Whitcomb: Gas-Tax Gimmick; Bring Your Own Bags; So This Is Religion? Unhealthy but Sometimes Fun
Robert Whitcomb, Columnist
Whitcomb: Gas-Tax Gimmick; Bring Your Own Bags; So This Is Religion? Unhealthy but Sometimes Fun
“The summer night was like a perfection of thought.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTThe house was quiet because it had to be….’’
-- From “The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm,’’ by Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), American poet and insurance executive
“The only ‘ism’ Hollywood believes in is plagiarism.’’
-- Dorothy Parker (1893-1967), American poet, short-story writer, critic and satirist
“There’s a constant notion that if the economy does well, the middle class will restore itself. That is not true. What happens over time in all economic history is that the wealthy weaponize government, lower taxes on them{selves}, resist competition — the biggest, most powerful companies entrench themselves, and you end up with an erosion of the middle class.’’
-- Scott Galloway, New York University business professor, in The New York Times.
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Hydrangeas -- particularly beloved in coastal southern New England – are already in full bloom. To quote Dr. Seuss: “How did it get so late so soon? It’s night before it’s afternoon.’’
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On most nights, the low temperature is higher than the hundred-year average for that date, a vivid sign of global warming. Be our guest: Move to Florida.
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To my dismay, there was no newsstand in Boston’s South Station, New England’s biggest train station, when I walked through it last Tuesday. Maybe they’ll bring one back: They’re doing a lot of construction there.
I’ve spent a lot of time over the years browsing the now-disappeared stand and many others at home and abroad.
Big newsstands are a joy, with lots of serendipity, but they’re disappearing. Too bad. You see all sorts of magazines you wouldn’t usually have access to. And buying and leafing through a paper publication is more enjoyable than reading on a screen. Further, your retention of what you read is better, say neurologists. Big newsstands make waiting at a train or bus station or airport less onerous.
Porn or semi-porn magazines used to be widely available on newsstands, amongst the more dignified materials, but wrapped in camouflage. Now, with the World Wide Web drenched in porn, the paper version of it is disappearing. Can’t compete! An advance for public order and morality?
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But driver’s licenses for these folks will also tend to lure more to Rhode Island. Are policymakers ready for that?
Pausing gasoline taxes at the federal and state level is bad fiscal policy. The tax revenue goes to maintenance and improvements for our roads and other transportation-related things. We shouldn’t be digging ourselves into deeper long-term holes. Biden’s admirable $1.1 trillion infrastructure bill isn’t nearly enough to meet our transportation needs. But you can understand the temptation for Biden and governors to pause the tax in an election year amidst high worldwide inflation. Many Americans are angry about what they’re paying at the pump and blame it all on Biden though he has virtually no influence in the pricing, which is controlled by international factors. Meanwhile, the oil companies are making record profits….
So Biden has proposed stopping the federal gasoline tax until the end of September and urges states to halt their gas taxes, too. If it’s done quickly, he and other Democrats could get a boost in the polls – until October, when the relief would end just as the mid-term elections loom! And the pause could boost inflation a tad by increasing demand.
Look at how U.S. gasoline prices rank with those in other nations:
https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/gasoline_prices/
https://fortune.com/2022/06/17/most-expensive-gas-prices-around-world-2022/
The two main inflationary factors for gasoline and other stuff: The snapback in demand after the worst of the pandemic and Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
Some of the loudest yelps about gasoline prices come from those who bought huge, gas-guzzling SUV’s.
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People who are too lazy to vote and then complain when someone like Trump gets elected and names far-right, gun-lobby-connected Supreme Court justices who pour guns into our cities (see last week’s ruling in a New York case) are, well, irritating.
Bravo to Rhode Island for the decision to ban disposable plastic bags at retail establishments’ checkout lines. They make a mess of the environment, including killing many creatures.
Under the new law, stores, etc., must offer such recyclable options as paper bags, or patrons can bring in reusable bags, which is what most people use in other, less wasteful countries. (And flexible compostable bags should be promoted.)
There’s plenty of time to prepare since the new law won’t take effect until 2024, or within a year of the state completing the regulation necessary to enforce the new law. Businesses that don’t comply will be fined $100 for the first offense, $200 for a second, and $500 for a third and any subsequent offenses. The fines might be increased beyond that after a few years.
The U.S. Supreme Court, run by right-wing extremists called, very inaccurately, “conservatives,” continues to erode walls between religious organizations (real or purported) and government, ruling, for example, last week in the case of two “born again’’ Christian schools in Maine that they can’t be excluded from a state tuition program. Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the 6-3 majority, says that states that subsidize private schools can’t discriminate against religious ones. But a couple of tricky things here are that some religious schools operate as theological propagandists to the public and as adjuncts of the Trump/QAnon Republican Party.
Consider:
One of the two schools, Temple Academy, in Waterville, says it expects its teachers “to integrate biblical principles with their teaching in every subject” (including science) and teaches students “to spread the word of Christianity.” It seeks:
“To foster within each student an attitude of love and reverence for the Bible as the infallible, inerrant, and authoritative Word of God.’’
But which translation/version of the Bible to use? Which one is “infallible”? What about the Good Book’s innumerable contradictions?
