Whitcomb: Law and Order; Summer Challenges; High-Level Risk Takers; A Real Meritocracy?
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Whitcomb: Law and Order; Summer Challenges; High-Level Risk Takers; A Real Meritocracy?
“I have seen flowers come in stony places
And kind things done by men with ugly faces,
And the gold cup won by the worst horse at the races,
So I trust, too.’’
-- “An Epilogue,’’ by John Masefield (1878-1967), British poet laureate 1930-1967
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“If all economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion.’’
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), Anglo-Irish playwright and critic
“Agnostic is the only respectable position, simply because our ignorance of the universe is so vast."
-- English novelist Martin Amis (born 1949)
Perhaps the politically most palatable approach, for now, in the controversy in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and many other states over whether public schools should mandate masks to curb COVID-19 is to let each district decide based on a district’s positivity – and be prepared to change the rules with a few days’ warning.
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Members of such activist groups as Direct Action for Rights and Equality and the Providence Youth Student Movement who talk about “defunding the police’’ should contemplate what it would be like to live in a city where the police were actually defunded. It would be a place of murderous and anarchic violence – a war of all against all. The general public understands this and strongly supports the police, indeed it wants more cops hired.
The very first obligation of government is to protect the lives and property of the public, and society is fragile.
Meanwhile, leaders of communities neighboring Providence, especially Cranston, could do more to discourage those grotesquely out-of-control ATV and dirt-bike riders from coming into Providence to wreak havoc. By the way, Providence is far from the only city in America to be tormented by these people.
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Providence Police Chief Hugh Clements noted last week that his force has seized 143 guns so far this year — about 100 more than the usual seized by this time of the year. “It’s incredible, the firepower out there, and incredible what men and women of the department are exposed to,” he told a meeting of the Providence City Council. But how to keep out the guns when they’re so easy to obtain? Of course, the recent social disorder associated with the pandemic and racial issues has exacerbated the gun problem.
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We’ve just had replaced the old water pipe coming into our house, in Providence, from the city water main under the street. What archeological surprises that has turned up in a house that the city asserts was built in 1890! And dealing simultaneously with the city and a private company in their not necessarily always friendly or well-coordinated joint venture in this has been a learning experience in the vineyards of bureaucracy.
Summer Challenges
"I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all."
-- Ecclesiastes
And even Newport’s famously exclusive Bailey’s Beach can be closed to swimming because of high bacteria levels.
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Ah, the power of a visual icon! Peter Fox, owner of the Rockport Fudgery, in the Cape Ann town of that name, lamented to The New York Times that pre-COVID, 30 to 40 percent of its business was European but that part of its business has pretty much disappeared for now because of pandemic travel restrictions. Still, why would so many Europeans want to visit Rockport in the first place?
Here’s the probable reason:
“Motif Number 1,’’ on Rockport’s Bradley Wharf. This is the “quaint,’’ bright-red fishing shack destroyed by the Blizzard of 1978 but replaced by an exact replica later that year. It’s famous among artists and art historians as "the most often-painted building in America.” It has certainly brought the bucks into Rockport over the years.
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Late-stage capitalist decadence? I was amused by the news that the Nantucket airport ran out of jet fuel the other week, what with all the multi-millionaires and billionaires flying in and out in their Lear jets. Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket have become Rivieras for the privileged, and sometimes tone-deaf, elite. Consider Obama’s big birthday party at his Vineyard estate on Aug. 7.
Remember former Massachusetts Republican Sen. Scott Brown? (He now lives in Rye, N.H.) After a stint as Trump-appointed ambassador to New Zealand and Samoa and an even briefer tenure as dean of New England Law/Boston, he wants to get back into politics, positioning himself as a promoter of “bipartisanship” – pretty disingenuous after his having been an early and enthusiastic endorser in 2016 of one of the most corrupt and divisive figures in American political history.
Ventilators to Florida
The Feds are sending ventilators to Florida, led by anti-masker and Trump acolyte Gov. Ron DeSantis, to deal with the COVID-19 Delta variant there.
Meanwhile, many people who have followed the science and gotten their COVID vaccines must be a tad irritated that in some states tax money is being used to bribe people to get their shots for the obvious good of themselves and those around them.
For those who think that the vaccines were dangerously rushed into production: In fact, the virology research that enabled their fast federal authorization had been going on for years before COVID-19 reared its head in early 2020. The crisis forced a rapid acceleration in vaccine development in the form of Operation Warp Speed, which was created by the Trump regime and overseen by Alex Azar, its secretary of health and human services. But the effort was undermined by the regime’s minimizing of the severity of the pandemic and embrace of anti-vaxxers, most of whom were/are Trumpers. And remember our Dear Leader’s suggestion that injecting bleach might cure COVID?
Risk Takers
I’ve long been bemused when people in high places, such as New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, Donald Trump, and Bill Clinton, engage in bad sexual behavior that will almost inevitably be exposed -- eventually. I suspect that they get an adrenaline rush from such risk-taking. And, as Henry Kissinger quipped when he was secretary of state: “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.’’
The Dems must have been much relieved to hear Cuomo’s resignation speech. And they must also be happy that he’ll be succeeded by a woman, now Lt. Gov. Kathy Hochul, another Democrat. Andrew Cuomo, like his father, the famously eloquent if Hamlet-like late Empire State Gov. Mario Cuomo, had been seen as an almost inevitable competitor for the presidency. Now he, too, will fade away.
