Beach bathos; save our shellfishermen
From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo has rightfully cut back parking at Scarborough and Misquamicut state beaches because of overcrowding, especially by young adults (many from out of state) who ignore social-distancing and face-mask directives. But anyway, I have always been surprised by the number of people who want to crowd together on a hot humid day on a beach, pandemic or not. A nice seat in an air-conditioned room or a walk in the mountains seems more inviting in mid-summer.
Meanwhile, it’s depressing to see the number of jerks who give retail people, such as at ice-cream stores, a hard time when the latter try to enforce pandemic guidelines. There are enough such people to have led a few store owners to decide to close for the duration. Selfish people making a tough period worse!
Of course mask-wearing is capitulation to the “liberal elite”!
New Shell Games
The shellfish industry – both wild-caught and aquaculture-grown -- is over-dependent on the restaurant industry and thus has been slammed during the pandemic. Many restaurants are reopening, but only at 50 percent or less capacity, and some have closed permanently.
So the oyster, quahog, soft-shell clam and mussel collectors are working hard to develop direct relations with consumers, with the latter going directly to oyster and other cooperatives to buy the stuff, to farmers markets and supermarkets or even have them delivered to homes and places of business. It reminds me of the fish man who would peddle his stuff, right off the boat and put on ice and covered with canvas, at the back of his truck, around our coastal town when I was a kid. (Was that illegal?)
Shellfishermen are just so New England. Let’s support them.
Don Pesci: Will Biden pick a Wallace or a Truman?
1944 election poster
VERNON, Conn.
President Franklin Roosevelt had three vice presidents, John Nance Garner, who broke with Roosevelt in 1940 and high-tailed it to Texas; Henry Wallace, whom Roosevelt chose as his running mate during the contentious 1940 Democratic National Convention over the objections of many delegates, and Harry Truman, chosen in 1944 and who occupied the presidency upon the death of Roosevelt.
Garner was once asked to evaluate the office of vice president. He said it wasn’t worth a warm bucket of spit. Actually, Garner used a different word, but sensibilities would not allow its appearance in the public media of the day – so, spit it was. Since Roosevelt’s day, sensibilities have evolved.
Sen. Edward Kennedy -- denominated “the Lion of the Senate” by fellow Democrats who willingly overlooked the significant part that Kennedy played in the drowning of Mary Jo Kopechne on Chappaquiddick Island -- served Massachusetts in the Senate for 47 years, until he joined the angels in Heaven. At the time of his death, Kennedy was the longest continually serving senator. By 2009, when Kennedy died, there were few or no Edwardian sensibilities left to ruffle.
The deaths while in office of such political lions as Roosevelt and Kennedy are reminders to the rest of us that politics holds out to privileged politicians no special immunities from the Grim Reaper. Lions also are mortal. When the great politician and cleric Cardinal Richelieu died, the pope of the day, a lesser politician than Richelieu and a better cleric, was asked to comment. He said, “If there is no God, Richelieu will have lived a good life; and, if there is a God, he will have much to answer for.”
The American populace is not God and, increasingly, politicians are not answerable to the always disorganized democratic mob, so strong are the usufructs of incumbency at a time when individual politicians have become mini-political parties, raising their own campaign funds from Big Business, influential PACs and mass-marketing techniques. And, of course, the media, sometimes lost in adoration of incumbents, also boost the power of political power players.
It’s been ages since Joseph Pulitzer, after whom the coveted Pulitzer Prize is named, said that good reporters should have no friends. Good reporters should ask themselves when was the last time that an incumbent with whom they regularly did political business refused to return their calls as a result of a displeasing story.
The top of the ticket candidates in 2020, Republican President Donald Trump and likely Democrat presidential nominee Joe Biden, are both incumbent politicians with records to defend. It is generally conceded – perhaps most especially by Democrats – that former Vice President Biden’s choice of his second in command will be extremely important. Biden, so far, has not been truly tested on the presidential campaign field of battle because, it has been said, the Coronavirus infestation, perhaps on the wane by Election Day, has forced his campaign underground.
