Whitcomb: Rooting for That Long-Range Forecast; Affirmative Action for….
Robert Whitcomb, Columnist
Whitcomb: Rooting for That Long-Range Forecast; Affirmative Action for….
“For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn?
-- Jane Austen (1775-1817), English novelist
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“I lie in the dark on my side
thinking about the different
sides that I’m aware of.
The side of a horse.
The side of a ship.
(Old Ironsides.)
A side of beef….”
--- From “Preparing for Sleep,’’ by Michael Earl Craig (born 1970), an American poet
“I stood beside his sepulchre whose fame,
Hurled over Europe once on bolt and blast,
Now glows far off as storm-clouds overpast
Glow in the sunset flushed with glorious flame.
Has nature marred his mould? Can Art acclaim
No hero now, no man with whom men side
As with their hearts’ high needs personified?
There are will say, One such our lips could name;
Columbia gave him birth. Him Genius most
Gifted to rule. Against the world’s great man
Lift their low calumny and sneering cries
The Pharisaïc multitude, the host
of piddling slanderers whose little eyes
Know not what greatness is and never can.’’
“At the Tomb of Napoleon Before the Elections in America—November, 1912,’’ by Alan Seeger (1888-1916), an American poet who died in the Battle of the Somme while fighting in the French Foreign Legion against the Germans in 1916.
Tuesday is Election Day, and Friday is Veterans Day, or, as it used to be called, Armistice Day, after Nov. 11, 1918, when it was finally “all quiet on the Western Front’’ -- until 1940. Free and fair elections and Veterans Day are related.
Among the biggest whiners about what happens as a result of Tuesday’s elections will be those who were too lazy to take a few minutes to vote.
Today is the start of Standard Time, which reminds me to ask why the U.S. House has yet to pass a bill sponsored by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse that was passed unanimously last March by the Senate. The measure would put us on year-round Daylight Savings Time. Do House members prefer the afternoon darkness -- better for 5 p.m. cocktails?
I dunno myself. I get up early and like light then.
While driving back from the gorgeous village of Padanaram, on Buzzards Bay, on a golden day last week, I noticed that most of the leaves were off the trees along Route 195. Gray, brown and russet were the main hues in the woods.
But as I entered Providence, I saw that many trees still had most of their leaves, with many of them still green. Urban heat island?
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Long-range weather forecasts (which can be very wrong) are calling for a warmer-than-average winter for Europe and much of the most densely populated part of the United States. This would be very good short-term news because it would reduce the upward pressure on natural-gas and oil prices associated with Russia’s rape of Ukraine. Lower fossil-fuel prices would undermine Putin, who pays for his war with revenue from gas and oil. A warm winter could also be another sign of global warming – from burning gas, oil and coal. Irony, oh irony!
The October inflation rate in the Eurozone on an annualized basis was an estimated 10.7 percent. The U.S. rate was 8.2 percent for September, when the Eurozone’s was 9.9 percent. The full U.S. October price data aren’t yet available but they’re bound to be high, as they are around the world.
For the longer run, the most effective ways to reduce inflation and stabilize prices, at least in America, include replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy, including, one hopes – eventually -- nuclear fusion; allowing more and denser housing (more supply: lower rents and home-purchase prices), and stopping the shrinkage of the labor pool, though automation will complicate that.
The news service also noted that the “U.S. has also produced more crude oil since Biden’s inauguration than it had done during the equivalent period of former President Donald Trump’s presidency, a POLITICO review of federal energy data shows.’’ But Biden won’t get credit from the GOPQ/MAGA crowd or, for that matter, from those worried about global warming caused by burning fossil fuel.
xxx
Yet more state rankings. All such rankings are, well, very debatable, though this one, from the Milken Center’s “Prosperity Index,’’ combing data on health, safety, personal freedom and some other data, probably has more rigor and credibility than most.
Massachusetts comes in at #1, Connecticut at #2, and Rhode Island, a poorer state, at #20.
Hit these links:
https://www.americandreamprosperity.com/rankings/us/overall-prosperity/trend/wv
Now that the U.S. Supreme Court seems poised to do away with that murky program called “affirmative action’’ that considers race in college admissions (meant to expand socio-economic as well as ethnic diversity), read this, from AdmissionSight:
“{A} legacy admissions statistic that may or may not surprise you is as follows: 36% of the Harvard Class of 2022 may claim a relative who was a student there in the past. Harvard’s legacy acceptance rate for the Class of 2025 is fascinating to look at, which is 16%. … {O}nly 12% of the new Crimson students who enrolled for the Class of 2024 identified themselves as legacy students. {Did many just not disclose such connections?}
The overall admissions rate was 3.4 percent for the Class of 2025.
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The top federal personal income tax rate in 1980 was 70 percent. It’s now 37 percent.
Hit this link for the historical record:
I rather fuzzily remember a flag-filled, informal motorcade in Cohasset, Mass., in 1956 for “Eisenhower for President’’. It was a fresh late-October day, with a northwest wind pulling the remaining red and orange leaves off the maples and the muted yellow ones off the hourglass-shaped elms, of which we still had many, although Dutch elm disease was rapidly killing them off. Kids and their young parents applauded alongside the road.
We proceeded in our station wagon over a little bridge near the harbor and headed toward the classic town common (you can see it in The Witches of Eastwick), with the little pond with a fountain on a rock island in the middle of it. At the common, I recall, a generally genteel GOP campaign rally took place.
On two sides of the common were the two very white (in two senses of the word) Unitarian and Congregational churches. Nearby, on top of a granite outcropping, presided the neo-Gothic St. Stephen’s Church, a monument of the WASP upper-middle and upper class in the rather WASPY town. The local clan who owned much of Dow Jones & Co. had financed much of its building.
