Whitcomb: Allie’s Angst; Open Up! R.I. a Hot Spot; A Kennedy Goes Down; Urban Crime
Robert Whitcomb, Columnist
Whitcomb: Allie’s Angst; Open Up! R.I. a Hot Spot; A Kennedy Goes Down; Urban Crime
“Crickets leap from the stubble,
parting before me like the Red Sea.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTThe garden sprawls and spoils.’’
-- From “Three Songs at the End of Summer,’’ by Jane Kenyon (1947-95), New Hampshire-based poet
"Happiness is light on water.’’
-- William Maxwell (1908-2000), American editor, novelist, essayist and short-story writer
“Even the most ardent environmentalist doesn’t really want to stop pollution. If he thinks about it, and doesn’t just talk about it, he wants to have the right amount of pollution.’’
-- Milton Friedman (1912-2006) in 1975, Nobel economics laureate and a libertarian
For a long time, it gave discounts to police officers (to be nice and presumably tending to ensure that it got better service if problems arose with nasty patrons, etc.) and military members. But when the Black Lives Matter campaign started to get massive attention with the police killing of George Floyd, the shop rescinded the discounts.
Then came the heavily televised demonstrations (a few of which became riots) in some cities against police violence on Black people that also drew in the vague leftist blob called “Antifa’’ and far-right folks in a few cities. This outraged some Allie’s customers, especially Trump backers, of whom there are plenty in parts of suburban and exurban Rhode Island. And so the shop has decided to hand out free donuts to customers who promised to hand them to police officers.
The shop’s actions show it with a finger in the air, trying to figure out what action will be the most popular or at least the least unpopular. I’m sympathetic! But they’ve now managed to alienate pretty much everyone with their gyrations. Still, the publicity has probably been good for business.
It’s all up to Allie’s, of course, but I think that the shop should treat the police like any other customers. We love them, of course, but officers don’t need the savings; they are well compensated and retire early with big pensions and benefits. They don’t need discounted or free donuts, a delicious food that’s not exactly healthy anyway, especially for people with heart disease, obesity and diabetes – which is much of the population.
It seems almost impossible to comment on Rhode Island’s public school reopening policy in the COVID-19 pandemic with any precision since it changes every day with the health data, and the tiny state has 36 school districts and sometimes irrationally, almost hysterically fearful teachers unions.
But I strongly favor reopening all schools in person. For many kids, especially from low-income households (all too many of which have only one parent around sometime during the day), “remote learning’’ is an oxymoron. There are many homes in which a parent can’t be there to assist their kids, some don’t have high-speed Internet connections and have no computers or inadequate ones. And so some poor kids will never recover from the effects of in-person school closings. But even for students from affluent families, being schooled on Zoom, etc., can’t compare with being in a real classroom.
Many crowded business establishments, including busy restaurants, gyms and liquor stores, are now open. The chances of students getting sick with the virus are tiny, and they and teachers and other staff can be protected through proven ways of blocking the spread: masks, rigorous testing, open windows when it’s mild, sometimes even outdoor classes, well-functioning HVAC systems and grouping kids in pods. Emergency federal funding to help expedite some of these changes might be even more important than more tax cuts for rich people!
“Online learning” is a slow-motion education, social and economic disaster.
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I wonder how many people will have come to always prefer Zooming/Skyping to in-person encounters even after the pandemic.
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The admissions scandal at various “elite” universities shows how the obsession with team athletics has perverted many institutions. This includes some that are so rich that they shouldn’t be so obsessed with alumni giving being energized by team successes produced by picking star high school athletes. I sometimes think that American higher education would be better off without any inter-collegiate sports.
Some Like It Hot
I suppose that some people enjoyed Rhode Island’s having just had its hottest recorded meteorological summer (June, July, August), at an average 74.4 degrees, and 23 days when the state (as measured at T.F. Green Airport, in Warwick) reached or exceeded 90 degrees. (Actually, I’m more impressed by how warm it stays at night these past few summers.) Maybe warm-weather and sunshine fans didn’t mind very much that the hot summer included little rain. But now we’re in a severe drought – maybe severe enough to wish for a couple of tropical storms to end it.
The Ocean State is warming faster than any other state in the Lower 48.
