Whitcomb: Club Culture; Drivers’ Licenses for All? Courtesy Collapse
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Whitcomb: Club Culture; Drivers’ Licenses for All? Courtesy Collapse
“Whatever became of the people from the 1960’s?
What happened to the young man
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTFrom a well-off family in the east,
Who had tried college and found it wanting?
Each night waxing and polishing
The hallway floors of the English Department….’’
-- From “The Great Wheel,’’ by Steve Orlen (1942-2010), American poet.
“The organization of American society is an interlocking system of semi-monopolies notoriously venal, an electorate notoriously unenlightened, misled by a mass media notoriously phony.’’
-- Paul Goodman (1911-1972), American author and public intellectual
“Winter {in the Boston area} was always the effort to live; summer was tropical license.’’
-- Henry Adams (1838-1918) in The Education of Henry Adams
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The latest controversy over U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse’s association with the elite, WASPy Bailey’s Beach Club, in Newport, has gone viral after being launched by GoLocal. (I prefer the silly-sounding real name of the club – the Spouting Rock Beach Association.) His wife is a member.
I don’t care much about politicians’ associations in their private life; it’s their public-policy positions that primarily interest me. But I suppose that any story about Newport’s summer creatures, blue-blooded or otherwise, has its allure. Many folks consider Newport an exotic place.
Jack Nolan, Bailey Beach’s general manager, told The Boston Globe that the club’s members and their families have included people of “many racial, religious, and ethnic backgrounds from around the world who come to Newport every summer.” Remarkable, if true…. In any event, for decades the club had reputation of being all white as well as anti-Semitic. Since it’s a private social and recreational organization it presumably doesn’t have to identify its members.
I have no idea what the club’s current diversity is or how it might change. It’s not in my solar system.
The first of a couple of times I went there was as a guest of the late Rhode Island Gov. Bruce Sundlun, who was Jewish. I also remember a couple of kids of color playing on the beach – a member’s grandchildren?
The beach itself is not very attractive – gray sand and, when I was there, ridges of seaweed with bugs flying over them. And the current clubhouse was uninteresting. It will probably be destroyed by the next big hurricane. But all was quiet and low-key.
As with most membership clubs, the members clearly like being in a place where they know most everybody, including the staff, which treats them in a way recalling domestic servants. Very cozy and soothing. And for public servants such as Senator Whitehouse, it must be pleasant to be in a place whose genteel tradition discourages harassing fellow members over politics or indeed anything else
Back when I was a newspaper editor I noticed that when I had a business lunch with a politician or other public figure, we were less likely to be bothered at a club than at a restaurant. And many people enjoy being taken to a meal at clubs, away from the clatter and crowds of restaurants.
No wonder such institutions are a refuge for the privileged.
There are now far fewer clubs around that are overtly discriminatory than a few decades ago. Back then the bias at the old WASP clubs, many of which were founded in the late 19th Century with money made in the Industrial Revolution, led to creation of golf, yacht and other clubs that catered to America’s newer groups. So there were “Jewish country clubs,” “Italian country clubs,” “Irish country clubs,’’ and so on. Of course, racism generally kept Black people out of fancy clubs.
Around here, I’ve only been a member of one club – the Providence Art Club, whose 16 co-founders (in 1880) included 10 men, including the distinguished African-American painter Edward Bannister, and six women. I’m no longer a member, though my wife, a painter, is. The club has a public educational and cultural mission, by the way.
Folks will always tend to coalesce into groups with whom they share certain background elements, attitudes and social behaviors. So clubs like Bailey’s Beach won’t go away, though they’ll change their memberships as America’s demographics change. They’ll need the dues money.
Meanwhile, given that the U.S. Senate is mostly a white male millionaires’ club, I’m sure that others besides Sheldon Whitehouse have some connections with exclusive (ethnically or otherwise) institutions. The GoLocal stories might lead media around the country to check into them. The voters can decide how important or trivial these associations are in the broad scheme of things.
Rhode Island, being so small and right next to much bigger and richer Massachusetts, is hamstrung in tax policy. Its overall tax level must be competitive with the Bay State’s. (It would be so much better if the Ocean State were merged into Massachusetts.) Yes, the federal tax structure, which favors the very rich and multi-generational plutocracy, is grotesque. That’s what must be fixed if the country is to prudently pay for the physical and social infrastructure it needs and that benefit the rich and powerful at least as much as the poor and middle class.
The individual states can’t address these national fiscal inequities by themselves, and they must compete with their neighbors. I think that Rhode Island Gov. Dan McKee and legislative leaders realize that at budget time though too many “Progressives” don’t. Much of the state’s tax policy is in effect made on Beacon Hill, not Smith Hill.
On the Road
“Americans are broad-minded people. They'll accept the fact that a person can be an alcoholic, a dope fiend, a wife beater, and even a newspaperman, but if a man doesn't drive, there is something wrong with him.’’
