Whitcomb: Minority Report; Promoting Sloth in Schools; Nantucket Going Topless
Robert Whitcomb, Columnist
Whitcomb: Minority Report; Promoting Sloth in Schools; Nantucket Going Topless
“I have given up considering happiness as relevant.’’
Edward Gorey (1925-2000), American writer and artist known for his macabre sense of humor
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“On a tricyle left in marbletime (in Town,
In Spring), the curbside maples drop slow smiles
Of blossom, sluice the gutters bright. The drift
Of this greengold treemoulting veins the asphalt,
Warming all black decency, adopting all abandoned toys.’’
-- From “New England Suite,’’ by Charles Philbrick (1922-1971), poet and Brown University professor
“All things seem possible in May."
-- Edwin Way Teale (1899-1980), mostly rural Connecticut-based naturalist and author
Annual human events seem to come faster and faster in the spring, especially graduations and other leave takings. Odd that the season of such expressive life should be so associated with endings. I went to a bunch of reunions last weekend in New York involving about 30 people. I’ll probably never see most of them again but then I had only seen a few of them in the past five decades. It was generally fun, though these events always lead me into “woulda, couldna, shoulda’’ reveries. We had diverged widely since we first met, and life had hammered some of us into creatures that would have surprised us so many years ago.
There aren’t many scenes in New England as lovely as the golden and green views from an Amtrak train of the vast marshes on Connecticut’s Long Island shoreline. They’re also a nursery for many species.
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One would think that an important role of schools is to get students to understand that their actions and inactions have consequences. But not always in the Providence public schools. Consider that students who flunk a class there haven’t been getting an immediate “F” but rather an “incomplete,’’ with the opportunity to try to make up the credit until the following Nov. 15. Strangely, this applies only to grades 6,7,9,10 and 11.
And another policy has barred any student from receiving a grade lower than 50 on a 1-100 scale, regardless of what they do or not do – such as not coming to school at all or if they do, not turning in any work. Don’t want to embarrass them?
There’s been a bit of an uproar over these policies (which apparently will be jettisoned) and the extreme lack of discipline they breed, a lack that will hurt the students in life. What a way to erode the morale of teachers, and of students who want to work to learn!
Providence schools need both better oversight (so stuff like the silliness above doesn’t happen) and stripping away excessive layers of bureaucracy, which too often strangle needed system-wide improvements in the cradle.
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Consider the demise of the “Tesla bill’’ in the Connecticut General Assembly. This would let electric-vehicle makers sell their newly made cars directly to consumers without going through dealers. The idea is, of course, to push fossil-fuel-use reduction. While the measure had considerable bipartisan support, it couldn’t overcome opposition by car dealerships, which have a monopoly on sales of new cars in the Nutmeg State, as in Rhode Island; the Massachusetts law on this is murky. Unions representing auto-maintenance workers also opposed the bill.
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I saw much of midtown Manhattan last Sunday tied in knots by a snake of bikes in a race that seemed to be miles long. It reminded me of the paralyzing running races in Providence. I suspect that if you took a poll that most people would say they oppose these events, however beloved they are by the participants and corporate promotion folks who use them as ads. Better to hold them in the country or exurbia.
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The official language of the bylaw amendment called “Gender Equality on Beaches’’ (politically correct!) says:
“In order to promote equality for all persons, any person shall be allowed to be topless {even men!} on any public or private beach within the Town of Nantucket.”
Given that in the summer Nantucket hosts many rich and well-traveled people who have seen lots of topless beachgoers on, say, the Riviera or in the Hamptons, this may not be that much of a step. But the measure may lure some day trippers to engage in a little perfectly legal voyeurism.
We stay away from Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard and Block Island in the summer. Too damn many people, too expensive and too much reliance on unreliable and crowded ferries. Of course, for the fat cats (mostly in finance) who increasingly dominate these luxury islands, there are their own planes.
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A lady called Jessica Pino keeps chickens at her property in East Providence, leading the city to cite her for a zoning violation. So the Rhode Island Commission for Human Rights is suing the city, alleging that the city is violating her civil rights because she allegedly needs the chickens to treat some unspecified mental condition.
My problem with this is the unspecified nature of her condition. I know that America is a world-historical center of litigation, but in such a public lawsuit, the public in general and her neighbors, in particular, deserve to know what precisely her problem is.
Keeping chickens and even a cow or two for milk wasn’t all that uncommon in cities at the turn of the 20th Century. However, tougher zoning laws spawned by health and “quality of life” concerns stopped such urban farming practices in many or most American cities.
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Happy news for reading with reflected light. While the big Barnes & Noble bookstore in Boston’s Prudential Center will close, it will be replaced by a branchof the wonderful Cambridge-based Harvard Book Store, reports The Boston Guardian. John Henry, principal owner of the Red Sox and owner of The Boston Globe, is said to be a voracious book-on-paper reader and an investor in Harvard Book Store. He’s behind the store’s Pru project.
The other good paper thing to note today is the existence of a charming publication, based in Gilmanton, N.H., called “Journal of the Print World: devoted to antique and contemporary works of fine art on paper’’ and rich with wonderful pictures and entertaining and eccentric text.
The apparent decision by the increasingly right-wing-controlled U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the abortion rights in Roe v. Wade shouldn’t have surprised anyone except those who wanted so desperately to believe the obfuscations/lies of Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Barrett in confirmation hearings. (There’s nothing about abortion in the Constitution; for that matter, there’s nothing about women in the document until the 19th Amendment, which gave women the national right to vote, was ratified in 1920.)
