Vox clamantis in deserto
'Plein air' inside
"Interiors #41 (oil on wood panel), by Carolyn Letvin, in her show "Intimate Interiors and Other Artistic Comforts,'' at Galatea Fine Art, Boston, through Feb. 28.
She says:
"I find interior spaces to be engaging and compelling. There’s a 'lost in time' sense about the rooms that call to me, which I believe is the essence of their allure for me and others. I do all of the paintings in the actual space. I like to stretch the definition of 'plein air' by including these works in that category. Even though I’m inside, I do usually have windows and doors open. And I deal with many of the same considerations that painting outdoors create, like changing light and visual editing of the subject. But I don’t have to deal with Mother Nature so much, which I consider a good thing!''
'His emissary, smoke'
"The sluggish smoke curls up from some deep dell,
The stiffened air exploring in the dawn,
And making slow acquaintance with the day;
Delaying now upon its heavenward course,
In wreathed loiterings dallying with itself,
With as uncertain purpose and slow deed,
As its half-wakened master by the hearth,
Whose mind still slumbering and sluggish thoughts
Have not yet swept into the onward current
Of the new day;—and now it streams afar,
The while the chopper goes with step direct,
And mind intent to swing the early axe.
First in the dusky dawn he sends abroad
His early scout, his emissary, smoke,
The earliest, latest pilgrim from the roof,
To feel the frosty air, inform the day;
And while he crouches still beside the hearth,
Nor musters courage to unbar the door,
It has gone down the glen with the light wind,
And o'er the plain unfurled its venturous wreath,
Draped the tree-tops, loitered upon the hill,
And warmed the pinions of the early bird;
And now, perchance, high in the crispy air,
Has caught sight of the day o'er the earth's edge,
And greets its master's eye at his low door,
As some refulgent cloud in the upper sky.''
-- "Smoke in Winter,'' by Henry David Thoreau of Concord, Mass.
Arctic adventure at Bowdoin
Go while it's still winter. Or go on a hot day in summer to think about cool.
The Peary-McMillan Arctic Museum, at Bowdoin College, in Brunswick, Maine, has lots of neat things (such as an oak-and-rawhide sledge, furry and leathery clothing for surviving Arctic weather and entries from an expedition journal) from the polar expeditions of Robert Peary and Donald MacMillan
Peary claimed to have been the first person to have reached the North Pole, in 1909, although that has been disputed. He was a hell of a promoter. It paid off. See his Eagle Island home in Maine's Casco Bay immediately below.
Most of the Bowdoin campus is lovely, with the Charles McKim-designed college art museum, below, the high point.
'Enhancing our essential selves'
On the Cape Cod National Seashore.
"The New England spirit does not seek solutions in a crowd; raw light and solitariness are less dreaded than welcomed as enhancers of our essential selves.''
-- John Updike, in Hugging the Shore.
Updike was an immigrant from Pennsylvania. He went to Harvard, worked briefly in New York City and then moved to the Massachusetts North Shore for the rest of his life.
Retire before it's too late, Mr. Brady
Brain at right shows the effects of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, which presents itself in people who have suffered repeated blows to the head, as is common in football.
From Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary,'' in GoLocal24.com:
“I'm always a flop at a top-notch affair,
But I've still got my health, so what do I care?
My best ring, alas, is a glass solitaire,
But I still got my health, so what do I care?
….The hip that I shake doesn't make people stare,
But I got such health, what do I care?
The sight of my props never stops a thoroughfare,
But I still got my health, so what do I care’’
-- From “I’ve Still Got My Health,’’ by Cole Porter
Everyone wants to leave as a winner. And so it’s easy to understand why the New England Patriots’ mega-star quarterback Tom Brady would indicate that he wants to play again in the next season, when he’ll be 41, after the underdog Eagles defeated the Pats in the Super Bowl. But the effects of being hit repeatedly in the head can be insidious, with visible symptoms all of a sudden appearing catastrophically. It would be very sad to see the very smart Brady gaga in five years. He should retire now.