Old campaign warhorses, such as former Connecticut senator Chris Dodd, have stepped forward to assist Biden in choosing his running mate. Few doubt that Trump’s choice for 2020 will be current Vice President Mike Pence.
It may seem to some commentators ironic that Biden’s choice may mirror that of Franklin Roosevelt’s. Garner obviously was wrong in his estimation of the vice presidency. Roosevelt was wrong in choosing Wallace as his vice president, a man further to the left than Roosevelt on many matters important to Democrats and the country. And Truman, perhaps considered at the time a throwaway choice for vice president, was the right man at the right time after Roosevelt had left the stage. During Truman’s 82-day vice presidency, Roosevelt never discussed major policies with his vice president. Truman, for instance, learned of the atomic bomb only after he had become president. But he knew what to do with the bomb and clearly had Stalin’s number. The Truman Doctrine was the central pillar of an ultimately successful U.S. Cold War policy.
Among some Democrats, Biden is considered a safe moderate at a time when his party has been for some time caroming down dark and eccentric political corridors. As in Roosevelt’s case, there may not be many more years left in Biden’s hour glass. Biden is 77 and, like Roosevelt, he does have underlying health issues, such as two brain-aneurysm operations.
The important question up for discussion is: Will the moderate wing of the Democrat Party, now a bare remnant of what it was the glory days of the John F. Kennedy Camelot, be swept away by the current progressive movement, or will people like Dodd be able convincingly to appeal to the angels of Biden’s better nature?
Don Pesci is a Vernon, Conn.-based columnist.
Maine's big garden
The Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens (CMBG), in Boothbay, are open to visitors until their season closes, on Oct. 31. At 295 acres, CMBG is New England’s largest botanical garden, with beautiful flora, nature trails and nearly a mile of tidal saltwater marshes. Thank you, Artscope, for passing this along
Foreign students are a boon for New England
Harvard Square
From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
It was good news that the Trump administration has rescinded an order that would have stripped visas from foreign students whose courses are moved exclusively online because of the pandemic. Various institutions, led by Harvard and MIT, had sued to block the order, which seemed to many to be obviously illegal. There are hundreds of thousands of such students in America, with tens of thousands in New England.
Trump pushed the visa ban, which would have caused administrative and financial chaos, to try to force colleges and universities to reopen all in-person courses despite the raging pandemic, presumably because he thought that it would be a signal that things were returning to normal, thus boosting the pre-election economy? And he doesn’t like immigrants anyway.
Foreign students are particularly important in New England – economically and otherwise – because of the region’s world-famed colleges and universities. They bring a lot of energy, ambition and a hefty work ethic and help connect us with, and teach us about, the rest of the world. That makes our region more competitive. And some of the best stay and become Americans. Look at all the foreign-born health-care professionals dealing with COVID-19 and the large number of foreigners who have stayed in New England to create successful, high-paying companies based here, most notably in technology.
.
‘Parts the air of summer’
“Evening falls. Someone’s playing a dulcimer
Northampton-style, on the porch out back.
Its voice touches and parts the air of summer….’’
From “Northampton {Mass.} Style,’’ by Marie Ponsot (1921-2019)
Northampton in the 19th Century
A robot that disinfects surfaces
The Stata Center houses CSAIL, at MIT. No, the building isn’t collapsing; it’s supposed to look like this…
From The New England Council (newenglandcouncil.com)
“The Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) collaborated with Ava Robotics and the Greater Boston Food Bank to design a new system to disinfect surfaces and neutralize airborne contaminants. The system uses a UV-C light fixture to kill the virus, however, the light is not safe for human interaction. Fortunately, the new robot is completely autonomous and can be used for the disinfection of restaurants, factories and supermarkets. Given the stress that food banks are under to reduce food insecurity, the robot could be a helpful tool to keep essential workers safe.’’
To see picture and read more, please hit this link.
But they'll find you there
"Untitled" (willow branches and saplings), by Patrick Dougherty, at Alnoba Sculpture Park, Kensington, N.H., in the southeast corner of the Granite State.
