Whitcomb: Freedom From Measles; Creative Nonfiction; Narragansett Beer & Library, Swindler’s List

Whitcomb: Freedom From Measles; Creative Nonfiction; Narragansett Beer & Library, Swindler’s List

“Backward, turn backward, O Time, in your flight, 

Make me a child again just for tonight! 

Mother, come back from the echoless shore, 

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Take me again to your heart as of yore; 

Kiss from my forehead the furrows of care, 

Smooth the few silver threads out of my hair; 

Over my slumbers your loving watch keep —      

Rock me to sleep, mother – rock me to sleep! 

 

-- From “Rock Me to Sleep,’’ by Elizabeth Akers Allen (1832-1911)        

 

Happy Mothers’ Day.

 

“The trees are coming into leaf 
Like something almost being said; 
The recent buds relax and spread, 
Their greenness is a kind of grief.’’ 

 

-- From “The Trees,’’ by Philip Larkin (1922-1985)

 

 

“Is it actually noble to cling to a religious idea so tenaciously? Certainly, it doesn’t seem so to me. After all, no human being really knows anything about the exalted matters with which all religions deal. The most he can do is to match his private guess against the guesses of his fellow men.’’

 

-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956), in his essay “Martyrs,’’ in the April 1922 issue of the magazine Smart Set

 

Anti-Vaccination Cranks

The policies in some states that exempt some religious and other cranks from having their children vaccinated as a condition for going to school need to go! The science on the need for vaccination is settled, whatever the posts on that great Petri dish of misinformation, Facebook, and the remarks of such deeply disturbed celebrities as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The anti-vaxxers can say anything they want, but they don’t have the right to cause a public-health emergency. That is what they do when their actions result in more than about 5 percent of the population in an area not being vaccinated for such diseases as measles, mumps and rubella, thus dangerously eroding “herd immunity’’   and threatening widespread epidemics.

 

Religious cranks can believe in all sorts of things, such as cutting off the hands of thieves and killing homosexuals and that the world was formed 6,500 years ago.  But just calling themselves “religious’’ doesn’t give them the right to use the First Amendment’s protection of freedom of religion (which also means freedom from religion)  to, in effect, endanger the rest of us any more than the same amendment’s freedom of speech provision protects someone shouting “Fire!” in a theater in order to cause a panic, in Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s famous example.

 

If the anti-vaxxers continue to erode measles vaccination rates, we’ll face big epidemics of a disease, once thought virtually eradicated in America, that can cause lifelong injury to a few of those who come down with the disease, including pneumonia, brain damage and shingles, and even death in some rare cases.

 

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I’m of a certain age and so remember the days before vaccinations against the aforementioned diseases. So, I and my siblings got them all. They were painful and necessitated pulling us out of school for stretches – especially, for some reason, in March and April. The only treatment I can recall was aspirin and chicken or beef bouillon and ginger ale.  While home, we also enjoyed the life-enhancing properties of the second-hand smoke from my mother’s cigarettes. If only more people were around to tell younger folks about how nasty pre-immunization days could be.

 

‘Gansett  Beer on the Bay

Last week’s news that Narragansett Brewery will open a brewery in Providence’s Fox Point section next year was very cheery news indeed. For one thing, Narragansett Beer is a storied local name going back to the 1880’s. For another, it’s always a good sign when a company wants to make something around here.  Manufacturing jobs tend to pay more than service ones, and that a popular consumer product will be made in Providence, and in a highly visible location at the head of Narragansett Bay, is good PR for the city and the state.

 

I assume, from a company picture, that Narragansett plans to have an outdoor beer garden with shared picnic tables, at the site, serving local food, which could become a summer tourist destination.

 

Let’s hope for colorful signage at the brewery, to attract attention from drivers on Route 195.

 

 

Places to Grow Good Citizens

Local libraries are educational institutions as well as places for quiet entertainment. They provide pleasant places for reading, study and research. In so doing, they tend to raise the level of a community’s civic culture, democracy and prosperity.  They’re particularly important for low-income people, who can’t afford to buy the books, periodicals, CDs and so on that a library holds.

 

Thus, the Narragansett Town Council’s 3-2 vote to slash the town’s funding of its library (in a time of prosperity!) to $400,000 from $841,000 would seem a false economy. Further, the cut would apparently result in the town losing a state allocation of $181,000 for the library.

 

But wait! The council majority says that the library has “reserves’’ of $686,443 that it should use for operating expenses, thus letting the town slash its allocation, presumably pleasing some taxpayers.

 

I’m not sure who’s right here. But as robber baron and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, Rhode Island’s John Nicholas Brown I (who paid for the Providence Public Library building) and federal, state and local officials who have overseen funding for so many of them over the years, have recognized they are very important. Let’s not starve them.

