A certain look at nature

"Hitched'' (after Desportes and Handecoeter), by Shelly Reed, in her show "A Curious Nature,'' at the Fitchburg Art Museum, through June 4.

The museum says :"With artworks spanning from a decade ago to works that have never been seen by the public, 'A Curious Nature' provides viewers with insight into the artist and her transformation throughout the years. The exhibition features a variety of works, including black and white canvasses  (e.g., above) and oil on paper. Her subject matter ranges from large scale scenes with animal and botanical details and more intimate portraits. ...Reed also includes several predator/prey images, detailing the stalking, contemplation, and attacking of these beings while encouraging the audience to contemplate who is watching whom both in the artworks themselves and the inspiration.''

David Warsh: Journalism, Russia's 'hybrid war' and the U.S. elections

St. Basil's Cathedral, on Red Square, in Moscow.

The other week, in which Atty.  Gen.  Jeff Sessions’s visit with the Russian ambassador dominated the news, the  most interesting thing I read was a 13,000-word article in The New Yorker. It exemplified all the preconceptions typical of what I have come to think of as reporters of the Generation of ’91.

David Remnick, b. 1958, was Moscow bureau chief  in 1988-1992 for The Washington Post, before he moved to become The New Yorker’s editor, a job he got in 1998.  He wrote Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, in 1993. Evan Osnos, b. 1976, joined the magazine from The Chicago Tribune in 2008 and covered China for five years. Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China appeared in 2014 and was a Pulitzer finalist. Joshua Yaffa is a journalist based in Moscow. He has written for The Economist and The New York Times Magazine.

Nothing in The New Yorker’s article – “Active Measures: What lay behind Russia’s interference in the 2016 election – and what lies ahead?’’ – was quite as punchy as the art that accompanied it. The magazine’s traditional anniversary cover featured Vladimir Putin, as a dandy peering through a monocle at a raging butterfly Trump, instead of the customary rendering of Eustace Tilley. That was non-committal enough, though it reminded me of the magazine’s 2014 Sochi Olympics cover, a figure-skating Vladimir Putin leaps while five little Putin lookalikes feign lack of interest from the judges’ stand.

More alarming was the art opposite the opening page, Saint Basil’s Cathedral, in Moscow, administering a jolt of light (a digital illumination ray?) to the White House from the skies above.  The caption states, “Democratic National Committee hacks, many analysts believe, were just a skirmish in a larger war against Western institutions and alliances.”

The article was organized in five little chapters.

In “Soft Targets,” Putin orders an unprecedented effort to interfere in the U.S. presidential election. It is a gesture of disrespect, ordered out of pique and resentment of perceived U.S. finagling in the 2012 Soviet election, intended to be highly public.

In “Cold War 2.0,” the Obama administration is caught flat-footed by the campaign and fails to respond effectively. The Russians have adopted a new and deeply troubling offensive posture “that threatens the very international order,” a former Obama official states.

In “Putin’s World,” a capsule history of the decline of Russian pride during the 1990s is presented alongside an argument for the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Putin’s mistrust of democracy at home is described, as well as his recoiling from the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Differences between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama after the annexation of Crimea are recounted:  She sometimes favors the use of military force whereas he does not.

In “Hybrid War,” Russia becomes technically adroit at cyberwarfare and experiments with a digital blitz on Estonian communications after a statue of a Soviet soldier is removed; meanwhile, the U.S. unleashes its Stuxnet computer virus on Iran’s uranium-refinery operations. The Russian Army chief of staff, Valery Gerasimov, is introduced, along with his 2013 article, “The Value of the Science Is in the Foresight’’ urging “the adoption of a Western strategy,” combining military, technological, media, political and intelligence tactics to destabilize a foe, the article having “achieved the status of legend” as theGerasimov doctrine, following the invasion of Ukraine.

An estimated thousand code warriors are said to be working for the Russian government on everything from tapping former Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland’s cell phone in Kiev (“a new low in Russian tradecraft”) to the forthcoming French and German elections. Finally, the hacking campaign against the Democratic Party is rehashed, and Clinton campaign manager John Podesta says the interaction between Russian intervention and the FBI “created a vortex that produced the result” – a lost election.

In “Turbulence Theory,” Trump is said to be a phenomenon of America’s own making, like the nationalist politicians of Europe, both the consequence of globalization and deindustrialization, but Russia likes the policies that are the result: Leave Russia alone and don’t talk about civil rights. Meanwhile, the hacking campaign may have backfired, and Trump may no longer have the freedom to accommodate Russian ambitions as might have been wished, but at least Russia has come up with a way to make up for its economic and geopolitical weakness, namely inflict turbulence on the rest of the world.

Three things about this assessment stand out.

Putin’s views of U.S. foreign policy are not integral to the account: They are presented in two widely separate sections, one on the history of U.S. “active measures,” the other on changes in his opinion wrought by the war in Iraq.

Putin is quick to accuse the West of hypocrisy, the authors write, but his opinions, and those of others, especially who compare the invasions of Crimea and Iraq (where the U.S. immediately set out to build an embassy for 15,000 workers) are dismissed as “whataboutism,”  exercises in false moral equivalence. NATO expansion is more or less taken for granted.  The military alliance’s extension to the borders of Russia forms no part of the narrative.

Second, no attention is paid to Putin’s problems, aside from a nod to his suppression of oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky and the rock group Pussy Riot. His plans for a Eurasian Union, which were at the heart of the Ukraine crisis, go unmentioned.  There’s nothing about the centuries-old struggle between Westernizers and Slavophiles who oppose policies that would tie Russia more closely to the West.

Third, the history of the Cold War itself gets short shrift. The genesis of the doctrine of “hybrid war,” ascribed to General Gerasimov, is described at length in The Last Warrior: Andrew Marshall and the Shaping of Modern American Defense Strategy, by Andrew F. Krepinevich and, Barry D. Watts (Basic Books, 2015). Marshall founded the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment. In 1973 he described what would become a dramatic strategic shift:

“In general we need to look for opportunities as well as problems; search for areas of comparative advantage and try to move the competition into these areas; [and] look for ways to complicate the Soviets’ problems.’’

