Long, lonely hours

“Night’’ (oil on canvas), by Leon Doucette, in the “2018 Regional Juried Exhibition,’’ at the Guild of Boston Artists, through Sept. 29.

Providence's Urban Innovation Project

On the Woonasquatucket River, in Providence’s Olneyville neighborhood.

From The New England Council (newenglandcouncil.com)_

“The City of Providence recently announced a partnership with anchor institutions to drive urban innovation. Mayor Jorge O. Elzora explained that this partnership would revitalize two innovation districts in Providence, one in the Jewelry District and another along the Woonasquatucket River Corridor, by prioritizing public and private investments in those areas.

Providence’s Urban Innovation Partnership echoes a model embraced by many other cities across the country, where city governments are considering how to thoughtfully partner with local businesses. Officials believe that partnering to grow the economy in Providence in a way that serves the diversity of the city will ensure a collective success. In efforts to advance their vision, the City of Providence has selected Boston-based Venture Café Foundation to serve as “Urban Innovation Districts Maker Incubator Program Manager” to help organize collaboration between various local institutions.

Providence Mayor Jorge O. Elorza said in his announcement, ‘Through the Urban Innovation Partnership we’re making a commitment to work collaboratively because we know that Providence’s future success requires that our diverse anchor institutions join us at the table. Our city has so many existing resources and strengths and to truly advance them we must work shoulder to shoulder to support innovation and job growth in our capital city.’

Magical thinking in coastal flood zones

Damage in Westerly, R.I., from Hurricane Carol, which struck on Aug. 31, 1954.

Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

Consider the Federal Flood Insurance Program, which before Hurricane Florence arrived was $20 billion in debt. The program – the primary source of flood insurance in America -- is in need of deep reform.

The basic problem, besides the fact that Congress and the White House try to put as much stuff as possible on our collective credit card, rather than paying honestly with tax revenue: The federal government, to please affluent homeowners, especially along the seacoast, and campaign-contributor developers and real-estate agents, blithely subsidizes rebuilding in flood-prone areas – areas becoming ever more vulnerable because of the effects of global warming caused by fossil-fuel burning.

“They have not dealt with the gorilla in the room which is proactively addressing these types of disasters for the future,” Rob Moore, a senior policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told Bloomberg News. “Too much of the U.S.’s response to natural disaster is completely reactionary: We throw a bunch of money after it happens.”

Indeed, after a hurricane slams a coastline, private and public rebuilding money pours into devastated areas, leading to the construction of more building in some places than were there before the hurricane!

Moore said that Congress should direct the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which runs the insurance program, to focus on strongly discouraging building in the areas most vulnerable to flooding as well as mandating that less exposed but still somewhat vulnerable structures be raised. The taxpayers have helped to rebuild some coastal-flood destroyed structures five or more times.

Last week it was the Carolinas, some late summer or early fall it will be southern New England when the eye of a northward-accelerating hurricane roars up the Connecticut Valley, exposing the coast of eastern Connecticut, all of Rhode Island and southeastern Massachusetts to a disastrous tidal surge. Most of us prefer not to help pay to rebuild a lot of McMansions on the dunes.

Regarding Florence, note that Orrin Pilkey, a retired Duke University coastal geologist, complained in a recent op-ed in the (Raleigh) News & Observer that the Tar Heel state hasn’t acted with the same rigor as, for example, the communities in Virginia and New Jersey, to prepare for rising sea levels.

Migrants and yardbirds

Photos (below) and commentary by Thomas Hook

I’ve noticed that in September comes a day or two that always feels like the end of summer with autumn soon arriving. On Sept. 17, the remnant of what had been Hurricane Florence was approaching my town of Southbury, Conn., from the west-southwest. It was warm and humid but it felt as if change was in the air.

Birds who migrate rarely stick around, but that afternoon some stayed in the trees in our front yard feeding rather than passing through. Perhaps anticipating the heavy rains due to fall on Southbury the next day, they were trying to get in a meal before taking cover.

The first two photos below are of a Northern Parula and a Red-eyed Vireo, birds that I normally only see in the spring. They were  heading south, way south. 

I also saw a pair of cardinals that I thought at first they were leucistic (an abnormal condition of reduced pigmentation) but in fact they were simply molting. So the third picture is of a male, looking bedraggled but hopefully healthy enough otherwise. The Cardinals are yardbirds and won’t migrate. This guy will stick around.