The old line about the Episcopalians was “the Republican Party at prayer.’’ No more.
The town’s Catholic church, St. Anthony, was a few blocks away, in that still majority Protestant town. Its parishioners were generally of Irish, Italian and Portuguese background. We Protestants felt sorry for the Catholic kids because they had to go to catechism and confession (gulp!) and couldn’t eat meat on Fridays. The last rule, however, provided very good business for the local fishing fleet.
The more liberal and, for that time, “Bohemian,’’ folks attended the Unitarian Church – for which the joke motto was “the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man and the neighborhood of Boston.’’ The Unitarians removed as much as they could assertions about the divinity of Jesus from their hymns and liturgies. As the years passed, even references to God diminished. General, diffuse celebrations of the glories of nature and plugs for the Civil Rights Movement replaced them. The minister had the lovely name of the Rev. Roscoe Trueblood.
The Congregational (aka “Congo”) church in Cohasset was only vaguely Trinitarian. The Congos were more or less the direct descendants of the Puritans, the Unitarians less directly so.
There also was, and still is, a Hindu temple in town!
Back to the campaign motorcade. Some kids sang “Whistle while you work, Stevenson is a jerk,’’ of course a play on the song “Whistle While You Work,’’ from the Disney movie Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which all the children had seen.
It already seemed to me that politics was harsh.
Is it politically incorrect now to refer to “dwarfs’’?
The town and most of the rest of America went heavily for Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969) over a former Democratic governor of Illinois, Adlai E. Stevenson (1900-1965). But the Republican Party was a very different creature from its current version, and Ike was a good, middle-of-the-road president, supporting incremental improvements in federal domestic programs and warding off war. Both Eisenhower and Stevenson were notably dignified.
You can understand why a few years later, soon before his death, a very tired Stevenson, then U.S. ambassador to the U.N., would say that “All I really wanted was to sit in the shade with a glass of wine and watch the dancers.” I’m pretty sure that many of us, tired of the increasing toxicity and tumult of public life, would sometimes want to declare a separate peace and maybe flee, with no forwarding address, and certainly no social media, to some remote, Arcadian place. One thinks of the phrase “a separate peace’’ in Hemingway’s World War I novel A Farewell to Arms and John Knowles’s boarding-school novel A Separate Peace.
In the Cohasset air was the aroma from piles of raked up (not blown!) leaves being burned – an activity now banned, mostly for public health reasons. Many of us of a certain age still miss that sweet smell, now replaced in too many neighborhoods by the aroma of gasoline from shrieking leaf blowers. Before their parents burned the leaves, small children loved to burrow into big piles of them.
Ah, youth! I remember with a pang the town’s scenic shores and the material comfort available to so many of its residents, along with dark scenes out of a Eugene O’Neill play.
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The takeover of Twitter by the volatile, egomaniacal, (mostly) far-right gazillionaire Elon Musk inevitably reminds folks of the famed journalist A.J. Liebling’s (1904-1963) remark that “freedom of the press is for those who own one.’’
Annals of Recycling
Don’t try to dump those used clothes, mattresses and shoes in the trash. Find places (Salvation Army, etc.) where they can be dropped off, cleaned and repaired so that others can use them. This is particularly important at this time of year, with winter coming on.
Indeed, there are many places where this stuff can be donated and recycled, avoiding landfills, where they take up a lot of room.
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Putting things made of plastic, which isn’t inert, into your recycling bin looks less and less acceptable by the month. Because of their chemical makeup, many used plastic products can’t be recycled, and a lot of this junk gets dumped in the ocean, where it poisons life, and/or is shipped overseas to poor nations, where it piles up to create even worse environment messes than in America.
Plastics may look inert, but chemicals used to make them are not. These chemicals, some carcinogenic, can leach away into the environment.
We’re waiting for scientific advances to create many more materials with much of the convenience of current, petro-chemical-based plastics but that can decompose/degrade without damaging ecosystems. The old DuPont motto comes to mind – “Better Living Through Chemistry.’’
But do keep recycling glass and metal, which are inert. And most paper is okay. But I do sometimes wonder how much water and fossil fuel (to warm the water) is expended to clean this stuff before throwing it into the bin.
Of Course….
GoLocal ran a news story the other day about some big companies with major Rhode Island connections making big donations to GOPQ candidates who promote (with various levels of cynicism/opportunism/treason) “The Big Lie’’ that Trump was re-elected in 2020 instead of being soundly defeated.
Of course! These election deniers generally back lower taxes for America’s corporate executives/campaign donors – by far the world’s highest paid -- along with less regulation in health, environment, financial-fraud, and some other areas. So it’s ye olde quid pro quo.
These execs may be cynical, amoral and selfish but they ain’t stupid!
Hit this link:
San Miguel School
Try to pick up a copy of the inspiring book The Miracle of San Miguel School: a collective memoir of love and hope. That’s the Catholic middle school in Providence founded, in 1993, by the Christian Brothers to holistically and rigorously educate underprivileged boys -– or in the school’s phrase, “from diverse and challenging backgrounds.’’ It has done a good job, as the record of how its students did after graduating attests. I urge folks to donate to it – helping it to expand its mission, which, in turn, improves the quality of life in our area.
The San Miguel story reminds me of how much societal good has been done by many Catholic parochial schools (albeit with serious problems at a few of them) over the years, and how sad it is that there are far fewer of these institutions these days. (Full disclosure: My wife taught art in some of these Greater Providence Catholic schools for many years.)