Whitcomb: Closed Churches for Homeless; A Serious Immigration Bill; Rep. George Santos (R-Moscow)?
Robert Whitcomb, Columnist
Whitcomb: Closed Churches for Homeless; A Serious Immigration Bill; Rep. George Santos (R-Moscow)?
“And what else? The rain-beaded cars in rows,
the pale, foreshortened city awash on the gray
horizon, two skeletal poplars, an unslaked sky.’’
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLAST-- From “Orthopedic Surgery Ward,’’ by William Matthews (1942-1997), American poet and essayist.
“Maine is a joy in the summer. But the soul of Maine is more apparent in the winter.’’
-- Paul Theroux (born 1941), American novelist, travel writer and essayist.
“Make human nature your study wherever you reside – whatever the religion or the complexion, study their hearts.’’
-- Charles Ignatius Sancho ( c. 1729-1780) a Black man, was a British abolitionist, writer and composer. He was born on a slave ship in the Atlantic.
So today is the bookend of the strange week between Christmas and New Year’s. Many people don’t quite know what to do with it. Some use the week for reflection and/or to write thank-you notes for parties, meals and presents and/or to set forth fragile plans for the next year. Some use it to drink a lot.
It’s a reminder of the swift passage of time, even though the hours can seem to drag during the Christmas-New Year’s stretch. Consider the line attributed to writer Gretchen Rubin, “The days are long but the years are short,’’ or writer Annie Dillard’s “How you spend your days is how you spend your life.’’
Better than trying to follow New Year’s resolutions, it makes more sense to make daily resolutions. “A day at a time,’’ as the Alcoholics Anonymous advice goes.
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Why do TV networks run so many storm stories, many of them verging on hysteria? One big reason is they get so much free video in this age of iPhones, useful for filling time as their journalistic staffs are cut.
The homeless, of course, get more attention during the holidays, especially when it’s very cold. Such places at the Cranston Street Armory in Providence, serve as temporary shelters. But permanent housing is needed for those clearly unable to act to house themselves.
The stock of housing that poor people can afford remains very low, in large part because of zoning laws and nimbyism that keeps housing from being built. Obviously having more housing would tend to lower rents and home-purchase prices. But well-off liberal Democrats, as well as far-right Trumpians, do what they can to keep poor people from living in or near their neighborhoods.
The often sardonic columnist Chris Powell, of the Manchester, Conn., Journal Inquirer, suggested last week:
“With organized religion declining, Connecticut abounds in empty church buildings….
“Organized religion's decline is not just a decline in theology and doctrine but also a decline in community, which can be seen in the worsening social disintegration generally. While in the old days religion could be politically divisive, in recent years in Connecticut it has stressed decency more than doctrine and so should be much missed.
“In pursuit of that decency maybe state government should lease some of those former churches for use as shelters and supportive housing, and maybe the neighbors, in danger of being rebuked by the antique architecture for any lack of hospitality, wouldn’t object.”
Let’s look at a common-sense approach to address the immigration crisis: Legislation co-sponsored by Senators Thom Tillis (R.-N.C.) and Kyrsten Sinema (I.-Ariz.) that would humanely and in practical ways deal with key pieces of the problem. It would allocate billions of dollars to boost border security, increase staffing to speed processing of now grievously backlogged asylum requests and give “Dreamers,’’ the illegal aliens brought to America as children and now late adolescents and young adults, a 10-year path to citizenship. The bill contains the most reasonable elements for finally starting to fix America’s long-broken immigration system.
The measure failed to get enough traction to pass last month.
Sadly, the very likely next House speaker, the outstandingly amoral Kevin McCarthy, has told his GOP/QAnon caucus that he’d block any new immigration bill in the next two years. That’s because, among other reasons, chaos at the border is a useful demagogic campaign tool. At the same time, many GOP businesspeople and “dark money” campaign donors want to keep the flow of very low-paid illegal aliens going. Then you have the fringe Democrats who, for various sincere/idealistic or cynical and often local political reasons, want to allow virtually uncontrolled immigration.
You might want to read this paper on “chain migration” into the U.S.:
And the argument that the U.S. needs more immigration to reduce inflation:
We have to finally stop the immigration “system’’ chaos permitted by congressional paralysis. It causes much suffering at the border and is fuel for class and ethnic divisions within America. Meanwhile, it’s tough not to be moved by the courage and initiative of so many of those who risk their lives trying to get to our borders from their often hellish home countries.
The Scottish Day
This is the semi-official day of the poem “Auld Lang Syne,’’ (loosely translated as “for the sake of old times”) by Scotland’s most beloved poet, Robert Burns (1759-1796). The poem provided the lyrics for an old Scottish tune sung around New Year’s, school reunions and so on.
My maternal grandmother’s parents were Scots who emigrated to, first Canada, and then the U.S., right after the Civil War. They luckily had business and social connections in America to help set them up.
My grandmother, who had a lot of family losses in her life, liked to recite “Auld Lang Syne’’ and other Burns poems in Scottish dialect, which her grandchildren thought weird, but now I understand. We have some musty Burns books from her family.
Her parents’ voyage across the North Atlantic probably was rough, but not nearly as bad as, say, the trek of Venezuelan refugees through jungles and over deserts thick with murderous drug cartels and other menaces.
Don’t Waste It
A long-abandoned 27.3-acre shopping mall in Coventry is for sale, reports WPRI. The best use for it, for boosting the area’s economy, would be for wind turbines and/or solar arrays (beats cutting down trees) to make us less dependent on fossil fuel for generating electricity, all of which fuel comes from outside the region. Next would be manufacturing facilities. (Wouldn’t it be nice if they were factories that otherwise would be built in China?) The worst uses would include big-box stores owned by out-of-state retailers.
