David Warsh: WWI, the elites and the 2008 crash

  By DAVID WARSH

BOSTON

A century after the outbreak of World War I, in 1914, and the memory of the wholly unexpected series of horrors to which it led, many commentators are feeling a little gloomy. Ordinarily I am persuaded by whatever sensible, knowledgeable, well-connected Martin Wolf has to say.

So I was surprised last week to find the chief economics columnist for the Financial Times arguing that our future is once again threatened by ignorant elites, just as it was in the years after 1914.  This time, he wrote, the best and the brightest have been mismanaging the peace rather than bungling a war and its aftermath.

Wolf’s bill of particulars: First, the economic, financial, intellectual and political elites mostly misunderstood the consequences of headlong financial liberalization. Lulled by fantasies of self-stabilizing financial markets, they not only permitted but encouraged a huge and, for the financial sector, profitable bet on the expansion of debt. The policy making elite failed to appreciate the incentives at work and, above all, the risks of a systemic breakdown.

When it came, the fruits of that breakdown were disastrous on several dimensions: economies collapsed; unemployment jumped; and public debt exploded.

The policymaking elite was discredited by its failure to prevent disaster. The financial elite was discredited by needing to be rescued. The political elite was discredited by willingness to finance the rescue. The intellectual elite – the economists – was discredited by its failure to anticipate a crisis or agree on what to do after it had struck.

The rescue was necessary. But the belief that the powerful sacrificed taxpayers to the interests of the guilty is correct.

It seems to me that the history of the last 40 years is susceptible to a very different interpretation:

That the Cold War, which began with the partition of Europe after 1945 and the Communist Revolution in China in 1949, entered its last phase with the five-day meeting of the ruling committees of the Chinese Communist Party in December 1978, little more than two years after the death of Mao Zedong;

That the financial liberalization in the West, in the U.S. in particular, began just in time, in the Seventies, to facilitate the entry of China into the global market system, starting in 1979;

That markets in the Eighties in general coped very well with a vast expansion of world trade; and that the immediate aftermath of the Cold War saw remarkably little loss of life, except in the Balkans;

That experts in the Nineties navigated a series of crises in Mexico, in Asia, in Brazil and Argentina, preserving the international financial system and maintaining global growth;

That when the 25-year  boom ended, in 2008, with the threat of a systemic breakdown of terrifying proportions, thanks to a global banking system that had evolved in ways that were little understood, central bankers correctly diagnosed the panic and  Congress passed its test, appropriating funds necessary to preserve the banking system.

At least in the U.S., the necessary rescue probably cost the taxpayer little or nothing. The loans have been repaid. The severe losses – homes, jobs, earnings, careers, the fisc – stemmed from the deep recession, which otherwise could have been much worse. (The continuing crisis in the Eurozone is another matter. So is the Middle East.) True, by hampering the Fed’s ability to act, the Dodd-Frank Act probably makes it harder, not easier, to deal with the next crisis. But there is still time to deal with that.

I’d like to think that Wolf was simply writing for his audience, which consists almost entirely of those elites whom he castigates. There’s nothing wrong with leaning against the preferences of your readers.  He cited weakening bonds of citizenship amid growing inequality and the constitutional disorder of the Eurozone as further evidence that elites are losing touch..

It seems to me more reasonable to fear that the rise of China and India to superpower status may cause increasing friction with their neighbors and with the West. The experience of World War I suggests that there may be something about coming into the club that wants a war.  That was the case with Prussia’s becoming Germany, and Russia’s designs on the Ottoman Empire in the run-up to August, 1914. This time the problem of climate change may be enough to keep the lid on.

Some pretty serious trials lie ahead.

David Warsh, an economic historian and long-time financial journalist, is principal of www.economicprincipals.com.

The Winslow Homer Studio

 

Winslow Homer's paintings have long been some of the most beloved art associated with New England. Thus many will want to visit the Winslow Homer Studio, at Prouts Neck, Maine. The studio, owned by the Portland Museum of Maine,  is where the artist lived from 1883 until his death, in 1910. The museum says the studio is meant to "celebrate the artist's life, to encourage scholarship on Homer, and to educate audiences to appreciate the artistic heritage of Winslow Homer and Maine.''

