Whitcomb: Lunching on Old Times; Bike Lanes in Newport; ATVs; A Spy Writer’s Material

Sunday, March 26, 2023

Robert Whitcomb, Columnist

 

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Robert Whitcomb, columnist

 

“The green catalpa tree has turned

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All white; the cherry blooms once more.   

In one whole year I haven’t learned   

A blessed thing they pay you for.   

The blossoms snow down in my hair;   

The trees and I will soon be bare.’’

-- From “April Inventory,’’ by W.D. Snodgrass (1926-2009), American poet
 

 

 

“Friendship itself will not stand the strain of very much good advice for very long.’’

--- Robert Wilson Lynd (1879-1949), Irish writer

 

 

 

“Any academic or literary hustler caught writing that graffiti is a fascinating expression of artistic and cultural creativity {should} be sprayed magenta and left without grants for a year, sentences to be served consecutively.’’

-- Calvin Trillin (born 1935), American writer
 

 

 

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Truman Taylor and President Ronald Reagan

It’s relaxing fun to break bread with a retired journalistic colleague and swap war stories. I (occasionally semi-retired) do that from time to time with my pal the world-historical Truman Taylor, a long-time anchorman and public affairs chief on Providence’s Channel 6. I was reminded of that last week as we met for a long lunch.

 

His stories of encounters with the famous and unfamous, from Baron Bic at the America’s Cup races at Newport, to mobster CEO Raymond Patriarca, to assorted Kennedys, to the drunken host of a fishing and hunting TV show in Maine are often hilarious, albeit sometimes darkly.  Ah, those jolly days before Google and Facebook started taking most of the news media’s ad revenue and publishing journalists’ stuff without paying.

 

Looking forward to our next lunch, and unlike not that many years ago, we don’t worry about having to get back to the office!

 

 

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There seemed an unusual dearth of robins a couple of weeks ago but now they seem to be on every lawn. Maybe a worm population explosion in the thawed-out, wet ground? Robins are rather boring to look at, but they sure have a pretty song.

 

 

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PHOTO: Ed Robertson, Unsplash

Old Books, Old Businesses

I was a guest the other week of a group of bibliophiles. Members’ passion for (mostly old) books, for their physical charms as well as their content, was endearing, as was the droll humor of some of the members I talked with.

 

At each of these dinner meetings, a member gives a talk. The speaker, when I was there, discussed a narrative about a Pacific island covered with guano, which for part of the 19th Century, was used to make a highly profitable product in New England. Yankee businessmen would ship the stuff from the Pacific or the Caribbean, mix it with fish meal and market it as the best fertilizer, which it was until manmade ones came along (to eventually pose serious environmental problems). Some of my ancestors were investors in the Pacific Guano Co., in Woods Hole, on Cape Cod. (“Whitcomb, I always knew you were full of….”). The company occupied land where you now catch the ferries to Martha’s Vineyard.


Most industries eventually shrink or even disappear. In New England, the best examples are the shoe and textile sectors.  (No comment on the slave trade or “The China Trade,’’ some of which involved selling opium.) So always diversify! Mix it up!

 

I thought of that while reading a Commonwealth Magazine article about Greater Boston losing manufacturing jobs and industrial land at an alarming pace.  This needs to be reversed. We need more than white-collar jobs.  And having local factories can help reduce supply-chain costs.

 

The article noted:

 

“A deteriorating regional industrial base has the potential to damage our region’s economic strength, pricing smaller companies out of the area and disproportionately impacting workers of color and those without college degrees. Economic studies tie healthy manufacturing employment and ecosystems to greater economic resilience and innovation, and the revitalization of American industry is key to building a middle class and addressing wage disparities. And yet, we are already facing a large-scale loss of space that could impact our state for many generations.’’
 

Hit this link:

 

The region’s biotech biz has shown great growth in the past couple of decades, but it’s dangerous to depend on one sector. Just ask the folks in Silicon Valley.

 

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PHOTO: File

Speaking of diversification and the lack thereof, as I noted last week, Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) collapsed in large part because of its depositors’ extreme concentration in tech and venture capital, which are under stress. Which gets me again to the troubling, if understandable, bailing out of SVB and Signature Bank depositors with more than the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. account- a coverage limit of $250,000 per owner or co-owner. That includes many SVB depositors, many of whom are very rich and who yanked their accounts in a panic. Once more, as with the tax code, it’s welfare for the rich.

 

The FDIC shouldn’t be bailing out people who could easily set up multiple accounts in multiple banks.  Spread the risk. My hunch is that so many of these fat-cat depositors were at SVB because the bank gave them very preferential treatment. Were there corrupt financial relations between bank senior officers and some depositors? Or was this just hubris and/or bad risk management? Maybe there should be limits on how much one depositor can have in a single bank.

 

And should shareholders be required to supply more funding for banks with less from depositors and debtholders? One thing is clear: More regulation and government examiners are needed. Banks obviously can’t be trusted to always be good risk managers.