Jim Hightower: Counting the 'populist' Trump's lies to his sucker followers
Via OtherWords.org
Have you noticed that Donald Trump constantly prefaces his outlandish lies with such phrases as: “To be honest with you,” “To tell the truth,” and “Believe me”?
Why? Because like a snake-oil salesman, he constantly needs to convince himself that he’s speaking the truth in order to perform his next lie convincingly. The show must go on… and on.
In fact, he already ranks as the perhaps lyingest president in U.S. history. And that includes Nixon! The Washington Post‘s fact checker counted over 2,000 lies in Trump’s first year alone.
Trump’s biggest whopper is that he’s an honest-to-God “populist,” standing up for America’s hard-hit middle class against Wall Street, corporate lobbyists and moneyed elites.
This prevarication has duped many working stiffs into thinking he’s their champion. The huckster doubled down on this lie in his inaugural address last year, pompously declaring, “The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer.”
That’s why a new, straight-talking pamphlet by the watchdog group Public Citizen is so important. It exposes the “people’s champion” as a rank fraud who’s worked from day one to further enrich and empower the corporate elites he had denounced as a candidate.
Public Citizen’s report documents with concise, easy-to-grasp specifics on how Trump-the-faux-populist has systematically sold out the working families whose votes he cynically swiped, handing our government to a kakistocracy of corporate plutocrats.
The Public Citizen exposé is titled “Forgetting the Forgotten: 101 Ways Donald Trump Has Betrayed the Middle Class,” and it drives the stake of truth through the heart of his populist pretensions. It’s available at CorporatePresidency.org/forgotten.)
Jim Hightower is a radio commentator, writer and public speaker. He’s also the editor of the populist newsletter, The Hightower Lowdown, and a member of the Public Citizen board.
The young kept busy in late 19th Century New England farm life
Right, "Young Farmers (Study for Weaning the Calf)'' (oil on canvas), painted in 1873-74, and, left, "Returning from the Spring'' (oil on panel), painted in 1874, both by Winslow Homer (1836-1910), at the Portland Museum of Art.
Winslow Homer (United States, 1836–1910), Young Farmers (Study for Weaning the Calf), 1873–74, oil on canvas, 13 5/8 x 11 1/2 inches.
Winslow Homer (United States, 1836 - 1910), Returning from the Spring, 1874, oil on panel, 7 7 /8 x 5 3/4 inches
North Conway getting a second branch of the New England Ski Museum
The New England Ski Museum is getting a second branch (above), this one in North Conway, N.H., near the Presidential Range.The first one is at Cannon Mountain, in the Franconia Range. To learn more, please hit this link.
Cranmore Mountain ski area, in North Conway.
Calif. to probe Aetna's coverage denials.
The Aetna headquarters building, in Hartford, designed by renowned architect James Gamble Rogers, is the world's largest Colonial Revival Building. It was finished in 1931.
By BARBARA FEDER OSTROV
Both of California’s health insurance regulators said they will investigate how Aetna Inc. makes coverage decisions, as the lawsuit of a California man who is suing the nation’s third-largest insurer for improper denial of care heads for opening arguments on Wednesday. Woonsocket, R.I.-based CVS Health, the pharmacy giant, seeks to buy Aetna.
The Department of Managed Health Care, which regulates the vast majority of health plans in California, said Monday it will investigate Hartford, Conn.-based Aetna after CNN first reported Sunday that one of the company’s medical directors had testified in a deposition related to the lawsuit that he did not examine patients’ records before deciding whether to deny or approve care. Rather, he relied on information provided by nurses who reviewed the records — and that was how he was trained by the company, he said.
Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones had already told CNN his office would investigate Aetna, which he reconfirmed in a statement Monday.
“If a health insurer is making decisions to deny coverage without a physician ever reviewing medical records, that is a significant concern and could be a violation of the law,” Jones said.
