Whitcomb: “With Every Christmas Card’’; Housing Hell; Dividends From Deportation

Whitcomb: “With Every Christmas Card’’; Housing Hell; Dividends From Deportation

 I went out at night alone;

 The young blood flowing beyond the sea

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Seemed to have drenched my spirit’s wings—

 I bore my sorrow heavily.

 

But when I lifted up my head

 From shadows shaken on the snow,

I saw Orion in the east

 Burn steadily as long ago.

 

From windows in my father’s house,

 Dreaming my dreams on winter nights,

I watched Orion as a girl

 Above another city’s lights.

 

Years go, dreams go, and youth goes too,

 The world’s heart breaks beneath its wars,

All things are changed, save in the east

 The faithful beauty of the stars.

 

-- “Winter Stars,’’ by Sara Teasdale (1884-1933), American poet

 

 

“I am sick and tired of publicity. I want no more of it. It puts me in a bad light. I just want to be forgotten.’’

—Al Capone (1899-1947), Chicago-based  gangster, in 1929

 

 

“The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.’’

—G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936), English writer, in 1908

 

 

As various writers have noted, every season in New England has elements of the others. So it was last Wednesday, when a wild, wet and warm southerly gale made one think of a tropical storm in late summer. Exciting! It also performed the useful function of knocking down rotten tree limbs and stripping a lot of those ugly brown leaves from the oaks. And eating into our drought.

 

The (physical) Christmas card tradition can sometimes be a bit weird. You get cards from people you haven’t actually seen in many years. Sometimes, they’re accompanied by narratives presenting what’s been happening with relatives and close friends of the senders – often as folded inserts in the card envelopes with listings of achievements – graduations, fancy new jobs, prizes – and less so, sad news, especially of deaths and illness.  Sometimes, they’re weirdly intimate, considering the length of time since you’ve seen or talked with the writers.

 

You might never again get a phone call or a visit from some of these senders. The next word you might get about them might be their obituaries.

 

My approach has always been to reply, in ink on paper, with a card to anyone who has taken the time to send one, no matter how long ago it was that I saw the senders. That’s not just because it’s courteous but because you never know what you might learn by maintaining these relationships, however tenuous they may seem. It’s a kind of yearly discipline, and you can look at the cards over the years as a kind of social history.

 

 

Probably Won’t Help Much, but….

Rhode Islanders approved a $120 million housing bond issue in the recent election, with the money to pay for such things as planning, buying land, and construction. The bond issue apparently includes a little money -- $10 million --  for building public housing.

 

It seems pretty clear that despite the Ocean State’s minuscule size that the program won’t help much – the demand for “affordable housing” is too great. What would have a big impact would be changes in local zoning laws to allow more density, but that’s politically tough to do.  Still, some new and helpful ideas may come out of the program.

 

I have noticed in some neighborhoods, such as close to where we live in Providence, a recent increase in homebuilding, but that’s for the affluent. Most of us have also noticed the large number of rich people from out of state who have been bidding up Rhode Island real-estate prices. They’re naturally drawn to the state’s lovely coastline, the college town ambience of Providence’s East Side, and the romance of Newport (though plenty of poor people live there).

 

The upcoming rendition of the Trump regime will show little interest in addressing the shortage of housing for low-and-moderate-income people. Its denizens are more interested in the mansions of political donors and celebrities.  Thus, the national housing challenge will worsen. The states will have to figure out how to best address the challenge. In a  densely populated place such as Rhode Island, with a lot of old commercial, industrial and other large buildings, ought to include more inventive retro-fitting of these structures. And building housing on the parking lots of dead malls would seem uncontroversial. Closed churches are other possible sites for people to move into, though they can be very tricky to change into dwellings.

 

As for out-and-out homelessness, which is still said to be increasing despite a generally strong economy: How much is due to such factors as untreated mental illness, drugs and for years the corrosive decline of the stabilization provided by traditional families run by a married father and mother? Those factors undermine attempts to address the housing-affordability crisis.

 

Of course, personal-housing crises can themselves exacerbate the above pathologies in a vicious circle.

 

 

Going Camping

Texas is known for its private prisons and other aspects of its hyper-capitalist culture. Next stop: How about privately run camps in which to, er, concentrate illegal aliens,  and maybe some non-illegals, too,  to be rounded up by the Trump regime to be deported? Presumably these would mostly be along the Rio Grande. Would people trying to escape these camps be shot?

 

Private deportation camps via big government contracts with Trump campaign donors could be very lucrative!