Many factors led to the collapse of the Soviet Union.  “Active measures,” of the sort propounded by Marshall, were prominent among them. You can hardly be surprised that the Russians have sought to master new techniques. The underlying proposition of The New Yorker’s article is that the world is, or at least it should be, unipolar, with the U.S. in charge of its democratic values. After all these years, the Russians still don’t agree.

David Warsh, a veteran financial and political columnist and economic historian, is proprietor of economicprincipals.com, where this essay first appeared.

A look at Brazil after a very tumultuous period

March 9, 2017

To members and friends of the Providence Committee on Foreign Relations (thepcfr.org; pcfremail@gmail.com).

And so the coldest part of the winter comes near the end…. New England’s bizarre climate!
 

Distinguished Brazilian political economistand commentator Evodio Kaltenecker (whom some of you may remember for a few years ago) willspeak on Thursday, March 16, about the challenges and opportunities facing that huge nation as well as conditions in South America’s Southern Cone – Uruguay, Argentina and Chile.

His talk's headline:

Brazil: 2018 and beyond and the pro-market wave in Latin America.

With political upheaval, the Zika virus, economic distress, Olympic agonies and other issues, this will be a good time to look at Latin America’s most important nation.

On  Wednesday, April 5, famed French journalist, novelist and broadcaster Jean Lesieur will speak on the global  order being turned upside down by the advances of dictators, the retreat of democracies and the presidency of Donald Trump, not tomention the existential crisis of the European Union and the wild French election campaign.
 
Dr. Rand Stoneburner, the international epidemiologist, is now scheduled to speak on Wednesday April 19. He’ll talk about Zika, Ebola and other global health challenges.
 
James E. Griffin, an expert on ocean fishing and other aspects of the global food sector, will speak to us on Wednesday, May 17.

David Shear, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Asian and Pacific Security Affairs, under the Obama administration, will speak to us on Thursday, June 1. (He is leaving office of Jan. 20, 2017.) He previously served as United States Ambassador to Vietnam.  He was also formerly deputy assistant secretary for East Asian and Pacific affairs at the U.S. Department of State. He’ll talk about Chinese expansionism in the South China Sea, North Korea and other Asia/Pacific topics.
 
Joining us on Wednesday, June 14, will be Laura Freid, CEO of the Silk Road Project,  founded and chaired by famed cellist Yo-Yo Ma in 1998, promoting collaboration among artists and institutions and studying the ebb and flow of ideas across nations and time. The project was first inspired by the cultural traditions of the historical Silk Road.
 
Meanwhile, we’re trying to keep some flexibility to respond to events. Everything in human affairs is tentative. ”We make plans and God laughs….’’
 

Suggestions and contacts are always appreciated!

The man who would take on Partners HealthCare

The Boston Globe profiles Kevin Tabb, M.D., who runs Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, in Boston, and is now trying to engineer a merger between his system and another prestigious one — in Greater Boston — Lahey Health. Such a combined entity would presumably be better able to compete with the elephant in the region — Partners HealthCare.

To read the profile, please hit this link.

Llewellyn King: St. Patrick's Day and the delicate matter of Irish immigration

St. Patrick’s Day is hard upon us. The green dye is being added to the beer in bars across the land, while more than 40 million Americans will remember their linkage to the Old Sod, even if that is sometimes tenuous.

Aye, it’s time for a wearing of the green and we will do it on March 17, in the great celebration of a small Irish nation and its relatively obscure patron saint.

On St. Paddy’s Day, we are all Irish whether we are, in fact, African-American, Chinese-American, Italian-American or any other hyphenated American. We all watch the parades, maybe take a drink or two and wear some green, from a hair ribbon to a whole suit.

If Britain has a special relationship with the United States, then Ireland has an extra-special relationship.

As has become a modern tradition, the taoiseach -- as the prime minister of Ireland is called -- will visit the White House to lobby the president.  

The prime minister, Enda Kenny, heads Fine Gael, which is more conservative than Ireland's other two parties. Kenny will, one supposes, present the customary bowl of shamrock and talk of the long history of Ireland and the United States. Ireland has always looked to the United States as kind of safety valve – a place where Irish immigrants could find safety and hope, particularly during and after the Potato Famine of 1845-49.

Kenny also will have a purpose: lobbying  President Trump on behalf of the 50,000 Irish who are in the United States illegally -- "illegal aliens" in the lexicon of the administration.

But the Irish PM will eschew that term in favor of “undocumented immigrants.” He will want to invoke that long history of migration from Ireland to America. He might even point out that the “wearing of the green” was illegal during the Irish Rebellion against the British in 1798.

The language is as loaded in Ireland as it is here. The Irish like to refer to their paperless migrants to the United States as “undocumented” -- suggesting a slight matter of language, rather than an implicit indictment of “illegal.”

By contrast, and several Irish commentators have pointed out, workers in Ireland who do not have papers to work or live are referred to by Irish politicians as “illegal aliens.”

The Irish intelligentsia and many Irish analysts say that this is racist. That the unspoken message Kenny will convey to Trump is: Take it easy on the Irish undocumented, they are white and Christian. Not brown or Muslim. We are you.

The Irish Times columnist Fintan O’Toole rages against what he sees as the race preference, and points out that the Trump administration is loaded with those of Irish descent. O’Toole calls them the “enablers” of Trump's immigration policy: They are advisers Steven Bannon and Kellyanne (nee Fitzgerald) Conway, Press Secretary Sean Spicer and Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly -- as was short-lived National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.

Another Irish journalist, Cillian Donnelly, makes the same points and fears that Kenny, who has said his mission is to speak up for the undocumented Irish in America, will become complicit in the Trump immigration stand and the deportation of “brown” migrants.

Trump himself has links to Ireland. He owns a huge golf course and hotel in Doonbeg, on County Clare’s Atlantic coast.

