Whitcomb: Easter Ambiguities; Fortuitous Follies; Tracks to South Coast; Guns Galore

Sunday, April 02, 2023

Robert Whitcomb, Columnist

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Robert Whitcomb, Columnist

When fishes flew and forests walked

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And figs grew upon thorn,

Some moment when the moon was blood

Then surely I was born.

With monstrous head and sickening cry

And ears like errant wings,

The devil’s walking parody

On all four-footed things.

The tattered outlaw of the earth,

Of ancient crooked will;

Starve, scourge, deride me: I am dumb,

I keep my secret still.

Fools! For I also had my hour;

One far fierce hour and sweet:

There was a shout about my ears,

And palms before my feet.

--- “The Donkey,’’ by G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936), English writer

Happy Palm Sunday!

"The year is ended, and it only adds to my age;
Spring has come, but I must take leave of my home.
Alas, that the trees in this eastern garden,
Without me, will still bear flowers."
-- Su Ting (680-737), Chinese official and literary figure

“Democracy is the menopause of Western society, the grand climacteric of the body social. Fascism is its middle-aged lust.’’

--- Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007), French sociologist, philosopher and poet

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PHOTO: DNK Photo, Unsplash

This time of year teaches a bit of humility. Soft, calm days followed by cold windy ones, albeit the former gradually winning over the latter as the light spreads, and, year by year, it gets warmer in fits and starts, especially at night. So while we used to associate daffodils with early April, now they start blooming by the third week of March and tulips by the last week.

I’m a product of a kind of post-belief religiosity, in which the habits of worship took over decades ago from belief in the supernatural – mostly. In my family, we participated in Holy Week events – Palm Sunday (we took the fronds home and swatted each other with them), noted the grimness of Good Friday, and observed both the spiritual and the consumerist aspects of Easter – candy, egg hunts and so on, maybe a present or two, followed by a lamb or ham dinner.

Somewhere along the way I asked my parents if they believed the Easter stories. My mother said something to the effect of “it’s tradition,” and my father, “I like some of the music.’’ But my sense of the numinous, of the feeling that there may be some directing force out there that we can never truly comprehend persists. We swim in mystery.

It all reminds me of the remark of the late novelist Joan Didion, (a deist or an agnostic) that she “believed in the sound of the {Anglican} Book of Common Prayer.’’

Eventually, after I had mostly fled town, my family moved from the Gothic Revival Episcopal church (“the Republican Party at Prayer”), with its ornate and dramatic liturgy, to the Colonial era meeting house now occupied by a Unitarian congregation whose services had an almost Quaker simplicity. (The church is in the silly movie The Witches of Eastwick.) The theology was all about being nice, tolerant and promoting mild social reform and showing respect for Nature. The old joke was that the Unitarians believed in “the fatherhood of God {sort of}, the brotherhood of man and the neighborhood of Boston.’’

There was some musical overlap, but the Episcopal hymns were generally better than the Unitarians’.

Easter reminded us that summer was coming, especially on those unseasonably warm late Easters when we regretted wearing those heavy winter going-to-church clothes (itchy wool) and watched the buds on some of the trees around the common unexpectedly become light-green leaves in a few hours.

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Those little yellow “lawn chemicals applied” signs are blooming. This stuff is toxic to a wide range of creatures, it screws up the local ecosystems, and it pollutes water.

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The latest news involving alleged corruption in the Teamsters union (hit link below) reminded me of its fearsome reputation for thuggery back in the ‘50’s and ‘60’s, when people I knew had to negotiate with them for some Greater Boston businesses. But despite their (oft-earned) bad vibes, the Teamsters were well known for compelling members to follow contracts to the letter – or else! -- once the unpleasant, smoke-filled bargaining was done. Admirable rigor!

READ MORE HERE

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PHOTO: William Smith, Unsplash

Spread It Around

Instead of plowing tens of millions of tax dollars into such big sports projects as Fortuitous Partners’ (unsettling name!) soccer stadium in Pawtucket, which already looks like a potential fiscal fiasco, Rhode Island would do better to follow the approach recommended by my friend Ken Williamson in Hawaii and help finance smaller, less expensive facilities for communities around the state.

Ken, who used to live in the Ocean State, notes that the Aloha State has:

“invested in sports complexes throughout the various communities which include baseball, basketball, football, tennis, swimming, horseshoe pits, rock climbing courses, golf courses, canoe paddling clubs, sailing clubs and new pickleball courts. There are ATV parks, gun ranges, archery ranges, ice skating rinks for hockey and figure skating, bowling centers, roller-skating rinks, in-line skating parks, drag strips, bike paths and bike street lanes to name a few.’’

