Whitcomb: Working and Drinking; Better Than S.F.; Shell Game Not Over; Unions vs. Democracy

Sunday, February 05, 2023

Robert Whitcomb, Columnist

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Robert Whitcomb, GoLocal columnist

“Show me a good loser, and I’ll show you a loser.’’

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-- Arnold “Red Auerbach (1917-2006), basketball coach and executive, most famously with the Boston Celtics

There is a singer everyone has heard,

Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,

Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.

He says that leaves are old and that for flowers

Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.

He says the early petal-fall is past

When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers

On sunny days a moment overcast;

And comes that other fall we name the fall.

He says the highway dust is over all.

The bird would cease and be as other birds

But that he knows in singing not to sing.

The question that he frames in all but words

Is what to make of a diminished thing.

-- “The Oven Bird,’’ by Robert Frost (Now that the increasingly boring drama of Tom Brady’s retirement is over, let’s hope that his concussions don’t catch up with him.)

As the percentage of old people in the population increases, more of us are dealing with people with dementia (while hoping we don’t get it ourselves).

It’s often hard to tell how much-demented people recognize us and what associations and emotions our presence brings up in their damaged minds. Still, except in the most extreme cases, there are obviously associations, indicated by their expressions. We must take what comfort we can from them.

Consciousness remains one of science’s great mysteries.

xxx

Cheer up, winter haters! In just a few weeks, skunk cabbages, those weirdly named harbingers of spring, will be pushing up green out of southern New England’s wet ground. And to hell with Punxsutawney Phil!

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PHOTO: GoLocal

Bar Life

For various reasons, going to New York City, as I did recently, reminds me of the bars that we newspaper and magazine reporters and editors used to patronize. This wasn’t a particularly healthy practice, but these places planted some evergreen memories.

Some of the joints I most remember:

Foley’s, in Boston, beloved of Boston Herald Traveler, Record American and Globe editors and reporters, especially scruffy police reporters, with their tales of gruesome or comic crimes and police and political corruption, and news and copy editors having their “lunch” at around 8:30 p.m. between edition deadlines.

Some actually consumed the bar’s pickled eggs as they knocked back their boilermakers --- a shot of whiskey followed by a beer, or pouring a shot of whiskey into their beers and then chugging that – or downing other, not very elegant beverages. I was often amazed that some of these journos could function at all under deadline pressure upon returning to the newsroom after “lunch” at Foley’s. Certainly, many of them looked ill and aged fast. Some had noses that were tributes to the distillers’ art.

The older guys (and virtually all these colleagues were men) told vivid stories going back to the ’40s of life in what was then a gritty city. Others were taciturn, as if battered into silence by bad hours and what they had seen and heard on the job in a business in which grim news usually sells better than good.

Then there was the bar off Broad Street in Lower Manhattan where a couple of Wall Street Journal editing colleagues and I would occasionally retreat in mid-evening after work. (We’d stop working soon after listening to WQXR, then The New York Times’s radio station, to learn if we had missed a story that our biggest rival had so we could make necessary adjustments. The station helpfully broadcast a review of its next day’s Page One at 9 p.m.)

One night we came across what appeared to be a corpse on the sidewalk outside the bar that appeared to have been there for a while. A cop came along to deal with the body. (The neighborhood was virtually deserted at night in those days because few people lived there then and there were few food stores, etc., to serve them. Now there are many apartment buildings, put up during the off-and-on boom years from the mid-‘90s to COVID, and so it has much more of a 24/7 feel, though less than before the pandemic.)

In the bar, we almost got into a fistfight with a drunk who insulted our colleague Ruth; in the event, he was evicted from the establishment.

I well recall the bar/restaurant in Wilmington, Del., called The Bar Door. That’s where some of us working for the News Journal, The First State’s statewide rag, then owned by the remarkably kindly DuPont family, would lunch at least once or twice a week. My colleagues there were the most abstemious of the newspaper types I hung out with in my career, usually just confining themselves to a Rolling Rock beer. And the food, especially softshell crab from nearby Chesapeake Bay, was good, so there was less drinking on empty stomachs.

The local pols, such as, I think, Joe Biden, then a recently elected U.S. senator, would show up to gossip. My favorite was Melvin Slawik, the charming New Castle County (which includes Wilmington) executive, who was a font of stories, including very funny, self-deprecating ones about himself. He later served time for perjury, obstruction of justice and bribery. He was one of the most likeable people I’ve ever met.

There was Le Village, a bar and restaurant dangerously close to the offices of the International Herald Tribune, in the affluent Paris inner suburb of Neuilly. Because French labor law mandates frequent work breaks, too many of the staff spent too much time there drinking, and, as at all journalist hangouts in those days, smoking. Several were what you might call merely recreational alcoholics. (Growing up, I learned enough about alcoholics, recreational and full time, to last me several lifetimes.)