It is unclear how widespread the review of patient claims by non-physicians is in the industry or whether other insurers will feel compelled to revisit their practices.
The California Department of Insurance, which Jones heads, regulates only a small fraction of the state’s health plans, but they include several Aetna policies. He has previously criticized Aetna for “excessive” health insurance rate hikes, though neither his agency nor the managed health care department has the power to stop the increases.
Jones’ investigation of Aetna will review denials of coverage or pre-authorizations during the tenure of the medical director who testified in the California lawsuit, Jay Ken Iinuma, who has since left the company. Insurance department investigators will also look into Aetna’s procedures for managing medical coverage decisions generally.
The dual investigations come as federal regulators are examining a planned $69 billion purchase of Aetna by pharmaceutical giant CVS — a deal that many experts believe could transform the health care industry.
It’s unclear how the investigations might affect Aetna’s future coverage decisions, or those of other insurers, said Shana Alex Charles, an insurance industry expert and assistant professor at California State University-Fullerton. But she praised the decision to investigate as exactly what insurance regulators should be doing. “Without that strict oversight, corners get cut,” Charles said.
Scott Glovsky, the lawyer representing the California plaintiff, Gillen Washington, said he and his client were “very pleased” by the news that Aetna will be investigated. Speaking Monday, before the managed care department said it would also investigate, Glovsky said his client brought the case “to stop these illegal practices, and we’re looking forward to the insurance commissioner’s investigation so we can make things safer for Aetna patients.”
Washington, of Huntington Beach, had been receiving expensive medication for years to treat a rare immune system disorder known as Common Variable Immune Deficiency.
But in 2014, Aetna denied the college student’s monthly dose of immunoglobulin replacement therapy, saying his bloodwork was outdated. During the appeal process, Washington developed pneumonia and was hospitalized for a collapsed lung.
In recent years, as California Healthline reported last June, patients with similar diseases have faced increasing difficulty getting their insurers to approve treatments, according to clinicians and patient advocates.
In an e-mailed statement on Monday, Aetna did not directly address the question of case reviews by non-physicians. It said its “medical directors review all necessary available medical information for cases that they are asked to evaluate. That is how they are trained, as physicians and as Aetna employees.” It added, “adherence to those guidelines, which are based on health outcomes and not financial considerations, is an integral part of their yearly review process.”
Aetna also noted that it has paid for all of Washington’s treatments since 2014 and continues to do so.
Aetna said in previous documents filed in the lawsuit that it is standard for people with Washington’s immunodeficiency disease to get regular blood tests and that Washington had failed to do so. But Washington’s attorney said his client clearly needed the medication and that Aetna’s action violated its contract with Washington.
Charles, the professor, said she was most surprised by the fact that Iinuma had admitted not only that he hadn’t reviewed Washington’s medical records personally, but that he had no experience treating his disease. The burden should be on insurers to demonstrate why treatment should be stopped, not on doctors and patients to show why it should be continued, Charles said.
“It’s easy to see the cases as just files and not people standing in front of you,” she said.
More startups needed
The Central Square area in Cambridge, Mass., an area famed for business startups, especially in technology, in large part because of the proximity of Harvard and MIT.
From Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary,'' in GoLocal24.com:
Eduardo Porter, a New York Times columnist, in a column headlined “Where are the Start-Ups? Loss of Dynamism Is Impeding Growth,’’ suggests that the slow growth in the U.S. economy in recent years has a lot to do with the rise of huge, market-controlling companies that suppress the creation of the small new business that drive new-job creation and that boost productivity. Mr. Porter notes that the rate of company creation is about half what it was 40 years ago.
A big problem is the failure, by Republican and Democratic administrations, to enforce antitrust laws against such enterprises as Google, Facebook and other huge companies, including big banks, that have vast marketing, pricing and other power. They enthusiastically engage in legally dubious anti-competitive activities. Washington has become increasingly in the thrall of lobbyists working for these giants. It recalls the heyday of the Standard Oil Trust and other monopolies at the turn of the 20th Century.