—- Photograph by Linda Chestney
See:
http://www.stickwork.net/featured
and:
https://alnobaartpark.org/about-us/
Dissatisfied religionists
— Photo by Tim Valentine
The Old Ship Church (also called the Old Ship Meetinghouse) is a Puritan church built in 1681 in Hingham, Mass. It is the only surviving 17th-Century Puritan meetinghouse in America. Its congregation, gathered in 1635 and officially the First Parish in Hingham, occupies the oldest church building in continuous religious use in the United States.
The New York Times called it "the oldest continuously worshiped-in church in North America and the only surviving example in this country of the English Gothic style of the 17th Century. The more familiar delicately spired white Colonial churches of New England would not be built for more than half a century."
Within the church, the ceiling, made of great oak beams, looks like the inverted frame of a ship — thus the church’s name.
From the Unitarian-Universalist World:
“The people who colonized Hingham were eager to get as far away from the influence of the Puritans in the Massachusetts Bay Colony as they could, so they settled in Hingham, twenty miles south of Boston. Ebenezer Gay, who served as the congregation's pastor from 1718 to 1787, rejected Calvinism in favor of Arminianism, the precursor of American Unitarianism. By the end of the eighteenth century, the congregation was essentially Unitarian, according to the Rev. Ken Read–Brown, the church's minister for the last twenty years.’’
New England has a great many houses of worship, at least in part because it was settled by people who were unhappy with the Church of England, or with Rome, or with Martin Luther; or who simply had a scheme of their own they wanted to try out — usually having to do with wearing black clothes and making sure everyone behaved.
From Contemporary New England Stories (1992), by C. Michael Curtis
David Warsh: The 2016 election and the Framers’ plan
“Scene at the Signing of the Constitution of the United States,’’ on Sept. 17, 1787, by Howard Chandler Christy (1940)
SOMERVILLE, Mass.
In the autumn of 1787, citizens of the 13 American states operating under the Articles of Confederation began discussing ratification of the Constitution drafted over the summer in Philadelphia by their representatives. They debated, among other things, whether so large a country as envisaged by the framers could be expected to hold together.
Almost immediately, Anti-Federalist opponents of ratification launched attacks on various aspects of the agreement. Alexander Hamilton recruited James Madison and John Jay to write with him a series of essays in support. The “Federalist No. 1’’ appeared in the Independent Journal, in New York, on October 27, followed by 76 more, to be published the next spring with eight other essays as The Federalist: A Commentary on the Constitution of the United States.
A week before, the New-York Journal carried what we would now call an op-ed signed by an Anti-Federalist under the pen name Brutus. He wrote:
The different parts of so extensive a country could not possibly be made acquainted with the conduct of their representatives, nor be informed of the reasons on which measures were founded. The consequence will be, they will have no confidence in their legislature, suspect them of ambitious views, be jealous of every measure they adopt, and will not support the laws they pass.
In November, Madison took to the pages of the New York Packet to rebut Brutus. The “mischiefs of factions,” meaning groups of citizens united by some passion or interest adverse to the rights of others, couldn’t be eliminated without destroying liberty. Madison wrote. After all, different opinions were in the nature of humankind – about religion and government, wealth and power, banking and commerce, agriculture and manufacturing. If factions couldn’t be eliminated, you could at least hope to curb their violence.
How? By reducing both the impulse to do mischief and the opportunity to misbehave. Republican government, small numbers of citizens elected by the rest to serve as legislators, could raise the tone above that of the appeal to mob emotion to be expected of pure democracy.
A larger country, with more people choosing each representative, could do the rest. “Extend the sphere and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests,” he wrote. Great issues would ascend to the national stage; local issues would remain the business of the states. Factions would oppose factions, and the more extensive of whatever unjust majorities might arise, the greater would be the likelihood that the thieves among them would fall out.
Madison continued: “A rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project, will be less apt to pervade the whole body of the Union than a particular member of it; in the same proportion as such a malady is more likely to taint a particular county or district than an entire State.”