Not that Homer is always that cheery. Many of his images show nature to be menacing, as in the painting "Northeaster'' below.

Blighted and bright college days

BY ROBERT WHITCOMB

(comment via rwhitcomb51@gmail.com)

A few weeks ago, I was chatting with a Dartmouth College classmate about stuff that happened when we were students in 1966-70. I mentioned someone we knew in common and recalled that he was in a certain fraternity.

 The guy I was talking with, Denis O’Neil, a screenwriter who recently published a part-memoir, part-novel of that period titled “Whiplash: How the Vietnam War Rolled a Hand Grenade into the Animal House,” politely corrected me; in fact, this person was in another fraternity.

Time has fragmented and mingled stories in my memory and those of others from that era, now almost half a century ago. One could argue that it was a tumultuous era, and thus it’s easy to get things scrambled, but most times are tumultuous and transitional. Mr. O’Neil makes much of the stress caused by the fear of being drafted and sent to Southeast Asia, but as bad as that was, it was much worse for young men in World War II. Whatever. We’re all the centers of our own universes, and we create narratives to explain ourselves to ourselves and others and to place ourselves in history.

Certainly, the huge size of the Baby Boomer generation, and technological and social changes of its young times, were dramatic, though I would argue that except for improvements in the rights of racial minorities and women, the transformations caused by the Internet (which increasingly looks as if it has made things worse for most people) have been much bigger than “Sixties” changes.

Still, it’s true that in that period one had the distinct sense of living in a discrete and vivid era, which actually began about 1966 and ended about ’73. People who lived in the “Roaring Twenties” — 1924 to the Great Crash of October 1929 — told me in “The Sixties” that they had had a similar sense back in the Coolidge administration. Youth is intense, and so the memories the now-autumnal people of “The Sixties” are intense, if sometimes erroneous.

From Mr. O’Neil’s book, which centers on fun, romance (not always fun) and anxiety, you might think that 80 percent of a male undergraduate’s time was spent drunk, seeking young women to have sex with and trying to get out of the draft. In fact, even for non-nerds who disliked what we then called “booking” — has the World Wide Web come up with its own equivalent phrase? — most of the time was spent going to class, studying and sleeping, not “raging” (the word for partying). After all, a lot of students wanted to get into good graduate schools and then fancy jobs. A lot did, and went on to become perhaps the greediest generation in U.S. history.

Mr. O’Neil was wise to have constructed his book at least in part as a novel, letting his imagination and telescoping of events provide a better story for the movies, a business he knows very well. If they do make a film of his story, I’d be interested to see how much of it gives a sense of the more humdrum aspects of college life for middle-to-upper-class late adolescents back then.

Probably not much.  The famous and often hilarious (and even witty) Dartmouth pranks memorialized in "Animal House'' (and Mr. O'Neil describes some corkers, including  a great train robbery of sorts) and the stuff described above offer rich material for a film.

Still, while L.P. Hartley’s line “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there” is much quoted  people don’t do things as differently as they now might like to think  they did 45 years ago.

***

I was working last week in Harrisburg, Pa., the capital of the Keystone State. While that recently bankrupt city has seen better days — for many decades, it was a thriving center of trade and manufacturing and is bounded by rich farmland — many of its old residential and commercial buildings are beautiful, and you get a sense that people in the region very much want the little city to come back.

Greater Harrisburg has more brick and stone houses than you see in New England, where most houses are of wood, but there’s the same sense of an almost European-style settlement pattern, with a tight city center and the countryside close by. More and more people there complain about commuting and some of the gentrification in parts of Harrisburg suggests that a lot of its aging population is getting tired of driving. Indeed, demographics may gradually undo, over the next decade, much of the social and economic damage done by developer-driven sprawl zoning.