Ironically, there he is enmeshed in a dispute over building a seawall. It seems when it comes to Ireland, Trump believes in global warming and sea rise: He has tried to get permission to build a 1.7-mile-long wall to keep severe storms from flooding his resort.

Trump's request to build the original masonry wall were turned down, and he is pushing for two more limited rock and steel structures. Environmentalists are opposing them, too. They maintain that these structures will not end the erosion, but rather will increase it with time, destroying the dunes. However, Trump is the largest local employer and his wall is supported locally.

If all this is enough to drive you to drink, St. Patrick's Day is a good time to start. Slainte!

Llewellyn King, a frequent New England Diary contributor, is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle,  on PBS. His e-mail is llewellynking1@gmail.com.

They're everywhere

Jazz Glastra: My meeting with my GOP congressman about healthcare

Via OtherWords org.

The Republicans just introduced a new plan to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act, or ACA — aka Obamacare. The rollout came after many members of Congress caught an earful from constituents trying to stop them.

Although I’ve voted for people in both parties in the past, I wanted to be one of them.

Residents in my central Ohio district started a petition in early January calling for our member, Republican Pat Tiberi, to hold a town hall to discuss the issue. After all, he’s the chair of the House Subcommittee on Health.

The petition quickly garnered over 1,000 signatures, but Tiberi refused to hold a public event, claiming they’re “unproductive.” Fair enough: I can see how it might be hard to have a discussion about complex issues in a hall filled to the brim with angry constituents.

So I decided to take Tiberi up on his offer to meet with constituents privately instead. When I arrived at his district office, I was surprised to find that eight other people had also been scheduled for the same time. It turned out that all of us were there to discuss the ACA.

Person after person shared gut-wrenching stories.

One woman was unable to find an insurer to cover her small business and its employees because of her Type 1 diabetes. Thanks to Obamacare, she was able to get coverage that’s affordable and life-saving.

A young woman recovering from cancer explained how, before Obamacare, her diagnosis prevented the entire company she worked for from changing insurers because the new insurer wouldn’t accept her “pre-existing condition.”

Another woman with breast cancer explained that if it weren’t for the subsidized health insurance she received through the Obamacare exchange, she might not be here today.

My own story is much less dramatic — without the ACA, I never could’ve afforded to pursue my chosen career path in the nonprofit sector. Luckily, the ability to stay on my parents’ insurance for a few years after college gave me the security I needed to take a risk on a low-paying but highly rewarding job that kick-started my career.

While Tiberi started out the meeting by declaring that he was “there to listen,” I left disappointed by how he treated our group. Not once during the entire meeting did he allow someone to finish speaking without interrupting to “give them the other side of the story.”

For many of the people in the room, Obamacare was literally the difference between life and death. Unfortunately, Tiberi only wanted to talk about how premiums are going up and in some places there aren’t enough coverage options.

To be sure, these are real problems that need fixing. But how can you look a breast cancer survivor in the eye and tell her the law that saved her life needs to be thrown out because it’s costing someone too much money?

My meeting with Tiberi took place well before Republicans released their Obamacare replacement plans, but even then Tiberi agreed that he doesn’t want to go back to 2009, when 20 million fewer people had health insurance.

Unfortunately, that’s exactly what’s going to happen to many people under the Republicans’ plan. That includes low-income patients on Medicaid and people who are young but have serious health conditions, like the woman at my meeting.

Someone recently asked me whether I consider myself a liberal or a conservative on healthcare. But what does that even mean?

We all want the same thing: affordable coverage we can actually use, lower costs, and a healthier population. I don’t think the ACA achieved all of these goals, but getting coverage for over 20 million people was a huge step in the right direction.

Why tear down years of progress and start from scratch when we can simply fix what we have?

Affluence under sail

Painting by Laura Tryon Jennings at the Art Complex Museum, Duxbury, Mass.

A generation of sociopaths?

"Narcissus'' (1590s) by Caravaggio.

Adapted from an item in Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary'' in GoLocal24.com.

Generations obviously flow into each other and we must be leery of over-generalizing. But Bruce Cannon Gibney is on to something when indicting the Baby Boom generation (1946-1964) for having all too many selfish, narcissistic, greedy, uncivic-minded, myopic and, well, dishonest people. He makes his case in forthcoming book: A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America.

Consider the corruption in varying degrees of leading politicians and business leaders in the past 40 years as the Baby Boomers came to power. Look at their disinclination, compared to their parents, to participate in unpaid if admirable civic projects.

You don’t hear very much anymore of “dollar-a-year men’’ who volunteer to take onerous but crucial public-sector jobs to address a crisis. Look at their using public office to line up gargantuan payoffs  later in the private sector.

You see many more rich Boomers plastering their names on buildings, be they at colleges, museums and hospitals, compared to their parents’ generation, for whom anonymous giving was much admired. From the Gospel of Matthew, in the New Testament: "Be careful not to do 'good works' in front of others. Don't do them to be seen by others. If you do, your Father in heaven will not reward you.’’

You see something of the Baby Boomer culture in executive suites, not to mention the Oval Office. As Boomers started to take big jobs in public companies many started to display astonishing greed compared to their parents, and a disinclination to share corporate wealth with their underlings, whose inflation-adjusted wages generally have fallen over the era of Boomer hegemony.

 That is, of course, partly due to the increasing self-segregation of Americans into their own socio-economic groups.  The rich have less and less daily contact with the nonrich and so the former care less and less about the latter. There is less and less cross-class interaction.

At the same time, insider trading and other Wall Street sleaze have flourished.

For whatever combination of reasons – be it that too many Boomers were cosseted as kids or whether the media came to excessively worship wealth and conspicuous consumption –arrogance and extreme greed came to characterize much of American business under the Baby Boomers. You have to go back to the Twenties and the Gilded Age of the late 19th and very early 20th centuries to see its like.

And consider many Boomers’ lack of interest in supporting government programs for the poor and other weak  groups and their generally successful push for lower taxes even as they fight any cuts in programs that benefit, or will soon benefit, them, especially Social Security and Medicare.  And look at the popularity of eliminating the federal estate tax as affluent Boomers’ parents started go to their reward. Or their debonair attitude toward the ever-deepening federal debt that goes with lower taxes and higher spending on programs that disproportionately favor the Boomers.