I sometimes get the impression that Joe Biden, who was a small boy in the last years of Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency, is trying to complete FDR’s New Deal wish list. Lyndon Johnson succeeded in doing some big New Deal-style things, most notably creating Medicare and Medicaid, but the tragic expense and distraction of the Vietnam War blocked other big programs he had in mind.
I still think that the Democrats would do better to hold off trying to get their controversial (especially its price) $3.5 trillion social program legislation, which includes health, education, climate and tax provisions, through Congress this year and just try to enact their very-popular-with-the-public and overdue $1 trillion physical-infrastructure measure.
The latter would create projects and well-paying jobs for which they’d get credit. And it would make them better positioned to expand their now minuscule majorities in the House and Senate and so be better able to press their social programs later, some of which are probably impractical anyway.
By the way, it would be nice if a little of the highway money in the infrastructure bill went to adding more public restrooms along major highways. The lack of these compared to other developed nations can be, er, painful.
George Will (whose graceful writing, historical knowledge, and skepticism I admire and with whom I fairly often agree) and other conservatives write often about how America is a “meritocracy’’ where individuals’ hard work, intelligence, ingenuity, risk-taking and so on are central to their success. Indeed, they say that America’s very character is based in no small degree on it being a place, allegedly above all other nations, where personal merit is key.
But you’d have to be in a coma not to notice how many highly successful “meritocrats’’ started on third base because of affluent parents who raised them in safe and pleasant places with lots of influential people around (future helpers!) and sent them to the best schools, with their associated social and economic connections, gave them big financial bequests and otherwise laid the foundation for their lifelong prosperity.
Indeed, to prosper in America, it’s more important than in other developed nations to have privileged parents. America is remarkably class-bound.
In a time of ever-wider income inequality, the U.S. more and more trails other developed nations in socio-economic mobility. This, in turn, undermines the middle class, whose health and size are key in determining whether we have a real democracy, or, as increasingly is the case, a self-perpetuating plutocracy that, quite rationally, uses its power to constantly tighten its economic and political control of the country in its own interest.
Of course, we need concentrations of wealth for capital formation and for the creation and perpetuation of highly creative and useful-to-the-public charities. (Some philanthropies are mostly just tax scams and ego trips.) We need rich people! It’s all a question of how much power they have.
This is a quote attributed to Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis (1856-1941). “We can have a democratic society or we can have the concentration of great wealth in the hands of a few. We cannot have both.”
To read Mr. Will’s recent column on meritocracy, please hit this link:
The Art of the Con
Grifter osteopath Joseph Mercola (of Florida, natch), who makes money by lying about COVID vaccines, spreading disinformation and steering his naïve customers to his quack “natural cures” and preventives for assorted ailments, is a classic representative of how con men can prosper, especially in the swamp of the Internet. You’d think he got his osteopathic medicine degree at Trump University.
Erving Goffman, in a 1952 essay, brilliantly discussed the universe of cons and their victims. To read it, please hit this link:
Pakistan and Taliban
As the fanatical and cruel Islamic fascists known as the Taliban continue to expand their evil authority in Afghanistan, we ought to place more blame than we have on Pakistan, whose corrupt regimes have long provided a haven to Taliban fighters. The Pakistani have seen the Taliban as an offset in Afghanistan to the influence of India, which Pakistan persists in seeing as its primary enemy. Still, as the Taliban appears likely to drag all of Afghanistan back into the darkness, some Pakistani leaders may be having second thoughts about having such a psychotic regime next door.
Of course, the corruption and ineffectiveness of the Afghan government and Taliban fighters’ greater will to fight, and their viciousness, are the most important factors in the government’s military losses.
What can America do? Not much except to try to improve its intelligence gathering in the region and beef up its special forces so that it can better identify, thwart and swiftly punish terrorist activity promoted by the Taliban – e.g., another 9/11. Our attempts at “nation building” in that benighted land seem to have been doomed from the start – a vast waste.
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We should praise the BBC for every day bearing witness to disasters, be they manmade, as in Afghanistan, or natural, and reminding us that we’re all on the same planet, and that a crisis many thousands of miles away can become our crisis, too.
‘Summit for Democracy’
It was good to hear that Biden will convene – by Zoom because of COVID-19 -- dozens of elected world leaders for a “Summit for Democracy’’ on Dec. 9 and 10. The meeting will celebrate democracy and explore how democracies can battle authoritarianism, which has been on the march in the past few years, with dictator suck-up Donald Trump not complaining.
The idea is that the summit will “galvanize commitments and initiatives across three principal themes: defending against authoritarianism, fighting corruption, and promoting respect for human rights,” says a White House statement.
As Winston Churchill said in 1947: ‘‘Many forms of government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…”
Reading Photos
Writer Geoff Dyer’s latest book of essays, See/Saw, is an exciting exploration of how photographers – and the rest of us – can see and frame our images of the world. Illustrated with memorable images, the book can make us better able to “read’’ a photo and to unearth the truths hiding in it.
And, as his publisher, Gray Wolf, puts it: Dyer shows how “a photograph can simultaneously record and invent the world.”