Whitcomb: Jokester Mother Nature; Being There, but Not Getting There; For Whom TikTok Tolls
Sunday, March 24, 2024
“Rest in a friend’s house, Dear, I pray:
The way is long to Good Friday,
And very chill and grey the way.’’
-- From “Lenten Communion,’’ by Katherine Tynan (1861-1931), Irish poet
“Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be
Coming back to….’’
-- From “Men at Forty,’’ by Donald Justice (1925-2004), American poet and teacher
“The illiterate of the 21st Century will not be those who cannot read and write. It will be those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.”
-- Alvin Toffler (1928-2016), American writer, futurist, and businessman
Today, misty recollections of swatting palm leaves at each other after church on Palm Sunday, when it was always too hot or too cold.
Climate chronicles continued:
I was driving through the snowless Berkshires the other week and saw a sad sign at a motel that catered to customers of nearby ski areas: “Think Snow.”
I was on my way, after meeting with a charity board colleague in the lively town of Great Barrington, to see the vast, exciting and low-slung Clark Art Institute, in Williamstown. It’s a museum mostly exhibiting European and American art, from the 14th Century on, created by Robert Sterling Clark (1877-1956) and his wife, Francine Clark (1876-1960). Mr. Clark was an heir to the Singer Sewing Machine Co. fortune.
The museum is in the very small academic town (Williams College) because the Clarks thought that its remoteness would prevent it from being destroyed in a Soviet nuclear attack! The number of cultural institutions in The Berkshires is astonishing – museums, theaters, musical venues, colleges, etc.
The region’s by turns bucolic and harsh beauty has drawn many famous visual artists and writers. One of the latter was Herman Melville (1819-1891), who saw the shape of a whale as he gazed at Mt. Greylock from Pittsfield while writing Moby-Dick, in 1850.
One of the strengths/quirks of America, and maybe a reminder that we have the West’s greatest income inequality, is how creators or inheritors of great wealth fund nonprofit institutions in a much wider range of places than you see in other Western countries – even in virtually the middle of nowhere.
Back to climate. Mother Nature has the final say. People with houses (mostly summer places. I think) along the beach in Salisbury, Mass., had passed the hat to spend $600,000 to rebuild sand dunes in front of the properties. Three days after the project was completed earlier this month, a storm washed away much of the dunes. And now the owners want the state’s taxpayers to help pay for restoration.
But many taxpayers are getting fed up with taking care of usually affluent people who insist on having houses virtually on the water. As I’ve written here before, it’s past time to sound the bugle to retreat inland. It’s worth noting that long before our era of global warming and rising seas, few people in New England towns lived right along the water. They built houses around town greens and on farms well above the highest storm tides.
Adapt, adapt! As warming winters cut in maple-sap collections, researchers are looking into getting much increased sap for syrup from such trees as birch and beech that are less affected by global warming. They aren’t as rich a source of syrup as maples, but they hold some promise at filling some of the gap. Hit this link from New Hampshire:
Southern New Englanders will also be growing more fruit trees that have typically been grown further south, such as peaches and heat-tolerant apple varieties.
Still, there’s the natural variability of weather as opposed to the march of climate. We’ll still have stretches in which the weather will be cooler than “average” (though “average” keeps changing), such as the weather forecast for this week.
I think of this quote (which I often drag out at this time of year) from Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, his memoir of being a young man in Paris in the ‘20s:
“When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person had died for no reason. In those days, though, the spring always came finally but it was frightening that it had nearly failed.’’
Then it’s April in Paris and chestnut trees in blossom…
Being There, Not Getting There
Thinking of travel: I dislike moving between widely separated places. Driving and flying have become increasingly unpleasant, partly because so many of travelers are, both those who were already surly from an early age (maybe including me), and those made unpleasant by the stresses of increasingly crowded travel. And trains don’t go to enough places, especially in America.
Travel is just so expensive, something I had mostly forgotten about in the years when an employer, temporary or permanent, was paying for much of my long-distance travel, especially abroad.
Being in a new place, especially foreign, however, is energizing – such as strolling around an old city the morning after you arrive, and sitting at a café with a coffee and watching the walkers. And you get lots of tales, some tall, to tell your friends back home. But don’t think about the trip back – the lines in the airports, etc.
There’s a paradox in that as you get older you might need/want to travel more even as it seems more onerous -- to visit friends or relatives who, you worry, might shove off to the next world without warning.
xxx
Despite the recent chill after a warm winter, a few lawns are turning green, though most remain a winter-flattened brown, and this week they will stay that way. The perfect uniformity of some of these lawns, produced by using only one seed variety, strong weed killers and manmade fertilizers, is enervating.
Some spring flowers – daffodils, etc. -- have a substance like anti-freeze (glycol) that lets them survive cold snaps. If only we humans had something like that, without getting drunk on a cold March day.
