Chris Powell: Democrats miss this big tax break for the rich

Looking northward from Saugatuck Cribari Bridge, in Westport, Conn., one of Fairfield County’s rich towns.

— Photo from WestportWiki 

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont and state Atty. Gen. William Tong, both Democrats, are pressing in federal court to restore a lucrative tax break for the rich. But somehow they are escaping criticism from those in their party who clamor for taxing the rich more.

The governor and attorney general have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the appeal of Connecticut and other states that claim that it is unconstitutional for the federal tax code to limit to $10,000 the annual deductibility of state and local taxes -- the SALT cap.

The SALT cap may have been the only liberal change to the federal tax code enacted during Donald Trump's administration. Anyone who pays more than $10,000 a year in state income and local property taxes is doing pretty well. Indeed, most of the benefits of lifting the SALT cap would go to the very wealthy.

Lamont and Tong claim that the SALT cap violates state's rights -- that it interferes with Connecticut's tax system. But it doesn't. The cap just reduces the federal government's subsidy to high-tax states.

Acknowledging as much, a federal district court and a federal appeals court have already rejected Connecticut's case and the Supreme Court almost certainly will do so too.

The governor and attorney general claim that the SALT cap was "politically motivated," since the high-tax states are Democratic and the cap was imposed by a Republican national administration. But of course nearly everything in government is politically motivated to some extent, political motivations are not unconstitutional, and many principled Democrats acknowledge that the SALT cap is fairer than the previous policy, unlimited deductibility of state and local taxes.

The Lamont administration's appeal of its defeat in the two lower federal courts is politically motivated too -- doubly so.

First, the administration wants to prevent Connecticut's high-tax policy from aggravating the state's many wealthy residents who lately have been voting and contributing Democratic, especially in Fairfield County, where many people find Trump repugnant and may not vote Republican again while the party is in thrall to the former president.

Since the SALT cap makes state and local taxes more burdensome, wealthy people who have lost the federal deduction may start resenting high state and local taxes more. If Republicans can free themselves of Trump, those people may transfer their disdain to the special interests that consume so much state and local government revenue and are the core of the Democratic Party in Connecticut.

And second, with its appeal against the SALT cap the Lamont administration rides an issue that might rile up those Democratic special interests as a state election approaches. By pressing the appeal, the administration tells those special interests that it is striving behind the scenes to protect high taxes so that those special interests remain well-compensated, even as the governor, when being watched more closely, tries to restrain taxes.

The SALT cap also makes hypocrites of Connecticut's members of Congress, all Democrats who advocate repeal of the cap even as they complain about other tax breaks for the rich. But if a federal tax break for the rich helps keep Connecticut a high-tax state more able to sustain the Democratic Party's army, the delegation will suspend its supposed principles.

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Connecticut law requires public high schools to offer a course in Black and Latino studies, and the other day two students at Trinity College in Hartford wrote an essay for the Connecticut Mirror calling for schools to be required to offer a course in Asian-American studies as well.

While there is much to be learned in these subjects, they are best incorporated into U.S. history courses. Separated, ethnic studies will crowd out general history, which is already neglected.

And while the law requires high schools to offer the Black and Latino studies courses, it doesn't require students to take them. Presumably it would be the same with an Asian-American studies course -- more politically correct but oblivious posturing even as most Connecticut high school students, enjoying social promotion, graduate without ever mastering English and math.

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

For an all-powerful speaker

Tip O’Neill in 1978

“I think the speaker of the House in Congress should be like the Massachusetts speaker: all-powerful. He should appoint committee chairmen and remove them if they stray from the party line. He should be answerable only to the caucus, which can remove him at any time. I'd throw the seniority system out on its ear in Congress.’’

— Thomas P. (“Tip”) O’Neill Jr. (1912-1994), New Deal-style Democratic who served as speaker of the Massachusetts House (1949-1953) and speaker of the U.S. House (1977-1987). He was known for his FDR-Truman-style liberalism, pithy political sayings, most notably “All politics is local,’’ and impressive nose.

His district was centered around the northern part of Boston.