Madison’s essay, “The Federalist No 10,’’ is famous today as among the most influential of the collection. In “The Federalist No. 39,’’ he went on to elaborate his view that the Constitution would assure both a democracy in which all citizens had a voice and a republic in which a complicated system of checks and balances obtained between the states and the national government – “a federal, not a national, Constitution.”
All this is fresh in mind because I read recently about Brutus’s essay in The Decline and Rise of Democracy: A Global History from Antiquity to Today, (Princeton, 2020), by David Stasavage, of New York University. “What if Madison was wrong about large Republics,” Stasavage asks. What about the problem of mistrust of a distant state? What if the nation’s factions become so various and mutually antagonistic as to prove ungovernable?
Madison himself quickly came to recognize that there would have to be continuing investments to insure that citizens would continue to trust their government. By 1791, he was pursuing measures to support newspapers and subsidize their circulation. Reformers who came later proposed state-funded public education.
But public education is under fire today, and the tiered structure of the newspaper industry has suffered greatly since the proliferation of digital media and the invention of search advertising. National newspapers – The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, USA Today and Financial Times – continue to grow in influence and circulation. They have been joined by digital media – Bloomberg, Reuters, Axios and Quartz.
But the fortunes of once-important metropolitan newspapers have declined precipitously, among them Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, Philadelphia Inquirer, Denver Post, Atlanta Constitution, San Jose Mercury-News and Providence Journal. Just last week, a New Jersey hedge-fund acquired at a bankruptcy auction the 163-year-old McClatchy Co., publisher of the Miami Herald, the Kansas City Star, the Charlotte Observer, and its flagship Sacramento Bee.
Here we are, some 235 years since Madison wrote “The Federalist 10,’’ the 13 states having grown to 50 states, with the District of Columbia petitioning to be declared a state. What is holding the country together? Tradition. of course, and culture: but institutionally, the answer seems to me to be the Electoral College – an ill-understood and frequently maligned invention of the framers. As Madison described it in “The Federalist 39,’’ “The executive power will be derived from a very compound source.”
The Electoral College emerged from the Connecticut Compromise, sometimes called the Great Compromise of 1787, which produced the bicameral Congress of the United States: proportional representation of the states by population in the House of Representatives, equal representation among the states in the Senate (two senators apiece), with the power to initiate taxing and spending measures reserved to the House. The election of the president follows the combination of state-based and population-based decision-making. Electoral votes are allocated to the states by the most recent census; but in almost all states, the winner of the popular votes takes the electoral votes.
Three elections in 25 years have demonstrated the significance of the Electoral College. In the 1992 election, H. Ross Perot received 19 percent of the popular vote, but didn’t win a single state and thus earned no electoral votes. In the 2000 election, litigation before the Supreme Court tipped the election to George W Bush, after the court decided that he had won a hair’s-breadth majority in Florida. His margin in the Electoral College was thus 271 to 266, though his Democratic rival Al Gore edged him in the popular vote by around half a million of more than 100 million votes cast.
In the 2016 election, Donald Trump won precisely because of the Electoral College. With more than 120 million votes cast, some 107,000 votes in three “battleground” states — Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin – provided his margin of victory — 306-232 — in the Electoral College. Had those states swung the other way, Clinton would have won, 278-260. She won the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes, 65.9 million to 63 million.
The Framers conceived of the Electoral College as essential to the federal structure of government. It forces candidates to campaign outside the states with the biggest cities, increases the political influence of small and sparsely-populated states and strengthens the two-party system, and generally binds the country together. Present-day critics, of whom there are many, assert that it sabotages the principle of majority rule by modifying the principle of one-person-one-vote. “It is rotting American democracy from the inside out,” Editorial Board member and author Jesse Wegman wrote in The New York Times the other day.
But a look at the poll projection summarized on the Web site 270towin shows just how dramatically fortunes can change based on voters’ assessment of a president’s performance in office. We won’t know how the election turns out until November. But it is significant that expectations are already leading candidate Joe Biden to extend his campaign (at least campaign expenditures in this virus-plagued year – to traditional “fly-over” states for Democratic candidates.