Anyway, as global warming accelerates, presumably more people will want to go to the beach to cool off. Thus they’ll be happy that Warwick, mostly using state money, will embark on a $565,000 project to spiff up Oakland Beach, including adding vegetation to reduce erosion in storms. That’s particularly important since rising seas and more severe tempests go along with the global warming suggested in the paragraph above; the polar ice caps are melting faster and faster. It’s always nice to see local and state government trying to improve the Ocean State’s aesthetic and recreational resources.
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Have a fine fall, in spite of everything! The next few weeks are the best of the year, except when you think about what follows.
The defeat of Congressman Joseph Kennedy in his attempt to unseat Sen Edward Markey, another liberal Democrat, has been cited as the end of a long era of Kennedy pre-eminence of Massachusetts. I don’t know about that – a week is an eternity of politics – but it was interesting. Consider that Senator Markey, who is 74 and looks at least that, defeated Mr. Kennedy, who is 39 and looks younger, in no small degree because Mr. Markey ran as the more “progressive’’ candidate and in doing so grabbed a lot of young voters for whom the Kennedy dynasty seems ancient history.
The latter didn’t experience the dynasty’s political heyday -- from the ‘50s until about 2000 – and the family “charisma’’ factor eluded them.
I don’t like political dynasties – they engender cults of personality and can suck the oxygen out of politics. The effort to create a Third World dictatorship kind of dynasty out of the Trump crime family is particularly scary.
Having said that, I’ve found the carrot-topped young Kennedy one of the best politicians to come out of that big gene pool. He’s honest, hard-working, self-disciplined, a stable family man, likeable and not arrogant. He’ll probably run again for high political office and win.
When I was growing up in Massachusetts, my family favored the sort of moderate Republicans now exemplified by the very popular and competent Gov. Charlie Baker – people such as Gov. John Volpe and Sen. Leverett Saltonstall -- and they often saw the Kennedys as ruthless and arrogant. Such Republicans were then common around America. But much of the party has since gone south and west and far right.
Trump and his affiliates have made much of crime in “Democrat Party-run cities’’. (By the way, the name of the party is the Democratic Party. Trump, in his usual infantile way, thinks “Democrat Party” sounds nastier. Perhaps the Dems will start referring to the “Republic Party”?
Violent crime has tended to rise in both Republican- and Democratic-run cities for the past few months for obvious reasons: The tension, anxiety, claustrophobia, joblessness and poverty caused or worsened by COVID-19 in a country awash in guns (thank you, NRA!) and racism. Having a pervasively corrupt, demagogic and racist regime run out of the Oval Office/ Trump Organization that has grotesquely mismanaged the pandemic hasn’t helped.
(For a nice look at how the NRA operates, hit this link):
The QAnon/Republican Party and their helpers in the Kremlin will do everything they can to stir up violence in cities, with the entirely rational belief that that will help Trump steal another election, and avoid post-election prosecution for his innumerable frauds while keeping up the looting of taxpayer funds for the greater glory of the Trump Organization.
So are cities dangerous? No most are not, in general, though you’d expect with more people and more density you’d often get more crime -- sometimes in some places. But there’s also the seeming paradox that in the pandemic, what with fewer eyes on the streets because of lockdowns and business closings, you have more crime. Empty streets, not crowded ones, are generally the more dangerous around the world, and streets in American cities have had fewer people since COVID-19 invaded in a big way last March.
And there’s little doubt that some police forces, leery of getting into racially-tinged encounters, have pulled back temporarily, leaving real and potential criminals space to do their thing. That gives the Trump campaign ammunition; they’ll use all of it.
Demonstrations, a few of which have become violent, including between Black Lives Matter and allied demonstrators and sometimes heavily armed QAnon/Trump/self-appointed “militia’’ members/cultists who have invaded a few cities looking for trouble, have mostly been confined to very small areas, but those areas get lots of television attention. Good for ratings! Most cities have seen no such trouble, contrary to what many folks in the suburbs and countryside might think while watching the news. (God knows, the demonstrations in Portland, Ore., and a few other places have gone on far too long. They’re no longer achieving anything, except to boost Trump and the fascist groups supporting him.)
Having butchered the response to the pandemic, Trump sees raising paranoia amongst white voters as his one way to keep power.
This reminds me of Richard Nixon, who made a big deal about being a “law and order’’ president even as he himself was a major lawbreaker, though not nearly as bad as Trump, and crime continued to surge during his time in office, as it did under “law and order” President Reagan.