And there’s still a lot of boosterism in Harrisburg: The small local airport is proudly called Harrisburg International Airport, with flights to Toronto providing the “international” angle. Perhaps poor little Rhode Island could use a little of what some might slur as Babbitry to help talk itself out of its inferiority complex.

Robert Whitcomb (rwhitcomb51@gmail.com) is a Providence-based editor and writer.    

The dangers of afternoon naps

 

"Seance II,'' by HYMAN BLOOM,'' at the University of New Hampshire Museum of Art.

Survey map of surveillance

 "I See You'' (gouache/pencil marker on paper ), by  BRENDA VAN DER BEEK, at Galatea Fine Art, Boston, in a Feb. 1-28 show.

A troubled beauty

 

Manmade beauty within natural beauty -- but not refuges from reality. That's what William Morgan has described in his new book,  with gorgeous photos by Trevor Trento:  "A Simpler Way of Life: Old Farmhouses of New York & New England'', published by Norfleet Press and selling for $49.59. This book itself can be a heirloom.

Mr. Morgan, a distinguished architectural historian, has written a text that does not sugarcoat the tough  and uncertain lives led by many farmers, especially when most of these farmhouses were built, in inland, upland New England and New York State, in the late 18th Century and well into the 19th.

The farmers were constantly at the mercy of the weather, far-away market forces and other factors over which they had no control. The book is informed by a deep understanding  of the  architectural, social and economic history, and  life today, of  the rural part of our corner of North America.

Messrs.  Morgan and Mr. Trento implicitly make the argument that the old country house can be as beautiful as any mansion, while evoking more humanity. There's a poignancy about these old houses.

But, my God, they sure can be hard to heat and maintain!

Laying a glove on Seekonk

 

Photo and comment by WILLIAM MORGAN

 

The Massachusetts town of Seekonk, which means black goose in Wampanoag, was once a quiet rural place of woods and marshes, often traversed, and sometimes ravaged  by, Native American warriors during King Philip's War, in 1675-76.

Then, in recent years, came the wholesale paving over of the place with box stores, shopping centers, car lots and all the other hallmarks of Everywhere, U.S.A. In other words, Seekonk is a place that I try to avoid.

Alas, I accompanied my wife on some last-minute Christmas shopping in Seekonk, to be surprisingly rewarded by this composition created by an abandoned rubber glove on the pavement in front of T.J. Maxx.

I was reminded of the abstract photos of Rhode Island School of Design Prof. Aaron Siskind, whose haunting details of forgotten and found objects in the New England scene famously included a Gloucester fisherman's old glove.

Stick together till spring

 

"Both'' (oil on panel), by ELLEN GRANTER at Peter Alpers Fine Art, Andover, Mass.

Chris Powell: Get paid to hire back those you fired

By CHRIS POWELL 

Maybe other big employers in Connecticut will get an idea from the state 
Economic and Community Development Department's latest excursion into corporate 
welfare. 

Last March ClearEdge Power Corp., owner of the former United Technologies Corp. 
fuel-cell factory in South Windsor, laid off more than 100 employees. But this 
week state government loaned the company $1.4 million at a deeply discounted 
rate, with about half the loan to be forgiven if the company adds 80 employees 
over three years. Rehiring employees laid off in March will count toward the 
total of new employees to be added to achieve loan forgiveness. 

So in Connecticut you now can lay off your workers and then get money from state 
government for hiring them back. 

The economic development commissioner, Catherine Smith, explains this as a plan 
to induce ClearEdge to expand in Connecticut rather than at its facilities in 
Oregon and California. But the plan will work only at the expense of inviting 
more big employers to blackmail state government -- not just by threatening to 
move but also by laying off employees and then demanding that state government 
ransom them. 

While the Democratic Party still poses as the party of working people, the 
“economic development” policy of Connecticut's Democratic administration takes 
from the poor to give to the rich. Big employers have blackmail power; small 
employers don't. So small employers and their employees pay more in state taxes 
to subsidize bigger companies and their employees. 