Disastrous as may have been the results of the 2016 election, Donald Trump’s victory must be counted as something of a success for democracy in America. In casting their votes for a reality-television star of deplorable moral character, an enormous proportion of Americans, if not a majority of voters, delivered a somber vote of no-confidence in their government in Washington – a message that would have been ignored with a popular vote determining the outcome.
Whether the sentiments of the disenchanted will wax or wane over the next few presidential cycles remains to be seen. But elections happen every four years. Disabling or eliminating the Electoral College altogether in favor of presidential election via the popular vote is a bad idea. It would disconnect the feedback system, with its shifting “battleground states,” that may equilibrate levels of trust among voters across a large and diverse nation and its national government. The Framers knew what they were doing.
. xxx
Expect two more “What Happened in 2016?” weeklies between now and the election: II, Russia; and III, the FBI.
David Warsh, a veteran columnist, book author and economic historian, is proprietor of economicprincipals.com, where this essay originated.
'External spaces, interior imaginings'
"Ley Line," by Kathline Carr, at Fountain Street Fine Art, Boston, through Aug. 2. Ley lines are lines that crisscross around the globe, like latitudinal and longitudinal lines.
Ms. Carr, who lives in the Berkshires, writes:
“My process of making is one of construction and reiteration: I render abstractions of real and imagined space, while imposing diagrammic marks through those planes. My work seeks to fuse mappings of external spaces with interior imaginings and associations. I utilize materials that are meaningful to me, often employing fabrics, collage, or found objects to hone in on a particular locale or experience. The landscape interests me as a point of entry to explore isolated forms, light, and implications of human interference.’’
See:
kathlinecarr.com
and:
https://www.fsfaboston.com/
Llewellyn King: Is China slipping in hardware that could jeopardize our electric grid?
The Manchurian Candidate was released in October 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
There are new worries afoot in the electric-utility world.
The issue is the integrity of the grid and the possibility that foreign suppliers of bulk power equipment (BPE) may have introduced the technical equivalent of Manchurian candidates into the hardware that manages the system.
This represents a departure from previous concerns that have emphasized software and paid more attention to attacks aimed at the computer systems of electric utilities than to their hardware. They get millions of these attacks every day and have worked relentlessly to protect against them.
Now a new front has opened.
The battle has moved from the world of Internet technology to the hardware itself, to BPE. Leading the charge to draw attention to systems whose vulnerability may have been overlooked is Joe Weiss, a professional engineer, a veteran of the Electric Power Research Institute in Palo Alto, California, and now an independent consultant.
Weiss said in a blog, which went viral in the world of utility engineers last week, “Why would attackers hit defenses head-on when they can simply bypass them?” And that is exactly what they’re doing, he believes.
On May 1, President Trump issued the far-reaching Executive Order 13920, which prohibits the purchase of major BPE from potential adversaries, later named by the Department of Energy as China and Russia, among others.
China is the primary supplier of BPE to American utilities.
Then, on July 8, the department issued a request for information about what the electric utilities purchase and from where. It appears the government is attempting to scope the problem.
Initially, many in the industry thought the executive order was just another shot in the Trump administration’s trade war with China. But not so. It signaled what may be a big vulnerability not only in installed equipment but also equipment that is on order.
China has become the primary supplier of heavy equipment for utilities, particularly big transformers. While these have no moving parts, Weiss believes that they can have “backdoors” through which an adversary could catastrophically alter their operation.
The key, he says, may be the censors that can send false readings and bring about major disruption, and send parts of the grid haywire.
Transformers are critical to the distribution of current. They boost voltage to compensate for line losses and ultimately step down the voltage for local distribution.
This vulnerability story began after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, when a trend to look at the security of the electric grid turned to a greater concentration on IT and, some argue, away from the old regime of operational technology, where engineers took responsibility for the security of their equipment.
A cultural division opened, as I was told by the one of the nation’s top computer experts in academia.
