Whitcomb: Wooden High Rises; From Close Shave to Hangover Look; Left-Behind Places; Reasons for Woke
Robert Whitcomb, Columnist
Whitcomb: Wooden High Rises; From Close Shave to Hangover Look; Left-Behind Places; Reasons for Woke
“He tells me in Bangkok he’s robbed
Because he’s white; in London because he’s black;
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTIn Barcelona, Jew; in Paris, Arab:
Everywhere and at all times, and he fights back.’’
-- From “Baby Villon,’’ by American poet Philip Levine (1928-2015). He served as U.S. poet laureate in 2011-2012.
“True friendship withstands time, distance, and silence.’’
-- Isabel Allende (born 1942), Chilean-American writer
“When he spoke of Germany’s disgrace I felt ready to spring on an enemy. His appeal to German manhood was like a call to arms, the gospel he preached a sacred truth. He seemed another (Martin) Luther. I forgot everything but the man. Glancing around, I saw that his magnetism was holding these thousands as one.”
-- Kurt Ludecke, an early Hitler follower, on the power of a speech by the future dictator in 1922. Sounds familiar….
Seeing the leaves of the swamp maples turn red, orange and yellow is a quiet thrill in early September. And the crickets and katydids get quieter as the nights cool. But soon the full-scale fumes and fury of the leaf blowers will be upon us.
Speaking of wood, the move to “mass timber”—thick, compressed, multi-layered panels of wood—is picking up speed. The idea is to reduce the use of concrete and steel, whose production spews out vast quantities of global warming emissions. Indeed, the construction sector accounts for almost 40 percent of global emissions!
Advances in mass-timber construction now permit even very tall buildings to be made of it. In case you’re worried, mass timber doesn't burn through like wood planks or beams, but only chars on the surface.
Of course, for mass-timber construction to achieve environmental goals, trees must be grown long enough to store enough carbon and be promptly replanted once they are cut down. Presumably, most of this would happen in areas with long histories of forestry management, such as Maine and northern New Hampshire.
If done carefully, the move to mass timber could be an economic boon for such regions, but not around our densely populated area, where we’re cutting down too many trees for solar farms. All those roofs, parking lots, some abandoned, and roadside strips are where solar panels should go.
Then we have the 787-foot-tall Forbes International Tower to be built outside Cairo. Its energy needs will be provided with hydrogen supplemented with solar panels, for a net zero carbon footprint.
Making progress….
From Blades to Housing
Gillette, the razor-blade company owned by Proctor & Gamble, is setting a good example by planning to set aside about a third of new buildings on its 31-acre site in Boston’s Fort Point neighborhood for housing, which, of course, is badly needed in “The Hub.’’ Other buildings will be for labs, offices and retail. But around half of the acreage will be for park-like open space.
All this is because Gillette is moving its Boston blade-making to a P&G site in Andover, Mass. Driving by the “World Shaving Headquarters’’ on the Southeast Expressway (often called the Distressway) brings back memories of frustration in traffic jams.
I have wondered how Gillette and the other companies making razors for males are doing these days when more and more men have beards, or at least three-day facial-hair growth, which makes some guys look like they’ve been on a three-day bender and look difficult to maintain in a stylishly scruffy style. The allure of the latter mystifies me, much as I dislike shaving myself; it can hurt a little. Is the aim of some to express manliness amidst a sense of identity insecurity? Hey, look at me! I’ve got testosterone!
Some details on the project:
Here's an answer to the sales question:
“The political circumstances of Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump may be different, but they have uncanny similarities: Cult followings, conspiracy theories about an 'elite' out to get them - and an overwhelming urge to burn down the country if they can’t control it.’’
-- Alon Pinkas in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz last year
Watching the two crooks, Netanyahu and Trump, collaborate to re-elect the latter and keep both of them out of jail is a spectacle of cynicism. Of course, Trump hopes that his alliance with “Bibi” will help him with the U.S. “Jewish vote’’ enough to offset the substantial Arab-American – or at least Muslim-- vote in such swing states as Michigan. It’s too early to know if it will work, but God knows that there are more than enough suckers to make it possible.
Netanyahu seems to want to keep the violence going, both by going after the evil Hamas terror group in the face of diminishing military returns, while encouraging the sometimes violent theft of Palestinian property by Israeli settlers on the West Bank. This pleases his most right-wing allies.
Netanyahu, like Trump, has been formally charged with criminal acts, but he’s safe from the slammer while he remains prime minister. The Orange Mobster, for his part, would order the Justice Department, which he’d staff with his lackeys, to drop all federal prosecutions for his brazenly treasonous acts if, by hook or crook, he took over the Oval Office again.
Maybe Bibi will help out his pal by delaying any ceasefire until after our presidential election, on Nov. 5, lest Biden-Harris get the credit.