Yes, many states are subsidizing big employers this way and inducing subsidy 
competitions with other states. But since subsidies to big business come at the 
expense of small business, both in taxes and general competitive disadvantage, 
the best economic development policy still is a tax and regulation regime that 
is favorable to all businesses without regard to size. 

Connecticut's unattractiveness to business and residents alike did not arise 
from a lack of subsidies to particular businesses but rather from the failure of 
government generally to provide value even as it has 
grown and become more expensive. 

That is, education policy has not been producing more or better education but 
mainly has just been enriching educators. Welfare policy has not reduced poverty 
and enabled and required people to start supporting themselves but rather has 
worsened dependence and anti-social behavior. Connecticut's government employee 
policies practically forbid ordinary public administration. And so forth. 

Connecticut's big problem is that the premises of some of its major policies are 
mistaken or, really, mere pretexts for parasitism. 
 
* * * 

According to a recent study by the state Office of Policy and Management, as 
reported by the Waterbury Republican-American, revenue foregone by state tax 
exemptions totals nearly half of state government's tax revenue -- $7 billion in 
tax breaks against $15.3 billion in receipts. 

While some broad exemptions may be sensible and command wide support, like the 
exemption of food from the sales tax, many exemptions are obscure and the 
product of special pleading or pandering, like the celebrated exemption for 
clothing and footwear. Legislators propose dozens of such tax breaks every year 
and some become law, like the one enacted last year to give tax credits for 
restoring historic houses. 

Apart from basic decency, which explains the food exemption, there may be only 
one justification for tax exemptions: efficiency, as when application of a 
general tax to a specific transaction will forfeit more money than it raises, by 
driving business out of state. By that standard state government probably could 
raise billions of dollars or finance billions in general tax reduction by 
repealing many less compelling tax exemptions. 

But it has been many years since Connecticut has been able to appropriate that 
much political courage. 

 
Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Conn. 

Better without the players

 

"First Tee,'' by DIANNE BUNIS,  at Gallery Seven, in Maynard, Mass.

She specializes in large-format black and white photography of the New England landscape, using the Zone System.

With the decline of farming, golf courses are some of the few remaining open stretches of green (or brown) open land in much of the Northeast. That's nice, although they'd look better if they had animals grazing on them. They're wonderful to run in, in the winter.

Something to look forward to

 

 "Redbud Tree in Bottomload,'' photo by ELIOT PORTER, at the Portland Museum of Art (but photo is copyrighted by Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Forth Worth) in the Portland Museum's show "American Vision: Photographs from the Collection of Owen and Anna Wells''.

  Please comment via rwhitcomb51@gmail.com

Jan. 7, 2014

Cold morning today but far from the "polar vortex'' catastrophe that  it's being made out to be by the news media because their denizens think that  nothing much else is going on. Of course, lots of stuff is going on but it bores those reporters and editors who haven't yet been laid off in the ferment caused by the triumph of mostly ''free'' information on the Internet. And maybe the public doesn't care all that much either.

Most importantly, "polar vortex'' sounds like a horror-movie monster. Very sexy. More vortexes to come because global warming is screwing up the jet stream? Too early to say with scientific assurance.

It's all rather typical of January, the coldest month. But  February is often the snowiest  because warm wet air begins to edge north again, setting up conflict with the cold air. Great for creating  Nor'easters! Arctic air and the Gulf Stream can be in explosive proximity.

As I walked the dog this morning I enjoyed the crunch of my feet on the thin layer of snow that had fallen overnight as the front swung through from Canada,  bringing a snow squall or two.  And the frozen  trees were creaking. Too cold to be slippery! The problem in the coastal Northeast is the wind. It can  make urban walking miserable. When I lived in the Upper Connecticut River Valley, the temperature could be much colder than in Boston, Providence, New York and Philadelphia but the comfort level much higher because there was much less wind and it was very, very dry. Sort of exhilarating  -- bright and almost antiseptically clean.