‘Like a stairway to the sea’

New Harbor, Bristol, Maine, about 1905.

She fears him, and will always ask
      What fated her to choose him;
She meets in his engaging mask
      All reasons to refuse him;
But what she meets and what she fears
Are less than are the downward years,
Drawn slowly to the foamless weirs
      Of age, were she to lose him.

Between a blurred sagacity
      That once had power to sound him,
And Love, that will not let him be
      The Judas that she found him,
Her pride assuages her almost,
As if it were alone the cost –
He sees that he will not be lost
      And waits and looks around him.

A sense of ocean and old trees
      Envelops and allures him;
Tradition, touching all he sees,
      Beguiles and reassures him;
And all her doubts of what he says
Are dimmed with what she knows of days –
Till even prejudice delays
      And fades, and she secures him.

The failing leaf inaugurates
      The reign of her confusion:
The pounding wave reverberates
      The dirge of her illusion;
And home, where passion lived and died,
Becomes a place where she can hide,
While all the town and harbour side
      Vibrate with her seclusion. 

We tell you, tapping on our brows,
      The story as it should be –
As if the story of a house
      Were told, or ever could be;
We'll have no kindly veil between
Her visions and those we have seen –
As if we guessed what hers had been,
      Or what they are, or would be.

Meanwhile we do no harm; for they
      That with a god have striven,
Not hearing much of what we say,
      Take what the god has given;
Though like waves breaking it may be
Or like a changed familiar tree,
Or like a stairway to the sea
      Where down the blind are driven.

— “Eros Turannos, by Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935), born in Head Tide, Maine.

Robinson’s boyhood home, in Gardiner, Maine.

Sneak attacks on winter moths

A winter moth caterpillar, above, and the moth as a, well, moth beiow.

Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

In happy environmental news, there’s good news for maple, oak and other trees, as well as blueberry bushes, defoliated by winter moths, aka Operophtera Brumata L.

A University of Massachusetts at Amherst scientist named Joseph Elkinton, working with the assistance of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, has developed a “biocontrol’’ method of killing the moths without pesticides with Cyzenis Albicans flies. The flies lay eggs on leaves eaten by winter moth caterpillars. The eggs hatch inside the caterpillars, and then the flies’ larvae eat the caterpillar from the inside out. Delightfully macabre, eh?

The winter moths are an invasive species that arrived in New England in the 1990s, with the spread associated with global warming. New England’s big trees are one of our region’s glories; it’s nice to know we can save more of them now without toxic chemicals.

Autumn vapors

— Photo by M. Rehemtulla

‘’{W}e had to conclude that something in the September combination of waning sun and increased humidity released vapors a stronger sun or an earth more parched would have beaten down or imprisoned and that the fragrance was indeed a distillation of all the things it suggested – of the late flowers in the meadows and the low, matted tangle of the half-rotted undergrowth, of the turning grape and of the falling apple and of the ragweed and the breath of the trees and the September rose and of the ripe brown body of Autumn herself.’’

— From In Praise of Seasons, by the late Connecticut essayist and editor Alan H. Olmstead

'Street art' in rich Manchester

“Coastal Bowl, Night Sky’’ (detail), by Matt Seasholtz, in the current show “Thriving Spaces: Street Art Meets Glass,’’ at the Southern Vermont Arts Center, Manchester.

The gallery says the show includes “never-before-seen works of glass and street art created for this unique exhibit.’’

Hildene, the estate of Robert Todd Lincoln.

Manchester is an affluent resort and second-home town in the southwestern part of the Green Mountain State, well known for hosting such high-end retailing as Orvis, the fishing-gear company. Departed industries include iron mines, marble quarries, mills, lumber companies and sheep for the burgeoning New England woolen business of the 19th Century.

Robert Todd Lincoln, the president’s son, helped Manchester famous by building Hildene, his grand country place, now a museum. He was drawn to the town by the gorgeous countryside and the grand Equinox House hotel, which is still there.

The Equinox House.

“View of Manchester, Vermont,” by DeWitt Clinton Boutelle (1870)

Jill Richardson: Why many women don't report sex assault

When Christine Blasey Ford came forward to report that President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, sexually assaulted her in 1982, you could cue the response: Why didn’t she speak out then? Why didn’t she go to the police?

