Whitcomb: Smoke Got in Their Eyes; Another Chapter in the American Crisis; ‘Yes in God’s Back Yard’
Robert Whitcomb, Columnist
Whitcomb: Smoke Got in Their Eyes; Another Chapter in the American Crisis; ‘Yes in God’s Back Yard’
“I would open my hand from the wrist,
step outside, not lose nerve.
Here is the day, still to be lived.
We do not fully know what we do.
But the trains depart the stations, traffic lurches
and stalls, a highway crew has paused….’’
-- From “New Year,’’ by Joanna Klink (born 1969), American poet and teacher
“One of the most time-consuming things is to have an enemy.’’
-- E.B. White (1899-1985), American writer famed for his essays and books for children
“While gossip among women is universally ridiculed as low and trivial, gossip among men, especially if it is about women, is called theory, or idea, or fact.’’
-- Andrea Dworkin (1946-2005), American writer and feminist activist
But I don’t remember seeing people wearing lampshades on their heads – the classic idiotic figures at a too-long Christmas party as presented in the movies and on TV back then.
The next morning, the bitter smell of cigarette smoke still hung in the living room. No matter how cold a New Year’s Day morning was, it was good to get outside and hope that the new year would be cleaner than the last.
We have plenty of drug problems now, of course, but it seems fewer adult drunks, partly because heavy drinking is far less tolerated than it was way back then, when too many people even saw it as humorous.
xxx
And now we’re in the most unearthly stretch of the year, between Christmas and New Year’s Day.
xxx
There are always lots of apparently homeless people panhandling along urban roads at this time of year, even in the worst weather. A favorite stretch is zones along North Main Street in Providence at traffic lights. There, grass has been beaten down to bare earth by the homeless folks pacing, sometimes perilously close to tipping into moving traffic. Many, perhaps most, of these people have assorted psychiatric and/or emotional illnesses and/or addictions. It’s too bad that there aren’t enough places for them to stay, at least for the ones who would willingly go to them.
War on Clean Energy Continues
At a time when the electricity grids are being stretched to the limit by the development of vast data centers and beyond that, an ever-increasing demand for electricity across the board, the lawless Trump has illegally “paused’’ five big windpower projects along the East Coast. He wants to kill this source of renewable energy because the convicted criminal hates looking at them and because some of his biggest donors/bribers are in the fossil-fuel sector, most of which is based in Deep Red states.
As lipstick on a pig, the regime, ruled by someone who knows little or nothing about engineering, cites bogus and disproven “national security” concerns,
In response, some U.S. senators are stopping negotiations to reform permitting processes that would have helped streamline natural-gas-pipeline approvals as well as those for renewable-energy projects. Good – time to hold the other side hostage, too.
Even some past supine Republican supporters of Trump (whatever they think of his nonexistent ethics in general) are pushing back against his action, yet another chapter in the growing American Crisis of public immorality and incompetence.
Even if Trump’s action is reversed in the courts, the delays and uncertainty he has caused for this source of electricity will jack up your electric bills and throw thousands of people out of work.
It will slow the urgently needed building of energy-source diversity, and make the United States that much less competitive, especially with our archrival China, which is all in on generating electricity from solar and wind. Of course, it also means more air pollution and global warming. (But note that Red States, whose heartland is the Old Confederacy, will suffer more from global warming than the Northeast, where most people dislike Trump and his larcenous regime. Indeed, man-fueled climate change is softening the Northeast’s winters in fits and starts.
Reminder: Electricity from new wind and solar projects is cheaper than from gas, oil, and coal plants as renewable-energy technology rapidly improves, including battery storage and energy from hydrogen and biomass. That’s not to say that we won’t need to use Earth-cooking fossil fuels for some years to come, along with nuclear plants. (Hopefully, one fine day the latter will include fusion, which would leave little radioactive waste compared to the current fission technology.) We’ll need juice from wherever we can get it.
xxx
As usual, Massachusetts is among those places seeking to strengthen its long-term economy by making itself more self-sufficient in energy. Consider that state officials are entering contract talks with four companies to build a big battery storage facility in Everett on, appropriately, an old Exxon oil-storage field. The facility would be used to store electrical energy when demand is low and release it when it’s high.
New England must move as fast as it can to reduce its energy dependence on the rest of the country and do it in partly by encouraging projects that don’t come under federal/Red State/fossil-fuel sector control – control that opens up the region to economic, political and environmental sabotage by Washington.
Here’s the Commonwealth Beacon article:
Religious Real Estate
The social, political and economic power of religious denominations has dramatically declined in much of America, no more so than in New England. More and more people just don’t believe in organized religion’s assertions, thinking that a lot of them are just based on an attempt to deny that when we die, that’s it – that we just go back to atoms. (I myself have a vague sense of the numinous and a generalized sense of mystery about why there is something rather than nothing.)
“….Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind….’’
-- Shakespeare, in The Tempest
Of course, the most important denomination in southern New England has long been the Catholic Church, and in some ways the region’s most powerful person was Richard Cushing (1895-1970), who was archbishop of Boston from 1944 to his death and was named cardinal in 1958.
During that time, the church continued to amass many thousands of acres in and around its parishes and elsewhere. Some Protestant denominations scooped up a lot of land, too, but nothing like the Catholics, including for such functions as its parochial schools and hospitals. Those have played edifying roles in society.
But as churchgoing has faded, along with church wealth, much of that land is no longer needed for religious purposes, indeed some of it was never needed for those purposes. (Some of that wealth has gone into settling lawsuits involving sexual abuse by clergy.)
So now there’s a move underway in the Bay State’s legislature to promote multifamily housing development on land owned by religious organizations by lowering zoning barriers there. That would help alleviate the state’s shortage of housing that low-and-middle people can afford to live in. Sounds pretty Judeo-Christian to me.
Flanner’s History on the Run
As we lurch into another year, it’s helpful to review history so as to be better able to guess where we’re going. So I suggest reading Janet Flanner’s World: Uncollected Writings, 1932-1975.
The great New Yorker magazine journalist (1892-1978) gives a tour of the worst and best of humanity with her dispatches covering politics, war, popular and high art, and other stuff, most famously from Europe. Much of her work was in vivid, indeed unforgettable, views of people from Hitler to Picasso to Bette Davis to Gertrude Stein and the Nazis being tried at Nuremberg.
Her reportage on the rise of fascism is particularly relevant now as that pathology spreads in America and parts of Europe. But the collection is filled with jewels of the journalistic art applied to a very wide range of human behavior and its products. We see creative genius, cruelty on a mass scale, compassionate heroism and the behavior in between of the man and woman in the streets as they walk, run and stagger through history amidst forces over which they have little or no control.