing, Jews found that music was one field (another was the movies) open to them in an era when anti-Semitism was still rife in America.  And many Jewish immigrants brought a high appreciation for music with them from Europe. Further, Christmas in the mid-20th Century was becoming more of a secular (and commercialized) celebration and diversion in the darkest days of the year and less a Christian feast day. Note, by the way, that Dec. 25 is the only federal holiday that’s also a religious one.

 

Anyway, a special thank God for the Jews at Christmas.

 

 

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Mask wearing is back PHOTO: GoLocal

Sorry, Time to Mask Up Again

COVID-19 cases are rising again. It’s still mostly the Delta variant but soon the pandemic will include a lot of the Omicron variant, too, which may become dominant in a few weeks.

So to slow the upsurge in hospitalizations already underway, and otherwise prevent the state’s health “system’’ from being overwhelmed, Rhode Island Gov. Dan McKee needs to reimpose the mask mandate for indoor public places.  (Maybe he will have done it by the time this is published.) Wearing a mask is not all that pleasant but it beats getting and spreading the disease and causing very serious symptoms, for some long term, and even death.

 

Many East Asians have been masking up for decades.

 

 

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PHOTO: file

More Housing Near Trains

There’s a new Massachusetts law that requires communities that have a MBTA train station to revise their zoning to allow (where it’s now banned) apartment construction within a half-mile of those stops. Implementation details are being worked out, but the law should increase the housing stock, helping to limit housing-cost increases and encourage train usage, with the environmental and economic benefits of that.

 

Density has its benefits.

 

Might Rhode Island do the same thing, especially as the MBTA might expand the number of stations in the state with the help of new federal infrastructure money?

 

 

Mini-Warehouses Replacing Grocery Stores

There’s a change underway, mostly in cities (including Providence and New York), that’s unsettling for those who love the relationships one develops with local stores. More and more space is being taken over for mini-warehouses (often in former grocery stores and restaurants) whence food is taken to people wanting more and faster home delivery of food. (The American obsession with  speed sometimes seems almost psychotic.) Obviously, the pandemic has accelerated the process, which mostly serves the affluent folks who can afford frequent home deliveries.

 

Well, it’s an open economy and folks can buy what and where they damn well want. But this development will drive out of business some grocery stores and restaurants. If residents want thriving towns and cities, they must often spend money at local establishments. And don’t we need – emotionally and psychologically – daily or at least fairly frequent in-person encounters with people rather than the sterility of on-screen and phone conversations and handing delivery people tips? And isn’t it good to get out of the house?

 

 

xxx

 

When a diner closes for good, which the Beacon Diner in East Greenwich is doing, a bit of a community’s spirit dies too. Diners are little informal community centers.

 

 

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Russia's Putin PHOTO: file

Will We Be up to the Challenge?

A lesson we all too often forget: Appeasement of aggressive, expansionist dictators doesn’t work, except, of course for the dictator. Consider Russia’s cold, calculating,  murderous thug-in-chief Vladimir Putin, who’s threatening to invade Ukraine to try to keep it from developing tighter ties with the West, which Ukrainians want.

 

The West should rush as much military aid as it can to help this democratic nation defend itself.  The Biden administration implies that it might do that; we’ll see. And it should prepare as tough economic sanctions as possible, including, for the first time, against Putin himself, who may be the richest person in the world given the oligarch regime he runs.

 

Putin’s endless aggression – through invading neighboring states and cyberwarfare against them and the West in general --   should remind the European Union that it’s past time to create a unified European army, navy and air force and to step up its cyber-defense capabilities.

 

And while I understand the energy needs of the European Union,  it must reduce its perilous dependence on Russian natural gas. That dependence subsidizes Russian aggression. (Nations whose economies, like Russia’s, are  based on extractive industries such as fossil fuel do tend to be corrupt dictatorships.)

 

If the West, led by the United States, doesn’t get tougher with Putin he’ll feel emboldened to try to invade other nations, too, particularly Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania. And against those he doesn’t directly invade but wants to suppress, such as Poland, he’ll use such weapons as stepped-up cyberwarfare and gas cutoffs in the winter. It’s essential that the Western democracies do anything they can to weaken his malign regime.

 

Other foes are closely watching how firm the West will be in confronting Russian aggression:  The Orwellian tyranny running China plans to try to seize Taiwan, a vibrant democracy, and Islamo-fascist Iran continues to try to expand its zone of client states in the Mideast. And they have helpers in such bloody aligned regimes as North Korea.

 

In 1935 the British weekly Punch mocked the  weak response in the face of Mussolini’s aggression against Ethiopia, the lack of response to which helped encourage Hitler’s aggression, with a satirical poem:

We don’t want you to fight,
But, by jingo if you do,
We shall probably issue a joint memorandum
Suggesting a mild disapproval of you.

Of course, appeasement in the ‘30’s led ultimately to an unavoidable, horrific war.

 

xxx

 

I hope that identity politics doesn’t undermine the rigor of science and math teaching in American schools, whose quality is a matter of national security.

 

Meanwhile, global research suggests that online education doesn’t work as well as in-person learning in a classroom.

 

Duh!

 

Hit these links:

Here

And, Here

 

 

A Matter of Balance

You may have noticed in many publications, especially since the Black Lives Matter movement erupted, the very large number of people of color appearing there in text and photos – vastly in excess of their percentage of the general population. Ditto with Gay and Lesbian people and the very tiny portion of people who are transexuals.

 

I guess some of this is just catching up after centuries of discrimination and worse. But does this very self-conscious coverage serve to reduce bigotry or does it mostly just irritate many in the still majority white and straight population and drive more of them into the arms of Trumpian nihilism?

 

xxx

 

To see an example of the rich folks who helped bankroll the Trump fascists’ attack on the Capitol last Jan. 6, please hit this link:

 

They want to put the likes of the Caudillo of Mar-a-Lago back in control – this time as an all-out larcenous dictator -- so he can cut their taxes some more. And monopolists willing to pay off Trump and his entourage would do very well.

 

Meanwhile, will one of those plutocrats please give each PBS station lots of money so they can stop running relentless concerts by geriatric rockers in order to raise money from bored Baby Boomers?

 

 

Marvelous Mayor

Life With Fiorello, a 1955 memoir by Ernest Cuneo (1905-1988), about Fiorello LaGuardia (1882-1947), New York’s brilliant,  brave, funny, irascible, ingenious and diminutive mayor in 1934-45 (and before that a Manhattan congressman and World War I hero, among other things), is exciting, and often hilarious as well as moving and instructive.

 

Mr. Cuneo, who had a fascinating career himself, was for a couple of years a legal aide for Mr. LaGuardia when he was a congressman and at the beginning of “The Little Flower’s” grand reformist tenure as Gotham’s chief executive. The memoir could be a textbook on how to use the pursuit of democratic (small “d’’) politics for the betterment of society through empathetic social services and much improved physical infrastructure.

 

Under Mr. LaGuardia’s leadership, New York became indisputably the unofficial capital of the world.

 

The Broadway musical Fiorello!, which debuted in 1959, is based partly on Mr. Cuneo’s book. Its songs include the hilarious “A Little Tin Box,’’ which satirizes corruption in the administration of Mr. LaGuardia’s predecessor James J. Walker, a creature of the Tammany Hall Democratic machine. LaGuardia himself was a Republican who made alliances with Democrats and independents to get elected and govern.

 

Everyone who wants to go into municipal politics  (or just watch them) should read this hugely charming book.

 

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