 

 

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Brooke Harrington, a Dartmouth  College professor of economic sociology, has a fine idea in trying to crack down on Russian oligarchs, many of whom help Vladimir Putin stay in power. She says:

 

“Impose sanctions on the wealth managers who create these complex offshore shell games. A new study shows why: The wealth managers, not their elite clients {the oligarchs}, are the masterminds devising sanction-evasion strategies, as well as the Russian-doll nesting structures that conceal oligarchs’ assets in shell companies and trusts. Punish the intermediaries, and the oligarchs lose access to many of the offshore networks enabling them to evade the law.’’

Hit this link:

 

 

 

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PHOTO: File

Biking in the City by the Sea

There will be a rumpus by some infuriated Newport business people and other locals, but this plan could ultimately be good for them and the city.
 

The city’s latest transportation plan calls for the lanes on America’s Cup Avenue and Memorial Boulevard to be cut to one lane in each direction in order to create bike lanes from the city’s downtown to Easton’s Beach.

 

Newport is a gorgeous and fascinating city to bike in, and this plan could lure a lot of tourists, at least from April to November. Maybe establish a  new parking facility where people from out of town could leave their cars and set out on their bike rides, maybe some on rental bikes. No ATV’s allowed!

 

 

 

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PHOTO: GoLocal

The ATV Assault, Redux

Let’s hope that the Rhode Island State Police can monitor and help stop the swarms of law-breaking ATV drivers occasionally invading Providence and threatening pedestrians and other drivers on (otherwise) nice days, such as a few days ago. Perhaps the cops in the surrounding communities can do more to alert Providence and the state police. This potentially lethal menace requires a lot of regional law-enforcement coordination to suppress.

 

Police need to undertake mass arrests of these barbarians and have them jailed.

 

 

 

Just Get Rid of It

ecoRI News reports:

“A trio of bills under consideration in the  {Rhode Island} House of Representatives would convert the {state} Coastal Resources Management Council from an agency with an executive council to a traditional government department and empower its executive director to take on greater authority (H6034). The legislation would also allow the director to appoint hearing officers who could be shared with other state agencies (H5779), and mandate a full-time lawyer to represent agency staff (H5966). ''

 

But as I’ve asked too many times before, why not ditch the CRMC entirely? While it has good technical staff, their recommendations are sometimes overruled by politically and economically powerful players on its board. Give its powers to the state Department of Environmental Management, whose actions are usually science-based.

 

Summer is coming soon, so we’re thinking more about this these days.

 

Hit this link:

 

 

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Always try to find out who’s funding self-proclaimed “environmental’’ groups that fight green-energy projects, such as offshore wind turbines. It could be the likes of coastal developers or laundered oil, gas, and coal money. Or just a small local group of well-heeled, well-lawyered people who don’t want these projects on their horizon. After all, they paid good money for their views!

 

READ HERE

 

 

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There’s lots of talk about raising the age at which people can collect Social Security, especially from Republicans. Should those who have had tough physical jobs, such as roofers and other construction workers,  fishermen and so on, be allowed to take their benefits earlier than those in purely white-collar jobs? (Not that many of the latter still wear shirts with white collars!) Sounds fair but I suppose it would be virtually impossible to establish the standards.

 

 

‘’Borne back ceaselessly into the past’’*

A Private Spy: The Letters of John le Carré, whose “real life” name was David Cornwell (1931-2020), is a treasure trove about the life and times of the great writer who became famous for his spy novels, starting with The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1964), which was made into a haunting movie. The letters were edited by his son Tim, who died last year. We can guess that Tim loyally kept out some embarrassing stuff, but le Carré was such a prolific letter writer (mostly in longhand; not coincidentally, he drew well enough to have become an artist) that more will probably come out of the shadows and perhaps be for sale at hefty prices and be used in biographies.

 

Le Carré was a complicated figure indeed. His father was a Trumpian-level con man, and an abusive narcissist; his mother abandoned him when he was five. As a spy and then as a writer, he was both repelled by and drawn to espionage, its drama and dangers, its betrayals, its friendships and its settings, some colorful, some drab. While embracing family life and with a seemingly happy long marriage with his second wife, he carried on affairs.

 

While he could be sociable, and maintained many long friendships, he spent considerable time as something of a hard-working recluse in his compound on the Cornish shore. He could be unctuous and sometimes scathing but usually he seemed straightforward, kind and diffident, and he could be funny. He saw himself as a sort of semi-socialist and yet admired Margaret Thatcher. He detested communism and rapacious capitalism, the latter of which he saw as becoming more extreme since the ’80s. He was a superb skier and had racehorses.

 

He once said:

 

"I remember the dissembling as we grew up, and the need to cobble together an identity for myself and how, in order to do this, I filched from the manners and lifestyle of my peers and betters, even to the extent of pretending I had a settled home life with real parents and ponies. All this no doubt made me an ideal recruit to the secret flag."
 

 

‘’Until I die, the father-son relationship will obsess me’’.

 

What might be his greatest book, A Perfect Spy (1986), with its autobiographical elements, grapples with this.

 

“Childhood is the writer’s bank balance’’ is reputed to have been said by the English novelist Graham Greene (1904-1991). Actually, isn’t that true for most of us?

*The last words of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.


 

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.


 

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