There’s a long, long list of reasons why a woman wouldn’t speak out even now, and no doubt it was even more difficult in the pre-Anita Hill world of 1982.

I can’t speak for everyone who has faced sexual assault, but I can speak for myself.

1. At first, I didn’t know that what happened to me was a crime. My first assault occurred in college, 18 years ago. He lived in my dorm. I knew what rape was and didn’t think I’d experienced that. But I didn’t know that sexual violations without consent that aren’t sexual intercourse are also a crime.

2. I couldn’t talk about it. Even now, I can’t describe what happened to my therapist in any detail. What happened involved body parts that are too private to discuss with those closest to me — let alone the police, a judge or a newspaper. Talking about a past trauma can be re-traumatizing. Some of us cope by staying silent.

3. I blamed myself. I physically resisted for a while and then I froze and it happened. At the time, I told myself that if I really didn’t want it, I would’ve kept fighting. I didn’t know that freezing is a normal human response in a traumatic situation.

4. Afterward, I wanted him to be my boyfriend. My therapist said this was my way of trying to improve the situation. If he was my boyfriend, then what happened could be reinterpreted as meaningful. It’s a perverse response, but it’s apparently not uncommon.

5. I know someone who reported a rape to the police and had a traumatic experience of testifying in court and getting cross-examined by her rapist’s lawyer in front of her rapist. And then the rapist was found innocent. I don’t want that to happen to me.

6. Now, 18 years later, the man who assaulted me is an instructor of neurology at a prominent children’s hospital. He did a terrible thing to me, once, nearly two decades ago. Should I attempt to ruin his career because of it?

The answer to that is: I don’t know. If I thought he was still assaulting women and my speaking out would contribute to making him stop, I would in a heartbeat.

What he did to me 18 years ago still hurts so much that I would only revisit that assault and expose him publicly if there was a very clear purpose to doing so.

I expect if I did attempt to expose him, I’d be attacked. People would say that it wasn’t an assault because I wanted him to be my boyfriend afterward. They would say I wanted it because I froze and stopped fighting. There are good odds I wouldn’t be believed.

I’ll tell you this: Like Christine Blasey Ford, if the man who assaulted me was nominated for the U.S. Supreme Court, I’d speak up. I don’t think a man who violates a woman that way is qualified to rule on cases of violence against women, or any other aspect of their well-being. I don’t think he could be impartial.

When a victim of sexual crimes comes forward, even if it’s decades after the crime took place, we shouldn’t use her past silence against her as “evidence” to discredit her. That urge to discredit is exactly why it takes so long for some to come forward in the first place.

Jill Richardson is an OtherWords columnist.

Post-newspaper news-gathering

An advertisement in 1896 for The Boston Globe.

From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

Local newspapers continue to shrink and disappear (the Trump administration’s recent lowering of its very high tariffs on Canadian newsprint might provide a small reprieve). This has encouraged an increase in costly local corruption as the ranks of reporters rapidly diminish as does local civic engagement; newspapers have long been important parts of the public square, acting as crucial sources of laboriously collected and edited information and as convenors for public discussions of important issues.

With the monopolistic Facebook and Google draining away ad revenue, things probably won’t get better for news on paper, unless the Feds start enforcing antitrust laws for a change.

Otis White, the president of Civic Strategies Inc., writing in Governing.com, reports on a very well run community – Decatur, Ga., an Atlanta suburb – where local leaders are trying to fill the civics-knowledge gap, albeit imperfectly. The City of Decatur mails out a monthly newsletter called Decatur Focus updating stuff going on in city government. It’s well done but in effect promotes the interests and status of city officials, elected and otherwise. Decatur also has a program called Decatur 101, which seeks to develop informed and involved citizens. And there’s its Citizens Police Academy, which focuses on how the police department enforces laws.

All very nice, but all communities need independent, private-sector news gatherers. Their demise is jeopardizing local democracy. To read Mr. White’s piece, please hit this link.

Bring your insulin

“Diary of a Bake Sale Diva’’ ( mixed media installation), by Ronni Komarow, in her show “Tender Mercies,’’ at Galatea Fine Art, Boston, Oct. 3-28.

David Warsh: If only Obama had become the Great Explainer of the Panic of 2008

SOMERVILLE, Mass.