Autumn in the Alewife Linear Park, near the corner of Cedar Street and Massachusetts Avenue, North Cambridge — Tip O’Neill’s neighborhood

The hanging of the green

“Slip” (thread, day glow paint and monfilament), by Marilu Swett, in her show at Boston Sculptors Gallery, Feb. 23-March 27.

The artist, based in Boston’s Jamaica Plain neighborhood, tells the gallery:

“My sculptures and drawings allude to natural systems and subsystems, microscopic, telluric and oceanic form, the human body, and industrial artifacts. I have lately been looking at the ocean and its littoral variety with pleasure and concern, with a strong interest in our history with and debt to it. My recent work reflects my musings. I cast, draw, scrub, carve, cut, tool, dye and paint materials to produce complex drawings and forms in plastic, resin, lead, bronze, rubber and mixed media. I sometimes include found objects. The work is serious and fanciful, abstracting, inventing, and drawing relationships among forms."

Soldier's Monument and First Unitarian Universalist Church in Jamaica Plain

Skating in Jamaica Plain, by Winslow Homer, 1859. The community, a part of the town of West Roxbury for a while, became part of Boston when the city annexed West Roxbury in 1874.

‘Like an ox’s breath’

— Photo by kallerna

— Photo by Vid Pogacnik

“But what would interest you about the brook,
It's always cold in summer, warm in winter.
One of the great sights going is to see
It steam in winter like an ox's breath,
Until the bushes all along its banks
Are inch-deep with the frosty spines and bristles--
You know the kind. Then let the sun shine on it!"

— From “The Mountain,’’ by Robert Frost

‘The local idiom’

Downtown New Britain

— Photo by Kenneth C. Zirkel 

“I wait the proper bus, and, waiting,

hear my name called in sudden greeting —

and my own responses come

apt in the local idiom.’’

— From “Journey,’’ by Constance Currrier (1908-1991). Besides being a highly productive poet, she taught Latin in West Hartford and New Britain, Conn. She was born and raised in New Britain, which for many years as a major manufacturing center.

Jim Hightower: Save our political cartoonists from Wall Street

Theodore Roosevelt introduces William Howard Taft as his crown prince in a 1906 Puck magazine cover.

“Join, or Die,’’ by Benjamin Franklin (1754), a cartoon on the disunity of the Thirteen Colonies during the French and Indian War. It was later used to encourage the former colonies to unite for the cause of independence during the Revolutionary War.

Via OtherWords. org

Right before our eyes, an invaluable American species is fast disappearing from view: Kartoonus Amerikanas.

These are the newspaper cartoonists who’ve long delighted readers and infuriated power elites. And there’s nothing natural about their sudden decline. It’s not the result of a declining talent pool, and certainly not due to a lack of political targets.

What’s happening is that their media habitat is being intentionally destroyed.

Around the start of the 20th Century, some 2,000 newspapers featured their own full-time cartoonists. But in just the last decade, those healthy media environments have shriveled. So now, only a couple dozen newspapers have these vibrant artistic journalists on staff.

One major reason is that most U.S. papers have been gobbled up by profiteering hedge funds that have merged, purged and plundered these essential local sources of news and democratic discourse. The overriding interest of these Wall Street owners is to cash out a paper’s financial assets and haul off the booty to boost their personal wealth — journalism and democracy be damned.

They view cartoonists as a paycheck that can be easily diverted into their corporate pockets, dismissing the fact that enjoying good local cartoonists ranks as one of top reasons people give for buying the paper.

Note that this mass extermination is not old-school media censorship, but slight-of-hand financial censorship by the new monopolistic order of newspapering.

Political cartoonists are still free to express any opinion they want, but the Wall Street system locks them out of their primary marketplace. Censorship is ugly, but eliminating paychecks — well, that’s just business.

The good news is that these freewheeling artistic spirits of the cartooning craft are inventing new ways to connect with America’s strong consumer demand for their fun and important work. To get connected and get active with them, go to EditorialCartoonists.com.

OtherWords columnist Jim Hightower is a radio commentator, writer, and public speaker.