Underlying this shift in responsibility are the workhorses of modern industry, programmable controllers, part of the larger Industrial Control Systems. These are the automated systems that do the work of managing operations in modern industry, including utilities.
The worry for the electric-utility industry is that these devices that manage the grid could be manipulated without showing up as an attack.
There is precedent for this kind of attack: The Stuxnet virus that disabled centrifuges at Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility in 2010. The United States and Israel didn’t go after the facility’s computer system — an attack that would’ve been detected — but rather after the controllers governing the centrifuges.
Last year, something big was discovered, and details are sketchy: A Chinese-made transformer at a large investor-owned utility was found to have counterfeit parts and, perhaps, backdoors through which the integrity of the grid could’ve been compromised.
Alarm bells rang at the departments of Homeland Security and Energy.
A similar or identical transformer made by JiangSu HuaPeng Transformer Company Ltd., a family owned company with a small office in San Jose, California, was seized by agents of the DHS and DOE and hustled straight to Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, New Mexico, upon its arrival at the Port of Houston.
This transformer had been destined for the Western Area Power Administration’s Aluit Station, near Denver. WAPA is one of the power distribution systems owned by the government through the Department of Energy.
What, if anything, has been discovered in the transformer hasn’t been disclosed.
Everything is cloaked in secrecy, my sources tell me.
On Twitter: @llewellynking2
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. He’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.
Control room in electric power plant
She's heard it before
—- Photo by Mathias Krumbholz
“An old woman by a window watching the storm —
Dark River and dark sky and furious wind
Full of green flying leaves, gray flying rain….
Daughters and grandchildren in a darkened room….
Call to her to come, to come away….
Above the wind and the crash of a porch chair
And now the thunder, she does not seem to hear
Or if she hears, she does not answer them….’’
— From “The Reading of the Psalm,’’ by Robert Francis (1901-87). He lived in Cushman Village, part of Amherst, Mass. Robert Frost much admired him.
Keet House, one of many old houses in the Cushman Village Historic District
Using saliva for COVID-19 testing
UMass Memorial Medical Center, In Worcester
— Photo by Cxw1044
From The New England Council (newenglandcouncil.com
“The University of Massachusetts Memorial Medical Center, in Worcester, has begun testing on a new form of test for COVID-19, using saliva instead of a nasal swab. The pilot program will be in use for testing units on UMass Memorial’s University Campus and Memorial Campus while other locations will continue to use nasal swabs. UMass Memorial has also started to shift care back towards a more normal operations, after dedicating numerous beds and personnel to coronavirus over the last several months. Read more here. ‘‘
And these days that’s enough
“YOLO” {“You Only Live Once”?} (hand punched paint chips on board), by Peter Combe, at Lanoue Gallery, Boston
See:
https://petercom.be/press
and:
Lanouegallery.com
William Morgan: My statuary saga in tense times
Roger Williams Memorial, Prospect Terrace, Providence
— Photo by William Morgan
In Rhode Island, we might soon exorcise half of the official name of our state as a symbol of solidarity with Black Lives Matter. The state’s official name is State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations. As we are removing statues that some find offensive, maybe we should take a look at some of our sculptural monuments here in Providence.
Providence Plantations was the name of Roger Williams’s colony, founded in 1636. He was one the most inclusive of all of America’s founding fathers. But the word “Plantations’’ holds unwholesome associations with the Antebellum South, echoes of Gone with the Wind and of America’s original sin of slavery.
Despite being beloved by many Native Americans and having translated the Bible into Narragansett, Williams made an unfortunate choice of nomenclature almost 400 years ago. Do we need to consider taking down images of Williams?
The statue (above) of Roger Williams overlooking the city from Prospect Terrace was the result of a competition during the 1930s, won by architect Ralph Walker and sculptor Leo Friedlander. In the spirit of those times, the composition looks like something that Mussolini ordered over the telephone.
Frédéric Bartholdi’s handsome rendition of Columbus is a version of the eponymous statue exhibited at the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893.
