Whitcomb: The Election and Beyond; Deaths, Like Masks, Are Unpopular; DeBlasio’s Insane Idea

Whitcomb: The Election and Beyond; Deaths, Like Masks, Are Unpopular; DeBlasio’s Insane Idea

“Only this evening  I saw again low in the sky

The evening star, at the beginning of winter, the star

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That in spring will crown every western horizon….

 It was like sudden time in a world without time….

-- From “Martial Cadenza,’’ by Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)

 

“We must select the illusion which appeals to our temperament and embrace it with passion if we want to be happy.’’

-- Cyril Connolly (1903-1974) British critic and essayist.

 

 

“To give thanks in solitude is enough. Thanksgiving has wings and goes where it must go. Your prayer knows much more about it than you do.”

― Victor Hugo (1802-1885), French novelist and poet. Author of Les Miserables

 

 

Next spring will be beautiful, whatever the weather. Lay low until then.

 

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How the low November sun slants in! Beautiful but headache-inducing.

 

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With the exit of the anti-clean-energy Trump regime next year, there’s a good chance of big advances for Revolution Wind, the massive and long-delayed wind farm proposed for off  southern New England. This would power 350,000 homes and boost southeastern New England’s economy. It’s too bad that it takes longer to do big infrastructure projects in the United States than in any other developed country, in part because of a toxic soup  of politics and special interests.

 

 

 

 

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Tough fiscal times for a state can lead to dubious proposals. Consider Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo’s plan to open state-controlled marijuana stores, rather like New Hampshire’s  state-run liquor stores, as a way to get more state revenue. It’s tempting in a time when COVID-19 and its accompanying recession are putting great stress on state budgets across America. But these stores would put the state’s imprimatur on increased pot use in our already drug-addled society.

 

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“It’s time to ban leaf blowers. The decibel level is a health hazard. Raking works.’’

Bravo to Richard Goldberg for posting to a Next Door site.

 

For weeks every fall,  and then again in the spring, affluent homeowners hire yard crews with screaming, gasoline-powered leaf blowers to make life utterly miserable for their human neighbors, as well as other animal life in the area, for hours  a day. These infernal devices also emit copious quantities of air pollution.  They’re  a menace to health and should  have been banned long ago. With so many people now forced to work at home, they’re hurting the health of many more people than ever.  (Electric leaf blowers are a tad quieter.)

And we notice that the ears and lungs of many of the workers wielding these monsters aren’t protected. More than a few seem to be illegal aliens, who lack workplace protections. They don’t dare complain.

 

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Outdoor Christmas spectacles on front yards seem bigger and more florid than usual this year. I suspect that the grimness of 2020 has more people seeking the comfort of color.

 

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The annual Christmas tree in Manhattan’s Rockefeller Center may be the most famous in the world. But this year’s is remarkably scrawny.  As wags have noted, that’s fitting for this ghastly year. And yet, there was enough foliage for a cute little owl to be found in the tree’s branches and rescued.

 

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Consider the decision by some Red State governors in “Fly Over Country” to finally order mask wearing after many months of refusing such orders. It shows that they’re now more afraid of becoming unpopular because of soaring COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths in their low-tax, low public-service states* than from being unpopular because right-wing voters demand their “freedom’’ to infect others.

*But with huge federal agricultural and fossil-fuel subsidies.

 

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Someone identifying himself as Alex Baze, and with a macabre sense of humor, noted on Facebook, regarding Thanksgiving and COVID, what happened when the Pilgrims feasted with, and otherwise encountered, Native Americans, who had no immunity to European diseases:

 

“Bringing a deadly disease to people with little or no immunity is a very authentic Thanksgiving re-enactment.’’

 

 

 

 

The GOP -- Our Lethal Political Disease

Now that Joe Biden has won, despite the Trump/Qanon/Republican/Grifter Party’s efforts to suppress voting and then treasonously try to overturn the election by nonstop lies about its legitimacy, we can more clinically look at what put a sociopathic, traitorous, larcenous, racist mobster in the Oval Office.  (Meanwhile let us consider how many tens of thousands of Americans crime boss Donald Trump has killed through his grotesque lies,  mismanagement and nonmanagement in the COVID-19 crisis.)

 

Changing socio-economic conditions, especially because of immigration, technology and globalization, made many anxious Americans more vulnerable to the lies of a demagogue and his lackeys than would have been the case a few decades ago. And remember that Trump’s business career was all about advertising himself and that he knows how to push the buttons of naïve people. Consider that the only business he made a lot of money in was “Reality TV’’.

 

And right-wing social media and cable-TV and radio hosts have provided many more opportunities for the proliferation of lies, especially bogus conspiracy theories, than would have been available a few decades ago. A decline in reading, and, as I have often said, the implosion of civics and history teaching in the public schools, have exacerbated this crisis. Most Americans have little idea of how their own government is supposed to work.

