Whitcomb: Red Bogs, Long Shadows; Bridge Buck Stopping; Magnet Store; Confused Revolution
Robert Whitcomb, Columnist
Whitcomb: Red Bogs, Long Shadows; Bridge Buck Stopping; Magnet Store; Confused Revolution
“Now she doesn’t need love like that, she has
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASThad it. She will walk in glowing, we will talk,
and then, when she’s fast asleep, I’ll exult
to have her in that room again….’’
-- From “First Thanksgiving,” by Sharon Olds (born 1942), American poet
1942 song celebrating Thanksgiving (wartime escapism?) :
“Anyone who’s never watched somebody die is suffering from a pretty bad case of virginity.’’
--- John Osborne (1929-1994), English playwright
“Nature resolves everything into its component elements, but annihilates nothing.’’
-- Lucretius (circa 99 B.C. to 44 B.C.), Roman poet and philosopher
Congratulations to everyone who doesn’t have to travel this week! I wonder what the ratio might be between those who want to travel to see family for Thanksgiving and those who feel they must, though they don’t want to. Certainly, our overwhelmed transportation systems make it increasingly tough to go anywhere far from home.
And next Sunday we go into Advent, with its fairs and ever more intense multimedia marketing. Meanwhile, we’re ready for “polar vortex’’ hysteria!
xxx
We’re past the fall harvesting season now, but the bright red cranberries floating on the water before harvesting in southeastern Massachusetts are one of New England’s most gorgeous sights, which brings back memories of the Great Cranberry Cancer Scare of 1959, which cast a pall on paranoids seeking to enjoy Thanksgiving that year. My family gobbled up as much cranberry sauce as usual that year, crowing about it, whether out of ignorance or fatalism, I don’t remember.
Which reminds me of when, a few years later, a teacher at my school with the triumphant name of Roderick Hagenbuckle advised the kids at the lunch table he was ruling to “Eat up: It’s good for you – makes you sick.’’
I have heard that there’s an ecumenical movement to move from roasted turkey to Asian restaurant takeout on Thanksgiving to fight holiday stress.
The shadows cast by the low sun of November seem to me the most haunting of the year.
Shouldn’t public employees, not private contractors, be ultimately responsible for inspecting and approving/rejecting work on public works? Consider the case of the infamous westbound Washington Bridge. Privatization can go too far.
The dangerous structural problem with the bridge that forced its closing was discovered by a private contractor's engineer, not by a state Department of Transportation (RIDOT) employee.
At a legislative hearing, former U.S. Atty. Zachary Cunha questioned state Transportation Director Peter Alviti about how the department operates, noting that it seems to be “{private} contractors all the way down.’’ And Mr. Alviti couldn’t recall the name of the state program manager who is supposed to oversee “outsourcing and contracting with’’ bridge-inspection companies!
“Is RIDOT helpless to do anything other than sign contracts and pay out money?” Mr. Cunha asked.
‘‘Where does the buck stop?’’ Good question.
RIDOT is a remarkable department! Perilous adventures in privatization?
Magnetic
The smaller stores near the site of what will be a large Whole Foods emporium on Pitman Street, on Providence’s generally middle-to-upper-income East Side, will probably enjoy the usual great value of having a big magnet store peddling essential stuff near smaller ones. And given the urban density of the neighborhood, that will include a lot of people walking there, a few, from the old folks’ residences that crowd the neighborhood, with walkers.
The new outlet will be where the beloved Eastside Marketplace used to be.
Smaller stores that have hung on in the tract there since Dutch/Belgian Stop & Shop chain closed Eastside will see a renaissance. Best is that the Walgreens drugstore in the tract, which lost business to the CVS octopus when Eastside was shut, will now probably be able to stay in business far into the future. Stock up on bananas and painkillers on the same trip!
But what will happen to the small, too-crowded Whole Foods store up a small hill not many feet away, which economics would suggest must be closed when the new big one opens? I vote to put housing there.
xxx
Kudos to those in the public and private sectors developing and promoting “urban trails’’ – for bike riders, walkers and runners -- in Providence’s 25 neighborhoods and linked to bike paths in the wider area. This will provide healthy options for those who can’t afford to, or just don’t want to, drive or take a bus.
But watch out for a possible problem, as illustrated in Brussels, where a no-car pedestrian zone has become so popular that the city has had to crack down on selfish bike riders.
This from Bloomberg CityLab:
“Despite the breadth of four lanes plus wide sidewalks, cyclists and pedestrians have clashed, with bikers weaving through the crowds. Pedestrians have regularly complained to the police about bikers not adhering to the zone’s 6 kilometers-per-hour (3.7 miles-per-hour) speed limit.’’
“The city has announced a ban on bikes in the zone most of the day, with bikes only allowed between 4 and 11 a.m., and is considering diverting bikes to a parallel axis along narrower streets to the west.’’
Revolutionary Review
“How is it that the loudest yelps for liberty come from the drivers of slaves?”
-- English writer, scholar and philosopher Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) in 1775
I’ve been watching some of Ken Burns’s PBS series The American Revolution. I tire of the relentless violin music heard in his shows, but the very timely series does serve to undermine various popular myths of the Revolutionary War and, more broadly, the American Founding. It was far more than a noble desire for freedom from an empire, albeit one run by an elected parliament along with a troubled, but not evil, king.
