Whitcomb: Summer Reading/Jobs; Dr. Kennedy’s Prescriptions; Buckley Public and Private

Whitcomb: Summer Reading/Jobs; Dr. Kennedy’s Prescriptions; Buckley Public and Private

Success is counted sweetest

By those who ne'er succeed.

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To comprehend a nectar

Requires sorest need.

 

Not one of all the purple Host

Who took the Flag today

Can tell the definition

So clear of victory

 

As he defeated – dying –

On whose forbidden ear

The distant strains of triumph

Burst agonized and clear!

-- “Success Is Counted Sweetest,’’ by Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

 

 

“Two things only the people anxiously desire, bread and the circus games.’’

-- Juvenal (55-128 A.D.), Roman poet

 

 

“The only places where American medicine can fully live up to its possibilities are the teaching hospitals.’’

-- Bernard De Voto (1897-1955), American historian and journalist

 

 

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Now that the trees are in full leaf, the wind blowing across them makes a sound like breaking and receding waves on a beach.

 

Summer Reading

Summer is the prime season for reading books for pleasure. And physical books are the best way to read long works. You can better focus and reflect as you turn paper pages with your fingers than by looking at and clicking at backlit screens. The physicality of it helps. Science suggests that you remember more of what you read in a physical book than from a screen, though the latter is fine for shorter pieces, especially if you can discipline yourself from being distracted by the colorful and sometimes blinking features that accompany many Web pages.

 

The mild revival of small, independent bookstores in recent years shows a healthy desire to escape from digital distractions, which can be anxiety-provoking.

 

So happy summer reading,  be it fiction (which boosts our imaginative powers and empathy) or nonfiction. Lose yourself in books, maybe while sitting under a tree. Even enjoy the musty smell of an old volume, which may bring back memories.

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Summer Jobs

I again wonder if the regime’s sometimes brutal crackdown on immigrants will reduce the number of legal and illegal aliens working on the yards of so many homeowners, middle class on up, this summer. Many of those seasonal jobs used to be done by American middle- and even upper-middle-class high school and college kids, who also worked at such places as beach snack bars. But the immigration influx of the last 30 years changed that in many places.

 

Will more American kids start doing those discipline-building (if often boring) jobs again? And will AI destroy a lot of summer work that had been performed in offices?

 

Back in the ‘60’s I had both kinds of jobs – e.g.,  in earlier teenhood cutting grass, weeding and clipping hedges. (I also delivered newspapers by bike, back when those pubs were thick.) In later years, I processed paper, mostly bills of lading, in a shipping company’s office on the then-gritty Boston waterfront. For some reason, one of my most vivid memories of that job was when someone swiped $40, which I had stuck in a drawer at a desk I was using. I told this tale of woe to a white-haired co-worker named Sylvester Gookin, who sadly noted: “You’ll lose a lot more than that in life.’’

 

Then I was a counselor at a camp along a mosquito-friendly lake in Plymouth, Mass., where some of the kids were bigger than me, so I had to be louder than them. Then I was a go-fer in the unairconditioned newsroom of a tabloid newspaper called the Boston Record American, after which I had no desire to go into the newspaper business. Too chaotic, low-paying and unhealthy! But I got into that racket again a year later because it gave me the first job offer I got after college, and in an air-conditioned newsroom this time.

 

In these summer jobs, we absorbed the value of showing up on time, learning how to deal with sometimes difficult customers and co-workers and getting an early handle on what we didn’t want to do in life.

 

 

Carnival of Censorship

"Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past."

-- George Orwell (1903-1950), in his novel 1984

 

A dictatorship tries to manipulate and suppress information, and cook up fake “facts,’’ to relentlessly further consolidate its power.

 

Consider, for example, that Trump officials have blocked publication of a quarterly economic analysis  (such analyses have long been routine at federal agencies) by the Department of Agriculture’s professional staff. The regime didn’t like that the analysis predicts that U.S. trade deficit  in farm goods will increase, which, as Politico noted, runs counter to Trump’s “messaging that his economic policies, including tariffs, will reduce U.S. trade imbalances.’’ The farm sector voted heavily for Trump last year.

See:

 

 

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“Bobby {Kennedy Jr.} has gone on to misrepresent, lie and cheat his way through life.”

-- Caroline Kennedy, one of his cousins

 

Then we have the “Make America Healthy Again’’ (MAHA) report from the, er, bizarre Health and Human Services Secretary/conspiracy promoter Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that, he said, provided “common scientific basis’’ for the Trump regime’s efforts to reconfigure health policy.

 

But the regime loves artificial intelligence, which can be a lie machine and which it heavily used in this case. So, as it turns out, at least four of the report’s citations referred to nonexistent scientific papers and three “mischaracterized’’ the articles’ findings.