Ten years after the Panic of 2008 began, the hardest thing is dealing with the might-have-been in its immediate aftermath. What if President Obama had better understood the situation he inherited?

He might have emulated Franklin Delano Roosevelt and begun his term as explainer-in-chief. He might have devised some modern equivalent of FDR’s “fireside chats” – the 31 radio broadcasts the president made in 1933 and 1934.

Obama then could have proceeded to explain what had happened in the previous few months, what the Federal Reserve Board, the Bush administration, and Congress had done about it and why, and what steps his administration would take next.

He would have said that, in the days after Sept. 15, when Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, the U.S. had suffered an uncontrolled banking panic, the first such since the Panic of 1907 – not just the United States, but the entire global banking system.

He would have explained how the 1907 panic, halted the old-fashioned way by a syndicate of wealthy bankers led by J.P. Morgan, was so severe that it led Congress to create the Federal Reserve System as lender of last resort in such emergencies.

He would have explained that a panic after 1929 had paralyzed the inexperienced Fed in the early 1930s, and that Roosevelt had been able to ease the fears with that first chat. He might have told, as an aside, how Roosevelt’s Fed Chairman Marriner Eccles had diagnosed the paralysis, and, drafting the Banking Act of 1935, centralized lending decisions with the seven-member Board.

Obama would have explained that only after the panic had commenced did Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and New York Fed President Timothy Geithner understand the intricacy with which the shadow banking system (as it would become known) was connected to the familiar banking system. He might have commended the Paulson eventual valor (if not his foresight) and explained that he was asking Tim Geithner to lead his Treasury Department, that he would nominate Bernanke to a second term as well.

He could have explained that, while a decline in home prices was the proximate cause of the crisis, it was better understood as an increasingly frenzied search for safe assets coming near the end of a global boom that had begun in the early ‘80s.

Therefore, he might have said, there was no reason to take the crisis out on homeowners. His administration, he would have told listeners, had begun an urgent search for a way of freezing subprime mortgages at their teaser rate for however long was required to avoid mass foreclosures.

Only then would he have moved on to the difficult topic of stimulus – the deficit spending he was asking Congress to authorize to counteract the rapidly deepening recession, which had been aggravated by a breathtaking if quickly reversed decline in world trade. And he would have warned that similar difficult choices lay ahead for members of the European Union.

True, the leaders who halted the stampede — Bernanke, Geithner, Paulson and their respective teams—didn’t understand themselves at first what they were up against. No one had seen a banking panic in the U.S for many years. They were thought to have become impossible. Four days were required to get government departments on the same page; another two weeks to persuade Congress it had no choice but to act.

But by Inauguration Day, those who had battled the panic had a pretty good idea of what had happened and why. Bernanke, Paulson and Geithner told their stories last week at the Brookings Institution in a remarkable two-day conference on the 10th anniversary of the panic.

Obama, on the other hand, either did not have a good grasp of the situation, or he did and chose to ignore it. Obama had hired Hillary Clinton’s campaign economic adviser, Jason Furman, after he defeated her in the spring; he signed former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers as his chief adviser on the Friday after Lehman.

That’s not to say that Summers is a bad economist. But he clearly does not share the Bernanke-Paulson-Geithner view of what was distinctive about the crisis. Summers helped persuade Obama to support the gauzy Troubled Asset Relief Program appropriation (TARP) that President Bush requested that Friday morning. And Obama never reversed himself on the campaign trail. But he had little or nothing to say about the rescue of the financial system

Instead, “stimulus” had become the mantra of the Obama team even before the election. The only question was how much could Congress be expected to approve? The Congressional Republicans, who had no better version of what had happened to take to voters than did the Obama team, hit the warpath.

Much has been said about the utter failure of “new classical” economics to give an account. But “new Keynesian” thinking was not much better (though it was better). Read Larry Summers’s first major speech about the crash, in March 2009.

“How should we think about this crisis?… [I]t was the central insight of Keynes’s General Theory that two or three times each century, and now is one of those times, the self-equilibrating properties of markets break down as stabilizing mechanisms are overwhelmed by vicious cycles, as the right economic metaphor becomes not a thermostat but an avalanche, and that is what we are confronting today.’’