— CareerShift.com
Already gone from its South Providence neighborhood, the Christopher Columbus statue above has met the fate of many monuments to the Genoese explorer in the employ of the Kingdom of Spain. A brave sailor, Columbus opened the Western Hemisphere to development, and thus to the exploitation of native peoples.
For generations, Columbus Day was the celebration day for Italian-Americans, a long-vilified immigrant group. But today do we need to consider changing the names of Columbia University, Columbus, Ohio, and the South American country of Colombia, not to mention Venezuela, which the intrepid navigator named?
And what might we do with the Providence statues of Dante, Garibaldi and Marconi? Statues put up to honor the great Florentine poet, the George Washington of Italy and the inventor of the radio would seem fairly uncontroversial, but you never know what you might in their histories….
And not just Italians. Are there any statues of Portuguese explorers in Rhode Island? Like the retired Mississippi flag, the Portuguese banner is surely a symbol of brutal colonialism in Latin America, Asia and Africa. Right?
As for Rhode Island’s outsized role in the Civil War, our monuments honoring Union leaders should be above reproach.
Nationally famous sculptors Randolph Rogers and Launt Thompson fashioned the Soldiers and Sailors Monument in front of Providence City Hall and the Burnside equestrian statue, respectively.
Ambrose Burnside statue, Kennedy Plaza, 1887.
Now that Theodore Roosevelt is being literally knocked from his pedestal, Spanish-American War monuments will probably soon follow. After all, the war with Spain brought American into its first big imperialist venture, after our seizure of much of Mexico in the 1840’s, as “liberators’’ of Cuba and the Philippines.
“The Hiker,’’ in Kennedy Plaza, was put up by the National Association of Spanish War Veterans, and therefore probably should go – except that its creator was a pioneering woman sculptor, Theodora Kitson. Score one for women’s rights.
“The Hiker, ‘‘ in Kennedy Plaza, Providence, by Theodora Kitson
— Photo by William Morgan
The less-than-ramrod-straight trooper in Providence’s North Burial Ground, commemorating “Citizens who served in the War with Spain, the Philippine Insurrection and the China Relief Expedition,’’ should also remain unmolested. While this soldier’s fey demeanor was probably unremarked upon in 1904, it deserves special protection.
Spanish-American War soldier, by Allen Newman, North Burial Ground, Providence
— Photo by William Morgan
Arguably, the most artistically significant sculpture in Providence adorns the entrance to the Union Trust Building, on Dorrance Street. “The Puritan and the Indian’’ is the work of America’s second-greatest sculptor (Augustus Saint-Gaudens was the greatest), Daniel Chester French, whose best-known work is the statue of Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial in Washington.
“The Indian and the Puritan,” by Daniel Chester French
— Photo by William Morgan
French was clearly inspired by Michelangelo’s tomb figures in the Medici Chapel, in Florence. Yet “The Indian and the Puritan,” despite their beautifully idealized physiques, represent stereotypes that might be offensive. In an unequal competition of assets, the Puritan rests on a library of scholarly tomes, while the “noble savage’’ has snowshoes and a pipe.
Brown University offers the city’s richest concentration of public sculpture, ranging from the naturalism of its recent life-size (yet curiously genital-less) Kodiak bear, by British artist Nick Bibby, to the rather traditional academic copies of the über-imperialist Roman Emperors Julius Caesar and Marcus Aurelius.
Marcus Aurelius, on the Brown University campus
— Photo by William Morgan
Not far from Marcus Aurelius is the Brown memorial to university alumni who died in World War II, Korea and Vietnam. After the bombast of the Civil War memorials, Richard Fleishner’s modest granite slab and bronze lattice is elegiac and refreshingly timeless.
Brown war memorial by Providence artist Richard Fleishner
— Photo by William Morgan
As with its new architecture, Brown seems to hire important designers and then is not quite sure what to do with them. We can say the same of the placement of some of the three-dimensional artwork they acquire.