Controlling Carnivores
Cutting fossil-fuel combustion is, of course, the most publicized challenge in slowing global warming.
But also tough will be reducing emissions from livestock and dairy animals. Rich and middle-income countries are the primary source of these emissions. The people there generally love to eat meat (though it’s not very healthy to do so) and dairy and can afford it. Plant-based diets are cheaper.
Emissions related to animal husbandry come mostly from cows’ methane-rich burps, manure and the corn and soy produced to feed farmed animals using gasoline-and-diesel-burning equipment such as tractors and combines. An estimated 15-20 percent of greenhouse gas emissions come from livestock.
And a lot of the land now used for grazing would otherwise be forests that would absorb some of the excess carbon dioxide we’re putting into the atmosphere by burning oil, coal and natural gas.
People will be increasingly encouraged to change much of their dietary habits away from animal protein. Good luck with that!
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Okay, now it’s official that the westbound part of the Washington Bridge on Route 195 will, in fact, be closed for at least two years as a replacement span is built. That’s a long time for a partial closure on an interstate highway in an urban area. Traffic on it is particularly heavy in the summer, with people heading for Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket or even heading east and then toward Boston and points north.
And the bridge was a way to get to the joys of Newport while avoiding the Pell Bridge.
So to at least alleviate the gridlock, not to mention high blood pressure, especially in East Providence (now too tangled to be the famous speed trap it was) could the state lease a bunch of ferries for new passenger service up and down the Bay, starting at Fox Point? At the very least, it might lure some of those out-of-state tourists who might otherwise be scared away by the bridge hassles. Places in Europe that include a big bay and archipelago, like Rhode Island, have dense ferry service.
I chuckle at how some reporters have said how important it is for Rhode Island Gov. Dan McKee’s re-election campaign to fix the Washington Bridge. I’d be astonished if he tried for re-election in 2026. He’s 72 and will always be associated with the bridge fiasco, though the fiasco was forming long before he became governor. There’s plenty of blame to go around.
xxx
Every state should have such a law: The Rhode Island Senate has passed a bill requiring that all firearms be stored in a locked container or have a tamper-resistant lock when not with their owners or other authorized users. Of course, the gun nuts will complain that this somehow violates their interpretation of the Second Amendment (which refers to “a well-regulated Militia” as its rationale).
Yes, of course, many people would ignore such a law, and it wouldn’t stop owners’ suicides. And there are hundreds of millions of guns floating around America, thanks to the NRA and its political allies. But as we follow the news from around America, we can see how laws like the one in the Rhode Island Senate would save some lives and stop some crimes.
xxx
Newport’s summer spectacular this year might be the Preservation Society of Newport County (which owns The City by the Sea’s most famous museum mansions) battling to block the installation of offshore wind turbines that some (most?) of its members don’t want to look at on the far horizon.
Meanwhile, check out Save The Bay’s exciting aquarium: CLICK HERE
Nice Beach?
The horror continues in Gaza as Hamas fighters, emerging from their vast tunnel network, continue to use civilians as human shields in the war against Israel that Hamas started on Oct. 7. Of course, the civilian deaths would stop if Hamas, which is still very intentionally fighting from hospitals and other big buildings with civilians trapped inside, stopped attacking Israeli troops. They won’t. Precipitating massive civilian deaths is a key part of its propaganda strategy. And as of last week, Hamas still held Israeli 134 Israeli hostages after having killed as many as 53 of them.
Meanwhile, there are still efforts underway to bring in “moderate” Arabs (everything is relative) from rich Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf sheikdoms to help rebuild and force out the remnants of Hamas in Gaza. Hamas is, after all, allied with the Arabs’ enemy Iran, which has long provided Hamas, whose aim is to eliminate Israel, with money, weapons and training.
Meanwhile, Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner has praised the “very valuable” potential of Gaza’s “waterfront property”. Club Med Gaza, after removing bodies and unexploded bombs?
xxx
After mostly wasting many lives and hundreds of billions of dollars in a failed effort to save Iraq and Afghanistan from tyranny, we’ve (because of the GOP/QAnon) pretty much stopped helping a democracy with Western values to fend off an invasion launched by a fascist dictator who also directly threatens our NATO allies.
Doesn’t compute.
Border Bathos
Politically, the Biden administration might have been better off not trying to block Texas from deporting aliens! In doing so, it reminded voters of a problem widely blamed, mostly unfairly, on Biden, whom many see as weak on the migrant issue. (Weakness is often attributed to the soft-spoken in the screaming circus of U.S. politics.) Many, perhaps most, Americans feel threatened by the migrant surge, though trying to stop it is practically and legally very complicated, unless, that is, someone is willing to call in the military to start shooting the migrants. Would that be popular? Probably to many Trumpers.
Hit this link for some debunking about immigration, legal and illegal, nationally and in Texas:
None of this means that the illegal immigration mess should not be brought under control! It has corrosive and divisive effects on the country and poses some, albeit exaggerated, national security issues. But effective reform would probably require that the same party have the presidency and, by strong majorities, the House and the Senate. Things are just too politically fraught and demagogic now to get any long-term fixes enacted.
