Whitcomb: Comparative Advantage; Hateful Thoughts; Lawrence a Municipal Model? Tony Bennett’s Memory
Robert Whitcomb, Columnist
Whitcomb: Comparative Advantage; Hateful Thoughts; Lawrence a Municipal Model? Tony Bennett’s Memory
“Our veins are open to shadow, and our fingertips
Porous to murder. It’s only the inattention
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTOf the prosecutors that lets us go to lunch.’’
-- From “The Eel in the Cave,’’ by Robert Bly (born 1926), American poet
“I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time.’’
-- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), German philosopher
I write here of two companies.
One is Quonset-based American Mussel Harvesters, an aquaculture company that raises mussels, oysters and clams in the Ocean State. Shellfish aquaculture has been hard hit by the pandemic because the products have been primarily sold to restaurants. But the Rhode Island Commerce Corporation decided on Jan. 29 to give the company a $50,000 grant to help design a new bagging system for two-pound bags to sell to individual customers. Restaurants have generally been buying 10-pound bags. Much of the restaurant sector will come back, albeit in different forms, when COVID fades, but certainly shellfish farmers need to diversify their customer base a lot.
Meanwhile, the Commerce Corporation is making a $49,972 grant also appropriate to the Ocean State: Helping Flux Marine, of East Greenwich, in a project to make electric outboard motors. There’s the green-energy aspect, of course, but there’s also that there wouldn’t be gasoline spills from these outboards.
Beats putting money into the local casino business, including its support system (e.g., IGT, the gambling-tech giant and partners with its pending 20-year, no-bid Rhode Island state contract). Casinos prey on lower-income people and send much of their money out of the region.
Is retired oral surgeon Richard Gordon a bigot? It seems that way. He’s the disturbed guy found guilty of assaulting his Iranian-American neighbor, Bahram Pahlavi, in a boundary dispute in Barrington while screaming racial epithets. But charging him with a hate crime is a slippery slope. Trying to get into somebody’s head, especially one as unhinged as the 71-year-old Gordon, is problematic. In general, it’s much safer law to charge people with what they physically did, and not what they said.
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In other crazy bigotry news, U.S. House Republicans will not discipline Georgia QAnon Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene for her anti-Semitism, all-around racism, peddling of lie-based conspiracy theories, gun-based threats (she’s yet another Republican weapons fetishist) and so on. But then, why should they? She represents an increasingly important part of the fearsome GOP/Trump Cult “base.’’
Coastal Waste
The sight of damaged houses foolishly sited along the beach in Sandwich, Mass., after that not very severe Nor’easter last week was a reminder of the insanities of federal flood insurance. This monster, subsidized by the taxpayers, encourages (mostly affluent) people to build and then repeatedly rebuild houses that shouldn’t be along the water.
Lawrence, No Longer Damned, at Least for Now
Old cities can be brought back, if not to their boom times, at least to more stability and even a modicum of prosperity. An example to watch is Lawrence, Mass., an old mill town on the Merrimack River. Even with the effects of the pandemic, the city is much better off than it was a decade ago, when Boston Magazine called it “City of the Damned” – a center of rising crime and poverty. (I spent some time there back in the fall of 1968, when I was teaching high school next door, in North Andover, Mass. It was a downer then but it still had a fair number of mills operating and was far from the disaster it became by 1990.)
A group called the Lawrence Partnership has been a key to the city’s economic and social revival. This includes a bunch of business and other community leaders formed in 2014 to “stimulate economic development and improve the quality of life” in Lawrence. This group has helped strengthen the city’s finances, cut crime, improve education and lure new business. COVID, has, of course, made things more difficult, but the city’s leaders are pressing on.
Lessons for cities in southeastern New England? Hit this link to learn more:
The Arts vs. Alzheimer’s
That distinguished promoter of “The Great American Songbook,’’ singer Tony Bennett, 94, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2016 but has continued to perform. The music and words for these songs are still somewhere in his head. The mysteries of the mind. My late friend Stanley Aronson, M.D., a neurologist, once told me that “we know about 5 percent of what we need to know about the brain.’’
We do know that the arts can help keep some people with dementia at least partly connected to the world. Back in 2010 I wrote an article in Pacific Standard magazine about this, focused on my friend Berna Huebner’s and Eric Ellena’s movie I Remember Better When I Paint, which was inspired by the experience of her mother Hilda Gorenstein.
Hit this link to read the article:
Mrs. Gorenstein had been a distinguished Chicago-based painter (nom d’art “Hilgos’’) before developing Alzheimer’s. That ruthless disease stopped her career and turned her into an anxious, withdrawn person. But one day Berna asked her mother if she'd like to paint again. Mrs. Gorenstein responded in a surprising way. "I remember better when I paint.’’
So Mrs. Gorenstein entered a program using students at the Art Institute of Chicago to work with her to get her painting again. This substantially improved her condition; she displayed less anxiety and more connection with the people around her. And some of the watercolors she painted while suffering from Alzheimer’s are gorgeously collectible.