To see what Summers thinks today, check out “The financial crisis and the foundations for macroeconomics,” his op-ed article in The Washington Post last week. Or wait, if you like, for A Crisis Wasted: Barack Obama’s Defining Decisions, by Reed Hundt. (Rosetta, February 2019). Hundt, another star of the Clinton administration (think Internet) and a veteran policy entrepreneur, was one of the would-be advisErs who was cast aside after the election, along with campaign economist Austan Goolsbee, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation chief Sheila Bair, and Fannie Mae receiver Herbert Allison. His is the best account yet of what went on behind the scenes in those first six months.

Perhaps Obama would have done better to stick with Goolsbee, the economist who had come with him to the dance, rather than rely on Summers. With his University of Chicago connections, and his modest professional ways, Goolsbee would have brought fewer preconceptions to the job. He might have negotiated a more genuinely bipartisan economic stance with which to begin the Obama administration – one that put the panic at the center of his account and acknowledged that the main event had been boldly and satisfactorily resolved by Bush administration appointees four months before Obama’s term began.

Hindsight is twenty/twenty. We’ll never know. The meeting at Brookings last week, a joint undertaking of the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy and the Program on Financial Stability at the Yale School of Management, was terrific. It took 10 years to happen, instead of 10 weeks in the autumn of 2008. But, even now, we may hope for a better understanding of the crisis than the one we have today.

David Warsh is proprietor of economicprincipals.com, where this column first ran.

Chris Powell: Those UConn tourists; unfair to DMV

Tourists at the Trevi Fountain, in Rome.

Bad news has been piling up quickly in Connecticut’s state government this month. Among the examples: 

-- A department head at the University of Connecticut at Storrs resigned after getting caught approving more than $100,000 in travel expenses and paid time off for his administrative assistant so that she could travel with him internationally in the name of attending conferences but actually for sightseeing and companionship. The department head was already earning more than $320,000 annually and during the last two years received another $125,000 in compensation for "research." Simultaneously UConn President Susan Herbst blamed a reduction in its state appropriation for the university's modest decline in a national ranking of colleges. 

-- State Atty. Gen. George Jepsen announced that he is suing 13 current or former state employees for defrauding state government's employee prescription drug plan of $11 million through a kickback scheme with a pharmaceutical company in Florida.

-- A toy chicken hanging from a noose was found in the office of a black employee of the state Department of Developmental Services in Torrington. Dozens of the department's employees long have been complaining about racial discrimination in the department. 

-- And the state Education Department announced the dismal results of the latest round of standardized tests of students in Grades 3 through 8 in the public schools. The results showed that there has been no closing of the "achievement gap" in the performance of minority and impoverished students in the last four years, during which state government has spent tens of millions of dollars in the name of closing the gap. 

So what did Gov. Dannel Malloy do about these things? Nothing. Instead this week he flew off to San Francisco to attend a conference on climate change, as if there aren't plenty of people already attending to that issue. But who is attending to state government's lack of management? Nobody until, maybe, the next governor takes office and changes Connecticut's political climate. 


A JOKE ON BOTH PARTIES: Ned Lamont, the Democratic candidate for governor, told a joke the other day in the course of making proposals to improve the state Department of Motor Vehicles. Customer service at department offices, Lamont said, has been so bad that people might enter as Democrats and exit as Republicans. 

Catchy as the joke was, it wasn't really fair, for clunky as the department remains in some respects, it has improved gradually in recent years, if not enough. More of its functions have been enabled on the Internet, and department employees now strive to route people to the right windows as soon as they enter the office so they don't waste time in the wrong lines. 

Besides, for the 16 years prior to the current Democratic administration, Lamont's joke could have been told with the parties reversed. Govs. John G. Rowland and Jodi Rell, both Republicans, showed less interest in the Motor Vehicles Department than Governor Malloy has shown. Indeed, the most notable frustration with the department in recent years resulted from an upgrading of its computer system that should have been implemented long before Malloy took office. 

The Republican candidate for governor, Bob Stefanowski, proposes privatizing more of the department's operations. Anything that reduces state government's direct employment may save money, but improving service is something else. That may require some investment, which will be hard to find in state government for a long time. 


Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.

Studied and studied

“The Puritan’’ (1887), a famous statue in Springfield, Mass., by Augustus Saint-Gaudens. Springfield is now best known for its new casino.