Why Boston is relatively peaceful

A Boston Police Dept. special operations officer

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

Boston is one of those few big American cities that hasn’t had a surging  homicide rate  in the last few years. (The national crime rate, including for murder, remains lower than it was in the 1970’s to 1990’s.)

In 2020, for example, Boston had 56 murders,  close to its five-year average of 51, and last year that number fell to 40. The city has in recent years been ranked at about 45th among American cities in murder rates. Consider that Baltimore, which has almost 100,000 fewer people than Boston, had 337 murders last year!

Boston’s relatively good record can be attributed to such things as a neighborhood-focused approach to policing that makes heavy use of local nonprofit and other organizations, including religious organizations. But it’s also that Boston lacks the entrenched culture of violence of many cities and that its residents tend to have fewer guns than residents of most big American cities. Indeed, the gun culture has always been  weaker in New England than in most of America, with the  notable exception of some thinly populated  rural parts, mostly in northern New England. And perhaps the much-noticed proliferation of surveillance cameras in parts of Boston may play some small role in discouraging crime.

And, for that matter, New England, of which Boston is the regional capital, has less crime in general than other regions, in part because it has a more stable population and stronger civic  culture, with less of the anomie found in the Sun Belt.

Those who misinterpret (ignoring the line about a “well-regulated militia’’) the Second Amendment  like to say “guns don’t kill people, people kill people,’’ so the more guns out there the better!

How disingenuous! It’s “people with guns who kill people,’’ and much faster and more efficiently than with other weapons. Details, details!

In any event, Boston has some lessons for other American cities.

Call pest control?And treating Norman Rockwell

“Scritchy Scratchy,” by Jan Brett (watercolor on paper, illustration for Gingerbread Friends), in the show “Jan Brett: Stories Near and Far,’’ at the Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Mass., through March 6.

Ms. Brett is the author/illustrator of such books for kids as The Mitten, Cozy and Gingerbread Baby. She has homes in the Berkshires and in Norwell, Mass., where she grew up.

The North River, with beautiful marshes, forms the southeast boundary of Norwell.

The famous Austen Riggs Center, a psychiatric institution in Stockbridge, the Berkshires town that the famed painter and illustrator Norman Rockwell (1894-1978) moved to at least in part because of Riggs, where he and his second wife, Mary Barstow, were both treated for mental illness. His wife, the more seriously ill of the two, suffered from depression and alcoholism and Rockwell from depression and anxiety.

The very expensive Riggs had the reputation of drawing well-known patients and celebrated psychiatrists.

Rockwell once said: "I paint life as I would like it to be.’’

Llewellyn King: How I fell for Taylor Swift big time

Taylor Swift

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

If Taylor Swift sat next to me on a bus – an unlikely confluence — I wouldn’t know that she was a famous singer, an idol to millions of young people (who call themselves Swifties), and especially to young women. But I have fallen for her big time.

Popular culture – with which I’ve never been very familiar, even when I wrote about movies and the theater -- has given me a wider-and-wider berth as time has passed. Truth is that I am more familiar with the evolution of technology than I am with the history of pop music, more comfortable with Turner Classic Movies than I am with this year’s releases.

This from a man who was paid by the London Dispatch to follow Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton around London when they were making Cleopatra — and making whoopee -- in 1962.

I might mention that when I did catch up with the most famous lovers of the day, they were lunching in a pub near where I lived in the leafy Dulwich area of South London. They were everything you would want of lovers: they glowed, held each other’s eyes, and were so clearly in the thralls of enchantment that I didn’t call for a photographer, or in any way fulfill my assignment for the newspaper. It was an active dereliction of duty, but they were so compelling.

The Romantic poet Lord Byron -- who knew a thing or two about adulterous love -- described an adulterous pair as “happy in the illicit indulgence of their innocent desires.” Taylor and Burton seemed to be lost in their affair, and then it was adultery -- they were both married, although later they wed each other, twice.

So much as I have been aware of the couplings of the rich and famous since those days, I have thought of them as tawdry. If you had seen Taylor and Burton in love, you would have dined at the table of the gods: love, fame, wealth and talent in one sublime package.