Glance at America’s crumbling infrastructure -- mostly due to a refusal to pay taxes commensurate with long-term public needs – is another monument of the Boomers, too many of whom are not societal builders but users.

And it’s curious that older Baby Boomers often get credit for promoting civil rights for racial minorities, women’s and gay rights associated with the ‘60s and early ‘70s, when the people who led these movements were from the so-called Greatest Generation and Silent Generation.

And while Steve Jobs and his Silicon Valley contemporaries did come up with some nifty inventions they can’t compare in long-term importance with those  developed by the generation before them – often with the help of federal programs. Semiconductors and Internet are examples.

It is true that many Boomers became avid foes of the Vietnam War – but mostly because they didn’t want to fight in it.

Let us hope that younger folks display more civic-mindedness and generosity than their parents. Or will they just disappear into social media?

'How out of breath you are'

Dear March - Come in -	
How glad I am -
I hoped for you before -
Put down your Hat -	
You must have walked -
How out of Breath you are -	
Dear March, how are you, and the Rest -
Did you leave Nature well -	
Oh March, Come right upstairs with me -
I have so much to tell -

I got your Letter, and the Birds -	
The Maples never knew that you were coming -
I declare - how Red their Faces grew -	
But March, forgive me -	
And all those Hills you left for me to Hue -	
There was no Purple suitable -	
You took it all with you -	

Who knocks? That April -
Lock the Door -
I will not be pursued -
He stayed away a Year to call	
When I am occupied -	
But trifles look so trivial	
As soon as you have come
	
That blame is just as dear as Praise	
And Praise as mere as Blame 

-- Emily Dickinson "Dear March -- Come In''

-

-

A tolerance for ambiguity

"Through,'' by Kathy Soles, in the show "Place and Memory: Two Views: Iris Osterman and Kathy Soles,'' at Fountain Street Fine Art, Framingham, Mass., March 9-April 2.

Mystery season

Photo by THOMAS HOOK

Depending on your attitude, a wintry  or springlike day Tuesday in  Southbury, Conn., with the mist, as Mr. Hook notes,  "veiling the difference between the seasons'' around Hidden Pond.

Chris Powell: Insurers may be joining the state in enabling Hartford's bad habits

Hartford from the other side of the Connecticut River.

Hartford's three biggest insurance companies -- Aetna, The Hartford, and Travelers -- are being hailed as the city's saviors for their pledge last week to donate $50 million, $10 million per year for five years, to help city government out of its financial disaster.

But rather than saviors, the companies more likely have just become the city's new enablers, joining state government in that counterproductive work. The companies say their gift will be "conditioned" on making it "part of a comprehensive and sustainable solution for Hartford -- a solution that allows the city to stabilize its finances and support quality services."

But such a solution is nowhere in sight. Mayor Luke Bronin has been trying to negotiate concessions from the city's government employee unions but he hasn't yet gotten nearly enough to close a projected city budget deficit approaching $50 million. The mayor also has been touring Hartford's suburbs in pursuit of financial contributions but has not yet come back with a check, a pledge, or more than sympathy for the thankless job he has been stuck with. And while Governor Malloy has proposed to slash state financial aid to suburbs and rural towns and transfer it to Hartford and other cities, his proposal's prospects in the General Assembly are not strong, since many legislators know how incompetent and corrupt city governments have been, even if the legislators don't recognize state government's shared responsibility for this.

With perfect irony the $50 million gift from the insurers happens to match the original estimate of the cost of the minor-league baseball stadium city government just built and botched, a cost now believed to approach $75 million not counting litigation expenses. Indeed, even as the insurers announced their gift, the stadium contractor fired by the city announced that it is suing the city for $90 million,

A few days earlier the state child advocate's office revealed that the city's school system long has failed to act against school employees who harassed and molested students. A "comprehensive and sustainable solution" for that problem is not yet in place either. So with their huge gift the insurers may have only 1) rescued city government from some of the expense of its irresponsible decision to build the stadium as bankruptcy approached, 2) reduced the pressure on the city employee unions to make the concessions the mayor wants, and 3) reduced the pressure on state government to stop subsidizing the anti-social behavior that is worst in the cities and has turned them into poverty factories.

As Aetna, The Hartford, and Travelers are big companies doing business throughout the nation, they might concur in the advertising slogan lately being used by another big insurer, Farmers: "We know a thing or two because we've seen a thing or two." Surely the insurers should know that in Connecticut, as elsewhere, when supposedly liberal government gets down to its last dollars, it will kick the innocent needy out of their hospital beds, open the doors of the prisons, and stop plowing the roads after snowstorms so what's left of the money can be paid as raises and pensions to government's own employees.

Saving Connecticut and Hartford requires overthrowing this mindset, and as major employers and taxpayers that are exceptionally able to relocate, the insurers have great leverage over both state and municipal policy. Having just bestowed something for nothing on the city, and, really, state government, the insurers have squandered their leverage. Instead of showering millions on incompetence, they should have threatened to move if state and city government don't quickly start pursuing the public interest instead of the usual special interests.

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

'Celestial time'' and 'manipulated landscape'

Photo from David Shannon-Lier's show "Of Heaven and Hearth,'' at the Foster Gallery at Noble and Greenough School, Dedham, Mass.  The large-format black and white photographs "explore the relationship between celestial time and space and a manipulated landscape that dwells underneath it,'' says the gallery.
 

John Feffer: My dystopian novel accidentally predicted Hurricane Trump

Graffiti, referring to George Orwell's novel 1984, on a wall in Donetsk, in eastern Ukraine, which has been under attack by Russia.

Via OtherWords.org

It’s terrifying when your dystopian nightmares begin to come true.

Donald Trump is consolidating a circle of extremist advisers. Hardline restrictions on immigration are going up, regulations on Wall Street are tumbling down, and ordinary Americans can no longer agree on simple truths, let alone politics.