It sounds like a fairer way to do things than concentrating so many resources in one project partly aimed at enriching a bunch of rich and well-connected investors.

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PHOTO: MBTA

Enough to Get Them on Board?

Will the return, after many decades, of passenger rail service between Boston, Fall River and New Bedford and intermediate spots late this year be a big boost to the long economically challenged old mill towns? Both Fall River and New Bedford are often lumped together, though they’re different in many ways, especially in that New Bedford is a big fishing port and the former whaling capital, as well as an arts center, and hilly Fall River is more physically dramatic.

Commuter service could enable some folks who otherwise would be stuck trying to find “affordable” housing in pricey Greater Boston to find much cheaper digs in those cities and, we hope, add new economic and other energy to urban parts of the South Coast in general. Could it even lure more than a few Boston area businesses to set up shop there?

The current MBTA plan for South Coast Rail calls for three-morning peak commuting trains and three late-in-the-day peak commuting trains to both New Bedford and Fall River. The trips from the cities to South Station in Boston are projected to take about 90 minutes, which could sometimes be faster than driving. The service will mean six morning and evening trains to Taunton and Middleboro; all the trains will make those stops. During off-peak periods, trains will run every 3 to 3½ hours.

Frequency, reliability and marketing are key to winning over enough drivers to mass transit. I’m not sure that the planned schedules would be frequent enough. Yes, taxpayers will heavily subsidize the service -- as they do the highways. The train service, if it’s promoted enough, might, over the years, gradually lighten traffic on those roads a bit.

Hit this link:

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PHOTO: GoLocal

Is Providence College now mostly a professional basketball team? Well, no, but sometimes that liberal-arts school sounds like it. What would PC’s Dominican founders have thought of the basketball obsession?

I came across this from a Dartmouth College publication:

“A new ‘tranquility room’ has opened at Berry Library, where students can enjoy two massage chairs, ambient music, and the occasional therapy dog.’’ Poor lambkins! How will they make it through life?

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GoLocal reports that the Rhode Island Senate has approved legislation that would allow sports wagering on in-state collegiate teams when they’re participating in tournaments that consist of four or more teams. Oh, good, maybe we can have our very own Black Sox-style scandal. Let’s get as many young people hooked on gambling as fast as we can.

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RIAC CEO Ahmad PHOTO: GoLocal

Kudos to Rhode Island Airport Corporation CEO Iftikhar Ahmad and his colleagues for bringing Breeze Airways and its numerous nonstop flights to Rhode Island T.F. Green International Airport (absurdly long name!), which is now one of the growing airline’s bases.

This is obviously good news for southeastern New England. I wonder what impact it might have on the airport’s city, Warwick.

Now if the airport could again snag a few European flights, I’m sure that the Federal Aviation Administration would like to take some of the load off Boston’s Logan International Airport.

The New England states need to act together in energy regulatory policies and in using new federal infrastructure money. They should do this to maximize the effectiveness of the region’s move away from fossil fuel to such energy sources as hydro, nuclear (yes), wind, solar and whatever else may help the environment and boost the region’s energy independence. The states are too small to go it alone, and each state has some similar challenges.

By the way, fossil fuel kills immensely more birds than wind turbines, both from direct pollution from spills, etc., as well as from the effects of global warming. In any case, companies are coming up with ways to try to better protect birds in turbine areas.

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The repopulation of Lower Manhattan over the last couple of decades may have some lessons for cities, some happy, some not so much, hammered by the pandemic and the remote work that has partly emptied many office buildings.

Hit this link:

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PHOTO: BK Bennett, Flickr

Mass Murder in Fox Land

Nothing serious will be done about assault rifles and gun violence in general until many more people decide to bestir themselves and oust the prostitutes of the gun industry who run an increasingly barbaric, demagogic, fascist and lie-soaked national Republican Party funded by very rich people who get goodies in return for financing culture-war distractions. That’s a windy way of saying that nothing will be done. Period.

An assault weapons ban that went into effect in the Clinton administration worked before it expired in 2004 with the approval of the Republican-controlled Congress, loyal employees of the gun lobby and its cultists. (I grew up with a .22 rifle and a 12-gauge shotgun myself.)

The country often had reasonable gun control before George W. Bush, and Trump stacked the Supreme Court with right-wing extremists, who ignored the wording of the Second Amendment, written in a time of muskets and single-shot rifles, and GOP gerrymandering gave the party control more often than not of the U.S. House.