A majority of Americans favor abortion rights. They also back universal health care, immigration reform, higher taxes for billionaires and other things opposed by the national GOP. That party is dominated by an alliance of social reactionaries, evangelicals (some of whom say the world was created about 6,000 years ago), money-grubbing media demagogues and plutocrats wanting their taxes cut some more and health, environmental and anti-fraud and anti-monopoly regulations slashed. There are exceptions to this stance in the few states partly governed by what’s left of the old “moderate’’ wing of what’s become nationally the GOP/QAnon cult. Consider New England, with three very able, thoughtful and successful old-fashioned “Eisenhower Republican” governors – Massachusetts’s Charlie Baker, New Hampshire’s Chris Sununu and Vermont’s Phil Scott. Sununu is the most conservative of the three, or maybe just the most libertarian.
Maybe ominously to abortion-rights supporters (and gay and some other rights backers, too, as well as contraception providers and users) the draft decision by Justice Samuel Alito left open the matter of whether the abortion issue would just be sent back to the states to decide or whether the “people’s representatives’’ he says should determine such laws would be Congress. That institution is elected more often than not by a minority of voters.
But then this is all about minority rule. America at the national level is not a democracy as that is understood in most of the West. Is it even a republic?
Republic: “A state in which supreme power is held by the people and their elected representatives, and which has an elected or nominated president rather than a monarch.’’
-- Oxford English Dictionary
Behind all this is that the Framers of the Constitution, to bring along small-state support to get it ratified, invented the Electoral College and a Senate in which each state (no matter how small or large) gets two senators. Thus heavily rural right-wing states with small populations have vastly disproportionate power in relation to their size. Remember that the president nominates people to sit on the Supreme Court and the Senate gets to confirm or reject the nominations.
Democrats have won the popular vote in seven out of the last nine presidential elections but lost the election in the GOP-favored Electoral College in two of them, in 2000 and 2016. (George W. Bush’s popular-vote victory in 2004, when he ran for re-election, was narrow.)
“The Democratic half of the current Senate (now at 50-50, with Vice President Harris, a Democrat, able to break a tie) represents more than 41 million more people than the Republican half.
Also, consider that while Republicans have often controlled the Senate since 1995, their senators actually represented a majority of Americans only in 1996-97.
Things are considerably more democratic (small “d”) in the House but because the GOP is much more ruthless in gerrymandering than are Democrats that body is not particularly, well, “representative’’.
Meanwhile, the Blue States (which generally have higher levels of education and much better social services) heavily subsidize through federal taxes generally poorer, more corrupt and less educated Red States, which have a remarkably large number of people who get most of their views from far-right TV, radio and Web sites.
A big question is how many more years can our political system withstand the disenfranchisement that goes with long-term, open-ended minority rule, before, well, mass social disorder, including violence, erupts?
So the structure of the federal government ensures that the Democrats face much higher hurdles than the GOP/QAnon. But the Dems make it worse for themselves with their low voter turnouts, especially in nonpresidential-election years, especially because of the civic sloth of younger voters. So people they may hate get elected to the Senate and ensure that the likes of Roe v. Wade get tossed out. These nonvoters like to say that “my vote doesn’t matter,” but think of the effect of millions of people having that negligent attitude. Or they may just like to avoid politics. However, politics eventually comes to their front door anyway.
Low voter turnout and the tedious obsession of too many Democrats with identity issues – LGBTQABFDWDWDEFYG --- as opposed to economic issues add to the heavy baggage Democrats already carry because of the structure of government.
Please hit this link for some background on Trump and abortion:
Celebrity Author
Much has been made about the pathologically ambitious J.D. Vance’s winning the Senate GOP/Anon primary election in Ohio last Tuesday. Mr. Vance is the Trump suck-up, celebrity author, venture capitalist (voice of the people!) and protege of extreme-right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel.
Mr. Vance won after Trump strongly backed him despite the industrial-strength hypocrite Mr. Vance’s denunciations of him back in 2016. That was then. Mr. Vance needed Trump in order to win the primary and so has professed undying support for his party’s caudillo. But note that about 70 percent of the voters in the four-candidate primary voted against Vance! That suggests that they don’t trust him and/or are getting sick of Trump. Still, there are millions of people who would vote for a duck-billed platypus if their fuhrer, Trump, told them to, and Mr. Vance will probably win in November. For one thing, his narrative on the economic and cultural damage done in parts of America by globalization resonate, not just with Trump cultists, and especially in a state like Ohio, whose industrial power has faded in the past few decades because of foreign competition, automation and U.S. companies seeking cheaper workers abroad.
The Buckeye, who is either mostly enraged, or likes to look that way to get his political customers enthused, became famous with memoir Hillbilly Elegy, about his growing up poor in southern Ohio. I read it when it came out. He often writes well, but much of the storyline is too neat and his sociological analyses sloppy.
Mr. Vance has said that if Trump is elected in 2024 he should "fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.’’ Fascist dictatorships can be such fun -- if it’s your Fascist.
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Many of us are still wondering why Hungary, ruled by corrupt semi-dictator and Putin pal Viktor Orban, hasn’t long since been thrown out of NATO and the European Community, which heavily subsidizes it.