 

The fake stuff included studies on drug advertising, mental illness and medications prescribed for asthmatic children.

 

After the stuff was revealed as phony, Kennedy’s minions removed the stuff.

 

This comes as Kennedy has threatened to prevent government scientists from publishing in such distinguished journals as The  New England Journal of Medicine, The Journal of the American Medical Association and The Lancet lest their data accurately contradict highly politicized reports put out by Kennedy’s department.

 

All that aside, how well could MAHA work when millions lose Medicaid and other health-related benefits under a “big, beautiful” Trump budget?

 

The increasing signs of the Trump regime distorting, hiding, and making up out of whole cloth government economic, scientific, and other data have put all the more pressure on news media to get out the facts, in the face, of course, of threats.

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Investments That Pay Off

Wallet Hub has ranked Massachusetts as having the nation’s best economy. The organization cites the state’s investments in industry and in academic and other R&D. Such rankings can always be criticized – there are so many economic variables -- but high-tax Massachusetts is indeed one of the richest states and it keeps churning out new inventions and enterprises. It uses its taxes better than other states, especially many low-tax -- except for regressive sales taxes -- Red States. But then the academic/techno/financial-services center called Greater Boston has long been a world center of wealth creation. Wallet Hub would have done well to tout the Bay State’s public K-12 education, which, although it has slipped in recent years, is still among the nation’s best.

 

Rhode Island, which has never moved fast enough from its old mill culture, has never had such a center. Wallet Hub ranked its economy 33rd and Connecticut’s 20th.

 

But will Trump’s assaults on Harvard, MIT and other parts of Massachusetts’s famed innovation economy do permanent damage?

 

Here’s the report:

 

 

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Good news for the Massachusetts South Coast at downtown New Bedford’s former Star Store. That building had been turned into the site of the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth’s College of Visual and Performing Arts before being closed a couple of years ago. But now the nonprofit Arts and Business Council of Greater Boston will turn it into an arts hub, giving another cultural boost to the city, which has the famed New Bedford Whaling Museum, the New Bedford Art Museum and many working artists, many of whom use the capacious former industrial buildings in the city.

 

The building will feature performance spaces and studio space.

 

I wonder how much, if at all, the recent extension of MBTA commuter train service to New Bedford from Boston had to do with the site’s revival. It sure didn’t hurt.

 

 

Public and Private Buckley

“Life can't be all bad when for ten dollars you can buy all the Beethoven sonatas and listen to them for ten years.”

 

“I would like to take you seriously but to do so would affront your intelligence.”

 

― William F. Buckley Jr.

 

Buckley: The Life and Revolution That Changed America, Sam Tanenhaus’s new biography of William F. Buckley Jr. (1925-2008), who directly, and through the National Review, the right-wing magazine he founded, in 1955, reminded me of how much the public and private personalities of famous people can vary. The public personality of  (unlikely?) mass-media star Buckley, whom I met a couple of times, was often of an arch, arrogant, spoiled (he was born to wealth) and venomous commentator.

 

Privately, Buckley, who was the leading conservative public intellectual and entertainer of his time, was generous, polite (he responded swiftly by mail to comments by, and questions from, relative nonentities like me) and good-humored. He treated people working for  and with him with kindness, including his family’s African-American employees, though for a long time he expressed racist views. And Buckley, with his famous languid semi-Southern and semi-upper-class English accent, did evolve  over the decades to a more tolerant and realistic form of Edmund Burkean conservativism, seasoned with libertarianism.

 

He was a genial and tolerant host at his family’s estate in Connecticut and elsewhere, novelist, sailor, skier and musician (harpsichord and piano), among other activities.

 

Back in the early ‘70s, through the help of a mentor of mine, Jeffrey Hart, who was  a National Review senior editor, I spent a couple of days in National Review’s offices in Manhattan to write a little story about the pub, which, while Bill Buckley was the star, was actually run by his sister Priscilla Buckley, the managing editor, and William Rusher,  the publisher. Everyone was very open and friendly, whatever they might have guessed about my political views back then, which were pretty middle of the road.

 

But then, Buckley, during his decades of celebrity, was known for his large number of liberal and further-left friends. It’s noteworthy that Buckley chose Tanenhaus, a former New York Times Book Review editor, a liberal, to write this  biography, the only one the polemicist authorized.  Buckley liked him, and trusted him with access to truckloads of personal information.

 

Would this defender for years, before pulling back, of the demagogic Sen. Joseph McCarthy have liked Donald Trump’s presidency? I doubt it, because Trump is anything but a “conservative.’’

 

In any event, the World Wide Web and other newish media have transformed the cultural settings in which Buckley thrived on TV and in print. We’re unlikely to again see anyone like the “aristocratic” Buckley gain such mass-market appeal.