Mr. Porter cites a study by the Hamilton Project, at the Brookings Institution, by Jay Shambaugh, Ryan Nunn and Patrick Liu, in which they explore possible causes of the American economy’s inertia.
To read the report, please hit this link.
Mr. Porter writes:
“The evidence paints a distinct picture of decline: Fewer start-ups mean fewer new ideas and fewer young, productive businesses to replace older, less productive ones.’’
There’s little indication that this will change as long as Washington favors the biggest lobbyists and campaign contributors. Of course, we have always had a few monopolies, such as the old American Telephone & Telegraph, that were regulated in varying degrees.
To read his article, please hit this link.
Chris Powell: Casinos transfer wealth to the rich from the poor but liberals still like them
The Foxwoods casino complex (the world's largest), in Mashantucket, Conn.
Nothing transfers wealth from the many to the few as casinos do, which is why they demonstrate so well the phoniness of what passes for liberalism in Connecticut.
Libertarianism can justify casinos, but they are not justified by their claims of employment, since that employment is merely the mechanism of the transfer of wealth from casino patrons, disproportionately poor, to casino owners, always rich.
So why does the clamor for enlarging casino gambling in Connecticut come mainly from supposedly liberal Democrats, most recently from Bridgeport's delegation in the General Assembly?
Because the casino jobs will go disproportionately to their constituents while the victims of casino gambling will be drawn from all over, because the casinos will pay political graft locally, and because nothing matters more to liberals than raising government revenue, whatever the source.
Fortunately for the advocates of a casino in Bridgeport there are two other issues -- the unfairness of Connecticut's current casino policy and its failure to maximize the state's royalties from the business.
That is, state government long has conferred a monopoly on the two casinos operated by reconstituted Indian tribes in the southeast corner of the state in exchange for 25 percent of their slot-machine take. But the state has never required the tribes to bid again for their monopoly even as the revenue they send the state has been declining for years because nearby states have been getting into the business.
Non-tribal casino operators such as MGM, which soon will open a casino just over the Massachusetts line in Springfield, would love to participate in an auction for casino rights in Connecticut. MGM maintains that a casino it would put in Bridgeport would pay royalties far exceeding what the tribes pay. Indeed, combined with the casinos being built in Massachusetts, a casino in Bridgeport might threaten the survival of the tribal casinos, cutting off most of their distant traffic and leaving them with a clientele that is mostly local and poor.
The big question about a casino in Bridgeport may be how long it could operate before inducing New York to put full-scale casinos in New York City, Westchester County and Nassau County and New Jersey to put them in the Newark area. Such a time is almost certainly coming anyway, and Connecticut will have caused it by legitimizing the Indian casino racket in the Northeast in the guise of social justice and ethnic reparations 25 years ago.
So what will happen with Connecticut's casino policy? Who will win -- the Indians, Bridgeport, or MGM? In any case it's not likely to be determined by any examination of the public interest.
xxx
Jostling for a return to office in recent years, former Secretary of the State Susan Bysiewicz, a Democrat, has made herself a caricature of political ambition, opportunism, and calculation.
She twice became a candidate for governor, withdrawing her second candidacy to run for attorney general, which offered her better prospects upon Attorney General Richard Blumenthal's decision to run for the U.S. Senate. But the state Supreme Court ruled imperiously that Bysiewicz lacked the lawyerly qualifications required by a manifestly unconstitutional statute. Bysiewicz then ran for U.S. senator but lost the Democratic primary. Lately she looked to move into various state Senate districts without Democratic incumbents. Last week she gave up on that and filed for governor again.
So does Bysiewicz stand for anything besides ambition? Last week she celebrated having no connection to the administration of Gov. Dannel Malloy, a Democrat not seeking re-election. Maybe that's a start.
Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.
Subdue and beautify
Old post card showing "White Village,'' aka Lower Waterford, on the Connecticut River and in Vermont's "Northeast Kingdom.''