Meanwhile, along the lines of ever-more "nurturing'' of children by parents and schools (at the ones I attended we were often called by our last names and there wasn't much open concern for our feelings), is the practice of clothing our dogs for winter walks,  even outside of the Upper East Side of Manhattan. I must confess that my wife and I have adopted this habit. The dog, a rescue mutt from San Antonio (via "Alamo Rescue''), fought having a coat on at the start but has since accepted it -- especially when  it's windy.

My most physically painful memories of winter are in the streets of big cities with the northwest wind squeezing between the high buildings.

When it's really, really cold,  ice is  so sticky that you don't even worry about driving up and down steep snow-covered hills. A few times I had to drive my  drunken mother to a drying-up spa at a place called Beech Hill Farm, on top of a mountain in Dublin, N.H. -- the little town where Yankee magazine was, and is, put out and where Mark Twain spent some happy times. If it was the winter, I'd pray for very cold weather.  Around freezing was the most insidious,  with a thin layer of melting in the sun, then quick refreezing toward evening.

The dramatic freeze-thaw  cycles in New England  make skiing more, well, exciting here than on the dusty, dry "powder snow'' promoted by resorts in the Rockies. Skiing in the White and Green mountains is much more of a challenge to muscles and nerves than is skiing at, say, Taos.

Anyway, I long for late February, when sun-facing cars and rooms suddenly seem to start to warm up  much faster  as the sun gets stronger. Even on a very cold day last week, I found the stone on a southwest-facing wall remarkably warm. We really do need to do a lot more with passive solar heating.

'Pretty white gloves'

  By PAUL STEVEN STONE

CAMBRIDGE

He sits on a folded-over cardboard box, slightly off-balance and without any visible sign of support other than the granite wall of the bank behind him and the few coins in the paper cup he shakes at each passerby.

Does he realize it is 4 degrees above zero, or minus 25 degrees if you factor in the wind that blows through the city and his bones with little concern for statistics? Does he notice the thick cumulus lifeforms that escape from his mouth in shapes that shift and evanesce like the opportunities that once populated his life?

Can he even distinguish the usual numbing effect of the cheap alcohol from the cruel and indifferent caress of this biting alien chill?

Too many questions, he would tell you, if he cared to say anything. But his tongue sits in silence behind crusted chapped lips and chattering teeth while half-shut eyes follow pedestrians fleeing from the bitter cold and his outstretched cup.

His gaze falls upon the hand holding the cup as if it were some foreign element in his personal inventory. Surprised at first to find it uncovered and exposed, especially in weather this frigid, he now recalls that someone at the shelter had stolen his gloves and left in their place the only option he still has in much abundance.

Acquiescence.

Examining the hand, and the exposed fingers encircling the Seven-Eleven coffee cup, he smiles in amused perplexity, murmuring to himself, “White gloves.”

Lifting his hand for closer inspection, he adds, “Pretty white gloves.”

An image of his daughter . . . Elissa, he thinks her name was . Yes, Elissa!, he recalls. An image of Elissa rises up in his mind, from a photograph taken when she was ten and beautifully adorned in a new Easter outfit: black shoes, frilly lavender dress and hat and, yes, pretty white gloves. The photo once sat on a table in his living room, but he couldn’t tell you what happened to it, nor to the table or the living room, for that matter. They were just gone. Swept away in the same tide that pulled out all the moorings from his life, and everything else that had been tethered to them.

The last time he’d seen Elissa she was crying, though he no longer remembers why. Must have been something he’d done or said; that much he knows.

“Pretty white gloves,” he repeats, staring at his hand.

He recalls the white gloves from his Marine dress uniform. At most he wore them five times: at his graduation from officer’s training school, at an armed services ball in Trenton, New Jersey, and for three military funerals. There was never a need for dress gloves in Vietnam. They would have never stayed white anyway; not with all the blood that stained his hands.

Out of the corner of his eye he can see a policeman walking towards him and instinctively hides his cup, some vestige of half-remembered pride causing him to avert his gaze from the man’s eyes at the same time.