“So many able historians have worked over seventeenth-century New England that one would think there was little left to be learned from the people who lived there - fewer than 100,000 at the end of the century. Seldom, apart perhaps from the Greeks and Romans, have so few been studied by so many. ‘‘

— The late historian Edmund Morgan

'The bickering flames'

Marblehead Neck.

Marblehead (1914 watercolor), by Maurice Prendergast.

Marblehead houses at the turn of the 20th Century.

DEVEREUX FARM, NEAR MARBLEHEAD.

“We sat within the farm-house old,

Whose windows, looking o'er the bay,

Gave to the sea-breeze damp and cold,

An easy entrance, night and day.

Not far away we saw the port,

The strange, old-fashioned, silent town,

The lighthouse, the dismantled fort,

The wooden houses, quaint and brown.

We sat and talked until the night,

Descending, filled the little room;

Our faces faded from the sight,

Our voices only broke the gloom.

We spake of many a vanished scene,

Of what we once had thought and said,

Of what had been, and might have been,

And who was changed, and who was dead;

And all that fills the hearts of friends,

When first they feel, with secret pain,

Their lives thenceforth have separate ends,

And never can be one again;

The first slight swerving of the heart,

That words are powerless to express,

And leave it still unsaid in part,

Or say it in too great excess.

The very tones in which we spake

Had something strange, I could but mark;

The leaves of memory seemed to make

A mournful rustling in the dark.

Oft died the words upon our lips,

As suddenly, from out the fire

Built of the wreck of stranded ships,

The flames would leap and then expire.

And, as their splendor flashed and failed,

We thought of wrecks upon the main,

Of ships dismasted, that were hailed

And sent no answer back again.

The windows, rattling in their frames,

The ocean, roaring up the beach,

The gusty blast, the bickering flames,

All mingled vaguely in our speech;

Until they made themselves a part

Of fancies floating through the brain,

The long-lost ventures of the heart,

That send no answers back again.

O flames that glowed! O hearts that yearned!

They were indeed too much akin,

The drift-wood fire without that burned,

The thoughts that burned and glowed within.

— ‘‘The Fire of Drift-Wood,’’ by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (18070-1882)

A scenic and mostly soothing job over the water

Bridge tender’s house in Chicago.

From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

Patrick Skahill, of Connecticut Public Radio, has written a delightful piece about a guy who moves New Haven’s Grand Avenue Swing Bridge to let bigger boats in and out of the Quinnipiac River where it approaches Long Island Sound. The tender, Maurice Little, has a job, which he performs in a little house at the bridge, that, of course, requires occasional close attention but allows for a lot of relaxation, too. Boat operators must call him ahead to let him know they need to come through. There’s lots of waiting, especially, I imagine, from September to May, when there are relatively few pleasure boats coming through.

Mr. Little told the reporter that his wife says: “Oh your job is boring.’’ He responds: “No it’s not boring. I’m used to it. I enjoy my job,’’ which gives him plenty of time to read books and look at his computer. And he can enjoy the ever-changing light and weather and boat traffic. Indeed, he might get enough material for a novel or at least a lyric poem.

Sounds like a nice job, but maybe best for a reflective and ruminative person finishing up his/her working years after a more strenuous career.

To read and hear the piece, please hit this link.

Kids' stuff in Concord

From the currrent show of Tomie dePaola’s book illustrations at the Mill Brook Gallery & Sculpture Garden, Concord, N.H. He has written and/or illustrated over 260 books, including Strega Nona, Tomie dePaola's Mother Goose, Oliver Button Is a Sissy, and 26 Fairmount Avenue. Mr. dePaola is now also exhibiting at the Currier Museum, in Manchester, N.H., with three other illustrators from New Hampshire.

Beauty in Brockton

“Blackbird” (glass), by Natasha Harrison, at the Fuller Craft Museum, Brockton, Mass. Brockton is gritty in many places, as you might expect in an old shoe-making center, but the Fuller is in a beautiful park with a lovely pond.

Peter Certo: Nobody in White House is part of 'The Resistance'

“Storming of The Bastille’’ (July 14, 1789), by Jean-Pierre Houel.

From OtherWords.org

This week, the White House continues its furious hunt for the anonymous official who proclaimed him or herself part of “The Resistance” in a New York Times op-ed. Unsurprisingly, the president is “obsessed” with it, CNN reports.