Enter Taylor Swift. I had gleaned indirectly -- the way one picks up information about subjects that don’t really interest one -- that she has had a string of lovers and almost ritually wrote songs about them. Self-indulgent, I thought. So many not very good modern singers seem to sing about themselves and their luckless love lives. Sing what you know, as it were.

So how come I’m head over heels for Swift? I have said I don’t know what she looks like, and I don’t believe I would recognize her music -- that is until I listen to the lyrics.

I met Swift and fell for her on one of those Web sites that aggregates quotations. I tell you the woman is a poet, a remarkable poet of love and its turbulence.

Just take just these lines from four different songs:

“Who could ever leave me, darling/But who could stay?”

“You’re not my homeland anymore/So what am I defending now?”

“You kept me like a secret/But I kept you like an oath.”

“Cold was the steel of my axe to grind/For the boys who broke my heart/Now I send their babies presents.”

They are so elegant and so true that they belong up among the great lyrics of the great love songs of the musical theater, the world of Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, Lorenz Hart, Oscar Hammerstein, and others from the golden age.

I don’t expect to meet her, nor do I have any special desire to. But if I did, I would say, “Keep writing, Taylor. You comfort young hearts and light up old ones.”

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

Holiday House (the white house on the left) is Taylor Swift’s home in the Watch Hill section of Westerly, R.I.

— Photo by JJBers

Bleery Boston

In the late’ 40s, the Boston University Bridge, connecting the BU campus and Commonwealth Avenue with Cambridge across the Charles River. Note the factory and other smoke that was so common in cities then, and Peter Fuller’s long-gone big high-end car dealership. There was still plenty of manufacturing in Greater Boston then.

Regional ruminations

A Fidelity Investments Investor Center on Boylston Street, Boston

— Photo by Grk1011 

“I was raised to believe that New England is the best place on the planet.’’

— Abigail Johnson (born 1961), CEO of giant, Boston-based Fidelity Investments, founded by her father, Edward (Ned) Johnson, in 1946.

Connecticut River Oxbow, in Northampton, Mass., from Skinner State Park on Mount Holyoke. Contrary to what Senator Lodge may imply below, there is much very fertile farmland in New England’s river valleys, with the Connecticut having some of the most productive agriculture in the East.

—Photo by Theo886 

“New England has a harsh climate, a barren soil, a rough and stormy coast, and yet we love it, even with a love passing that of dwellers in more favored regions.’’

— Henry Cabot Lodge (1850-1924), powerful U.S. senator and historian

xxx

“But let’s face it…those of us from New England know we’re the real Yankees. We can’t bear being confused with folks from other parts of the country. Proud and stubborn, self-sufficient and independent. What a pain in the ass we can be. And as much as we piss and moan about the weather, we stay put. Until we don’t. Statistically half of all New Englanders who leave in search of greener pastures and warmer climates return. For good. As a stranger on a plane, from Vermont as a matter of fact, so he was the real deal according to Mr. White, said to me, as I we were hurtling through the air headed back to the biggest movestake of my life, “It gets under your skin. Some of us just can’t shake it.”

— From yankeesoul.com, which is defunct

A looming void

An image from James Hunt’s   show  “The Draper Factory Demolition,’’ at the RI Center for Photographic Arts, Providence, through Feb. 11.

The Draper factory, in Hopedale, Mass., was once the world’s largest manufacturer of powered cotton looms, with the machines built there playing a role in the American Industrial Revolution. The demolition of the 80-acre complex, in 2020, came after it had stood vacant since 1980, creating a void in the fabric of Hopedale.

A utopian Christian community (there were a lot of them in the mid-19th Century) was established in 1842 in Hopedale. It went bankrupt in 1856, and its assets were purchased by Ebenezer and George Draper, manufacturers of looms.

Judith Graham: New COVID rules for visitors distress relatives of elderly people in nursing homes

From Kaiser Health News

As COVID-19 cases rise again in nursing homes, at least for now, a few states have begun requiring visitors to present proof that they’re not infected before entering facilities, stoking frustration and dismay among family members.