Abroad, Europe may be splintering, too, Asia looks volatile, and wars continue to rage in the Middle East. And everywhere, climate change creeps forward.

For me, however, the rise of the Trump era held a special terror.

My novel Splinterlands, which I finished in March 2016 and published in December, imagines a world that breaks into a million little pieces. It begins with the destruction of Washington, D.C.C, by a terrible storm — which I called Hurricane Donald — and goes downhill from there.

I tell the story of the unraveling of a family, which takes place against the backdrop of the break-up of the European Union, the collapse of China, the disuniting of the United States, and a massive financial crisis that wipes out the middle class everywhere.

After submitting the final draft of the book to my publisher, I watched in bewilderment as the British public voted to withdraw from the EU. I was astonished some months later when the American public elected Donald Trump. And I was dismayed to watch the new administration begin to undermine U.S. democracy even before it officially took office.

I also felt a strange sense of déjà vu. It was a feeling akin to traveling back in time to watch the unfolding of an assassination or the lead-up to a world war. I’d already gamed out these scenarios when I was plotting my novel.

I’m no Nostradamus, and I didn’t intend Splinterlands as a prediction of the future.

When I was writing the book, I was concerned about the rise of far-right extremists, the rollback of democracy, and growing divisions here and abroad. And the half-measures the international community adopted to address climate change didn’t bode well for the health of the planet either.

I wanted my new novel to serve as a wake-up call. The world — and our country — could easily fragment, I warned, if we didn’t pay more attention to the sources of the new populist nationalism.

Economic globalization was benefiting some and leaving others behind. Faith in the democratic process was eroding as political elites engaged in corruption. Social media was undermining the distinction between real and fake news.

In past eras, progressives challenged these developments with calls for greater economic equality, more democracy, and solidarity across social identities. But mainstream progressive parties have often backed the same 1 percent-friendly policies as the right, leading to skyrocketing inequality.

The decline of the left has provided enormous political opportunities for the far right.

They’re climbing in the polls all over Europe. And here in the States, the white-supremacist alt-right played a critical role in getting Donald Trump elected.

But novelists don’t write dystopias because they think that the dismal future they portray is inevitable. 1984, Brave New World, The Handmaid’s Tale: These were all calls to arms. If humanity didn’t change its ways, the novelists warned, those dystopias would be more likely.

Americans, fortunately, are already responding to the threat.

The protests following Trump’s inauguration brought millions of people onto the streets. And the executive order banning Muslims from seven countries from entering the United States has generated unprecedented backlash.

The United States is divided, but still it stands.

I’m terrified. But I’m also hopeful. My novel Splinterlands remains mostly fiction, and I’ll work hard with millions to keep it that way.

Mass. and N.H. top US News's "Best States'' rankings, winter and all

Apple orchard in Hollis, N.H. New England winters help keep out the worst bugs and tropical diseases.

Adapted from an item in Robert Whitcomb's 'Digital Diary,'' in GoLocal24.com:

Yet again, after many decades of Sun Belt hype, we have another measure of how the generally northern and mostly Blue States are, by important metrics, the best states to live in. That’s largely because of their tradition of strong education and infrastructure. US News & World Report’s first ranking of the best states list in the top 10: Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Minnesota, Washington State, Iowa, Utah, Maryland, Colorado and Vermont. (Connecticut was 12th, Maine 18th and Rhode Island 21st.)

The publication said:

“Some states shine in health care. Some soar in education. Some excel in both – or in much more. The Best States ranking …draws on thousands of data points to measure how well states are performing for their citizens. In addition to health care and education, the metrics take into account a state’s economy, the opportunity it offers people, its roads, bridges, Internet and other infrastructure, its public safety and the integrity and health of state government.

“More weight was accorded to some state measures than others, based on a survey of what matters most to people. Health care and education were weighted most heavily. Then came the opportunity states offer their citizens, their crime & corrections and infrastructure. State economies followed closely in weighting, followed by measures of government administration. This explains why Massachusetts, ranking No. 1 in education and No. 2 in health care, occupies the overall No. 1 spot in the Best States rankings. And it explains why New Hampshire, ranking No. 1 in opportunity for its citizens, ranks No. 2 overall in the Best States rankings.’’

The low-tax (except for their regressive sales taxes) low-public-service Red States in the South generally did very poorly.

Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker, a Republican and a very able executive who’s expected to run for re-election next year, said:         

“We have a lot of really smart people, we have a lot of great schools. That has led to a whole series of terrific what I would call ‘ecosystems’ around technology and health care and finance and education. And you put it all together, and in this day and age, in this kind of global economy and global world we live in, it’s a terrific mix.” Of course, Massachusetts has had some great institutions since the 17th Century; it had a running start.

Mr. Baker will probably get some credit for the ranking, but the essentials of the Bay State’s health have been in place for a long time.  Governors and U.S. presidents have remarkably little impact on the economic health of their jurisdictions;  there are far too many variables.

As for New Hampshire, it has the overwash of wealth from the very rich Greater Boston area, the Granite State’s good public education, political integrity, local  and state civic-mindedness, a tradition of  having many well-run small and medium-size companies and industrial craftsmanship. And as  befits a state that is mostly suburban, exurban and rural,  lower taxes than Massachusetts’s.

US News folks did note that Massachusetts, despite of, or because of, its very low unemployment rate, had too little “affordable housing’’ (whatever that means exactly) and very wide income inequality. But the latter is due largely to the vast wealth collected by the senior execs and shareholders of very successful enterprises founded in, based in or with major operations in the Bay State and the large number of well paidvphysicians, engineers, financial-services honchos and other very highly skilled professionals.

Another advantage of New England: It's so far north that tropical diseases rarely make it to the region. There are some advantages to having the cool snap we call "winter.''

3 freezings are the charm

Spring Peeper.

"After the frogs begin to sing in the spring, if they are frozen in three times, you may be sure that afterwards you will have warm weather.''

-- Clifton Johnson, from his book What They Say in New England.