The British would have done well to follow the advice of the great Anglo-Irish politician and political philosopher Edmund Burke (1720-1797), who argued for conciliation between the British government and Americans who had felt that their traditional rights as British subjects were being violated by a far too dictatorial, rigid and aggressive government in London.
While Burke didn’t back giving American colonists representation in Parliament, at least partly because of the distance across the Atlantic, he did push for letting colonial legislatures set their colonies’ own taxes and many other policies. After all, he argued, the colonies had long experience of various degrees of autonomy, including considerable self-government.
Many Americans displayed great antipathy toward British-imposed taxes (but enacted, among other things to pay for protection from foreign powers such as the French). “No taxation without representation!’’
The Revolution was also about Americans’ greedy and brutal lust for seizing the tribal lands of Indians across the Appalachians – people whom the British mostly wanted to leave alone -- and an effort by the South to keep their partially slave-based system expanding.
Indeed, you could argue that the revolution was more about money than Enlightenment ideals of republican government.
And it was a bloody civil war between Loyalists for the British and those wanting their own country. There were ethical and other good and evil points on each side.
The Loyalists certainly thought they’d be better off governed under the relatively orderly British Empire than under the sometimes anarchic and rough people now calling themselves “Americans.’’
Lots of Loyalists fled, to Britain, the Maritime Provinces, Quebec and elsewhere, especially as Americans stole their property and in some cases threatened their lives. Some fled along the Maine Coast to points east enough that they thought they’d be safe. But the Treaty of Paris, in 1783, pushed the boundary further east than many had expected, and they found themselves stuck on the U.S. side of the border. At that point, many Loyalists were too tired to move again, and so they stayed put and became “Americans.’’ At least that’s what a Loyalist descendent living in Brunswick, Maine, told me!
The American Revolution helped lead to the very different French Revolution. You can read how and why they took such different courses by reading Hannah Arendt’s classic study On Revolution.
I suspect that a few of my New England ancestors (who were mostly around Boston and on Cape Cod) were Loyalists, but old documents suggest that most of them were “Patriots.’’ I love the old terminology of that war. I came across this from a family record:
“In 1775 John Butler is linked to Private Captain Joseph Palmer’s co. when they marched for 3 days {to where?}. Also with Captain Barrachia {!} Bassett’s co. dated January 13th, 1776, a distance of 170 miles. Also on Captain Joseph Palmer’s co Col. Freeman’s regt. For service of 8 days on alarm {waiting for British troops to show up?} at Dartmouth and Falmouth in September 1778.’’
Would the world have been better off if the 13 colonies had remained part of the British Empire? Could they thus have been in a better position to have encouraged Britain to adopt some of America’s better ideas/ideals (and, to quote Lincoln, “the better angels of our nature”) about government, the economy, and other sectors, and society in general? These were ideas and ideals, some of them infused with a rhetorical egalitarianism, less common in Britain, and made manifest in the thoughts and actions of the often bickering Founders? Of course, there are far too many variables to know what would have happened. But playing “what if’’ is fun.
The only fairly sure bet is that slavery would have ended sooner here if London had remained in charge. The public opinion that slavery was evil was stronger in the United Kingdom than in what would become the United States, where part of the nation’s economy profited so much from it.
Meanwhile, one wonders how The Founders would have reacted to the current American regime of bottomless corruption and drive for tyranny, and that a plurality of those who bothered to vote backed a person with a 50-year record of private and public depravity. Of course, The Founders were always terrified that an extreme narcissist demagogue would take power in a lie-infested “populist’’ wave.
And now it’s happened.
xxx
“America! America!
God mend thine every flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law!’’
-- From “America the Beautiful,’’ lyrics by Katherine Lee Bates (1859-1929), of Falmouth, Mass.
I have a bridge to sell to anyone who believes that the regime won’t continue to try to hide and destroy any evidence in the Jeffrey Epstein files that illustrates Trump’s activities in association with the pedophile financial operator – whatever Congress says. The current U.S. Justice Department, now corrupted by a mobster, can’t be trusted on anything involving the Trump tribe. Tragic for the country. The rule of law is being perhaps permanently damaged by the imposed toxicity of the Justice Department and the assaults on the independence of the federal judiciary.
xxx
The perverse friendship between former Treasury secretary and Harvard president Lawrence Summers and the late Mr. Epstein is a wonderment. Or is it? To me, it bespeaks the validation and sense of power that even already powerful and rich people such as Mr. Summers get from hobnobbing with even richer people. It’s the adoration of big money, and the freedom from morality it seems to afford, by certain kinds of people who turn out to have far less character than you might have thought.
Here’s what some Harvard students had to say last week:
Meanwhile, Epstein’s associate sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell continues in a relatively luxurious prison camp in Texas, awaiting her sentence commutation or pardon in return for not saying anything incriminating about the Trump-Epstein palship.
Disastrous Decisions
People are writing about how 9/11 destabilized America and led to Trump. Indeed, the Bush administration’s sloppy, ignorant and arrogant military reaction and pumping up of paranoia did great damage. But given too little attention is the administration’s deregulatory and loose-money mania, which led to the Crash of 2008, the Great Recession, the Tea Party, and fascist-flavored MAGA.
Hit this link from the Libertarian Cato Institute: