Whitcomb: More Bridge Bathos; Burst of Summer Color; War Zones; Strand Stories; Justices Okay
Robert Whitcomb, Columnist
Whitcomb: More Bridge Bathos; Burst of Summer Color; War Zones; Strand Stories; Justices Okay
“Give me back the long heat wave, the sweat dripping
from eyelashes, the stained blouses, the black windows,
the spiders dangling from their silver bridges,
the wasps lighting on the branches of the cedar bushes
as they waited for me to make a dash for the screen door.’’
— From “The Long Heat Wave,’’ by Jeff Friedman (born 1950), New Hampshire poet and educator
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“It's strange how much more beautiful
the sky is to us when it's framed
by these columned openings someone meant us
to take for stone.’’
—“Demolition,’’ by Mark Doty (born 1953), American poet
“Whoever is not a misanthrope at forty can never have loved mankind.’’
-- Nicolas Chamfort (1741-1794), French writer
“Lawdy, Miss Scarlett, I don't know nothin' 'bout birthin' no babies!”
- The great Butterfly McQueen as “Prissy’’ (1911-1995) in the ahistorical 1939 movie Gone With the Wind
This is grimly funny: No companies have submitted bids to rebuild the infamous and now closed westbound part of the Washington Bridge, which carries Interstate Route 195 over the mouth of the mighty Seekonk River. The job will, of course, cost in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Add a couple of hundred million to the official estimate, which is now about $400 million.
The great Ken Block, businessman, software engineer and political reformer, noted sardonically in GoLocalProv.com:
“{Rhode Island Gov.} McKee, who has struggled not to step on his own feet when discussing the bridge, blurted out this buffoonery when asked about the unanimous rejection of the state’s project by every construction firm: ‘We kind of expected that.’’’
Eh?
Given how toxic and politicized the bridge project has become, and an oft-inept Rhode Island Department of Transportation, in a tiny hothouse state, and potential bidders’ fear of being sued, it’s no wonder that companies shy away from it. A very hot potato. The Feds will force this project to get done but this was never going to be simple!
Of course, much of the public infrastructure has been falling apart for years across America because of under-investment. The Biden administration’s infrastructure law is helping to reverse that.
“Streets full of water. Advise.’’
-- Humor writer and actor Robert Benchley (1889-1945) in a telegram from Venice
Folks in Providence, Boston, and other coastal cities facing increased flooding as a result of global warming would do well to look at Weston Wright’s book More Water, Less Land, New Architecture.
Bloom Bursts
How nice now to enjoy such spectacular blossoming of hydrangeas as distraction from so much grim news. Of course, most news in the media is grim: “If it bleeds it leads’’. Gotta turn it off now and then.
The mild and wet winter is being given much of the credit for the particularly vivid colors of these acid-and-coastal-loving bushes this summer, which can make walking around so cheery and make you forget that the most colorful time of the year is late spring and October, not mid-summer. There’s a great Robert Frost poem called “The Oven Bird," that deals with this.
The Fourth of July is over, but the fireworks keep flaming and blasting, terrifying animals, sometimes including two-legged ones. When New England states started to allow fireworks sales over the past few decades, things got much worse. (When I was a boy, my parents -- and many others -- stocked up on fireworks during station wagon trips south, such as at South of the Border, in Hamer, S.C. I sometimes wondered if these munitions would blow up in the car since both my parents smoked a lot there. Back then, you rarely heard/saw fireworks except on July 4, the night before the Fourth and on New Year’s Eve. But now you must live with them for weeks.
These incendiaries and mini-bombs are often used illegally, but that’s become so common in Providence and other communities around here that police are hard-pressed to stop their misuse, which poses a serious threat to public safety, mostly in warm weather. These things can burn and blind their users and nearby people, and such hand-grenade firecrackers as M-80’s (beloved, as were BB rifles in my boyhood) can blow your fingers off. War veterans and other people suffering from PTSD, as well, of course, as pets, suffer mightily from these things.
Fireworks also start fires in buildings and woods.
Poorer neighborhoods usually have the worst of irresponsible fireworks fun, especially beloved by teens and young men, but rich ones can also be besieged for days by explosions, adding variety to the din from gasoline-powered leaf blowers.
But yes, they’re fun to watch, and even hear, over a wide open space on the night of The Glorious Fourth.
“Objects on the beach, whether men or inanimate things, look not only exceedingly grotesque, but much larger and more wonderful than they really are.’’
-- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) in Cape Cod, published in 1865.
Sandy beaches, with dunes or bluffs behind, stony beaches and these days even disappearing beaches, draw us. I’ve lived near most major varieties.
Beaches invite long walks, and offer a wide-open view to the horizon, which we need in our all-too-indoors world. And they’re the best places for kite flying because they’re usually breezy; too bad that you don’t see as much kite flying these days. I mention in passing beaches as venues for sex. Bad manners.