 

GoLocal's News Editor Kate Nagle and Robert Whitcomb

 

I returned to one of the pleasures of my youth last week when I came across  in our cellar remarkably well-preserved copies of Life magazine from  Oct. 16, 1944 (newly famous bombshell movie star Lauren Bacall on the cover and lots of WWII stuff inside); March 20, 1964  (Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. on the cover and the deepening Vietnam War inside), and Feb. 25, 1972 (Liz Taylor at 40 on cover and the Winter Olympics  and tribute to Cole Porter inside). 

 

What evocative popular history, including the history of advertising, before other media squashed most of the magazines-on-paper business! The vanity of so many political dreams  in these issues presented itself in Life’s endorsement of  New York Republican Gov. Thomas E. Dewey in the 1944 presidential race; its presidential touting of another liberal Republican, Lodge, who was then ambassador to South Vietnam, in 1964, and  of liberal Republican recently turned Democrat John Lindsay in ’72. Now, of course, there are now very few “liberal Republicans,’’ though you might identify Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker and Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan among them.

 

The flamboyant and well-crafted ads were delightful, including those that made cigarette smoking seem such a healthy habit.

 

We subscribed to many magazines when I was a boy, with the big-format photo-dominated Look and Life my favorites, though I did later develop an affection for such now-long-dead middle-brow mags as The Saturday Review and even Business Week. We had a strong sense of anticipation waiting for these creations to arrive with a thud at the front door toward the end of each week.

 

One of my favorite quiet recreations in college was to addictively leaf through the bound (mostly in green fabric) back issues of the wide range of magazines in the large periodicals room of my college’s library. (I didn’t want to pay to subscribe to anything.) I still remember a lot of history from 1900 to 1970 because of this browsing, though I suppose I could have spent my time much more productively.

 

With the triumph of electronics, very few people will browse as I did back then and few will remember as much as I do from having read this stuff  on paper instead of a screen.

 

 

Highly Creative Tax Ruling

Bless the Rhode Island chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union for suing in federal court a really ridiculous state Division of Taxation stance that a special sales-tax exemption for the works of published authors in the state applies only to fiction writers because, the division asserts, nonfiction isn’t “creative and original.’’ (The division also favors work by musicians and such visual artists as painters and sculptors.)

 

Of course, historians and other nonfiction writers, even including some journalists writing news and commentary articles, must often be highly original and creative in coming up with topics, and in crafting engaging narratives combining analyses and syntheses --  all with the aim of drawing and holding readers. There is artistry in this.

 

The ACLU’s argument is that the Division of Taxation’s distinction violates the First Amendment guarantees of freedom of speech and the press. I don’t know about that but I do know it’s grossly unfair and illogical. Whether authors, in general, should get preferential sales-tax treatment is another issue. It reminds me a bit of when I worked for the old International Herald Tribune,  technically a French company, we journalists had 25 percent lopped off our French income tax in what was in effect a government subsidy to encourage the practice of journalism; it was partly in reaction to the censorship during the  Nazi occupation of France.

 

 

What to Do With Wyatt?

I can see why many of the good people of Central Falls don’t like having the privately run Wyatt Detention  Center in their heavily Hispanic city, especially since the jail has controversially housed some illegal aliens from South of Border. But the tiny and impoverished city needs the tax revenue from the facility, which employs some locals.

 

Perhaps when the ballyhooed new passenger train station/bus hub opens in 2022 in Pawtucket, making the two cities more accessible to people from Greater Boston seeking more affordable housing, and boosting local small businesses, tiny Central Falls will gain enough new tax revenue to offset the closure of Wyatt. The new transit center will connect riders to Boston and Providence and some Massachusetts communities in-between, as well as to T.F. Green Airport's InterLink and  Wickford Junction. It might gradually transform Central Falls.

And would the looming prison be torn down, or could the relatively new structure (opened in 1993) be used for, say, some manufacturing and/or distribution functions? A high-security luxury hotel?

 

Technology at Polar Park

I predict that after a couple of years of curiosity and excitement, attendance will fall at Polar Park, the new baseball stadium to be built as the home of what is now (sigh) called the Pawtucket Red Sox. Polar Park (after Worcester-based Polar Beverages) is supposed to open in 2021.  Eventually, there may be considerable loyal buyers’ remorse for the big tax breaks and other publicly financed incentives being given to the group of very rich men who are moving the team. And how popular will baseball, in general, be in a decade? Whatever, I wish them well.

 

Anyway, however, the Boston Red Sox farm team does in Worcester, something of long-term value may come out of the project:

 

Worcester Polytechnic Institute and the PawSox will partner to improve ballpark technology. This will include having WPI students working on such projects as mobile apps for ordering food, technology to ease parking and special seating for those with sensory challenges.

 

WPI’s president, Laurie Leshin, said: “As Worcester’s hometown technological university, WPI shares the club’s vision and opportunity for Polar Park: to create a versatile regional sports venue that combines a traditional ballpark environment with modern, smart, and connect amenities.”

So however successful the park turns out to be as a business, technological applications, some of them utterly unanticipated, might come out of the park that can be used to improve things at other large entertainment venues. Think of the surprising electronics and medical advances that came out of the U.S. space program in the ‘60s.