What really set Trump off — perhaps understandably — was the suggestion that aides were deliberately undermining orders. “We want the administration to succeed,” the author said, before describing a coordinated effort to “thwart parts of [Trump’s] agenda and his worst inclinations.”

But not all of that agenda. The author praised Trump’s commitment to “effective deregulation, historic tax reform, [and] a more robust military,” and even complained about “near-ceaseless negative coverage” obscuring those supposed accomplishments.

The president’s behavior in pursuit of that agenda may be “detrimental to the health of our republic,” the author admits, but assures readers: “There are adults in the room. We fully recognize what is happening.”

This helps the rest of us understand what’s happening, too: Career Republicans are riding right along with someone they themselves describe as “anti-democratic,” “reckless,” and “erratic.” And they’ll do it just as long as he cuts taxes for billionaires, deregulates the corporations they own, and keeps the spigot open to the military-industrial complex.

He’s doing that.

So, what’s he doing wrong? The author specifies only Trump’s “preference for autocrats and dictators” such as Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un.

Trump’s admiration for those figures says a lot about his disdain for democracy. But the response the author describes sounds more like an effort to shut off diplomatic openings with nuclear-armed rivals than to curb Trump’s anti-democratic impulses. Feel better?

Beyond this, the author offers few specifics on what they’d actually like to prevent.

Pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal and the Paris climate accords? Not a problem, apparently. Deregulating the banks that caused the financial crisis, and the fossil fuel companies causing climate change? Go right on ahead.

Giving corporations and billionaires a $2 trillion tax break, then trying to cut food stamps, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid? Trying to throw 24 million Americans off their health care?

The author describes precisely no concern about any of these things, because virtually any Republican would have done them.

Remarkably, the author actually complains that Trump “shows little affinity for ideals long espoused by conservatives.” But it sure sounds like he’s governing as one.

Sure, Trump has made unique his own contributions to modern conservatism — alliances with white nationalists, concentration camps for babies, etc. But our anonymous “adult in the room” offers no objection here either, even as down-ballot Republicans increasingly embrace those extremes.

I can believe that White House staffers really do find the president unstable and dangerous. But instead of constitutionally removing him by the 25th Amendment, they’re keeping him around so they can cut billionaires’ taxes, put over half of every taxpayer dollar into the military-industrial complex and coddle corporations that loot the country and pollute the planet.

The writer pines for the late Sen. John McCain, calling him “a lodestar for restoring honor to public life.” McCain was surely more honorable than the president he feuded with, but even he voted with Trump 83 percent of the time. Do we really think Trump’s pathologies reside entirely in the other 17 percent?

If Trump implodes, they’re going to act like his personality was the problem — not the policy agenda he’s executing on their behalf. They’ll say we haven’t gotten enough “real conservatism.”

Sorry, but I think the amazing social movements behind the real “resistance” would disagree. They’re not trying to roll back 17 percent of what this White House has done. They’re trying to transform it — and much of what came before it — 100 percent.

Peter Certo is the editorial manager of the Institute for Policy Studies.

Delay school openings to well after Labor Day?

Classical High School in Providence.

From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

‘Rhode Island state Sen. Leonidas (sounds Shakespearean!) Raptakis has proposed having all Rhode Island public schools open after Labor Day because of late-summer heat in a state where few public schools are air-conditioned, and opening later in June, when, he says, the weather takes its time getting hot.

"Typically, the temperatures are much more bearable during June as opposed to late August and that is one reason why our kids should only be going back to school after Labor Day.  It is virtually impossible for our children to properly learn during these intense heat conditions," he told GoLocalProv.

We need a comparative analysis of temperatures in mid to late June compared to late August and early September to see if he’s right. Opening later (in my youth public schools opened a day or two after Labor Day) would also certainly be good news for high school kids with summer jobs at Rhode Island’s many summer-based businesses, mostly along the coasts.

Raptakis’s remarks are  a reminder of the huge income-based inequities in education. While most private school classrooms  and many affluent-town public schools have air conditioning in all their classrooms, few public schools do around here. It’s mighty hard to learn in a room where it’s a humid 90 degrees. As global warming continues, I hope this basic inequity will be addressed. To read about the senator’s remarks, please hit this link.