Whitcomb: Unionized College Players; Should We Expand RICAS; Office Building Conversions

Whitcomb: Unionized College Players; Should We Expand RICAS; Office Building Conversions

“One day you finally knew
 what you had to do, and began,

though the voices around you
kept shouting

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their bad advice….’’

-- From “The Journey,’’ by Mary Oliver (1935-2019), American poet

 

Here’s the whole poem:

 

 “When a man unprincipled in private life,  desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper … is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity .… It may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion that he may ‘ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.’”

-- Alexander Hamilton in a letter to George Washington in 1792

 

 

“If once elected, and at a second or third election outvoted by one or two votes, he will pretend false votes, foul play, hold possession of the reins of government, be supported by the States voting for him.’’

-- Thomas Jefferson in a letter to James Madison in 1787

 

 

“Say whatever you like, but don’t lay it on too thick and don’t tell too many lies.’’

--Well-in-advance request by the great retired Providence Journal editor and renaissance man James K. Sunshine (1924-2023) to mourners at his memorial service last Friday at Swan Point Cemetery in Providence. 

 

 

xxx

 

Memories from the deep past are often more vivid to me than what happened last week.
 

I think of Mr. Small, a Latin and German teacher and a team coach at a Connecticut boarding school that I attended in the mid-60’s. Mr. Small, who looked rather like Mr. Clean and had piercing blue eyes, was a fine and sometimes entertainingly acerbic, but basically kindly, teacher, and was a veteran of the Battle of the Bulge, in which he saw horrific things, such as the shooting of unarmed German POW’s by understandably enraged GI’s.

 

A bachelor, he had a small apartment in the school (an institution that looked a bit like a Collegiate Gothic fort). On many weekday evenings he’d invite a group of boys in for coffee, and, if they were seniors, let them smoke.  Almost always, he’d be playing music on his fancy record player,  mostly classical but sometimes newer works, even movie scores -- I especially remember that from the grim and colorful Italian documentary Mondo Cane.

 

But he’d set aside an hour or so every day to listen alone to Bach. He called it his Bachstunde.

 

On many Sundays, he would drive off in his Porsche,  which we all envied, sometimes in the company of a lady about his own age. We never found out who she was, what their relationship was or where they went. Indeed, much of his life was a mystery. He did remark once, with a weary shrug, that unmarried men teaching in a boys school always had to deal – in that still very homophobic time --   with the suspicion that they were gay.

 

It's been many decades, but his voice and face are as vivid as ever to me, and I remain intrigued by the mysteries around him.

 

We all swim in opaque waters about the people around us, especially about why they did what they did and how they interacted with the world they inhabited, so alike in some ways and so different in others from ours.

 

 

School Pleasures

Dr. Edward Iannuccilli’s recent GoLocal column on the beauties of using fountain pens reminded me of some of the sensual pleasures of pre-computer days in elementary school. There was the rich metallic and slightly sweet smell of ink and the cedar aroma of wooden pencils, especially when you were sharpening them, which was satisfying. But my favorite was the boozy smell of the fluid for mimeograph machines, which were superseded many decades ago by photocopiers. You’d think that you could pour it on ice cream.

 

Ink pots for refilling pens on desks were sometimes spilled, wreaking brief havoc, angering the teacher, who might slap the spiller, and sometimes necessitating a visit from a grouchy janitor.

 

I like the doctor’s plug for sending physical letters, rather than emails, most of which quickly disappear into the electronic fog, except for such necessities as legal investigations. And those written with a fountain pen are the most memorable, and beautiful if the writer has been well-trained in penmanship, that almost extinct craft, which Dr. Iannuccilli clearly has.

 

Here's his column:

 

 

 

Unionized College Players

So the Dartmouth College basketball team has voted to unionize, setting off a loud explosion in the cartel called the National Collegiate Athletic Association. The team’s theory is that playing on such teams helps promote the college’s PR, and thus finances, and so they should be paid as employees, even though Dartmouth provides among the most generous financial aid of any such institution in America, and academics, not athletics, is primary at such “elite” colleges unlike, it seems, at many schools.

 

I wonder if forcing even fairly small private colleges, such as Dartmouth, to treat athletes as employees will lead some institutions to stop competing in some inter-collegiate sports, including basketball. That sport has never been very big at Dartmouth, by the way.  So maybe the college will consign it to merely intramural competition. A reasonable decision.