“As for the wilderness, they {the Puritans} saw it as something to be ‘subdued,’ on the assumption that anything not immediately useful to man was inherently evil. The Indians who lived there had no real claim to it {the Puritans claimed}. ‘They ramble over much land,’ wrote {Boston founder John} Winthrop, ‘without title or property.’
“However they acquired their rights of possession, the new owners demonstrated an instinctive feeling for beauty in planning their towns in harmony with the land, and a sense of stewardship that abides in many communities to this day. Here in Lower Waterford, Vermont, known as White Village {because most of the buildings are painted white} the meetinghouse {church} and the library stand together as living links with the past.’’
-- From “Light From a Meetinghouse Window,’’ an essay by Paul Brooks, in the book Arthur Griffin’s New England: The Four Seasons, With Original Essays by 51 Famous Authors.
Josh Hoxie: Ryan's $1.50-a-week gift from the GOP tax law
Avarice, by Jesus Solana.
Via OtherWords.org
Love is in the air. Or so the marketers want us to believe, as Valentine’s Day ads sweep the nation into a frenzy of buying flowers, greeting cards, and confections to communicate our affection.
Washington is less forthcoming with the adoration, especially for working people.
You’re probably tired of hearing about the tax plan passed by Congress late last year. If not, just wait for the media barrage coming your way from the Republican donor class, which is guaranteed to make the Super Bowl Tide ads look like child’s play.
In case you missed it, Republicans jammed through a comprehensive reform of the tax code in December without a single congressional hearing or Democratic vote. The plan was a massive gift to the ultra-wealthy — a money grab by any measure, with just a few peanuts tossed to the rest of us.
Next, Republican lawmakers and their backers announced plans to spend tens of millions of dollars promoting said peanuts, to distract from the huge windfalls going to millionaires and billionaires.
They’ve got their work cut out for them in promoting the most unpopular legislation in recent history.
Speaker of the House Paul Ryan took to Twitter to celebrate the reported tax savings of a secretary in Pennsylvania resulting from the Trump tax cuts. Her take of the $1.5 trillion cut? A whopping $1.50 per week added to her paycheck, Ryan boasted.
It’s safe to say this PR effort is off to poor start.
Ryan didn’t explain why he quickly deleted his tweet shortly after posting it. I suspect it had something to do with the Twitter users who pointed out that the billionaire Koch brothers stand to gain as much as $1.4 billion annually, according to Americans for Tax Fairness.
That’s $1.50 a week for the secretary in Pennsylvania, versus about $27 million per week for the Koch brothers.
The Koch brothers jab might’ve hit a bit close to home for Ryan — who, just days after the Trump tax cuts became law, accepted $500,000 from Charles Koch for his fundraising committee. If it looks like corruption, smells like corruption, and tastes like corruption… Well, you get the idea.
The author and Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel taught us, “The opposite of love is not hate, but indifference.” What we’ve witnessed from Ryan and his billionaire backers, as well as Trump, is complete and utter indifference to the needs of working families.
The $1.50 tweet is indicative of just how out of touch Washington has become with ordinary families. The only group that matters is the wealthy. They get the love, the adoration, and the huge handouts.
Meanwhile, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) will expire without re-authorization this year. SNAP, sometimes called food stamps, serves one in seven low-income Americans, over 20 million households.
This is just one of many vitally important programs on the chopping block of Trump’s proposed budget. Given the rhetoric coming from the Republican majority in Congress, prospects look dim.
Maybe this Valentine’s Day, Cupid’s arrow will strike our greedy Koch brothers as they sit in their private jets looking down on the working families for whom they hold such deep disdain. Maybe they’ll find a little love and compassion for the less-well off and stop doing everything they can to make themselves richer and everyone else poorer.
Josh Hoxie directs the Project on Taxation and Opportunity at the Institute for Policy Studies.
For a minute anyway
"Joining Minds'' ( oil and tar on linen), by Richard Nocera, in the group show "A Pairing,'' at Atelier Newport, through March 25.
