Whitcomb: Running Red Lights; Old Energy; Head Inland; Memoir Mysteries
Robert Whitcomb, Columnist
Whitcomb: Running Red Lights; Old Energy; Head Inland; Memoir Mysteries
And also on the unjust fella;
But chiefly on the just, because
The unjust hath the just’s umbrella.
-- (Lord) Charles Bowen (1835-1894), English lawyer, judge and writer
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“It’s good to remember that in crises, natural crises, human beings forget for a while their ignorances, their biases, their prejudices. For a little while, neighbors help neighbors and strangers help strangers.’’
-- Maya Angelou (1928-2014), American writer
“It was the men I deceived the most that I loved the most.’’
-- Marguerite Duras (1914-1996), French novelist, playwright and screenwriter
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Welcome again to that spare New England time called “Stick Season,’’ the period in late fall after the leaves have fallen and before snow (which seems to come later and later) as the years roll by. Here’s a song about it:
Stubble season might be another good name for this stretch. And this is the time to collect pine cones, and to look for Christmas ferns, which can stay green through Noel and beyond – one of the joys of the winter woods.
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We had to go to New York City last week to attend a fund-raising event for a nonprofit. It gets more and more tiresome and expensive to do so. After I walked from Penn Station to the cacophonous jostle of Seventh Avenue, my first desire was to go right back home to provincial calm.
New York still draws many young people for its excitement and cultural riches. But then many, maybe most, bail out because of the cost and the exhaustion of urban life in what Pope John Paul II called the “capital of the world. But it will always be a revolving door."
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But then, it has long seemed to me that most people are speeding most of the time. It’s dangerous, and the only good thing that comes out of it is municipal revenue. The newspaper says:
With a fine for speeding of $50 and for running a red light of $100, the camera system brought in $90,000 for speed violations and $25,800 in red-light violations to the City-by-the-Sea.
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Massachusetts officials are considering allowing people to consume marijuana at the shops where they buy it, and to let them legally use it at such venues as yoga studios, theaters, rallies, and festivals.
Another reason to stay off the roads….
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Reading about and hearing the poor people affected by Trump’s SNAP (aka Food Stamp) cutoffs and health-care-insurance cutbacks reminded me again of a central ailment of America – the dearth of responsible fathers among poor people, which can be one reason they’re poor. Other reasons – and they tend to be related -- include the failures of “trickle-down economics’’ and the fading of labor unions, which have made middle-class lives out of reach for many.
It’s staggering how many single mothers there are. The absence of fathers to help support the children they spawn leads to a wide range of pathologies – most notably, lifelong poverty. Can’t the right and left come up with policies to encourage more responsible fatherhood, and even marriage, which more often than not goes with it?
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There might well be another government shutdown in January.
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But our electricity needs continue to surge, especially now with the vast data centers needed to fuel artificial intelligence. That means that we’ll need as many new energy sources as we can get – be they wind, solar, nuclear, hydrogen, etc., as we strive to get ourselves off the polluting gas, oil and coal with which we’re cooking the planet. Sadly, we’ll also need a lot of that carbon stuff for a long while to come.
More of the public is finally getting it, as witnessed by the upset victory of two Democratic green-energy backers on Georgia’s (a state more Red than purple) Public Utility Commission last week. More and more voters, even in states with many, to use the euphemism, “low-information’’ voters, realize that it’s economic, as well as environmental, suicide to keep so tightly hitched to the fossil-fuel industry, a powerful part of the MAGA’s fascist machine. Utility rates have been surging around the country as billionaire ”Tech Bros’’’ gobble up more and more electricity and land for their data centers.
(It's not for nothing that the worse their public education and literacy levels, the Redder the state.)
What can you do as utility rates continue to rise? Well, turn off more lights.
Dike-Building Time
The fossil-fuel burning is raising sea levels at alarming rates, forcing coastal states, in the face of federal inertia and worse, to act more decisively. Consider Massachusetts’s new 144-page document “ResilientCoasts’’ that seeks to make it easier, as WGBH summarizes, “to access funding, share data and coordinate projects. It also outlines steps to protect property and strengthen infrastructure, such as preserving natural buffers like salt marshes, elevating houses, and requiring homeowners to disclose their property’s flood risk to prospective buyers.’’ (I think that it should mostly be the responsibility of the prospective buyers to research that risk.)