The other institution, Bangor Christian Schools, says it wants to develop “within each student a Christian worldview and Christian philosophy of life” – whatever that means in these days of public hyper-hypocrisy.
And both institutions’ admissions policies let them deny enrollment to students based on actual gender, gender self-identity, sexual orientation and religion, and require their teachers to be born-again Christians. (I admit, by the way, that I’m weary of “sexual-identity’’ issues.)
Fine.
It’s their business, until the matter of taxpayer money beclouds the situation.
Evangelicals are a key part of the coalition that has ardently supported the least Christian and most immoral president in American history, but Trump promised he’d get them the sort of judges they wanted and he came through. (And then he got them to send him millions of dollars, which he pocketed.)
This reminds me of the fact that too many organizations (including those run by TV con men preachers) claiming to be mainly “religious” in order to be tax-exempt are in fact political-propaganda or commercial organizations that under tax laws are not supposed to be tax-exempt. A lot of us are becoming increasingly irritated by having to pay their taxes for them.
For some reason, this reminds me of a school reunion I attended back in 2016 in which I was asked to preside over a memorial service for our departed schoolmates. After the school chaplain gave me the program printout, I noticed that it was a Christian service – Lord’s Prayer, Corinthians, etc. – and asked the minister (an Episcopalian): “What about the Jewish classmates?’’ of which there were a few. “They can suck it up,’’ he replied with a smile.
The service took place without incident.
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Patriarch Kirill, the corrupt and rich head of the Russian Orthodox Church, is a pal and/or lackey of Putin and loud advocate of Russia’s war on Ukraine. America doesn’t usually put sanctions on religious figures, but the creepy Kirill (called by some wags “Putin’s altar boy’’), with his long-time ties to people in Russia’s security services, business oligarchs and other figures in that bloody dictatorship’s power structure, richly deserves them. Britain has sanctioned him; so should we.
As if we needed more reminders that religious leaders can be evil.
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The successes of the far right and far left in recent French legislative elections – a defeat for President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist government -- show the fraying of that nation’s society and may threaten the country’s generally stable democracy. Think late Weimar Germany? It’s probably bad news for the West, particularly given the menace of Russia, which seeks to divide Western democracies, both within each country and between them.
Newspaper Days, Redux
I’ve been reading Carl Bernstein’s new memoir, Chasing History: A Kid in the Newsroom, which is mostly about his days as an erratic high school and college student in Maryland and as a devoted copyboy, dictationist and reporter at the old Washington Star in the early and mid-'60s. It’s a terrific tale of the sometimes inspiring, sometimes exasperating world of journalism back then. It recalled to me some of the similar stuff I saw a few years later as a news assistant at the old Boston Record American, a rather tacky tabloid, and as a reporter at the Boston Herald Traveler (RIP), a somewhat stodgy broadsheet.
Ah, the unpredictable, open-ended hours, the tense, looming deadlines, the smoking, the bad coffee, the immediate post-deadline drinking at nearby watering holes, the interviewees you thought you’d hate but ended up becoming friends with, or enemies, the speeding in cars with fins to story scenes and speeding back to write the stories before deadline and the sudden, exciting assignments to far-away places. Meanwhile, you’d gradually put together a sort of mental Geiger counter to determine with increasing, in fits and starts, acuity if sources were lying to you.
Then there were the printers in the intensely unionized composing rooms who would stage a wildcat strike and/or tip over a page of the lead type spat out from clanking Linotype machines if someone from the newsroom so much as lightly touched the type.
One of Bernstein’s recollections particularly caught my eye: Reporters were sometimes called upon to get a picture of a recently deceased person – killed usually in a car accident or crime -- from his or her survivors to run with a story about the death. We called these assignments “takeouts.’’
I did a few myself, with trepidation. You’d knock on their door, looking mortified, make the request for the picture, which you’d promise to return as soon as it was in the paper, and ask if you could chat with them a bit about their loved one for the article to run with the picture. Rather than being enraged by my bothering them at such a sad, traumatic time, I found that they usually wanted to talk about the victim’s life. Thus I sat at kitchen tables hearing their stories. That I looked younger than my years probably made them more sympathetic about my invasion. Still, it was often tense and of course tearful.
Then there was the editor, who, after a too-long liquid lunch, lit his tie on fire after his cigarette fell from his lips as he nodded off.
Ah, newspaper days: Bad for your health but good for a lifetime supply of anecdotes.
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Bernstein and his Watergate scandal reporting partner at The Washington Post, Bob Woodward, agree that Trump has been more dangerous to democracy and more corrupt than Nixon, as bad as he was.
In an earlier time, Trump, a cancer on the body politic, would be facing the gallows, and rightly so.
Then there’s the low life working for him, and the millions of suckers who voted for him. Some would have voted for Hitler, too.
Regarding those former Trump administration officials who testified last week about his coup attempt. Why didn’t they speak out before or just after Trump’s attempted coup of Jan. 6, 2021? Instead, they let the lies continue to roll on, further poisoning America, mostly without their challenge. Well, until last week they were cowards and cynics – perfect attributes for Trump employees.