Art Buchwald (1925-2007) American humorist and columnist.
“Progressives” and others in Rhode Island and Massachusetts want to provide state drivers’ licenses to undocumented residents (aka, “illegal aliens”). Assuming that these people would undergo the training and tests that citizens must have to get their licenses, this might make the roads safer. And opening up licenses in this way certainly would make it easier for illegals to find and keep a job in our all-too-car-dependent society. With jobs, they usually end up paying FICA and some other taxes. But these licenses might also lead to fraud, and by offering a form of identification that can be very useful, encourage yet more illegal immigration across our borders and make it easier for the undocumented to stay here.
Meanwhile, the red tape in the immigration system, and especially the backup in the grossly understaffed immigration courts, continue to virtually paralyze attempts to regularize immigrants’ status.
Here’s another sign of declining manners:
GoLocal reports that Newport restaurant, Salvation Café, complains that they had 120 no-show reservations the other weekend as business gets steaming in the City by the Sea. This has forced the eatery to start forcing customers to give it credit-card information on the phone and to charge for no-shows. I’m sure that many other places are doing the same thing.
It takes little energy to call and cancel a reservation. Nor does it take much energy to write -- on paper! -- thank you and condolence notes. Or standing up when a person comes to your table to join you for a meal. But those courtesies are fading too.
It’s these little signs of civility that help make life, which can be harsh, more, well, livable.
To read the GoLocal story, please hit this link:
Profiteering on a Cosmic Scale
Will this lead to laws that let the Feds finally negotiate with drug companies on the prices of drugs for people covered by Medicare and Medicaid?
I refer to Cambridge-based Biogen Alzheimer’s disease drug Aduhelm, which the Food and Drug Administration, despite the fervent opposition of some experts, has approved for sale. The dubious drug would cost an estimated $56,000 a year per patient. A mountain of gold! So I wouldn’t be surprised if Biogen spends more money marketing the new drug than it did on the R&D to create it.
The Kaiser Family Foundation, which focuses on health care, reports:
“It is hard to know exactly how many Medicare beneficiaries will take Aduhelm, but even a conservative estimate would lead to a substantial increase in Medicare spending. In 2017, nearly 2 million Medicare beneficiaries used one or more of the currently available Alzheimer’s treatments covered under Part D, based on our analysis of Medicare Part D claims data. If just one-quarter of these beneficiaries are prescribed Aduhelm, or 500,000 beneficiaries, and Medicare pays 103% {including shipping and handling?} of $56,000 in the near term, total spending for Aduhelm in one year alone would be nearly $29 billion, paid by Medicare and the patients who use this drug – an amount that far exceeds spending on any other drug covered under Medicare Part B or Part D, based on 2019 spending. To put this $29 billion amount in context, total Medicare spending for all Part B drugs was $37 billion in 2019.’’
There are an estimated 6 million Alzheimer’s victims in the U.S., but that could be a substantial undercount.
Aduhelm reminds me of how the U.S. health-care “system” hugely favors private business and inventing exciting new treatments even as overall health outcomes remain around the bottom of the Developed World.
The drug would add tens of millions more to the wealth of Biogen senior executives and a total of billions more to Biogen shareholders and be a boon to Massachusetts’s many fine restaurants and private clubs. How much it would help the growing number of Alzheimer’s victims is unknown. What is known is that would be a huge hit to the federal budget, draining money to address other needs even as it remains very difficult to raise taxes because of Republican opposition to any tax increases.
To learn more, please hit this link:
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Interest rates are still low but will too many people who have signed on to big mortgages to deal with the pandemic-pushed local and national housing-price surge go underwater in the next recession? Better to rent now and wait for the house-buying frenzy to subside?
Wrong Date for New Holiday
Will “Juneteenth,’’ the newest federal holiday, always be celebrated on June 19, marking June 19, 1865, when a Union general told slaves in Galveston, Texas, that they were free, or will it morph to, say, the third Monday in June to create another three-day weekend? In any event, I’m sure that travel, hotel and restaurant businesses will do well from the new holiday, though it will be inconvenient for citizens seeking government services that day.
June 19, 1865 was certainly a dramatic day in Galveston, but wouldn’t a holiday to mark the ratification of the 13th Amendment on Dec. 6, 1865, make a lot more sense? That amendment abolished slavery in the United States. It reads: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States.’’
The most recent creation of a federal holiday before Juneteenth was another one addressing America’s long struggle over the rights of Black Americans – Martin Luther King Jr. Day
Green but Dry
I spent much of the week before last mostly alone in a cabin (called “Rock Bottom”) by a trout stream in Vermont. It was sometimes a bit lonely but I did a lot of reading for pleasure, with delightfully little of it any use in work.
The owners of the cabin lived in a house in the woods up the rocky hill from the cabin. They are Mormons and so, as usually the case (at least in my experience) were very nice – available to chat but otherwise busying themselves with grass cutting and other chores on their spread, mostly out of my sight lines. I’d sometimes spot them in the distance reading on a bench by the little river, a scene that reminded me of an Impressionist painting.