Brown commissioned Maya Lin, creator of the hugely influential Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, to do a piece for the university. Instead of one of Lin’s adventurous land sculptures, Brown preferred something less bold and controversial. Lin’s slab, inscribed with a map of Narragansett Bay, is disappointing and poorly placed.
“Under the Laurentide,’’ by Maya Lin, on the Brown campus
— Photo by William Morgan
The thoroughly inappropriate placement on Brown’s College Green also lessens the impact of Brown’s real sculptural prize, “Three-Piece Reclining Figure Number Two,’’ by the great English artist Henry Moore. This is one of six castings of this piece. Moore’s bronze figures were status symbols in the 1970s – it seemed that curators of every museum or university felt they had to have one.
“Three-Piece Reclining Figure,’’ by Henry Moore, at Brown
— Photo by William Morgan
But any Henry Moore, however displayed, is always a welcome treasure. And the Brown gem demonstrates that an abstract piece with a vague-sounding and totally apolitical name can survive decades of cultural storms.
Public art is necessary to defining who we are, and can also be the focus of protest. Revolution is a hallowed Rhode Island tradition, but let us try to maintain our tradition of tolerance as we embrace new visual expressions.
William Morgan, the author of many books, is a Providence-based architectural historian and essayist.
Abortion and ancient vs. modern rights; racism in public health?
Interior of the U.S. Supreme Court
MANCHESTER, Conn.
For years the political left has argued that medical insurance should be disconnected from employment. The national medical insurance law known as Obamacare began the disconnection, establishing government-subsidized insurance for private-sector workers and granting employers religious exemptions from providing insurance for contraception and abortion.
Nevertheless, last week the left exploded in rage when the U.S. Supreme Court, with two of its four liberal justices joining the five conservatives, upheld exemptions granted by the Trump administration to religious employers, thereby disconnecting contraceptive and abortion insurance from certain forms of employment.
Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal declared indignantly: "To the women of America, the message of today should be: You have a right to control your future. You have a right to control your body and your family and your health care, and we are going to fight as long and hard as necessary to make sure that right is protected."
But neither the Supreme Court nor the Trump administration has taken those rights away from anyone. The issue of the case was only who should have to pay for the insurance coverage in question -- and cost here isn't such a big deal, since most people can obtain contraceptives and even abortions for little or no cost from Planned Parenthood or similar organizations. Meanwhile government Medicaid pays for contraception and abortion for the poorest.
Besides, as Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Neil M. Gorsuch wrote, if insurance for contraceptives and abortion is such an important right, the government itself could provide the insurance to everyone, not just the poorest.
The political left isn't pressing this issue out of medical necessity but rather to bludgeon people whose religious convictions the left considers backward. But the right to religious convictions, however backward they seem, is ancient and was placed in the Constitution more than two centuries ago, while the right to make someone else pay for your contraception and abortion is a very recent concept.
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Now that local governments in New Haven, Windsor and Manchester, Conn., and other places have declared racism to be a "public-health crisis," what exactly is to be done about it -- and not just the supposed crisis but also the supposed racism?
Where exactly is the racism in public health? Who are the racists?
The examples offered are few and weak. Yes, the poor tend to live closer to pollution sources than the rich do, and poverty correlates with race, but housing always will be cheaper near pollution and someone always will be living closer to it than someone else.
Besides, pollution is not why the recent virus epidemic has afflicted people of color more than whites. The disparity in affliction also correlates heavily with poverty, and perhaps with biology as well, since medical authorities increasingly believe that darker skin pigment weakens immune systems by reducing the body's ability to produce Vitamin D from sunlight. (Maybe government should distribute Vitamin D pills without charge. At least that would be something.)
No, these public-health crises are being declared because cries of "Racism!" are more magical than "Open sesame!" Nobody in authority dares to talk back to such cries and attempt rational discussion, and why bother when they can be deflected with empty gestures? These days if racism is invoked as the cause of a problem, any local government might be glad to declare a crisis in flat tires, paper cuts or burnt toast.
Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.
Stare at it while you can
“Summer Reflection’’ (pastel), by Ann Coleman, at Ann Coleman Gallery, Wilmington. Vt. See: