Whitcomb: Alone Together; USPS Tries to Rescue X-Mass Mail; Stop the Pawtuxet Pollution
Robert Whitcomb, Columnist
Whitcomb: Alone Together; USPS Tries to Rescue X-Mass Mail; Stop the Pawtuxet Pollution
I write to say we are still ourselves.’’
-- From “A Christmas Letter,’’ by John N. Morris (1931-1997), British-born American poet and teacher
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"A good conscience is a continual Christmas."
– Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
“One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important and that to take a holiday would bring all kinds of disaster. If I were a medical man, I should prescribe a holiday to any patient who considered his work important.”
-- Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), English philosopher, mathematician and polymath, in his 1930 book The Conquest of Happiness
Perhaps some lonely people won’t feel so bad this Christmas since so many more people than usual will be alone this Christmas. Indeed, to be alone seems to be the patriotic in-thing.
Christmas brings out silly memories. A couple of mine are that my father, a pretty good amateur musician, hated Irving Berlin’s 1942 song “White Christmas,’’ with its melancholic nostalgia for something that wasn’t quite real, because it was all in the key of C, and as the years rolled by he stopped wrapping presents, of which they were many, and just stuck the stuff in brown paper bags.
I wonder how many people still stand around a piano and sing Christmas songs. Not many, I’d guess.
I love the intro to White Christmas:
“The sun is shining, the grass is green
The orange and palm trees sway
There's never been such a day
In Beverly Hills, L.A.
But it's December the twenty-fourth
And I am longing to be up North.’’
Then there’s that Robert Frost wrote “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” in June.
For years, until my original family’s terminal dispersal – first gradually, then suddenly -- we had Cornish game hen for our big holiday dinner, on Christmas Eve. We kids (five of us) thought (for a while) that it was pretty neat that we each had our own bird to consume.
Ah, all those fading presences from around the holiday tables of decades ago.
A (dubious?) Web site ranks Rhode Island as the loneliest state in the Union this holiday season, using seven criteria. Others in the top five are New Mexico, California, New York and Massachusetts. That the Ocean State is the second most densely populated state, with New Jersey the most, makes this intriguing.
Maybe lots of Rhode Islanders want to be alone…
The U.S. Postal Service, ravaged this year by the Trump’s regime’s politically pushed cutbacks and the pandemic, has been swamped by a demand flood as consumers have swarmed into online buying. So lots of deliveries, including letters, will be late; maybe they’ll be home for Kwanzaa!
While private delivery companies UPS and FedEx have cut off deliveries for some retailers, the under-staffed Postal Service must serve everyone. (The delays could affect mail-in ballots in the crucial U.S. Senate races in Georgia. There, if the plutocratic far-right and corrupt (insider trading, among other things) Trump worshippers running win, the brilliant, icy, amoral Moscow Mitch McConnell will continue as majority leader.)
Postal Service employees are stretched to the limit and are working very hard in this difficult time. We should salute them.
We need to reinvigorate PUBLIC services and infrastructure and protect them from corporate pressures. No, we should not expect agencies to be profitable. Public services enable advanced civilization and in so doing help people make money in the private sector.
Find the Pawtuxet’s Dumpers
Attention Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the State Police! What’s the source of the revolting yellow scum and suds that appear on the South Branch of the oft-scenic Pawtuxet River, particularly when the water is high after a rainstorm? It’s especially noticeable at the otherwise beautiful waterfall along the Royal Mills complex, in West Warwick.
This pollution is killing birds and other wildlife, and proximity to it can’t be good for people either.
Locals have been asking the DEM for several years to find out why this is happening and to stop it, but as yet nothing has happened.
Is this industrial waste? There’s not much industry left in the valley. So is the pollution draining from an old closed factory? From sewers?
Or, as seems much more likely, are people dumping stuff directly into the river, which would be a crime? These sorts of miscreants, often dressing in black to avoid detection, particularly favor dumping at night to avoid the expense and inconvenience of proper disposal.
Anyway, this has gone on far too long!
The Persistent “War on Christmas’’ Myth
For years we’ve heard the complaint that there’s a “war on Christmas’’ because, for example, a government official or a company wants to call a Christmas tree a “holiday tree’’ to sound more inclusive. What a joke. Christmas rolls on relentlessly, even with COVID-19. I’ll always call it a Christmas tree but why would anyone care? For that matter, Christmas trees were originally pagan decorations, in Europe. And consider that Christmas is the only religious holiday in America that’s a federal holiday. Pretty protected!
Meanwhile, let’s honor those “Deep State” brilliant government and private-sector science people, mostly in America and Europe, who have come up with vaccines that promise to make 2021 much better than 2020. But warning! Places of worship are getting special privileges from the U.S. Supreme Court to ignore standard public-health guidelines for pandemics. That will make some of them potentially dangerous places to attend Christmas services.
Christmas has long been celebrated more for its family-and-friends gatherings, getting and giving gifts (and related boost to the economy), and for the fact that we can all use some cheer in the Northern Hemisphere’s darkest time of the year, than for any “religious” reason. That’s why so many non-Christians celebrate it too. (And for that matter, Jesus was probably not born in December – historians and theologians place his birthday at sometime from spring into fall; Christmas Day is a descendant of pre-Christian winter solstice celebrations.) Yes, there are plenty of folks who attend Christmas church services but that’s mostly to see/hear the show – the haunting carols, the colors, “the smells and bells.’’ You hear of “Christmas and Easter Christians’’….I love these services myself.
The “war on Christmas’’ line is endlessly repeated by right-wing spokespeople (backed by billionaires who want their taxes and regulations cut further) to rile up their gullible followers and divert them from demanding new public policies that might help them. As with some other “social issues” it’s a smoke machine.
Which reminds me of the alarming politicization of religion since the 1980s, mostly by so-called evangelical Christians, led by rich preacher politicians and their helpers. One of the most irritating things about many of these people is that although these groups operate as “religious” organizations in order to be tax-exempt, many function as parts of the increasingly far-right Republican/QAnon/neo-Confederate Party. They heavily promote the most extreme Republican candidates and policies.
Under the tax code, “nonprofit” religious organizations are supposed to be barred from political activities. But the IRS, fearful of facing off against powerful people, looks the other way. So the rest of us pay the taxes that these groups avoid. What a scam.
Consider the giant “nonprofit’’ Republican/evangelical adjunct called Liberty University, in Lynchburg, Va. This far-right enterprise is heavily involved in promoting Republican causes, especially those that benefit the richest among us. Founded by the TV-friendly preacher Jerry Falwell, it was later led by relentless Trump promoter Jerry Falwell Jr. until a sex scandal involving Falwell, his wife and a young man exploded last year. It’s been a hell of a money maker for the Falwells and those connected with them. As an academic institution it’s ranked very low. As a business, it’s a triumph.
xxx
While a kid looks out at the window at a snowstorm and feels (in most years) the joy of no-school (but maybe not with remote learning) and the storm’s beauty and drama, an adult mostly considers the inconvenience and fatigue to come. Slightly sad.
xxx
One of the pleasures of the sometimes tedious task of walking a dog is that you see such beautiful designs in nature below you, such as the roots of old trees spreading/snaking into the grass and sidewalks.
The China Challenge
The biggest foreign-policy challenge for the Biden administration will be clipping the wings of the aggressive Chinese surveillance state, with its concentration camps, ever-stronger military and territorial thefts. The regime, a weird mix of fascist, communist and capitalist, is making progress to becoming the Number 1 world power.
And we must face off against Russia, our second biggest foreign threat, with far more firmness and ingenuity to defend ourselves from their relentless cyberattacks against us – the last one has been the worst so far. That Trump, who is beholden to Vlad Putin in mysterious ways, is leaving office (if his Proud Boys stormtroopers allow it) suggests that things may get better for us in this war.
Trump’s silence after the Russians’ just disclosed devastating hacks this year speaks volumes on what he is: a traitor.
As proof, if more were needed, that the nonpharmaceutical, behavioral responses to infectious respiratory diseases can be very effective in stopping and/or slowing epidemics, consider that the incidence of the flu remains the lowest it’s been for decades. The main reasons are mask-wearing and socially distancing to try to thwart getting and giving COVID-19.
I wonder if this means that even after vaccinations bring COVID to heel, that many Americans (at least the non-Trumpian ones) will continue to wear masks in public places, as so many East Asians have done for years, to try to stay healthy and to reduce the chance of a new virus exploding into the general population. If a lot of people keep wearing them in public places perhaps we can avoid the next pandemic.
Please hit this link for flu updates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention:
An Alarming Sweater
There’s a new product out that you may find funny, useful or too Orwellian. It’s a holiday sweater with integrated motion sensors that sound a SimpliSafe siren whenever someone gets within six feet. Wearing it may make you friends or enemies.
Is There Another Doctor in the House?
A recent essay by Joseph Epstein in The Wall Street Journal taking aim at Jill Biden for calling herself “doctor” aroused a silly uproar as Mrs. (the word I’d use) Biden’s supporters leapt to the defense of the very nice next first lady’s choice of title, which is based on her having a doctorate in education.
While Mr. Epstein, whose elegant, often funny and frequently contrarian writing I have long enjoyed, hurt himself by also calling her “kiddo” and otherwise sounding condescending, I basically agree with him that only physicians and dentists (I’d add vets) should use that title, since other doctorates have a far wider range of rigor behind them, from weak (as with some degrees in education) to strong. And confining the use of “doctor’’ to physicians, dentists and vets gives a pleasing precision to its use.
Some of this is somehow connected to the sloppy extension of the word “professional” to just about everyone, whatever their occupation. Everyone’s now a “professional.’’ When I was full-time editor and writer, I bristled when journalism was called a “profession.’’ No, it’s a trade, which can be honorable. A “profession’’ needs a formal code of ethics and a formal, very specific education structure to be properly called that.
And I wonder if an obsession with gaining the prestige of a fancy-sounding degree leads to too many people going deep into debt to get something that might not turn out to have much to do with what they do in life, or what they want to do.
(The title creep reminds me of the language-pomposity creep: “Use” becomes “utilize”; “about” becomes “approximately’’ and so on, as if using longer words make us sound more important.)
I rather liked that what I did at the various publications where I worked involved getting the knowledge and skills, mostly learned on the job (including in composing rooms working with printers back when we still had them), that were analogous to becoming, say, a plumber, carpenter or electrician.
Evil ‘Socialism’
Trump and his entourage have frequently cited Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro and the evil “socialism’’ of his regime to warn that somehow the Democrats’ “socialism’’ would produce a similar disaster. But in fact, Maduro is a lot like Trump in his fascistic megalomania, thuggery and lies. And even the most left-wing elected Dems (a very small percentage of elected Dems) are social democrats of the ilk of many Western Europeans, all of whose countries have vibrant market economies.
There’s lots of “socialism’’ in the U.S., such as Medicare, Social Security, huge subsidies for agribusiness, huge tax breaks for investors compared to wage earners, massive “cost-plus” contracts for defense contractors….. “socialism’’ for favored groups. And in business we often privatize profit and socialize risk – bailing out big banks, etc.
Consolations of Art Amidst Horror
Debra Dean’s novel The Madonnas of Leningrad is a back-and-forth story set in Leningrad (now back to being called St. Petersburg) and in the present, where the main character slides into an ever-deepening dementia. This ravages her short-term memory but she retains much of her long-term remembrances, mostly of her time as a docent in Leningrad’s famed Hermitage Museum during the Germans’ horrific siege of the city in World War II. The book, while the quality of its prose varies, is an expert exploration of dementia and of the mysteries of memory as well as of the consolations of great art amidst the horrors of war.