The founder of the Church of Latter Day Saints (the Mormons), Joseph Smith, was born and spent some of his boyhood in nearby Sharon, Vt., where his parents were farmers. Many of the first Mormons hailed from rural New England before heading west.
Sadly, there were no trout in the stream, at least so far as I could see. While Vermont (as befits the French origin of its name – Green Mountain) looked verdant, the rivers and lakes were very low, as they are in most of northern New England now, and locals fear a bad forest-fire season. Climate change or natural variability (i.e., “weather’’)?
Mid-Week Traffic Jams
The move to allowing and/or ordering many millions of white-collar workers to work at home on their computers instead of in business offices, accelerated by COVID-19, will obviously continue. But many employers will want their people to show up in the office at least a couple of days a week, among other reasons to promote the team building and brainstorming -- and personnel evaluation – that works best in person. After all, humans are social animals. I think that those days at the office will generally be Tuesdays through Thursdays because most people will want their work-at-home days leading into or out of the weekend. So commuting congestion will be mostly mid-week.
Drivers and mass-transit managers take note.
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It takes at least some masochism to drive to Cape Cod on a summer weekend.
Good Time for a Former Cop to Run for Mayor
As a former New Yorker and frequent visitor, I watch politics down there fairly closely. Eric Adams, the current Brooklyn borough president and a former city police captain, has run in large part as the dominant anti-violent-crime (especially with guns) candidate. Gun crimes have increased across America in the past five years, especially during the disruptions caused by COVID-19 in the last 18 months.
Crime of all kinds tends to run in cycles in response to demographic and economic trends and public policy changes. Crimes with guns continue to get a special boost from the increasingly successful efforts of the blood-soaked National Rifle Association, the lobbying arm of the firearms industry, and its affiliate the Republican Party to let anyone with cash or a credit card obtain any gun of their heart’s desire.
In any event, violent crime in New York, violent and otherwise, remains much lower than it was from the late 1960s to the 1990s. Hyperbolic news coverage, however, makes it seem worse.
I think that things will calm down a bit this year in Gotham. It won’t hurt that a tough and politically savvy guy who understands police work could well be the next mayor. And no, the police won’t be defunded. Indeed, they’ll be getting an increase in money to, among other things, hire more cops, some of it from President Biden’s COVID relief package.
New York will have lessons for Providence.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a very smart and disciplined far-righter and (former?) Trump suck-up who wants to run for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination (irritating the former caudillo) has backed and signed into a law legislation ordering public universities and colleges to survey students, faculty and staff about their viewpoints to support “intellectual diversity.” Translated: To make sure that enough of them are Republicans. DeSantis, et al., are acting like a fascist or Communist surveillance regime.
The survey is meant to determine “the extent to which competing ideas and perspectives are presented” in these institutions and to find whether students, faculty and staff “feel free to express beliefs and viewpoints on campus and in the classroom.’’ Well, people in these institutions have always been free to express their views. But I guess too many have had views not shared by DeSantis & Co. By the way, DeSantis went to that liberal hot spot Yale.
DeSantis has implied that these institutions could face budget cuts if he and his crowd find that too few right-wingers show up in the survey.
There are many reasons to avoid Florida. Here’s another, along with Burmese pythons, hurricanes, a stultifying flatness, an armed-to-teeth populace and an over-abundance of strip malls.
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Watching the two ruthless and expansionist dictatorships of Russia and China continue to cozy up somewhat recalls the alliance of Nazi Germany and Japan in World War II. The Russia-China alliance against the world’s leading democracies (whose example to the dictators’ subjects unsettles the tyrants) emphasizes the need for the West and other democracies to push back much more strongly, in part simply by promoting with far more energy their shared values and their benefits.
But Russia has some things to fear about China….
Mysterious Parents
“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.’’
-- The first line of L.P. Hartley’s 1953 novel, The Go-Between, set in the English countryside in 1900.
I noticed quite a few references on Father’s Day to fathers (and mothers) being a mystery to their children, as my quiet, cryptic father was to me. (My mother, a very troublesome person, was more transparent.) But then, the worlds they grew up in and were formed by, with their customs, prejudices, pleasures and pains, not to mention wars and economic depressions, were remote from what their children experienced even if the children remained in the same general socio-economic and ethnic milieu.
Their memories, their thinking were very different from ours. But then, we are, to a large extent, our memories.
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Beware those arrogant computer-caused “corrections.” For example, in early versions of my June 12 column, Microsoft Spell Check changed Andre (as in Andre Gide, the French novelist) to Andrew.
The Rise of the West
Joseph Henrich, in his new book, The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous, is a brilliant, sometimes data-dense, sometimes chatty study of how the West became so socially, economically, politically and scientifically advanced, leaping over other cultures. Part of the explanation is behaviors and practices that came out of Judeo-Christianity.