 

 

Offices to Factories

Proposals to fill up a lot of those post-pandemic and still partly empty downtown office buildings in Providence, Boston and other cities have usually focused on converting them to housing. But given their features, especially their large floor plates, high ceilings, utility layouts and huge windows, turning them into places for light assembly of high-tech and other physical products makes more sense. Something like this has been underway in the past few years in Boston and Cambridge as biotech companies have moved into some space previously used for offices for “white-collar” workers.

Call them mini-factories. We often forget that many Northeast city downtowns  once had substantial manufacturing operations, including, up until around 50 years ago, some heavy manufacturing. Reinvigorating downtown manufacturing would help create more diverse and, thus, healthier urban economies. It’s clear that in this age of remote work, many office workers won’t ever return to downtown office towers.

 

We must focus on building much more housing. Trying to transform office buildings into dwellings won’t help much.

 

xxx

 

Rhode Island does not make high-school students take a state-created comprehensive assessment test analogous to the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) exams. Instead its high-school students take either the PSAT or SAT. But perhaps the Rhode Island Comprehensive Assessment (RICAS) tests should be given in high school, too, to better gauge how state policymakers can improve the state’s public education, which lags behind Massachusetts’s first-in-the-nation public education. Some of the  Bay State’s ranking can be attributed to the creation of the MCAS exams.

 

A Gift to the Cult

Officials in some American cities continue to propose that taxpayers pay reparations to descendants of slaves. What a wonderful way to help Trump and fellow fascists (many of whom are white racists) gain power. The vast majority of Americans don’t feel guilty about the innumerable outrages of history. “Hey! I didn’t own slaves!’’ Billing them for reparations will anger some enough to embrace the Trump cult. That won’t be good for the descendants of slaves, reparations for whom would be fiendishly difficult to calculate in any case.

 

The best ways to help minorities in this polarized nation is through such race-neutral strategies as building much more housing, to bring down costs; improving public education; more job-skills training; expanding health care; boosting public transportation, and trying new strategies for preventing crime and drug abuse.

 

These will especially help Black Americans and some other minorities who are disproportionately poor.

 

Paper Chase

As we slog through the ever more complicated federal tax code – the swampiest in the world -- and are forced to pay big bucks to accountants to help us file them, I think more and more that we need to jettison the whole code, much of it written in effect by Capitol Hill lobbyists and their House and Senate lackeys, and replace it  with a flat tax, with adjustments for lower-income people.

 

Even most CPA’s and tax lawyers have a hard time understanding parts of the code.

 

And think of all the time that must be taken from more productive activities, such as working for money or sleeping, in order to trudge through our annual tax ordeal.

 

In our house we joke that our CPA weighs our supporting-document-heavy return and charges us by the pound.
 

And we should ditch the corporate-income tax entirely. Its existence encourages bribery by big business in the form of campaign contributions in exchange for favorable congressional treatment. And in the end, of course, individuals pay the corporate taxes, not some room-temperature, inorganic creature called a company.

 

Of course, these reforms would require a political revolution.

 

 

 

Hell in Haiti

Haiti always seems hopeless. It has a barely functioning government. It is rife with vast violence, urban anarchy and poverty, with criminal gangs running amok.

 

What the country needs is for the U.N. to step in and run it for a while. But that won’t happen. And/or it needs that very rare creature -- a strong but honest and competent dictator, backed up by a police force and army subsidized by us, who won’t try to stay in power for life.

 

The U.S. won’t be sending in troops to help restore order. An America with an increasingly isolationist minority (isolationism it will eventually come to regret – see the ‘30’s) doesn’t want more peacekeeping roles in nasty places, especially after the disasters of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars started by George W. Bush, back when the Neocons ran the Republican Party.

 

In any event, desperate Haitians will continue to try to flee to Florida. Some will wash up dead on the beach close to Mar-a-Lago. America is a very big country, but we can’t seal ourselves from the world’s miseries.

 

xxx

 

Seeing the sociopathic George Santos,  the former New York Republican congressman ousted for seemingly bottomless corruption, sitting and yucking it up with the arrogant and depraved Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz in the U.S. House chamber before President Biden’s State of the Union speech last Thursday says a lot about the moral squalor of the current congressional GOP.

 

Another Sad Clown

I’ve been dipping into When You Are Engulfed in Flames, a book of essays by the writer and humorist David Sedaris (born 1956), who has become fairly famous for his storytelling, especially on radio. Most of his stories are self-deprecatory and exaggerated tales about his foibles, often in foreign lands. Despite the sometimes chirpy (on the radio) author’s reputation for being silly and hilarious, I found much of his stuff sad.