With the aging of the population, there are big increases in the number of people suffering from Alzheimer’s and other dementias. Drawing them into the arts can help improve their quality of life in their last years, and that of their caregivers, too, who are called upon to do exhausting, frustrating work
Hero for Our Time
Alexei Navalny, the brave Russian political dissident whom dictator Vladimir Putin keeps trying to murder and last week had thrown in prison, is a great hero of democracy and human rights in a time, like the 1930s, in which tyranny is on the march around the world. Will Putin have him murdered in jail?
One scary aspect of the spread of tyrannies in recent years is dictators’ (including Putin and Saudi leader Mohammed bin Salman, another Trump favorite) intensifying efforts to terrorize and kill opponents who have fled abroad. They stepped up their terror during Trump’s pro-dictator and anti-Western regime. Now that we again have a pro-democracy, pro-human rights occupant of the Oval Office, let’s hope that an again-unified West, with strong leadership from America, pushes back against these assaults on our deepest political values.
Mr. Navalny’s “crime’’ was a probation violation committed while he was in a coma in Berlin after he was poisoned and nearly killed (at former KGB agent Putin’s command) by the same state security forces that have locked him up again.
One hopeful early sign is that the Biden administration has stopped the plans set in motion by Trump to withdraw thousands of troops from Germany, where they have long acted to discourage Russian aggression.
But the West needs to levy very strong financial sanctions on Putin and the oligarchs in his circle to begin the disastrously delayed effort to convince these gangsters that their crimes have consequences.
Likewise, the West needs to impose heavy sanctions on the Myanmar (formerly Burma) military leaders who have staged a coup against the democratically elected government led by state counselor Aung San Suu Kyi and President Win Myint. It’s a return to the long, brutal, kleptocratic military dictatorship under which the country suffered for decades, aided and abetted by China, which has major economic interests in Myanmar and alliances with top generals there.
Sharing Soup
There’s something very soothing about making soup in the winter and then sharing it with neighbors. It’s another way of solidifying relationships in neighborhoods, like ours, with a wide variety of people, including socio-economically. I suspect that sharing soup isn’t so common or gratifying in those affluent “gated communities’’ that strive to separate their residents from the complexities of the rest of society.
Anyway, we’re big soup sharers.
This reminds me of the old expression “borrow a cup of sugar from my next- door neighbors’’. This implied mutuality: that you’d repay your neighbor with something (not money) when they needed it.
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I think of the toughness and resilience of life when I see the rabbits (prime coyote food) bounding around this time of year, even as snow and ice cover much of their food sources. I’d guess that most don’t make it through winter, but that so many do is inspiring.
Legislation in Congress would start a $10 billion pilot program for cities to study parts of their transportation infrastructure that have sharply divided them along racial and economic lines. The cities would get funds for transforming, or even removing, such structures as sections of those huge highways (some now crumbling) that were plowed through city neighborhoods starting back in the late ‘50s as the Interstate Highway System got cooking. They’d be replaced with gentler, more humane cityscapes and healthier neighborhoods, including with improved public transit. And some of the land freed up by removing highway sections would be available for redevelopment.
The idea is to help stitch cities together that had been torn asunder by highways.
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Meanwhile, contrary to gloomy projections (mostly based on anecdotes) that the effects of the pandemic are driving out vast throngs of residents and dooming the long-term prosperity of big cities, a new survey by The Harris Poll and the Chicago Council on Global Affairs show their basic strength.
A Bloomberg News story on the poll noted:
“Notably, big city residents are especially eager to stay in cities. Seven in 10 of the people we surveyed in metro New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Phoenix and Philadelphia say they prefer to live in a big city; only 8% say they would prefer to live in the suburbs. By contrast, fewer suburbanites (61%) prefer suburban living, and three in 10 would choose a city — big or small — instead.’’
To read the piece, please hit this link:
Even in, or maybe especially in, a pandemic, cities’ concentration of resources -- health care, social infrastructure, private and public institutions, etc. -- are so important to most people who live in big (and many medium-size) cities that they trump any desire to leave. Meanwhile, one can only guess the range of things that will happen to all those office buildings (some of them skyscrapers) now nearly emptied by the move to remote work (some of it permanent) by the pandemic.
But it seems safe to predict that their rents will be a lot cheaper than in pre-pandemic days. That will likely draw in a much wider range of people than have used those huge edifices before. Indeed, the midtowns of big cities may again lure the middle class to live there as well as work there. That work will probably include fewer big businesses and more small ones, including start-ups.
Some of the former offices could even be turned into light-assembly venues, such as for jewelry, electronic parts or clothing, thus bringing back manufacturing to some center cities.
In any event, I doubt that many huge office buildings will be torn down because of the changes wrought by the pandemic. Somehow, they’ll be reused.