Indeed, crime, violent and otherwise, surged from the late ‘60s to hit a record in 1991, during the presidency of George H.W. Bush, yet another Republican self-proclaimed “law and order’’ leader. The crime surge wasn’t reversed until Bill Clinton’s terms, when it started a steep decline. Crime, including violent crime, has generally continued to fall since then but, again, has risen sharply since the pandemic started.
Crime rates rise and fall for various reasons, age demographics (having a large cohort of young men, as when the Baby Boomers were young, tends to be associated with higher crime), economics, the availability of drugs, etc., etc. Explaining it is not that simple.
Hit these links:
https://ballotpedia.org/Party_affiliation_of_the_mayors_of_the_100_largest_cities
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/americas-faulty-perception-crime-rates
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/10/17/facts-about-crime-in-the-u-s/
https://www.statista.com/statistics/191219/reported-violent-crime-rate-in-the-usa-since-1990/
Why are the majority (about 65 percent) of large cities run by Democrats? For one thing, cities, being more complicated, require more public services than the countryside, and Democrats are more likely to ask for such services, and be willing to pay for them, than Republicans. (Urban areas, with their dynamism, are also America’s big wealth creators – wealth that subsidizes Red States through personal and corporate taxes.) For another thing, cities, almost by definition, have far more diverse populations than the mostly white rural and exurban areas where GOP voters predominate. People in racially and ethnically diverse places tend to identify with the Democratic Party.
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Here’s an interesting report from The Washington Post:
“About 93 percent of the racial-justice protests that swept the United States this summer remained peaceful and nondestructive, according to a report released Thursday, with the violence and property damage that has dominated political discourse constituting only a minute portion of the thousands of demonstrations that followed the killing of George Floyd in May.
“The report, produced by the nonprofit Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, also concluded that an escalation in the government response to protests and a sharp uptick in extremist activity means the United States faces a growing risk of ‘political violence and instability’ ahead of the 2020 election.
“ACLED, which monitors war zones and political upheaval around the world, launched the US Crisis Monitor report with Princeton University’s Bridging Divides Initiative. Using media accounts and other public information, the report identified 7,750 protests from May 26 through Aug. 22 that were linked to the Black Lives Matter movement. The protests took place in 2,400 locations across all 50 states and the District.’’
To read more, please hit this link:
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Perfect! A vaccine sounds wonderful and any ill-effects from this rush job wouldn’t show up until after the election. That, combined with Trump’s postmaster general working to snarl voting by mail; Republican officials in some places closing voting places with lots of minority voters, and intensifying Russian disinformation, may well ensure that Trump wins the Electoral College and we more formally join the majority of the world’s nations, which are run by larcenous dictators and their families. Democracy is so tiring anyway.
Maybe They’ll Be Dead
Trump (age 74) wants to get rid of the payroll tax, at least through the election and maybe through his second term. But the payroll-tax is meant to support Social Security and Medicare, two socialist programs beloved of his ‘’anti-socialist’’ core supporters – older people. Just what we need as tax cuts and government spending drive America into its deepest debt hole since World War II! Eventually, in some painful ways, the money must be paid off. But the people in charge now may all be dead when that happens.
Democrats and Republicans both want more services (for their major constituencies) and lower taxes!
Again, It’s a Public Service
The U.S. Postal Service, hamstrung by onerous long-term employee-retirement funding rules imposed by the GOP in 2006 that virtually no other enterprise has to deal with, is not a “business,’’ contrary to the Trump regime’s assertions, though we can hope it’s run efficiently.
It’s a “public service,’’ like the roads, mass transit, airports, Amtrak, the U.S. Public Health Service and innumerable other government services that serve individuals and businesses so that they can make a living.
Interestingly, The Washington Post reports:
The holdings of Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a major Trump donor, and his wife, Aldona Wos, Trump’s nominee for ambassador to Canada, “include $30.1 million to $75.3 million in assets in USPS competitors or contractors. Postal Service mail processing contractor XPO Logistics — which acquired DeJoy’s company New Breed Logistics in 2014 — represents the vast majority of those holdings.’’
More Pandemics, Please!
Key stock market indices have generally risen during the past few months, especially driven by the pandemic-pushed prosperity of oligopolistic Big Tech companies. COVID-19 has been very good for them by accelerating the move to a digitally based economy and, indeed, society. But tech-stock drops late last week suggest that prices are starting to be considered frothy.
Places in America
Lucy R. Lippard’s The Lure of the Local: senses of place in a multicentered society, is a weaving of geography, history, and art that will heighten your understanding of place wherever you live in America. There’s lots of stuff about New England in it.