The sea level is projected to rise 1.5 to 3 feet in southern New England by 2050. A big storm pushing a tidal surge on top of the base sea level means that flooding is apt to be more destructive in coming decades. But the upside is better video on the news shows! People love storm images!
Of course, something that many fear hearing is that many properties, including those of the numerous affluent people with fancy seaside houses, must be abandoned in the next few decades. ¡Qué será, será!
Here’s stuff on ‘’ResilientCoasts’’:
Irrational Energy ‘’Policies’’
In more craziness, the Orange Oligarch’s attacks on electric-vehicle manufacturing and fuel-efficiency rules will tend to raise costs for consumers. For while electric and hybrid cars usually cost more to buy than totally gasoline-fueled ones, they’re much cheaper to operate. As for the rollback of fuel-efficiency rules, that will cost drivers who buy new gasoline-powered cars and trucks higher fuel costs.
The rest of the world is moving on toward renewable energy as America is stuck in irrational, contradictory and gyrational energy “policies,’’ if they even can be dignified with that word. As with responding to the trade protectionism and accompanying chaos unleashed from the Throne Room of the White House, many nations are looking for ways to detach themselves as much as they can from our crazy country. That includes extracting themselves from joint energy research and other energy ventures in the United States and looking for other nations in which to sell and buy their electric cars.
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The fiscal numbers don’t add up in Trump’s plan to pay people (but not those with “high incomes” — undefined) $2,000 each from tariff revenue. Like most of his proposals, it’s at least partly a con. On this and other Trump-hyped schemes – e.g., for obesity-drug-price relief -- do your own research and be wary of the willful suspension of disbelief. But, yes, all this policy stuff is complicated.
Amusingly, our Narcissist-in-Chief calls the obesity-drug program TrumpRx, as if he’d be paying for it.
The U.S. House hadn’t been in session from Oct. 1 until last week, but members were paid. Air-traffic controllers, whose work can be a matter of life and death, weren’t paid during the record government shutdown.
Interesting.
Biographies: Up Close With Working Class
Congratulations to the Providence writer Hester Kaplan and her husband, Michael D. Stein, M.D., for their new books.
Ms. Kaplan, a novelist and short-story writer, has just published Twice Born: Finding My Father in the Margins of Biography. This memoir revolves around her attempts to better understand her father, Justin Kaplan, the famed biographer of Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, and Lincoln Steffens, and the author of other books, too; he was also a distinguished editor. I found it haunting and honest, leavened with what you might call social comedy, such as life among the self-conscious and often quietly anxious literary and academic strivers in their Cambridge, Mass., neighborhood and on Cape Cod.
Mr. Kaplan, well experienced in family tragedy as a boy, was a very complicated man, whose layers his daughter has striven with considerable success to peel off. I wonder how Mr. Kaplan, a memoirist himself, would have responded to his daughter’s book.
“I’m an obscurantist. I’m drawn to people whose lives have a certain mystery — mysteries that aren’t going to be solved, that are too sacred to be solved,’’ Mr. Kaplan told Newsweek in 1980. Hester Kaplan seems to have unraveled some mysteries about her father, but not all.
We often seem to have much more interest in trying to understand why our parents did what they did after they’re dead. I know I am still trying to figure out mine many years after their deaths. But as L.P. Hartley famously wrote at the start of his novel The Go-Between: "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there". Of course, in probing their mysteries, we’re trying to better understand who we are. To greater or lesser degrees, we are mysteries to ourselves.
For his part, Dr. Stein, a primary-care physician, health-policy researcher and prolific writer, has come out with A Living: Working-Class Americans Talk to Their Doctor. These are vignettes based on Dr. Stein’s conversations with his patients who, in a wide variety of ways, do manual labor. Many of them have had tough lives and have been victims of the harsh side of American capitalism, and some have been victims of their behavioral mistakes.
(I’m so glad that Dr. Stein included a clam digger!)
Dr. Stein notes that A Living was inspired by Studs Terkel’s 1974 best-selling book Working.
A Living presents an often poignant, sometimes jarring and sometimes funny, or at least wry, look into a part of American life that more privileged citizens would do well to know much more about, such as by reading this little book. Indeed, their ignorance about, and/or lack of interest in, these people explains some of our biggest economic, social and political problems.