This is interesting:
https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/04/middleeast/netanyahu-derailed-hostage-deal-in-july-intl/index.html
Economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman’s recent column comparing West Virginia and eastern Germany led me to write this. The column reminded me a bit of reading Thomas Frank’s 2004 book What’s the Matter With Kansas: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, about the “anti-elite” movement (financed by rich elitists!) in which citizens vote against their own socio-economic interests to express their resentments, as, of course, they have every right to!
Why do so few folks in West Virginia vote for Democrats, since that party has provided the lion’s share of the federal aid that has made the state a big net gainer of our tax money and kept it from economically collapsing? The latest example is money from Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, which, among other benefits, boosts manufacturing and public physical infrastructure in a state that needs to move much faster away from the decaying coal business. The act heavily targets “disadvantaged communities,’’ of which West Virginia has many.
In any event, the increasingly fascist (and larcenous) national Republican Party is really good at pushing the buttons of bigotry, anxiety and resentment to get its adherents to vote against their own rational self-interest, albeit for their sense of belonging to an old group so important to their identity. One particularly strong tool in Red States is to stoke resentment against immigration. And yet, for example, only 1.61 percent of the Mountaineer State’s population is foreign-born, compared to 13.6 percent nationally.
One might wonder why more West Virginians don’t move to richer, mostly Blue or Purple, states for jobs. Well, moving can be anxiety-provoking and costly; it’s tough to leave family and friends, and a lot of the state is beautiful, even with the pollution from coal mines, etc. Despite all their pathologies – drug addiction, poverty, ill health, water pollution and so on -- the state’s communities offer a certain kind of cozy appeal to the state’s natives.
A lot of people want to be left behind.
Further, many West Virginians, like many Trump fans in general, are “low-information’’ folks who don’t do serious research when developing their political stands. They’d rather not let the facts get in the way of their emotions and biases as they listen to sensationalist, lie-rich radio and political talk shows and read and believe, or want to believe, the easily debunked conspiracy theories that thrive there and on the likes of Facebook and Twitter (which is owned by Trump promoter and narcissist extraordinaire Elon Musk).
West Virginia has one thing going for it: its violent crime rate is much lower than in other Red States.
Yes, I’ve been to West Virginia, and I know a bit about industries on the decline – e.g., some of my relatives were in the steel and shoe businesses and I was in the newspaper industry.
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The recent electoral success of the far-right party Alternative for Germany in eastern Germany recalls the susceptibility of economically backward places such as West Virginia to demagoguery. Like our Rust Belt areas, parts of eastern Germany have moved far too slowly away from old industries and the associated ways of life as the German economy has changed at an accelerating rate, leaving behind large numbers of anxious and embittered people, who sometimes seem psychologically paralyzed.
The region where the far right has become very popular is in what had been Communist East Germany. Some older people there even long for the security, of jobs and otherwise, as stifling as that security could be, of living in a dictatorship/police state rather than in a dynamic, competitive market economy and democracy where you’re more responsible for yourself. And they deeply resent immigrants, although these newcomers are essential for the region’s economy.
You need only drive to parts of northern New Hampshire’s Coos County where Trump is popular to see the sociological effects when a dominant industry, such as the wood-pulp-/paper business, goes into decline. (Some of Coos County looks like West Virginia.)
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Want to kill some folks fast? No problem in getting a MAGA-beloved AR-15-style assault rifle like the one a 14-year-old boy allegedly used to murder four people at his Georgia school last week.
It was satisfying to learn that Colin Gray, the father of the kid, Colt (hmm...) Gray, has been charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter, two counts of second-degree murder and eight counts of cruelty to children. Colin Gray allegedly bought his son the rifle for Christmas. For defense?
People in other civilized nations choose to make it difficult to commit mass murder with military-style weapons engineered to kill as many people as fast as possible. But people in many U.S. states, including Georgia, have chosen to make it very easy. They favor owning assault rifles over “the sanctity of life.’’
The statistics show the results.
Hit this link for information on Georgia gun laws:
Go to Sleep?
There’s been a lot of sarcastic stuff about being “woke,’’ generally from the MAGA mob. But being “woke,’’ according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, means “aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice.).’’
Of course, letting many of our human encounters become hyper-self-conscious efforts to avoid giving offense would be silly and exhausting. But in the world’s most complicated society and a semi-democracy – America -- being aware of others’ challenges would seem a moral and practical good thing, indeed essential for the nation’s long-term health.
It sometimes seems that people are more likely to show others pictures of their grandchildren than of their children. Less complicated emotions involved?
A Queen of Mean
Some of the references may be dated in this 1989 essay collection, but many of Florence King’s (1936-2016) observations in Reflections in a Jaundiced Eye remain great fun. As she’s quoted on the book jacket: “The Land of Hopefully {sic} and Glory {America} is the only place in the world where you can suffer culture shock without leaving home.’’ And what a literary critic: Reading John Updike is “like cutting through whale blubber with embroidery scissors.’’