Remember the migrants Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis sent to Martha’s Vineyard last year? He’s now considering sending more to the island, known, like Nantucket, as a favored place for rich summer people, many of them Democrats! This time he’s focusing on Haitians who are fleeing, via dangerous seas, violent crime, chaos and poverty.
I’m sure they won’t be allowed to linger near the Edgartown Yacht Club.
As I was recently reminded when visiting a bed-bound friend in a nursing home in a surprisingly suburban-looking part of Boston, many Haitian-Americans go into nursing. The ones I’ve met seemed remarkably competent and kindly.
TikTok Traumas
Will that millions of Americans have fun on and/or make money off TikTok make it politically impossible to force the Chinese Communist Party-controlled company ByteDance (sounds so cute!), which owns TikTok, to sell it to a U.S. company? Or make it impossible to just ban it? National security to play second fiddle to (most-of-it-mindless) fun?
Consider that the Chinese government can use TikTok to stick malware into our phones and computers; that the app can be used to influence U.S. politics, and that it can be used to scoop up our personal data.
And the app is yet another huge, intelligence-lowering, time-wasting tool for entertaining ourselves to death. The American way. But that’s not a security risk. Or is it?
While Trump as president promoted the idea of banning TikTok, in the last few weeks he has changed his tune and now says he likes it the way it is. Why? Well, he recently met with Jeff Yass, a GOP megadonor and ByteDance investor, who has a 7 percent personal stake in ByteDance -- a stake valued at about $21 billion.
The caudillo said "there are a lot of people on TikTok that love it," including "young kids on TikTok who will go crazy without it." True. Just as there are lots of people who will go crazy without hard drugs and/or porn.
What is clearly a scary security risk is that Trump needs money to pay for the hundreds of millions of dollars he owes as a result of losing two big legal cases in New York. Where will he get it? Note that the Trump Organization has gotten hundreds of millions from the Russians, and that his daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, are in bed with the Saudis. Or maybe the Orangeman can get his pal Viktor Orban, the Hungarian autocrat, kleptocrat and Putin disciple, to help out.
I’ll be interested to see how Trump might get some or all of the money he needs from laundered cash from dictators and their associates. And please, Biden, don’t give him access to national security information during the campaign. He’d sell or give some of it away.
Whatever Trump’s relentless claims of being a billionaire, this traitor, con man, rapist, and thief, beloved by tens of millions of sucker followers and much missed by billionaires for the goodies his kleptocratic regime gave them, he’s never been nearly as rich as you might think. A lot of blue smoke and mirrors.
Trump says he hasn’t been able to post a bond for the money he owes after reaching out to dozens of bonding companies. He must swiftly pay the full $464 million (and counting) he owes or secure a bond to avoid having some of his real-estate assets seized by the State of New York.
For a fee, a bonding company would guarantee the full amount to the New York court.
But bonders would have to pay it if Trump loses his appeal of the damage awards. Bonding companies are leery of having anything to do with a man infamous for non-stop fraud/lies, theft from vendors and charities and, all in all, stiffing everyone he can.
Indeed, most financial and related institutions with New York operations keep their distance from the Trumps, even one that had been a key funder of his 50-year crime spree, famed international money-laundering paradise Deutsche Bank.
Part of Trump’s exotic cult coalition – staggeringly and willfully (and joyfully?) ignorant citizens who don’t look up stuff, preferring to hear/watch their messiah playing his greatest hits unsullied by tedious facts -- haven’t bought enough of his gilded sneakers to cover his legal costs. They should be excommunicated!
Meanwhile, Trump wants to put tariffs of up to 60 percent on all imports from China. That would mean much higher prices for American consumers. Call it the Inflation Expansion Act.
And the Chinese would retaliate with their own tariffs on U.S. goods.
As we enter the grim industrial-strength part of the 2024 political campaign.
They Work for Us
Let’s hear it for “The Deep State” – federal government employees -- that Trump and his fascist minions are always denouncing for demagogic effect. The Deep Staters include public health workers, medical and scientific researchers, transportation overseers such as air traffic controllers, FBI agents fighting crime, regulators battling business and consumer fraud, military leaders, and brave CIA operatives abroad. The full list, of course, is much longer. Since these are all people, they all have their flaws. But consider what America would be without these people doing their often-thankless tasks for us.
Adventurous Essays
English journalist Bernard Levin’s (1928-2004) 1984 collection of essays titled The Way We Live Now is a memorable ride, whether he’s writing about history, paintings, music, politics, villains, heroes, smokers (he sort of defends them) or pretty much anything else. While many of the events and personalities the once-famous Levin takes on are long gone, the sharpness, humor, vast learning and courage of his commentary seems as fresh as ever.
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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