 

Hit this link:

 

 

Blood-Stained House Guests

I suspect that Putin (often just called “Vladimir” by an admirer, our once and future leader) will tire of hosting fellow mass-murdering tyrant Bashar al-Assad and his family now that they’ve fled Syria after destroying much of it. After all, what can the guest killer do for the very transactional King of the Kremlin? For that matter, that Assad was overthrown and barely escaped being torn limb from limb by his victims is embarrassing to fellow executive thugs. I wouldn’t be surprised if he suffers a sudden fatal illness in his country of asylum, or falls out a window, a remarkably common cause of death in Russia for people who have become problematical for the regime.

 

But dictators often stick together for a while. One thinks of  Adolf Hitler’s rescue of his ally Benito Mussolini in 1943 after the Italian Fascist dictator was overthrown and jailed.

 

It was mordantly amusing that the Assad asylum was granted on “humanitarian’’ grounds given the many years of Bashar and his father, Hafez, torturing their own people, with the heavy assistance of Russia since the “Arab Spring’’ revolt in the early 2010’s. Poison gas was a favorite weapon.

 

The Assads looted the equivalent of billions of dollars in Syria. Putin and his entourage have done the same in Russia. How much does the MAGA mafia preparing to rule America hope that it can loot from the U.S. Treasury? The inner circle had some practice in the first term.

 

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It’s much too early to know whether Syria will, in fits and starts, become a humane and tolerant place with some real democratic elements or slide into violent fragmentation or Islamic dictatorship. And yet many thousands of Syrians who fled the country plan to return, even though most are fearful.

 

The civil war and Assad’s brutality have made Syria the site of the world's largest refugee crisis, with over 14 million Syrians having fled their homes since 2011, with around 7 million leaving the country.  Most of the latter have been living in neighboring countries.

 

Germany, which accepted the largest number of Syrian asylum seekers outside the Mideast, has as many as a  million people with Syrian passports. Many are well-educated.

 

(There are few Syrian refugees in the U.S.)

Right-wing German politicians want them to go back to their native land ASAP, with some politicians even suggesting paying them, say, the equivalent of $1,000 each to return.   As in America, there continues to be much anti-immigrant animus. But there’s also uncertainty about who will take the jobs that these refugees, many with middle-class backgrounds, have had in Germany,  more than a few in health care.

 

 

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Tennessee is right. In a case that’s before the U.S. Supreme Court,  it defended its ban on the use of such hormones as “puberty blockers”  for people under 18  who want to present themselves as having another sex than the one they’re born with.  This is simply common sense. Young people change their minds more often than adults and the effects of these “sex-change’’ treatments can be irreversible – and sometimes dangerous.

 

Note that the United Kingdom’s Labor Party government has also banned these hormones.

 

And people who have “changed sex’’ shouldn’t be allowed to play on school athletic teams composed of members of their “new” sex. That’s because it can be unfair: The laws of biology as represented by, among other things, physical strength can’t be entirely annulled.

 

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Do many people who do their work entirely from home via Zoom, etc., gradually lose their ability to comfortably work with people in person? Does distance work increase anomie? What are we giving up with the erosion of groups working in person?

 

xxx

 

 

Core inflation, even without the effect of Trump’s tariffs and promises to deport millions of immigrants working in low-paid jobs, will stay painful for many consumers around the Developed World,  especially because of, among other things, demographic changes, supply-chain problems, wars and global warming (causing worse droughts). How long can the new regime effectively blame inflation on Biden? Inflation is, to a large extent, international.

 

Trump’s second thoughts:

 

 

Disorderly Conduct

If only a lot of voters had read historian Richard Slotkin’s latest book,  A Great Disorder: National Myth and the Battle for America. But reading entire books is an increasingly rare behavior. Actually, “lies” is a more accurate word than “myth’’. American history is rife with politics based on lies and obfuscations about our history.  (Of course, that holds true for most nations.) One of the biggest obfuscations is denying the big role played by civil and other violence in regard to racism and class. Mr. Slotkin cites the role of perceived cultural “regeneration through violence,’’ especially by White ethnonationalists.

 

He discusses such myths as those around the frontier; the Founding; the Civil War (which in some ways is still being fought) and “The Good War” (World War II) and subsidiary myths.  He brings us to now by showing how differently Red and Blue America think that they “understand’’ the past and how they came to have such divergent ideas about the nation’s identity and role in the world, as seen in our ongoing culture wars.

 

And he notes that the Right, up to the quasi-Fascist MAGA movement, has been much more relentless, and often very successful, in marketing its American mythology than has the center-left entity that we call the Democratic Party.  They’re aided by the fact that their followers tend not to be very interested in rigorous fact-finding or even in reading.