Writing in Commonwealth Magazine, Matt Barron, a political strategist and resident of the tiny town of Chesterfield, Mass., suggests that Massachusetts’s incoming governor, Maura Healey, create a new office of rural affairs to work out of Springfield and help look after the interests of the large rural areas in the western part of the state. These include many small towns and farms, some fairly large in the very fertile Connecticut River Valley, but most small; small-scale manufacturing, and Berkshire County’s big tourist and seasonal- and weekend-home sectors.
People in the western Bay State often complain, fairly or not, that state government, based in Boston and dominated by densely populated and affluent eastern Massachusetts, doesn’t give them enough attention, including economic help. How much does the same attitude apply in Rhode Island’s rural and exurban parts along the Connecticut line?
And this one on public policy to help rural areas across America:
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Politico has published a long investigative piece about how some affluent people on Connecticut’s Fairfield County “Gold Coast’’ benefited greatly from federal disaster-relief grants for victims of Hurricane Sandy, in 2012, after the Department of Housing and Urban Development weakened regulations that had made poor people the priority. Money went to help repair some plus-$1 million houses.
This reminds me of how much of the federal tax code favors the affluent.
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All we need: Far-right crazies are suspected to be behind recent attacks on the U.S. electric-utility infrastructure, in what might be just another example of the nihilism that Trump cultivated. The aim seems to be to create chaos, followed by a fascist dictatorship.
This growing problem may tend to encourage decentralization of the electric grid, which would make it less vulnerable.
The corrupt and authoritarian Benjamin Netanyahu’s return to power as Israeli prime minister threatens to create a quasi-fascist regime. And his unwillingness to address the legitimate needs of the country’s Palestinian population, especially on the West Bank, won’t end well, given the demographics. Further, Netanyahu is friendly with Vladimir Putin.
How far can Israel go on this course without losing support from its chief protector, the United States?
Mission from Moscow?
The New York Post reported that the now infamous endless liar/con man Trumpian GOP Congressman-elect George Santos, who is pro-Putin, “reported earning $750,000 from his Devolder Organization, along with dividends valued between $1 million and $5 million. As recently as 2020, however, he reported making just $55,000 in annual salary.
“In late November, the Daily Beast reported that Andrew Intrater — a cousin of and money manager for sanctioned Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg — gave more than $56,000 to political committees supporting Santos, who defeated Democrat Robert Zimmerman Nov. 8 in a New York congressional district.
“In addition, filings with the Federal Election Commission show Santos loaned his own successful House campaign more than $700,000 — almost as much as his reported salary.’’ As I asked last week, where did the money come from?
Santos smells like a national-security threat.
Hit this link:
One little local paper reported well before the election that Santos was a crook, but big media didn’t follow through until it was too late
https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2022/12/29/north-shore-leader-santos-scoop/
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Russian businessmen who criticize Putin tend to fall out of windows.
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Fatal shootings are so unusual in Britain that just one such death makes the BBC world news while on average more than 100 die daily in America from guns. We’re hardened to our murderous mayhem.
Meanwhile, support for Brexit, enacted in a Trump-style xenophobic misinformation campaign in 2016, continues to decline as economic reality bites.
The rest of the Royal Family would do well to ignore the grifters Harry and Meghan.
Steps to the Outbreak of World War II
You know how the story ends, but Rush Loving Jr.’s new book about the lead-up to the German invasion of Poland, which started on Sept. 1, 1939, launching World War II, is riveting. Its terrific title is Fat Boy and the Champagne Salesman. The “Fat Boy” is Adolf Hitler’s second-in-command, Hermann Göring, and the (former) “Salesman’’ is his foreign minister, the endlessly conspiratorial Joachim von Ribbentrop. The two vied for the attention of the dictator as he mulled further Nazi aggression, with Ribbentrop arguing that Britain and France would keep appeasing the tyrant while Göring warned that an invasion of Poland would lead to war with those two countries, which together had pledged to come to Poland’s aid if it were attacked.
Mr. Loving vividly explores the power plays within the evil regime and the reaction of the rest of the world to Hitler’s maneuverings and ravings, most importantly Britain, France and Hitler’s pal Mussolini.
The West now faces another powerful country’s homicidal tyrant – Putin. There may be some lessons in the book about how to push back against such dangerous dictators.
The Endlessly Experimental e.e. cummings
E.E. Cummings (1894-1962) was, in his time, probably the most famous American poet after Robert Frost and T.S. Eliot, who became a British subject. I never much liked his lower-case-loving experiments in typography, syntax, and punctuation and found many of his poems boring when I had to read them in my school days, which happened when literary Modernism ruled, but I am probably in the minority.
Whatever. Cummings was also a gifted painter, novelist and essayist. And while he was extremely self-absorbed, irresponsible, a sponge and often childish, many found him charismatic.
Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno’s book E.E. Cummings: a biography is well worth reading. To me the best stuff is the narrative of Cummings’s relations with many famous poets (Ezra Pound, etc.), novelists (Hemingway, etc.), visual artists (sculptor Gaston Lachaise, etc.) and other cultural luminaries of his time, the heyday of Modernism in the arts. He met them bouncing around New York and Europe, especially Lost Generation Paris, and many other places. And then there’s his florid love life.
(His favorite place was his family’s summer place in Madison, N.H., Joy Farm.)
Here's one of his best-known poems, “Buffalo Bill’s’’. I rather like it:
Buffalo Bill’s
defunct
who used to
ride a watersmooth-silver
stallion
and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat
Jesus
he was a handsome man
and what i want to know is
how do you like your blue-eyed boy
Mister Death