An intimate moment at the New England Aquarium

When I would visit my octopus friend, Octavia, at (the} New England Aquarium {in Boston}, usually she would look me in the face, flow right over to see me, and flush red with emotion when she took my arms in hers. Often when I'd stroke her she'd turn white beneath my touch, the color of a relaxed octopus.

-- Sy Montgomery
 

Sea Research Foundation/JASON Project CEO to speak at PCFR

March 6, 2017

To members and friends of the Providence Committee on Foreign Relations (thepcfr.org; pcfremail@gmail.com).

Our next guest will be Dr. Stephen Coan, on Wednesday, March 8.

Dr. Coan is president and chief executive officer of Sea Research Foundation, Inc., a 501c3 non-profit organization which operates Mystic Aquarium, Institute for Exploration and Immersion Learning. He is also chief executive officer of The JASON Project, an internationally acclaimed science program for classroom students, also managed by Sea Research Foundation in partnership with the National Geographic Society.

He’ll talk about the condition and future of the oceans in a time of global warming and other environmental challenges, especially the manmade ones.

Don Pesci: Of Lincoln and today's politics

Don Pesci, a Vernon, Conn.-based political writer and frequent contributor to New England Diary, have the address below at Meriden’s Fourth Annual Lincoln Day Dinner.

The day is named after Abe Lincoln, and well named too. I suppose this year those attending these remarks will thank God – who else? – that they are not called upon to celebrate the Jefferson, Jackson Bailey Dinner, which used to be a day of feasting and merriment for Connecticut Democrats. This was before conscience-stricken Democrats re-named their annual event. They did so because Democrats decided, three quarters of a century after President Jackson died, that he had owned slaves – who knew? -- and was not kind to American Indians. Though somewhat debased, Jackson, revered as a populist, is still regarded as the founder of the modern Democratic Party.

 

Lincoln owned no slaves and, in fact, prosecuted a bloody Civil War to emancipate them. He had a wicked sense of humor, unlike the stern, forbidding, disputatious and humorless Andy Jackson. On one occasion, in the midst of a speech, a heckler in the audience cried out that Lincoln was two-faced. Lincoln replied, “If I had two faces, do you think I’d be wearing this one?” His was a face only his wife and Mathew Brady, the famous photographer, could love.

I like to think that the modern Republican Party carries within its political DNA some of the characteristics of its founder. One has to have a robust sense of humor, after all,  to have survived eight years of President Barack Obama, or the possibility that his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, might have become president, a near miss for which the nation must thank God – who else? – or six years of Gov.  Dannell Malloy, whose approval rating, when last I looked, was scraping the bottom of the barrel at 25 percent – not as low as the approval rating of many journalists, but getting there.

So, what Lincolnian virtues should Republicans carry forward into the still nascent 21st Century?

Foremost, I think, would be an unflinching regard for the founding documents: the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights to the U.S. Constitution and the Constitution itself. Superman presidents come and go, but we are still a nation of laws dedicated, as Lincoln would have it, to certain timeless principles, among which is that government should interfere as little as possible with life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

This last formulation – the pursuit of happiness – properly understood, may grate on modern ears. The founders thought the pursuit of happiness was intimately bound up with property rights, the right to own, enjoy and dispose of property. Most scholars agree that the expression comes down to us from John Locke, who wrote in his Two Treatises of Government  that political society existed to protect property, which he defined as a person’s “life, liberty, and estate." For “estate,” Jefferson, in the Declaration of Independence, had substituted “the pursuit of happiness.”

The Virginia Declaration of Rights, written by George Mason and adopted in June 1776, relying heavily on Locke, states, “That all men are by nature equally free and independent and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.” A Virginian himself, Jefferson would have been familiar with the Virginia Declaration of Rights. Jefferson regarded Locke as one of the most important apostles of liberty. He was himself, modern libertarians will tell you, a champion of liberty viewed as the absence of governmental force, and also, sexual liberationists never tire of reminding us, a bit of a hedonist. George Washington defined government in a single word:  “Government,” he said, “is force.” And because it is force, it must be used sparingly and well.

So then, rights of property, liberty, which is the absence of unnecessary coercion, rational general laws and public virtue, best secured by republican forms of government, are the principle movers of right human action. Lincoln most heartily believed this, and he prayed for an end to the Civil War so that our nation would experience “a new birth of freedom” rooted in republican perceptions. Near the close of the Civil War, speaking for the nation at large, his words drifting over Gettysburg’s hallowed and blood-soaked ground, Lincoln prayed “that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Self-government, then, is intimately related to natural-law rights, or God-given rights, or imprescriptible rights that are part of our nature as human beings. We have a right of assembly because human beings are by nature social animals; we have a right of unhampered speech because as social animals we communicate with each other by means of words and signs, and if we were not at liberty to do so, there could be no social forms – no families, no neighborhoods, no municipal governments, no state governments, no federal governments; we have a right of freedom of religionbecause religious institutions, like political institutions, provide a theatre in whichwe may freely speak and assemble; a church – which is the gathering of the faithful, and not a brick building with a pulpit inside -- is a social theatre of thought and action, like a town hall.

Where are we today? Emerging from the Continental Congress that gave to the nation a Constitution of liberty -- a form of governance -- Ben Franklin was accosted by a woman who asked him, “Well Sir, what have you given us?” And his reply rings down the ages as a challenge thrown at the feet of future generations. “A republic, madam,” he said “— if you can keep it.” All the founders, students of history, every one, knew that republics were perishable forms of government, giving way, usually, to ambitious autocrats and followed by borderless displays of power. So it was with Rome, a promising republic at the beginning that ended with Suetonius’ “The Twelve Caesars,” many of whom – but most emphatically Caligula and Nero – proceeded to govern as demi-gods in whom naked power had replaced honor and public virtue. Caligula is the real precursor of Hitler, Stalin and Mao, three demoniac, totalitarian disturbers of the peace operating in the 20th century, possibly the bloodiest century in the history of the world.

So then, let’s take a survey of what V. I. Lenin used to call “the correlation of forces” right here in Connecticut in year 2017 to see if we have kept the republic.