“We need to get you inside, buddy,” the officer says. “You’ll die of cold, you stay out here.”

Moments later, a second police officer, this one a woman, steps up to join them.

“That’s the Major,” she tells her colleague. To the seated figure she offers a smile.

“You coming with us, Major?”

“Go away,” he answers, looking up as he leans further against the cold granite wall. “Don’t need you. Don’t need no one.”

“Can’t leave you out here,” the first officer says. “We’ve got orders to bring you and everyone else in.”

“Leave me alone!” the seated man shouts, gesturing with his hands as if he could push them both away.

“Oh shit,” the female officer says under her billowing breath. To her partner she whispers, “His hands. Look at his hands.”

Quickly recognizing the waxy whiteness for what it is, the officer shrugs, “Guess we’re a little late.”

To the man on the sidewalk, he offers, “That’s frostbite, buddy.”

“No,” the seated man protests. He holds up both hands, numb and strange as they now feel and offers a knowing smile of explanation.

Just like the Marine officer he once was, just like the sweet innocent daughter he once knew, just like  the young man grown suddenly old on a frozen sidewalk, his hands are beautiful and special in a way these strangers will never understand.

“White gloves,”he insists proudly.

“Pretty white gloves.”

Paul Steven Stone is a Cambridge-based writer. His blog, from which this comes, is www.paulstonesthrow.com.

Public-sector embarrassments

 

From HELEN PAYNE'S show "Here I Sit, Brokenhearted" at the Bromfield Gallery, Boston.

The gallery says her show is an " installation on bathroom tiles where drawings make visceral vignettes, showing moments ranging from giving birth to getting booked.  A shape-shifting protagonist emerges from the tiles. She morphs in time and race and limps along at odds with expectations but at one with viscera.''

It's "about the ill fit of the body and how our most private moments can play out in the public sphere.''

Our private moments playing out in the  private sphere can be bad enough.

Baby Boomers as shut-ins; Gees' infernal groves of academe

By ROBERT WHITCOMB

(rwhitcomb4@cox.net or rwhitcomb51@gmail.com)

Will America soon get more realistic about the “Silver Tsunami” of Baby Boomers heading into old age? So far, the nation’s policymakers have mostly been in denial, though it’s probably the biggest fiscal and social challenge of the next few decades in America and Western Europe.

But then, most Boomers themselves have been in deep denial. Many have not saved nearly enough money. They might have been lulled into complacency by seeing how many of their parents, beneficiaries of historical luck, have lived comfortably on old-fashioned defined-benefit pensions (and Social Security), which many of them started enjoying upon remarkably early retirements.

Some of the oldest Boomers — those born in the late 1940s — have those traditional pensions; most of the younger ones will have to settle for, at the most, 401(k)s. Meanwhile, most Boomers underestimate how much ill health will beset them as they age.

But there are even bigger problems. Consider how dispersed America (capital of anomie) has become. As always, many families with children break up as couples divorce — though more and more the couples don’t get married in the first place — and people move far away from “home” to seek jobs or better weather, or are just restless. This leads to a sharp decline (accelerated by modern birth control) in the number of large but close-knit families. At the same time, there has been a huge increase in the number of younger families where only a very harried mother, who may well never have been married, is the sole parent in place, amidst a societal emphasis on “self-actualization” above family and civic duties. All these factors mean that a lot of old people won’t have the family supports enjoyed by previous generations of old people, even as they generally live longer, albeit with chronic illnesses.

There are, of course, retirement communities, with some of the high-end ones set up like country clubs. The better ones have gradations of care, from independence, within a rather tight if safe community, organized by for-profit or nonprofit organizations, to “assisted living,” which usually involves residing in an apartment and getting help with some daily tasks, and, last, the nursing-home wing for those who have slipped into full-scale dementia or are otherwise disabled.

But plenty of people can’t afford to live in a retirement community.