Boston mayor complains about dearth of state funding for city's schools
Plaque commemorating the first site, on School Street. of the Boston Latin School, the most prestigious public school in Boston and, founded in 1635, the oldest public school in America.
Boston Mayor Marty Walsh told the New England Council on Monday that his city is in a “crisis” because the state has been failing to address longstanding shortages of state funding for local schools. And he said he disappointed in the amount of aid proposed by Gov. Charlie Baker, a Republican with whom the Democratic mayor has generally had friendly political relations.
“One of our biggest fiscal challenges that we can’t wait to solve is our declining and underfunded state aid. We have issues there.''
The city says: “State aid has been reduced substantially over the course of the last two recessions. Since FY02, net state aid (defined as state aid revenues less state assessments) to the City has been reduced by over $252 million or 59%. The City lost approximately $79 million between FY03 {fiscal 2003} and FY05, gained approximately $16 million between FY06 and FY08.''
To read more, please hit this link.
Tim Faulkner: N.H. panel's rejection of Northern Pass hydro-energy project upends Mass. plans
Via ecoRI News (ecori.org)
By all accounts, the rejection of the Northern Pass energy project was a major surprise. The plan to deliver 1.09 gigawatts of hydropower from Quebec through New Hampshire to southern New England via high-voltage transmission lines was all but assured by the developer and energy officials in Massachusetts. The Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources was counting on the electricity for its Clean Energy and Climate Plan for 2020.
A Massachusetts Clean Energy power-purchase contract was recently awarded to Eversource and Hydro-Quebec for hydro electricity to help meet the state's goal of 1,200 megawatt of new land-based power by 2022. Eversource intended to start construction in April and complete the project by 2020.
On Feb. 1, however, the New Hampshire Site Evaluation Committee rejected the proposal, 7-0. The board worried that the 192-mile power-line system, including hulking towers, would disrupt main streets and harm tourism, particularly in the scenic northern portion of the state that is home to the White Mountain National Forest and Franconia Notch.
Eversource made concessions by promising to bury 52 miles of the route and set aside 5,000 acres of preservation and recreation land. But it wasn't enough. The decision was celebrated by small towns and environmental groups that vigorously opposed the project since it was announced in 2010. Thousands of New Hampshire residents submitted comments objecting to the project.
Eversource said it was “shocked and outraged” by the vote and plans to appeal the decision in New Hampshire Supreme Court. It has 30 days to appeal the vote by the site evaluation committee.
“The process failed to comply with New Hampshire law and did not reflect the substantial evidence on the record,” Eversource said in a prepared statement.
The utility referred to the economic benefits of the $1.6 billion project, including $30 million in annual tax revenue, as well as the renewable-energy goals it would be fulfilling. The process, Eversource said, “is broken and this decision sends a chilling message to any energy project contemplating development in the Granite State.”
Eversource had invested some $250 million in the project and received approval from the U.S. Department of Energy for a portion of the power lines last November, but still requires a permit from Quebec.
In Massachusetts, the office of the attorney general and the Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs (EEA) said they would reevaluate the energy procurement decision, while remaining committed to acquiring imported hydropower.
Peter Lorenz, EEA communications director, said a new proposal for renewable energy would be considered if existing contracts can't meet the terms of the agreement.
Rhode Island has also shown interest in imported hydropower. Former Gov. Lincoln Chafee advocated for a deal with Hydro-Quebec after touring the company. In recent years the state discussed buying a portion of Quebec hydropower in a deal with Massachusetts but an agreement was never reached.
On Feb. 5, Gov. Gina Raimondo announced a goal of acquiring 400 megawatts of utility-scale renewable energy from the Northeast, but only small-scale hydro projects qualify for the program.
Tim Faulkner writes for ecoRI News.