 

Then there’s the ignorance of, and outright rejection of, science. Consider the ignorance/idiocy behind Trump’s  flag-draped fanatics’ demand that the election be overturned: They say that Trump must have won because he drew much bigger (and louder) televised crowds than Biden to campaign rallies. Well, duh, that’s because Biden’s campaign discouraged backers from going to big gatherings and mandated social distancing (which reduces the size of crowds) and mask wearing at the relatively few rallies it had. The Biden campaign followed standard public-health guidelines, and recognized that big, crowded rallies are perilous in a pandemic.  At Trump’s urging, his screaming, maskless, cheek-by-jowl followers ignored these guidelines, as they tend to ignore science and reason in general.

 

That’s one reason that so many of them have COVID-19 now in states so sparsely populated that transmission rates should be very low.

 

It's no accident that Biden got far more votes in places with good education systems than did Trump, who has always flourished among the less educated and thus more gullible. He knows where the suckers are. Indeed, Trump’s greatest political strength may be the willful ignorance of  so many of his followers.

 

Of course, there are also those, especially the wealthy, who have cynically backed Trump because he cut their taxes and reduced environmental and other regulations. They may have held their noses as they voted for their immediate self-interest. It recalls how big German businessmen helped put Hitler in power and benefited from Nazi rule, even to the point of using slave labor.

 

(Perhaps the most dangerous funder of far-right causes now is the family led by billionaire hedge funder Robert Mercer. Then there’s billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel, another avid selfishness-above-all advocate.)

 

And we have the extreme political cowardice of most other figures of the national Republican Party, very few of whom are willing to take on the  unquestioning “Base” of our very un-American caudillo, who is not a “conservative’’ but a neo-fascist. Most of these servile creatures are still unwilling to openly accept Biden’s clear election victory for fear of facing the wrath of Trump and his followers (all too many of whom like to feel powerful by walking around with guns, and they aren’t averse to making death threats).

Hit this link to read about a particularly unsettling death-threat case:

 

The most notably smarmy, oily character in all this, at least recently, is South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, who always tries to make sure that he’s close to people who radiate power, as if he gets a vicarious sense of importance/agency from this proximity. Before Trump, Graham was a pal of the late Sen. John McCain, who detested Trump as a dangerous fraud. But once Trump was elected, Graham became among the most sycophantic of Trump’s enablers. Assume the position, Little Lindsey!

 

He’s been among the most toxic forces in trying to undermine the legitimacy of this year’s election, with the most outrageous example being his effort to pressure Georgia’s Republican secretary of state to throw out some votes for Biden. Graham is so corrupt that one wonders how much of his re-election victory was due to fraud in a state totally controlled by Trump Republicans.

 

That’s now. Back in 2016 just before the election that all polls projected that Hillary Clinton would win, he said on Twitter:

 

“Like most Americans, I have confidence in our democracy and our election system. If he {Trump} loses, it will not be because the system is ‘rigged’ but because he failed as a candidate.”

 

Of course, the Republican congressional leadership has long plumbed the depths of hypocrisy and cowardice but Graham stands out. I have long suspected that may be because Trump, the Russians and others have something on him, probably involving his personal life.

 

But help is on the way! Rudy Giuliani, son of a New York mobster, is now officially Trump’s lawyer of record as he tries to overturn the election, or at least indelibly stain it. At least this crazy, corrupt figure puts on quite a show!

 

Alas, the national Republican Party’s (Trump Cult’s) corruption may be beyond cure. Sad: Every democracy needs a thoughtful, policy-prescriptive right-of-center party that, unlike the current GOP, respects our institutions and believes in fact-based policies and doesn’t tout “alternative facts.’’  Indeed, America urgently needs a new conservative party to hold Democrats, the left-of-center party, to account when necessary and  to discourage excessively utopian schemes.

 

When a ruling party doesn’t respect democratic institutions and the rule of law, tyranny can swiftly follow. The other night I watched a PBS show, part of a series, on the Nazis. As an old history major  who focused on Europe, I knew the facts of what transpired, but the show expertly dramatized what can happen when a right-wing, violence-threatening “populist’’ party starts to destroy such democratic institutions as the rule of law and fair and transparent elections, while threatening  skeptical news media and killing nonpolitical professionalism/expertise  in the civil service and elsewhere in government by rooting out anyone who might question the Maximum Leader.  As of this writing, the latest such victim in our challenged quasi-democracy is Christopher Krebs, a cybersecurity expert and former Microsoft executive whom the would-be dictator fired for defending, based on FACTS, the accuracy and legitimacy of our election process. He was fired for not being corrupt.

 

As Mark Twain is purported to have said: “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.’’

 

For the PBS series, please hit this link:

 

Biden will be tempted to discourage federal prosecution of Trump and his fellow crooks, to, as they say, “let the country move on.’’ But considering the extent of Trump’s criminality and damage to America, that would encourage future miscreants to do the sort of things he has done. He should be prosecuted. I now think that President Ford’s pardoning of Richard Nixon, in 1974, (which I reported on at the time) set a bad precedent, though Nixon was about 10 percent of the criminal that Trump is.

