Whitcomb: Grandeur and Grit in Old Port; Confederacy of Dunces; Pogo Was Right
Robert Whitcomb, Columnist
Whitcomb: Grandeur and Grit in Old Port; Confederacy of Dunces; Pogo Was Right
Some day, when trees have shed their leaves
And against the morning’s white
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTThe shivering birds beneath the eaves
Have sheltered for the night,
We’ll turn our faces southward, love,
Toward the summer isle
Where bamboos spire the shafted grove
And wide-mouthed orchids smile.
And we will seek the quiet hill
Where towers the cotton tree,
And leaps the laughing crystal rill,
And works the droning bee.
And we will build a cottage there
Beside an open glade,
With black-ribbed blue-bells blowing near,
And ferns that never fade.
“After the Winter,’’ by Claude McKay (1890-1948), a Jamaican-American poet
“The optimists among us
taking heart because it is spring
skip along
attending their meetings
signing their e-mail petitions….’’
-- From “April,’’ by Alicia Ostriker (born 1937), American poet
“Grow your tree of falsehood from a small grain of truth.’’
-- Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004), Polish-American poet and diplomat
How heartening to see the crimson buds of the red maples opening and dropping their casings on the sidewalks and green plants pushing up through last fall’s leaves. This is pushing up season.
We had lunch with a friend in New Bedford last week, in a neighborhood with many grand 19th Century mansions of various styles, from austere to very ornate, up on a hill from which you could look down at the port, whence came much of the city’s original great wealth, most of it in its 19th Century whaling heyday. A dangerous, cruel and very risky business, but for ship owners carrying the potential of great rewards, as did the “China Trade” (much of it in opium).
The textile industry that followed, which employed nasty practices such as child labor and virtually no occupational-safety rules, wasn’t pretty either, though it helped maintain New Bedford’s role as a great moneymaker into the 20th Century.
One thinks of Balzac’s famous line, "Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.’’ Well, not always. Consider the riches accruing to an inventor or discover, or Warren Buffett’s brilliant, tough but honest investing via Berkshire Hathaway, originally a New Bedford textile company, which made him and many others very rich. Maybe it’s more along the lines of it’s more comfortable not to know how sausages or laws are made.
Those grand houses: Beauty from risk-taking and considerable misery.
It’s sort of romantic to know that this storied city remains America’s leading commercial fishing port.
Amateur Hour
“It's what our system produces: Garbage in, garbage out [only in this case sewage]. If you have selfish, ignorant [unintelligent] citizens, you're going to get selfish ignorant [unintelligent] leaders…So, maybe, maybe, maybe, it's not the politicians who suck. Maybe something else sucks around here... like, the public. Yeah, the public sucks.’’
-- George Carlin
What comes to mind in the wake of top Trump national security figures’ discussions on the commercial chat app Signal about bombing Houthi rebels in Yemen, which apparently killed many civilians? Well, the incompetence, the ignorance, the immature macho-posturing (with emojis!) suggesting emotional insecurities, the nonstop lying, all seasoned with the intense desire to please their spoiled, oft-angry and insecure man-child of an uber-boss. And we should add how the infantile yakking is bound to further offend our allies, if we have any left. Here’s a particular note to that world-class fraud/Europe hater J.D. Vance, who desperately wants to be president: Someday, you’ll need allies but find no takers.
And who among our allies would want to share sensitive information with America, given the sloppiness of our current national-security management and/or the possibility that Trump would disclose it to his fellow thug in the Kremlin or even to golfing companions.
Oh, by the way, a member of the chat group, Putin admirer Steve Witkoff, was in Moscow at the time to suck up to Putin as part of Trump’s plan to sell Ukraine down the river and/or grab a lot of its natural resources. The Russians must have enjoyed listening in.
That this chat was on Signal, with its disappearing-messages feature, suggests that it was to avoid the stuff being archived. This is illegal because a federal law mandates that all such planning discussions be archived. The next four years will see a relentless effort to illegally hide administration schemes, some of them illegal.