Don Pesci: Chris Powell has been very important to Connecticut
I happen to be writing something on Mark Twain’s politics, and I couldn’t help but wonder what he might have thought rather than written – for Twain was fairly cautious, some would say over-cautious, while his wife and censor Olivia was still alive – about recent Connecticut politics.
Surely Twain would have noticed that the flight of progressive politicians from their sinecures have followed the flight of businesses and entrepreneurial capital from his beloved state. There’s got to be some heavy levity, Twain’s specialty, in there somewhere. Not even Olivia, the keeper of Twain’s reputation, could have prevented him from poking fun at Connecticut’s political Grand Guignol. Following a fatal dip in the polls, Gov. Dannel Malloy has chosen not to run again, and he has been followed out the door by his lieutenant governor, a promising Democrat gubernatorial prospect who has not spent time in prison, Comptroller Kevin Lembo, Atty. Gen. George Jepsen, and other Democrat celebrities, all banging their tushies, frantically attempting to put out pant fires.
We don’t have Twain with us anymore. But Chris Powell, whose retirement from his job as managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn., is still pending, will be with us for some time to come. Though he will be leaving the paper as a regular employee after 50 years, Powell will maintain his column – good news for the good guys, bad news for the bad guys.
State Sen. Joe Markley said on Facebook that Powell was Connecticut’s “indispensable man,” and this flushed out some doubters. One would think in the era of President Trump, country and state would have gotten used to a little hyperbole. A little rich, one guy thought. We hauled that guy off to a dark corner and gave him a public thrashing, because Powell really is the indispensable man. It’s OK; you can do this sort of thing on Facebook and, if you are president of the United States, on Twitter, which has become a kind of tumbril used to transport distasteful politicians to the guillotine.
I provided half a dozen items -- all written by me; interviews with Powell on Connecticut Commentary, mentions of him in past columns, his indispensable review of Lowell Weicker’s autobiography Maverick, which Powell titled “Mr. Bluster Saves The World,” and such like -- to support Markley’s thesis.
At the same time, I received from my nephew Craig Tobey, who is living in California – please don’t ask me why – a message on LinkedIn congratulating me for having spent 38 years writing columns. Powell is wholly responsible for this. So, I wrote Craig back saying “Thanks. It’s a long time to have been writing on water.”
When the waves break, when time passes, all of it is writing on water. You try to say some things that will stay fresh on the shelf, and Powell is better at this than most. He’s quotable and memorable, always the sign of a superior intellect. And he likes all the right thinkers -- Frédéric Bastiat, for instance, and G.K. Chesterton. Tethered to either of these sane anchors, you cannot wander far from the truth.
There are, as we know, two kinds of truths, pleasant and unpleasant -- mine and yours. It is the unpleasant but necessary truths we all instinctively retreat from.
We all are servants of the truth, not its masters. Writing in “The Examiner” in 1710, Jonathan Swift said it best: “Besides, as the vilest writer has his readers, so the greatest liar has his believers; and it often happens, that if a lie be believ’d only for an hour, it has done its work, and there is no farther occasion for it. Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it; so that when men come to be undeceiv’d, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale has had its effect.”
It is the business of honest journalism to see to it that the truth is not washed away by lies. To lie is to say the thing that is not, and journalists should avoid this too common practice like the plague. For fifty years in journalism, that has been Powell’s honorable trade. He will never receive a Pulitzer – neither did Bill Buckley, astonishingly – but he has retired from the paper only, and during his long haul he has kept faith with Joseph Pulitzer’s ever-fresh observation that “good journalists should have no friends” -- in the political world, I should hasten to mention. Isn’t it uplifting to think that we will have Powell with us to kick around threadbare politicians a bit more?
Don Pesci is a Vernon, Conn.-based essayist, and, like Chris Powell, a frequent contributor to New England Diary.
'Green under the snow'
"Ice comes undone
Skin shining and
hair full of
March
girls spill out of
offices their
bones whispering strong
hands to marry
glazed orchards
and vines coming back
Green is under the
snow....''
-- From "Thaw,'' by Lyn Lifshin