They also offer surprises: The waves constantly bring in different things to look at – some beautiful, some hideous – maybe, if you’re unlucky, even a human body. Every day walking on a beach brings different revelations, especially when it’s stormy. You’ll find such treasures as colorful sea glass -- physically and chemically weathered glass found on salt-water beaches. There used to be a lot more before plastic (made from petrochemicals) took over much of the container business. Plastic bottles, etc., turn into microplastics that present a range of environmental woes.
Then there are skate-egg cases. But there are fewer interesting shells these days and, it seems, less driftwood. And far fewer horseshoe crab shells, in part because they’re being fished out for their blood for use in medical applications. You probably know that they aren’t real crabs, by the way, but, rather, related to spiders and scorpions. Creepy?
Then there are various kinds of seaweed, some of which are edible, and useful for other purposes, too, though they draw insects, some biting, to the beach, and can have a rank smell.
High summer on beaches thronged with people can be problematic. Best to go before Memorial Day and/or after Labor Day. Then you can hear the birds and the wind more than the yelps of vacationers; you’re more likely to avoid the screech of transitorily popular music, or cutting your feet on a beer can, and, if you’re casting for fish, less likely to catch someone in the eye.
I’ve been thinking a bit more about beaches these days because the last close relatives I’ve had on Cape Cod are selling their house in a village where we’ve had ancestors (many of them Quakers) since the 17th Century. There’s a beautiful sandy beach close by (though it’s eroding at an accelerating rate because of seas elevated by global warming) that brought us many fine memories. The clean water is warm from late June to late September – in the 70s (F) – and there were/are graceful sand dunes we used to roll down as kids.
My paternal and laconic grandfather, who lived in West Falmouth after retirement, used to call the entire Cape “The Beach.’’
xxx
So voters, if they care at all – they’ll have to eventually -- might mull that Trump, if he returns to power, which he probably will, can do such things as:
Order the murder of political foes; sell high-level federal jobs and force out many thousands of experts, such as in health, public health, transportation and environmental matters, from the Civil Service who are not willing to follow his ignorance-and/or greed-and/or-power-hungry-based whims; seek to silence journalists whom he doesn’t like. “Terminate with extreme prejudice?” Sell pardons? No problem!
Trump, who has long evaded most federal taxes himself as head of a company soaked in scams for decades, would also order the IRS to audit the returns of his real or perceived enemies; would do secret and not-so-secret deals with foreign dictators and businesspeople for money, and abandon our democratic allies. If you don’t think he’d do these things, you’ve been in a coma for years. I have followed for decades (some of the time as a business editor) this protégé of the reptilian Roy Cohn, evil genius in the New York cesspool whence came Trump. Here’s a bit about Cohn:
I get a chuckle when I hear members of the MAGA/fascist party call themselves “conservatives’’ as if they’re old-fashioned “small government,’’ fiscally responsible Republicans of the sort many of us grew up with. In fact, they want an even bigger government run by a dictator of bottomless corruption and unrestricted power as long as he will expand their wealth and power, or at least go after people they hate. And they don’t care about the national debt. More tax cuts!
The MAGA Supremes represent the intimate and ultimate alliance of certain business interests (far from all of them!) and the “Republican’’ Party, which you can also see in a relatively little-noticed ruling by them in this term:
The MAGA court overturned, 6–3, in Snyder v. United States, the 2019 corruption conviction of an Indiana mayor who took $13,000 from a local business tycoon after ensuring that the tycoon’s company got a major town contract. The justices ruled that such bribes are not against the law. At least two of the justices, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, are direct bribe takers from Republican donors themselves, and the other four Republican operatives on the court have thick and lucrative ties with business interests intertwined with MAGA world.
Business groups and “conservative’’ think tanks helped engineer the new ruling, as they did in the Citizens United case, in 2010, which opened the floodgates for special interests to pay off, often in secret, political candidates in return for more money and power. This was part of a decades-long push by certain right-wing corporate interests to curb or abolish laws prohibiting bribery and other business corruption.
On the already tedious matter of whether Biden should bail out: Of course, he should, but will he continue to resist it because of his ego and the egos of his immediate entourage, especially his family’s? Does he want to be held accountable for the disaster of another Trump regime? Maybe we’ll know by the time this column is published.
Of course, a substitute Democratic nominee could lose, too, especially given the extent to which the MAGA mob have shown themselves willing to use fraud and violence to maintain power. But reasonable people would agree that those chances would be less than with Biden running, especially given that the Dems have several very strong potential candidates – three of whom I mentioned last week -- Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro. And now people are looking at the impressively articulate Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear.