More realistic and pleasant for many folks are such organizations as the Beacon Hill Village model, in Boston. In this, for hundreds of dollars a year in dues you become part of a formal network of old people (and thus indirectly the networks of their families and friends) and get such services as easy access to transportation, shopping, some health-care connections and trips to cultural events. The central idea is to let people “age in place” — to stay in their homes as long as possible.

Of course, most old people eventually get very sick and end up in the hospital and/or nursing home. But the Beacon Hill approach is attractive — if you can afford the dues.

The fact is that most oldsters will have to create their own informal networks of family and friends to help look after each other as their mobility declines. And in the end, the majority must depend on family members, if they can find them. So often, obituaries report that the recent decedent was at the time of demise in some strange place with no seeming link to his or her past. It’s very often the community where a child — more often a daughter — has been living. As Robert Frost said: “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” “They” generally means a relative, not a friend.

Until then, will you have enough loyal friends to look after you when you get really old? You’d better make sure that your pals include some folks too young to live in retirement communities.

***

Hurrah for “Higher Education: Marijuana at the Mansion,” Constance Bumgarner Gee’s well-written memoir. Most of the self-published book is about her time as the wife of the very driven, peripatetic and big-spending E. Gordon Gee, who has led the University of Colorado, West Virginia University (twice), Ohio State University (twice) and Brown University, where he had the tough luck to succeed the much-liked  and world-class hugger Vartan Gregorian, who had gone on to run the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

There’s lots of, by turns, hilarious and sad personal stuff in the book — about her sometimes bizarre relationship with her immensely well-paid and workaholic husband, the silly controversy about her using marijuana to treat her Meniere’s disease, her love of her riverfront house in Westport, Mass., and her ambivalent attitude toward her native South. But best is her vivid portrayal of university boards and administrations these days.

It’s not a pretty picture. The social climbing, empire-building, brand obsession, backstabbing and money-grubbing don’t present many good civic models for today’s students. The  stuff at Brown was bad; it was much worse at Vanderbilt in Mrs. Gee's story. Big universities are starting to look like New York City hedge funds whose partners are driven to build ever bigger houses to show off to each other in East Hampton.

Now to reread Mary McCarthy's novel "The Groves of Academe''.

Robert Whitcomb (rwhitcomb51@gmail.com), a former editor of The Providence Journal's editorial pages,  is a Providence-based editor and writer. 

An old-fashioned face

 "North End Saturday" (photo), by JUDITH MONTMINY, in the "Synergies: New Gallery Artist Expo," at South Shore Art Center, Cohasset, Mass.

What a face of weathered wisdom (however misleading it might be)!  Of course, he would be told not to smoke a pipe -- danger of oral cancer.

But pipe-smoking used to be considered a sign of calm, good humor and, yes, a kind of healthiness. A lot of doctors smoked pipes; it went along with their bow ties. But then, they'd do ads for cigarettes, too.  Just look in a big magazine from  the '40s. "Not a cough in a carload!"

Hard-wired for art

 

From the ''Head''  series of Mary Mead (here a woodcut intaglio monoprint), in her show at Kingston Gallery, Boston, to open Jan. 10.

Don't send out for ice

"Breaching Iceberg: Greenland, August 8'' (photo), b y CAMILLE SEAMAN, in the show "Seeing Glacial Time: Climate Change in the Arctic, ''  through May 18 at the Tufts University Art Gallery, Medford, Mass.

The layered effect

"Winter Painting','  by DAVID BARNES, in his show at the Hess Gallery at Pine Manor College, Chestnut Hill, Mass., through Jan. 20.

When I was a kid, I couldn't sleep in gleeful anticipation of  blizzards, which were particularly dramatic at our house on the top of a windy hill near the sea.  Now I still can't sleep but the snow seems like a blanket  of death.

How we ended 2013 and entered 2014

 

Painting by ZAHIRA TRUTH, at Roxbury Open Studios, Boston.

Blank slate, for a minute

  A perfect New Year's Day morning  here in southern New England -- cold, calm and head-clearing, with cirrus clouds suggesting more storms to come.