This latest U.S. attack on the Houthis (Biden ordered attacks, too) may have been justified because the group’s attacks on ships in the Red Sea have threatened freedom of navigation in international waters. A country of the size of the United States must defend that freedom, even if members of the Trump regime resent helping other nations, such as our (former?) European allies, in the process. Houthi attacks have declined in the past year; we’ll see if they keep doing so. Or will this be whack-a-mole? (Probably.)
Let’s hope that volatile Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, whose previous job was as a Fox “News” weekend entertainer, isn’t drinking again. His high-pitched lies on television after the Signal scandal broke must have worried many viewers.
Looking at photos of grim-faced and mostly male Rhode Island foes of any and all limits on the ownership of guns, including those rifles designed to kill as many people and as fast as possible in war, I wonder what their ratios of aggression and paranoia might be. How many fear that the likes of, say, “woke” commies/liberals will take away their perceived God-given right to maximum firepower? Anyway, there’s a chance that the legislature might actually pass a serious gun-control law this year.
The MBTA’s South Coast Rail is finally providing service between Boston, Fall River and New Bedford. As people get used to it, it will take more and more cars off the roads over the next few years and will help trigger economic development and housing construction in the two cities, which could sorely use it.
But the $1 billion project has taken decades to get done, largely because of short-sighted nimbyism. Consider that the construction took much longer and cost a lot more because local foes fought the most direct route, which would have involved carefully cutting through a swamp via an old rail-line route that was used until the ‘50s. Opponents cited rare turtles and salamanders. But it stretches credulity that a rail line (much narrower than a highway) would have posed much of a problem to these creatures if a proposed trestle bridge and other adjustments had been made to the swamp route to protect wildlife.
Of course, multilane roads do far, far more damage to wildlife, via vehicles running them over, air pollution, runoff from oil, gasoline and other vehicle liquids, and global warming, than trains do. And having to go in a zigzag route added 20 minutes to the South Shore to Boston trip, making it less competitive with cars.
It’s no secret that it has become outrageously easy in litigious America for small groups to block big projects for years, although they are manifestly in the general public interest. You can never please everyone. Government needs boosted eminent-domain and other powers to move faster.
Speaking of traffic, a study has confirmed what I have long suspected: Our ever-increasing traffic density can be blamed in part on the popularity in America of huge, gas-guzzling SUVs, in addition to a growing population, lousy public transit, and sprawl development. Researchers looking at traffic in Minneapolis-St. Paul found that SUV popularity reduced the capacity of highway lanes by 9.5 percent between 1995 and 2019.
Further, while SUV drivers perceive themselves to be safer than in less, er, formidable vehicles, they are big killers of the pedestrians and people in small cars they crash into. One might also note SUV’s high profiles combined with blinding LED headlights serve to blind drivers coming from the opposite direction.
Whatever! Americans love big cars and go deep into debt to drive them. For that matter, they like big in general when they can afford it – including huge houses.
Who’s Bringing It In?
Trump, et al., have made much of the threat posed by fentanyl and other drugs being brought into the U.S. from Mexico and Canada by illegal immigrants. But in fact, from 2019 to 2024 American smugglers were responsible for 80 percent of the fentanyl seized at legal border crossings on our southwest border.
A grand total of 43 pounds of fentanyl were seized at our border with Canada, but more than 21,000 at the Mexican border during that period. How bizarre that our regime is attacking the kindly and law-abiding Canadians!
Very little fentanyl is seized by illegal migrants coming between official border crossings – the people who Trump says are “poisoning our blood.’’
And who arms the Mexican and other drug cartels? Most of their guns come from the United States.
As the comic strip’s Pogo famously said: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.’’
The threat of illegals carrying drugs into the U.S. was cited as a rationale for punishing Mexico and Canada with big tariffs.
xxx
It will be interesting to see how the regime’s crackdown on illegal (and some legal) immigrants affects food prices as we head into the prime farming season, in which immigrants have constituted many of the field hands, including in New England: Think big farms in the Connecticut Valley, chicken and turkey farms around the region, cranberry bogs, and Maine’s big potato plantations. Then, there are workers at summer resorts.