“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.’’

Note the wording “well regulated’’.

Even worse mass murders are coming, but the GOP/QAnon won’t care unless far more of the majority of the population who polls show want substantially tougher gun controls actually vote on the issue.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/811842/support-distribution-for-banning-assault-style-weapons-in-the-united-states/

The biggest sick joke/lie is when gun fetishists say that the numerous mass murders with assault weapons should be blamed on mental-health problems. Well, there are lots of mentally and emotionally ill people everywhere, but in America we arm them with weapons of war. And for that matter, Red States, the heartland of guns and gun violence, generally provide fewer resources for mentally ill people than Blue States. Hypocrisy makes the world go round.

It's worth noting that Blue States that try, with considerable success, to curb gun violence, must deal with the guns flooding in from Red States.

Hit this link for state-by-state comparisons of gun deaths; southern New England looks very good:

The heavily armed Red States have the worst indices of a range of things – poverty, health, violent crime, education, etc., and are heavily subsidized by the rich Blue States. (The subsidies include helping Southerners cope with their nonstop weather disasters, such as frequent tornadoes and floods.) Before businesses move there because of state tax promises they might want to look more deeply into what they’re getting into.

In any event, nothing much will change unless and until voters change Congress.

If you want to see a picture of mental illness and guns, look at Tennessee GOP/QAnon Congressman Andy Ogles’s Christmas card. What a family man! He represents part of Nashville, scene of course of the latest school shooting.

https://www.cbsnews.com/video/nashville-rep-andy-ogles-responds-to-criticism-of-christmas-card-of-his-family-posing-with-guns/

By the way, like some other GOP/QAnon reps, the Koch Brothers-funded Ogles turns out to be a major liar about his background, though not, so far, at the Olympic level of his Trumpian colleague New York Congressman George Santos. Of course, the Dems have liars and con men, too, but as seems appropriate in a party whose leader is a world-historical liar/con man, the current GOP/QAnon takes dishonesty to stratospheric levels.

(And now the nation’s orange malignancy has been indicted, the first in what will probably be a series of charges more serious than last week’s. Wouldn’t anyone else who had done what he has done over the years long ago been in the slammer?)

Hit this link:

Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.

-- Mark Twain

But then congressional Republicans have long abandoned the notion that they’re supposed to work at governing/problem-solving to make life better for Americans. They’d rather spend their time as performers in culture-war spectacles that rile up their base.

Maybe someday some brave group will create a thoughtful, prescriptive right-of-center party, which every democracy (or plutocracy/ semi-democracy like America) needs as a brake on leftist utopian schemes. Until that happens, we’ll have to put up with a fake “conservative” outfit, parts of which increasingly resemble organized crime.

The GOP has long had one big thing going for it: Ruthlessness. Consider what they did in the 1968 and 1980 presidential campaigns:

Richard Nixon pressed the South Vietnamese government to block peace talks in the closing days of the 1968 elections, and Ronald Reagan’s people worked to delay the release of American hostages from Iran until after the defeat of Jimmy Carter. Treason? You be the judge.

Then there’s Watergate and Iran-Contra….

Of course, millions of folks will continue to fall for these guys. Que sera, sera. Many Americans care remarkably little about the health of their semi-democracy, though they’ll regret it after it sinks below the waves. Millions forget (or don’t research!) the historical connection between prosperity and democracy as they look forward to reinstalling a psychopathic gangster in the Oval Office.

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From the endless news references (including dragged into the Nashville murders) to “trans people,’’ you’d think, say, 20 percent of Americans are transgendered! In fact, they comprise a minuscule percentage of the population. Hit this link:

They are not a threat to The Republic and what some call “The American Way of Life,’’ which means whatever you want it to mean. Still, they’re over-covered by the news media.

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One useful thing that has come out of Russia’s horrifying war on Ukraine, aided by Putin ally and fellow tyrant China’s Xi Jinping, is awakening Europe to the dangers of economic reliance on China. Thus, European nations are belatedly taking such steps as restricting exports of chip-making equipment to that aggressive nation and, all in all, pushing a more protectionist policy toward it. They are coming to realize their security depends in part on strengthening trade ties among democracies.

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: Easter Ambiguities; Fortuitous Follies; Tracks to South Coast; Guns Galore

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Whitcomb: Easter Ambiguities; Fortuitous Follies; Tracks to South Coast; Guns Galore

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