Governor Malloy, no stranger to the use of naked force, is the most progressive governor Connecticut has had since Wilbur Cross, a Yalie belle lettrist and a Depression0-era governor. I do not here mean to suggest that Malloy is a belle lettrist – far from it; I cannot recall a single line of his uttered during his two terms as governor that is quotable or even memorable. But both he and Cross may properly be characterized as progressives; Cross in the era of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, no mean progressive himself, and Malloy in the era of progressive President Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders, a Vermont socialist who may justly be compared with Eugene Debs, Sanders’s political guardian angel. Debs ran for president as a socialist a number of times. 

Progressivism is the doctrine that anti-republican government not only knows best; it can and should be both omni-present and omni-competent, somewhat like the demi-god Caligula who, following his mother’s death, tore open her womb because he wanted to see the place where Caligula-The-God had been born. Progressivism is the doctrine that government is productive of good, an article of faith among both progressives and socialists. Given this presumption, government should be unbounded by such restraints as constitutions, the traditional balance of powers constitutionally hardwired into our republican form of government, long-standing traditions – all of them considered by progressives to be outworn social artifacts -- a lucid view of history and the collective common sense of a people that continues to insist, perversely, that theirs should be a government of, by and for the whole people. There are and must be no limits to true progressive government. We should have known something was up when the newly elected Obama told us that the U.S. Constitution was a document that insured “negative liberties.” The Constitution, in Obama’s view, said what the government may not do. But what the country really needed at the beginning of a regime committed to radically changing the political DNA of the United States was a living constitution that would spell out in precise terms what the government ought to do, a declaration of progressive action. After implementing this new declaration of dependence, the people should let Obama be Obama.

With some very few critics chirping in the background, the nation did allow Obama to be Obama. The results were not encouraging. Obama’s Affordable Care Act, the central pillar of the former president’s legacy, such as it is, carelessly implemented, became unaffordable; in due course, insurance companies took a hike. Obama’s two Secretaries of State – Hillary Clinton and John Kerry – brought war not peace to the Middle East. Vladimir Putin, now nuzzling up to President Donald Trump, bit off a large piece of Ukraine, successfully supported Bashar Assad – a tyrant even more bloody-minded than his father – in Syria, where Obama once drew a quickly disappearing red-line. ISIS, settling into northern Iraq and Syria, claimed responsibility for having blown up Paris -- numerous times. Ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens, is still dead, his tortured ghost crying out for justice. At Obama’s leave-taking, the national debt stood at $20 trillion, the now former president having doubled the debt within the space of eight years. Obama concluded a disastrous treaty with Iran, which is quickly becoming a client state of Putin’s, the terms of which were never submitted to congressmen such as U.S. Sen. Dick Blumenthal, who signed off on a “deal” that exploded a successful Iranian embargo and gave the mullahs there, all of whom have pledged to push Israel into the sea, millions of dollars in cold cash they doubtless will use to finance the services of Hamas, the militant spear-point cunningly fashioned to pierce Israel’s heart. In his last few weeks in office, the out-going president tried his best to hobble the incoming president – but there are only so many hours in the day, and the days ran out. Thanks to term limits, future damage has been halted, for the time being, and any repair job on Obama’s disastrous legacy was cut short by the unexpected victory of Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton. These are some of the bitter fruits of a borderless “rule by executive order” government.

Here in Connecticut, Malloy has followed a similar progressive course. Almost everywhere today, it is assumed that Connecticut does not have a revenue problem; how could it, following Malloy’s two major tax increases, the first the largest and the second the second largest in state history? It is now generally agreed, except in some “of course the earth is flat” quarters, that Connecticut is suffering from a spending problem. Malloy had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, to this golden perception. He has several times promised there will be no new tax increases, but he is not opposed to measures that will enhance revenue, and lately he has waffled on the matter of tax increases. He also has waffled on the ideological nature of his administration. Allow me a parenthetical remark: I am here using the word “ideological” in its non-pejorative sense. An ideology is a logical and ordered – not necessarily desirable – body of thought. The opposite of an ideology is a thoughtless, random assemblage of illogical, half-baked ideas.

Malloy has said both that his is the most conservative and the most progressive government, depending upon which group of people he is addressing. Mr. Malloy asked Connecticut reporters at the beginning of the New Year, “Who is the most conservative governor that any of you have worked with in the last whatever period of time you’ve been here?” Here we find him taking an undeserved conservative bow. A couple of weeks later, he was telling reporters that he had accepted an invitation to Trump’s inauguration ceremony because he thought progressive governors should be represented atthe affair. No Connecticut reporter has yet shouted out at a media-availability that Malloy is two-faced.

Only those willing to be fooled are fooled by any of this. Malloy is a progressive, pure and simple. At the beginning of Malloy’s second term, Jim Dean, Howard Dean’s brother, noted that Malloy “has been cited by some progressives like Mayor (Bill) de Blasio, of New York City, as an example of a Democrat who can win by emphasizing progressive themes, while many Democrats who moved in the other direction were defeated." And de Blasio himself draped the progressive mantle over Malloy’s shoulders: “And don't forget Gov. Dan Malloy -- who was written off by so many in his re-election bid in Connecticut. Malloy raised taxes so he could invest more in education each year (at a time when other governors were slashing education to close budget gaps). Malloy passed earned sick time and a minimum wage hike. And in his re-election bid, he proudly stood alongside Obama.” Malloy’s most articulate apologist, Roy Occhiogrosso, recently popped up to confirm that the earth is not flat and his former boss is indeed a progressive.

Lincoln, who believed that men and women should retain the wealth they had earned by the sweat of their brows, was neither a progressive nor a socialist.

Three lines are sometimes quoted from Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address to show that he harbored socialistic tendencies. Here are the lines: “Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.” One imagines Karl Marx, whose articles appeared in New York Papers from 1852-1861, nodding his head in affirmation. The First Inaugural Address was delivered years earlier than Marx and Engles’s Communist Manifesto, and if both had paid close attention to it, incorporating its measures into their ideology, the world would have been spared much trouble.