As the finance editor, in charge of overseeing a third of the paper, I was sometimes put in the awkward position of trying to stop the working-hours drinking of people reporting to me. In one case, I had to remove an engaging and smart, but too often drunk, colleague from consideration for a promotion. In any case, labor law sharply restricted disciplining staffers. It was tough to hire people and even tougher to fire them.

There were other journo bars too, where I heard wild stories that could be the bases of a few novels and/or film-noirish movies, some of which stories were actually true. But my time in such places mostly ended about 30 years ago. One reason I’m still alive.

Oh, yes! There was a bar called Hope’s that was heavily patronized by Providence Journal people, and owned by two of them, but I only made a few clinical research visits.

Malcolm Muggeridge (1903-1990), the great English journalist, satirist, spy, womanizer and late-in-life religious fanatic, once said something to the effect that he regretted the smoking he did, but not the drinking, because of the stories and camaraderie he got out of the latter. But drinking and smoking are two devils embracing.

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PHOTO: GoLocal

Downtown Providence now often looks more crowded than downtown Boston and San Francisco. The colleges help keep it busy, and so does the very close proximity of a large middle- and upper-class neighborhood on College Hill.

Another thing that will help is that Warren-based food-business incubator Hope & Main has opened a marketplace downtown featuring fresh and prepared foods from a wide range of local entrepreneurs, a reminder that locally grown food, in our generally temperate climate, has become a much bigger deal around here, at markets and in restaurants, over the past decade or so.

xxx

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PHOTO: RI DEM

Perry Raso and his Matunuck Oyster Bar/Mantunuck Oyster Farm may ultimately get part of the three acres he had sought for added space in South Kingstown’s Potter Pond for oyster and scallop aquaculture. It had looked like the five-year battle over the farm might end in the total defeat of his expansion plans, but now the Rhode Island Coastal Resources Management Council may consider a scaled-down version.

Mr. Raso now farms seven acres – a gigantic 2 percent of Potter Pond. Increasing his state lease by three acres, in the pond’s Segar Cove, would boost it to a vast 3 percent!

Let’s hope that Mr. Raso gets at least a substantial part of what he wants. Shellfish aquaculture cleans the water and Matunuck Oyster Bar is a very successful business that has brought substantial money to the area. These mollusks are very nutritious, and, without central nervous systems, apparently don’t feel pain. And they’re conveniently quite passive.

Mr. Raso has been blocked by neighboring rich summer and weekend people from out of state armed with high-priced lawyers. The affluent neighbors don’t want to look at his cultivation equipment, though, of course, it’s very low in the water, and don’t want any more space taken from such summer recreation as water skiing.

xxx

Rather than via a proposed state law that would set limits on how many of those God-awful, unreliable, job-killing self-checkouts a store can have, it’s better that Rhode Island customers consistently boycott all self-checkout equipment. Capitalism doesn’t work well with micro-managing, red tape-spawning laws like the aforementioned. Let consumers decide.

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Newly released

Public Employee Unions vs. Democracy

A few weeks ago, I noted that Philip K. Howard’s new book, Not Accountable: Rethinking the Constitutionality of Public Employee Unions, was about to be published and would get a lot of attention. I encourage citizens to read this important – and very readable -- work. Indeed, it’s often entertaining in a mordant way. (I heard Mr. Howard speak the other week in New York.)

Mr. Howard’s central idea is that public-employee unions, which mostly started back in the ‘60s with support from the Kennedy administration, present a big conflict of interest because politicians want/need the support of these unions to stay in office. It’s one hand washing the other.

Thus the citizenry’s interest in government being able to efficiently manage its workforce gets short shrift, and so does representative democracy. The constitutional right of the people to pick their leaders is eroded where public-employee unions, not elected officials, have the greatest public power.

Further, copious union rules make it very difficult for government managers to make processes more efficient, cost-effective and fair. Think of how hard it is to improve public schools by removing bad teachers and promoting good ones, or to remove violent, rogue police officers. Public-employee unions can make it sometimes close to impossible for government employees – both managers and the rank and file – to use their judgment and take responsibility.

And rigid union rules can hugely delay and raise the cost of needed public works, such as transportation projects – indeed, sometimes blocking them entirely. They are a reason our public infrastructure lags well behind those of other advanced industrialized nations.

Further, aggressive public-employee unions tend to undermine, fairly or not, the citizenry’s respect for public employees, and to create a sometimes toxic relationship between them. That’s unfair to the public servants and the citizens they serve.

For all these reasons, such liberal icons as Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman opposed allowing public employee unions. Of course, public employees, most of whom try to do a good job serving us, should have strong civil service protections from arbitrary punishment, including firings, especially those politically based.

Public-employee unions are anti-democratic. Time for a flood of lawsuits challenging their legality. That is not a matter of liberal and conservative but of good government.