 

In policy matters and personnel selections, the Biden administration will probably be hamstrung by a very narrowly GOP-controlled Senate – the cult will do anything, no matter how ruthless to hang onto two Georgia Senate seats to keep the amoral Moscow Mitch McConnell in the driver’s seat.

 

Meanwhile, I hope that Democratic leaders move away from identity politics, which can severely undermine the party’s ability to govern and win future elections. (Consider some Democrats’ bizarre obsession with the transgendered, who comprise an estimated 0.6 percent of the population.)

 

The president-elect should focus above all on improving the socio-economic status of all middle- and lower-income Americans; start to rebuild the country’s crumbling infrastructure, and work to improve the most expensive and most inefficient health-care “system’’ in the Developed World, with among the worst medical outcomes. And address the biggest, but long-term, existential issue of them all – global warming.

 

Revitalizing that always fragile thing called democracy, badly battered by Trump, must be a foundation for the above.

 

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It’s “socialism” when someone else gets government benefits. It’s what a patriotic American deserves when you get it – Medicare, Social Security, etc.

And Abroad…

 

At the same time, the Biden administration must rebuild America’s international alliances, which are essential to its security.  It should start by reinvigorating NATO, sorely weakened by Russian pal or puppet Trump and our most important alliance by far.

 

And I noticed the other day that 15 Asia-Pacific nations signed a huge trade deal – The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership – which doesn’t include the United States but does include, as its most powerful member, China, which almost daily is moving to become the world’s most powerful country.  You’ll recall that Trump, in an isolationist orgasm, pulled out of the Trans Pacific Partnership at the start of his regime, though membership in the TPP would have strengthened U.S. economic and geopolitical power in Asia and beyond.

 

There have been reports the last week or so about a coming State Department study on how to push back against increasingly aggressive Chinese expansionism. Good. The news recalls diplomat George Kennan’s 1947 article in Foreign Affairs that’s seen as the foundation of the “Containment’’ policy meant to curb the expansion of Soviet tyranny in Europe. It’s certainly past time for a coherent response to this huge authoritarian threat.

 

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I’m sure that Mr. Biden, who is a standard, old-fashioned Truman-style Democrat, will offer at least a couple of the few remaining responsible Republican leaders  jobs in his administration to try to help unify and calm the country.  Perhaps it would be a successful governor (Massachusetts’s Charlie Baker? Ohio’s Mike DeWine?), an official from one of the Bush administrations, or nationally known business/civic leader. 

 

Madness in Manhattan
New York City Mayor Bill DiBlasio has a terrible idea of sending mental-health professionals and emergency medical technicians, and no cops, to deal with disruptive people in some cases.

 

This experiment won’t last long. Yes, many of these disruptive people are more crazy than criminal but some can be dangerously violent. The cops need to always be there to apply force if necessary. The mayor’s move is a trendy effort to defuse anger in Black and Brown communities about police abuses. But that anger will be transformed into general public anger when things go rapidly south in one of these incidents, which they will. Situations seemingly under control can turn deadly in a second, as I learned a half century covering the Boston police.

 

And no, the police are not about to be defunded. But cries of “defund the police!” hurt the Democrats in the election, though most leaders of the party, including Joe Biden, have strongly opposed the idea and indeed have showed themselves consistently pro-police over the years.

 

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Mayors and city planners should make more of an effort by, among other ways, zoning changes, to encourage the creation of “mini-downtowns’’ within  neighborhoods – places with stores, restaurants, public services and transportation centers that people can walk to.

 

Europe to Slow Down

Most of Europe has long had very high-speed limits, some at more than 80 miles an hour. (I remember back in the ‘80s being stopped by a French highway cop for going too slow – about 65 mph. Embarrassing!) But now, impelled by the desire to save lives and reduce air pollution and dependency on fossil fuels, some European nations, including the United Kingdom, France and Spain, are moving to cut maximum speeds by 10 mph or more. There’s a COVID connection: Faster driving puts out more air pollution, which weakens people who may have the virus, and more people are driving now to avoid using public transportation because of grossly exaggerated fears of traveling on buses and trains.

 

During the Reagan administration, many places in America, especially in what are now called “Red States,’’ raised speed limits – “it’s all about freedom!’’  (That came after poor Jimmy Carter’s administration lowered the limits in the Energy Crisis of the ‘70s. Party pooper!)

 

 I’ll bet that some states will follow Europe’s lead and pull back in the next few years.

 

As we head out of the 2020 hellscape into 2021 and, presumably, blessed relief from the virus, it will be exciting to see what new laws and permanent regulations come out of the traumas of 2020, and how many people permanently change their behavior.

To read more about European speed limits, please hit this link:

 

Nov. 22, 1963

Today is the 57th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. To those of us who remember it well, it seems both long, long ago and yesterday. For all his charm and style, I was never a big admirer of Kennedy but his killing at the age of 46 did long-term injury to the body politic that still hurts.