It is true that labor is superior to capital and must be attended to. “The effort to place capital on an equal footing with, if not above, labor in the structure of government,” Lincoln says, leads to a series of false assumptions. The false assumption that capital rather than labor is preeminent leads to other dangerously false assumptions.

Here is Lincoln again: “It is assumed that labor is available only in connection with capital; that nobody labors unless somebody else, owning capital, somehow by the use of it induces him to labor. This assumed, it is next considered whether it is best that capital shall hire laborers, and thus induce them to work by their own consent, or buy them and drive them to it without their consent. Having proceeded so far, it is naturally concluded that all laborers are either hired laborers or what we call slaves. And further, it is assumed that whoever is once a hired laborer is fixed in that condition for life.”

The notion that laborers, once fixed in their jobs, do not advance and improve their lot but remain part of a permanent class – the central presumption of Marxist socialism – is simply not true in Lincoln’s United States.

Listen closely to a uniquely American perception of the relationship between labor and capital:

“Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. Capital has its rights, which are as worthy of protection as any other rights. Nor is it denied that there is, and probably always will be, a relation between labor and capital producing mutual benefits. The error is in assuming that the whole labor of community exists within that relation. A few men own capital, and that few avoid labor themselves, and with their capital hire or buy another few to labor for them. A large majority belong to neither class--neither work for others nor have others working for them. In most of the Southern States a majority of the whole people of all colors are neither slaves nor masters, while in the Northern a large majority are neither hirers nor hired. Men, with their families--wives, sons, and daughters--work for themselves on their farms, in their houses, and in their shops, taking the whole product to themselves, and asking no favors of capital on the one hand nor of hired laborers or slaves on the other. It is not forgotten that a considerable number of persons mingle their own labor with capital; that is, they labor with their own hands and also buy or hire others to labor for them; but this is only a mixed and not a distinct class. No principle stated is disturbed by the existence of this mixed class.”

Lincoln never thought in bumper-sticker captions. His last law partner, William Herndon, said of him that Lincoln “not only went to the root of the question but dug up the root and separated and analyzed every fiber of it.” A fellow attorney, Leonard Swett, warned, “Any man who took Lincoln for a simple-minded man would very soon wake up with his back in a ditch.”

Listen now, and try to hear Lincoln’s words with the ear of your heart:

“Again, as has already been said, there is not of necessity any such thing as the free hired laborer being fixed to that condition for life” – no permanent class structure. He continues, “Many independent men everywhere in these States a few years back in their lives were hired laborers. The prudent, penniless beginner in the world labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land for himself, then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him. This is the just and generous and prosperous system which opens the way to all, gives hope to all, and consequent energy and progress and improvement of condition to all. No men living are more worthy to be trusted than those who toil up from poverty; none less inclined to take or touch aught which they have not honestly earned. Let them beware of surrendering a political power which they already possess, and which if surrendered will surely be used to close the door of advancement against such as they and to fix new disabilities and burdens upon them till all of liberty shall be lost.”

The substance and tone here is Reaganesque; no one would be surprised to find these words, or words like them, printed in a contemporary conservative press – not, of course, in Connecticut.

Lincoln left us a legacy we can draw on to advance liberty, the foundation stone of republican government. He was a man ahead of his time because his thoughts were not entirely bound up with momentary political events – which are not to say that Lincoln was not a political creature. He most certainly was a better politician than most men of his period, such as General McClellan, whom Lincoln more or less fired because McClellan, unlike Grant, was not overly concerned with the destruction of the South’s army. McClellan – who ran for the presidency against Lincoln and got shellacked – was a lesser general than Lincoln, who was intimately familiar with Napoleon’s successful military tactics, and who glimpsed in Grant the steel necessary to win a war and keepFranklin’s republic.

Studying the speeches of Lincoln – even his casual remarks – and comparing them with the sound-bite rhetoric of any modern politician you care to mention, one is forced to the conclusion that the Darwinian notion that a final product is more complex and perfect at the end of any developmental process is pure hokum. Only a political process that retains what is best and purifies our politics by speaking to the angels of our better nature can be called an improvement, a step forward toward beauty and perfection.

We must understand this about Lincoln: Secession, the abolition of slavery and most importantly the Civil War are the distortion lenses through which the character of Lincoln shines through. Lincoln used to say that all men can abide adversity; but if you want to test a man’s character – give him power. He wended a tortuous way during his own time between Radical Republicans rushing forward at warp speed, less impulsive Conservative Republicans, War Democrats who turned against him mostly for political reasons, and Copperheads, the foot-draggers of the age. Lincoln understood the mind of the country better than any other president before or after him. And he was a masterful commander-in-chief, says James McPherson in a book called Tried by War; Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief.

The war ended; the union was preserved; slavery was abolished. Ten years after Lincoln was assassinated, Fredrick Douglas was asked to say a few words about Lincoln on the occasion of the dedication of the “Freedmen’s Monument” in Lincoln Park east of the U.S. Capitol. This is what he said: “The honest and comprehensive statesman, clearly discerning the needs of his country, and earnestly endeavoring to do his whole duty, though covered and blistered with reproaches, may safely leave his course to the silent judgment of time. Few great public men have ever been the victims of fiercer denunciation than Abraham Lincoln was during his administration. He was often wounded in the house of his friends. Reproaches came thick and fast upon him from within and from without, and from opposite quarters. He was assailed by abolitionists; he was assailed by slaveholders; he was assailed by the men who were for peace any price; he was assailed by those who were for a more vigorous prosecution of the war; he was assailed for not making the war an abolition war; and he was most bitterly assailed for making the war an abolition war.”

A man of character was Lincoln. I think it was Henry Adams – the black sheep of the Adams family who, consciously attempting to wound puritanical sensibilities in Boston – placed the highest point of Western Civilization in the 12th Century. It was all downhill from there, Adams thought. Having written columns about Connecticut politicians for some 35 years, I hope you will forgive me if I say Adams may have a point.