By the way, I’m a big backer of trade unions, and have been a member of a couple of them. Americans, especially people of low and middle income, would be better off with more and stronger trade unions to get a fairer share of America’s increasingly concentrated wealth.

Hit this link for a trade union controversy:

xxx

It’s good to see that some jurisdictions, such as Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Utah, are dropping the requirement that people have college degrees for most jobs. This will strike a blow against widening income inequality because most of these positions provide solid middle-class incomes. There are many high-school courses, vocational-education programs and apprenticeships that can provide applicants for these jobs the training they need to get and keep them without the time and expense of college.

Another way to reduce income inequality would be to overturn the Supreme Court’s hideous 2010 Citizens United ruling, which gave business executives the right to funnel unlimited campaign contributions to politicians who in return act to increase the wealth and power of, natch, rich corporations, their officers and investors. But barring, say, a cholera epidemic at the court, don’t expect change any time soon.

Then we have the likelihood that this spring the Supremes will ban colleges’ affirmative action in admissions for racial minorities. The effect will be to strengthen traditional affirmative action for affluent white and Asian students. That’ll widen income inequality a bit.

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PHOTO: file

Drugged-Up Ads

U.S. drug companies’ biggest market is older people who watch TV, especially the evening network news shows. Drugs for a wide range of ailments, or at least conditions, some serious, some hilariously minor, even invented, are pitched on these programs. And because they’re in-patent and with brand names – they’re all expensive.

The aim is to get well-insured patients, upon seeing these alluring and oft-misleading ads, to ask their physicians for prescriptions for the stuff. Medicare, Medicaid and private insurance pay for most of these meds – yet another reason why U.S. health costs are the highest in the world.

I wasn’t surprised when I read a report in JAMA Open Network that about 73 percent of the drugs advertised on TV have “low therapeutic value” compared with existing, often generic, meds.

It would be better if direct drug-company-to-consumer advertising were banned, as it used to be because of the fear that naïve, ill-informed patients would be tricked by the marketing into obtaining inappropriate medications by pestering their doctors for them. The only other Western nation that allows this direct marketing is New Zealand.

Hit this link for the JAMA article.

In any event, turn on your skepticism machine while watching these drug ads.

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Governor Ron DeSantis PHOTO: State of Florida Public Domain

Course Correction

“The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.’’

-- Aristotle, circa 330 B.C.

As I noted the other week, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis blocked an Advanced Placement high school African-American Studies (mostly history) course. The vengeful, grandstanding governor, who wants to be president and so is promoting himself as a crusader against “wokeism” (i.e., social awareness, which would generally seem a good thing), said it lacked “educational value.’’

The course has since been revised.

The problem is that the course, like some others, would tangle the students in current politics, trendy jargon and gibberish-rich arguments at the expense of a solid, chronological knowledge of history.

For example, a College Board draft of the course DeSantis blocked, obtained by a gleeful Wall Street Journal editorialist, include “The Reparations Movement” (to address the long-term effects of slavery}, which “explores the case for reparations,’’ and “Black Queer Studies,’’ which “explores the concept of the queer of color critique, grounded in Black feminism and intersectionality, as a Black studies lens that shifts sexuality studies toward racial analysis.’’ A fragrant rhetorical swamp!

Far too many young people arrive at college remarkably ignorant. Courses like the one at issue don’t help.

I had a brilliant European history professor at college named John Adams, a thrillingly lucid lecturer whose exam questions were along the lines of “list -- with precise dates -- and explain the significance of the five most important events in Europe from 1815 to 1914.’’ Get the basic chronological facts down. Adams was a famously tough marker but you didn’t mind because you learned so much.

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I remember with a pang having a couple of meals with bright young Russian businessmen (okay, would-be oligarchs) in America and France in the mid-'90s, those brief, chaotic years in which it seemed that there was a good chance that Russia could finally escape from tyranny and fend off the developing post-Soviet kleptocracy. These guys drank a lot, and wanted me to also as they spun out ideas for joint ventures, etc.

They seemed so friendly and were ebullient about the potential of their vast country, now back to being ruled, in traditional Russian fashion, by a brutal dictator.

xxx

You often hear the argument that NATO members should avoid further arming Ukraine, which desperately wants to join the alliance, lest the war there be seen as Russia vs. NATO. But Russia has warred on NATO for years!

Robert Whitcomb is a veteran editor and writer. Among his jobs, he has served as the finance editor of the International Herald Tribune, in Paris; as a vice president and the editorial-page editor of The Providence Journal; as an editor and writer in New York for The Wall Street Journal, and as a writer for the Boston Herald Traveler (RIP). He has written newspaper and magazine essays and news stories for many years on a very wide range of topics for numerous publications, has edited several books and movie scripts and is the co-author of among other things, Cape Wind.

Whitcomb: Working and Drinking; Better Than S.F.; Shell Game Not Over; Unions vs. Democracy

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