 

 

‘Economic Growth’ Could Kill Us All

Most people, of course, will ignore the new United Nations report projecting that the massive die-off of animal and plant species that’s underway will intensify because of humankind’s increasing assault on the Earth’s ecology. The researchers see perhaps a million species facing extinction.

 

Most of us are understandably caught up in day-to-day concerns and set aside fears of global devastation. But in fact deforestation, global warming, chemical and plastic pollution, etc.  are already hurting many human communities.

 

Most of the threatened species are unknown to the vast majority of the world’s population and so their extinctions would go unnoted, at least for a while. But all life is inter-related, and we need maximum biodiversity. The disappearance of individual species has a multiplier effect on other life, including those animals called people.

 

“For a long time, people just thought of biodiversity as saving nature for its own sake,”  Robert Watson, chairman of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, which conducted the assessment at the request of national governments, told The New York Times. “But this report makes clear the links between biodiversity and nature and things like food security and clean water in both rich and poor countries.”

 

To read a summary of the report, please hit this link:

 

The report’s implications, to me, include that the obsession with maintaining economic growth per se may destroy us and that we need a massive effort to further reduce human-population growth. We’re destroying our one and only home at an accelerating rate. “Silent Spring’’ indeed.

 

‘Stable Genius’ at Work

“….Trump’s history of financial incompetence and alleged swindling also helps explain how he eventually got into bed with the Russians. In the early 1990s, the Soviet Union had collapsed (I was working in Moscow at the time), and there was a lawless, Wild West free for all as Russians grabbed whatever assets they could…Many Russians needed to launder cash; Trump needed cash. It was a marriage made in heaven. ‘For decades, at least 13 people with known or alleged links to the Russian Mafia held the deeds to, lived in or ran criminal operations out of Trump Tower in New York or other Trump properties,’ The Washington Post reported.’’

-- Paul Brandus, author and former venture capitalist, in MarketWatch. To read his piece, please hit this link:

 

The latest reports on Trump’s finances show yet again that he was generally a very incompetent, if exuberantly dishonest, businessman, at least in terms of starting and managing enterprises. Later in his career this world-historical charlatan, who has called himself  a “stable genius,’’ did, it is true, show himself a highly effective salesman of himself as a TV personality/circus barker and then as demagogue, which got him to the White House, which he uses as a base from which to boost his enterprises’ revenues and profits.
 
The report also shows that it was his daddy’s money that repeatedly saved him, perhaps intensifying his narcissist’s sense of inadequacy – which may explain some of his frequent lashing out.  Fred Trump, the Queens and Brooklyn real-estate mogul not famed for integrity, kept giving money to Donald to help cover up the latter’s serial business failures.  It bears noting that 1985-94, the period covered by The New York Times’s May 7 article “Decade in the Red: Trump Tax Figures Show Over $1 Billion in Business Losses’’ was generally a very prosperous time.
 

To read The Times’s article, please hit this link:

 

Besides his ruthless and very smart father, Trump’s other major mentor was none other than the vicious New York lawyer, fixer and Joe McCarthy aide Roy Cohn. Please hit this link to read more:

 

The latest revelations about Trump’s business dealings simply reemphasize Trump’s key talents while making it even clearer than it already was that the tax laws regarding commercial real estate, which favor con men like Trump, need to be reformed. But in fact, he made sure that the 2017 GOP tax law made things even cosier for himself. Meanwhile, remember, folks, you have to help pay the taxes that Trump won’t. Suckers!

 

 

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David Daley’s Boston Globe May 6 article headlined “Rep Richard Neal’s Washington high life’’ about that how that Massachusetts Democratic congressman, chairman of what is usually called “the powerful House Ways and Means Committee,’’ raises money from lobbyists and other rich movers and shakers in fancy venues. Mr. Daley writes that Mr. Neal’s latest political fund-raising report “provides another frightful look behind the curtain – at the high life that members of Congress lead while they raise that money, and how they turn around and spend it on their own high-class travel, dining and entertainment.’’ Mr. Neal is in a particularly strong position to extract money because the Ways and Means Committee is the chief tax-writing committee in the House.
 

This legal corruption is  part of the Washington “swamp’’ that Trump promised he’d “drain,’’ but as anyone who had followed Trump’s career would have known would happen, Trump has broadened and deepened the swamp as he directs the most corrupt White House in American history.

 

Mr. Neal’s upscale activities, rife with conflicts of interest, make public financing of political campaigns even more attractive and the need to throw out the Citizens United ruling that formalized the sale of Washington, D.C., to the highest bidders all the more obvious. To read Mr. Daley’s essay, please hit this link:

 

 

Why You Like That Tune

Nolan Gasser’s book, Why You Like It: The Science & Culture of Musical Taste, while some of it is too far too technical for the likes of me, nonetheless contains much very interesting material on why we physically and culturally respond how we do to various forms of music as they have developed over the years.