Biden, meanwhile, is a decent man who deserves credit for having gotten enacted major legislation that has helped, and will continue to help, most Americans. And he assembled an administration with very competent and honest people in his cabinet and elsewhere. He has overcome huge personal tragedies in his life on his way to the Oval Office.
Every day that Biden holds off making a decision on whether to drop out is a gift to Trump and his suckups as we look toward what might be America’s last relatively fair federal election.
Voters would do well to review plans for the next Trump regime:
Have a nice day!
It’s somewhat comforting that even some rural Republicans are pushing back against the oft-successful MAGA/big business effort to use tax money originally intended for public education to fund private schools, including Evangelical and Catholic ones (in, to me, an obvious violation of the separation of church and state). The main beneficiaries of this erosion of funding for public schools are usually affluent families. (On the other hand, even some right-wing Evangelicals might not necessarily want their kids to be taught by “Creationists’’ in a “Bible-based” school that the world was created 6,000 years ago.)
Starving public schools in some places is part of a decades-long erosion of the sense of nonsectarian communal responsibility – an erosion organized by the far right in favor of private ideological and business interests.
(Having said that, I’d add that teachers unions in public schools are generally bad for education. For that matter, public-employee unions are a bad idea – rife with conflicts of interest; these jobs deserve civil service protections, and that’s it.)
You might note that there’s no reference to “God’’ in the U.S. Constitution, written in 1787, though it is dated in “The Year of Our Lord’’ -- aka, A.D. for “Anno Domini,’’ still used by most people, though it’s politically correct to use C.E., for in the “Current Era’’.)
Those who seek to tie the promotion of their version of “Christianity” to the Founders would do well to note that many key Founding Fathers, including Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Madison and Monroe—were Deists. That includes a philosophical belief in human reason as a reliable means of solving social and political problems. Belief in reason, or even in factual knowledge, seems to have waned in America in the past few years.
It would be fun to speculate on what the Founders would have thought of current American Evangelism, much of which is now mostly an adjunct of the Trump cult, being turned into a highly lucrative racket. Some of the most successful celebrity Evangelists now separating the gullible from their money include Joel Osteen, T.D. Jakes, Kenneth Copeland and Paula White. Their operators are standing by to take your moolah for The Lord!
Of course, there have always been con men and a few con women in American Protestantism (read Elmer Gantry) but their ascendency on the wings of cable TV, radio and “mega-churches” has been a spectacle to behold by this former church vestry member who was compelled to read the whole King James version of the Bible.
Readers might also note that:
The Pledge of Allegiance was formalized as an official document by Congress in 1942.
“Under God’’ was added to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954.
“The Star-Spangled Banner’’ (written, like The Declaration of Independence, by a slaveowner, for “The Land of the Free’’) became the national anthem in 1931. It’s set to the tune of a late 18th Century English drinking song.
“In God We Trust’’ has been printed on our paper money since 1957.
Before the Civil War it was considered unconstitutional to place "In God We Trust" on currency for fear that that would violate the First Amendment. But during the Civil War, however, in response to increased religious fervor, Congress let the motto to be used on coins.
Of course, there have always been con men in American Protestantism (read Elmer Gantry) but their ascendency on the wings of cable TV, radio and “mega churches” has been a spectacle to behold by this former church vestry member who was compelled to read the whole King James version of the Bible.
Let us pray!
Doomed Love Affair?
Various statesmen have said that “Nations don’t have friends. They have interests.’’
Russia and China are allies now, along with such fellow tyrannies as Iran and North Korea, as part of their offensive against democracies. But one wonders how many years this can last. Putin, who is subordinate to Xi Jinping, is anxiously watching China’s growing influence in Central Asia, particularly in the former Soviet “republics” of Kazakhstan and Tajikistan. And it bears noting that the Soviet Union and China have fought over disputed stretches of their border in the not-distant past.
The Soviet Union and Hitler’s Germany were allies from Aug. 23, 1939, to June 21, 1941, when the Nazis invaded Stalin’s empire. Dictators can be so unreliable!
xxx
Back in the ’80s, when we lived and worked in Paris, on a couple of hot days, I checked out a weird open-air structure with a swimming pool inside that was parked at a quai along the Seine in the middle of “The City of Light." The pool’s water was not from the river!
On the other side of the river was a very narrow (maybe 15 feet deep from a wall to the water) “beach,’’ where sand had been dumped, and potted palms set up, for sunbathing, picnicking and watching the tour boats go by.
The idea of actually swimming in the richly polluted river seemed bizarre. It’s a lot cleaner now – so much cleaner that an Olympic swimming competition is scheduled in it late this month. But the latest analysis shows there’s too much potentially dangerous bacteria in it for safe swimming. I’d be leery of swimming in any urban river – God knows what might go into it!