Navigating Aging focuses on medical issues and advice associated with aging and end-of-life care, helping America’s 45 million seniors and their families navigate the health-care system.

Officials in California, New York, and Rhode Island say new COVID testing requirements are necessary to protect residents — an enormously vulnerable population — from exposure to the highly contagious omicron variant. But many family members say they can’t secure tests amid enormous demand and scarce supplies, leaving them unable to see loved ones. And being shut out of facilities feels unbearable, like a nightmare recurring without end.

Severe staff shortages are complicating the effort to ensure safety while keeping facilities open; these shortages also jeopardize care at long-term care facilities — a concern of many family members.

Andrea DuBrow’s 75-year-old mother, who has severe Alzheimer’s disease, has lived for almost four years in a nursing home in Danville, Calif. When DuBrow wasn’t able to see her for months earlier in the pandemic, she said, her mother forgot who she was.

“This latest restriction is essentially another lockdown,” DuBrow said at a meeting last week about California’s new regulations. “The time that my mom has left when she can recognize in some small locked-away part of her that it is me, her daughter, cleaning her, feeding her, holding her hand, singing her favorite songs — that time is being stolen from us.”

“This is a huge inconvenience, but what’s most upsetting is that no one seems to have any kind of long-term plan for families and residents,” said Ozzie Rohm, whose 94-year-old father lives in a San Francisco nursing home.

Why are family members subject to testing requirements that aren’t applied to staffers, Rohm wondered. If family members are vaccinated and boosted, wear good masks, stay in a resident’s room, and practice rigorous hand hygiene, do they pose more of a risk than staffers who follow these procedures?

California was the first state to announce new policies for visitors to nursing homes and other long-term care facilities on Dec. 31. Those took effect on Jan. 7 and remain in place for at least 30 days. To see a resident, a person must show evidence of a negative covid rapid test taken within 24 hours or a PCR test taken within 48 hours. Also, covid vaccinations are required.

In a statement announcing the new policy, the California Department of Public Health cited “the greater transmissibility” of the omicron variant and the need to “protect the particularly vulnerable populations in long-term care settings.” Throughout the pandemic, nursing home residents have suffered disproportionately high rates of illness and death.

New York followed California with a Jan. 7 announcement that nursing home visitors would need to show proof of a negative rapid test taken no more than a day before. And on Jan. 10, Rhode Island announced a new rule requiring proof of vaccination or a negative covid test.

Patient advocates are worried other states might adopt similar measures. “We are concerned that omicron will be used as an excuse to shut down visitation again,” said Sam Brooks, program and policy manager for the National Consumer Voice for Quality Long-Term Care, an advocacy group for people living in these facilities.

“We do not want to go back to the past two years of lockdowns in nursing homes and resident isolation and neglect,” he continued.

That’s also a priority for the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, which has emphasized since Nov. 12 residents’ right to receive visitors without restriction as long as safety protocols are followed. Nursing homes could encourage but not require visitors to take tests in advance or provide proof of covid vaccination, guidance from CMS explained. Safety protocols included wearing masks, rigorous hand hygiene, and maintaining adequate physical distance from other residents.

With the rise of omicron, however, facilities pushed back. On Dec. 17, an organization representing nursing home medical directors and two national long-term care associations sent a letter to CMS’ administrator asking for more flexibility to “protect resident safety” and “place temporary visitation restrictions in nursing homes.” On Jan. 6, CMS affirmed residents’ right to visitation but said states could “take additional measures to make visitation safer.”

Asked for comment about the states’ recent actions, the federal agency said in a statement to KHN that “a state may require nursing homes to test visitors as long as the facility provides the rapid antigen tests, and there are enough testing supplies. … However, if there are not enough rapid testing supplies, the visits must be allowed to occur without a test (while still adhering to other practices, such as masking and physical distancing).”

Some relief from test shortages may be at hand under the Biden administration’s new plan to distribute four free tests per household. But for family members who visit nursing home residents several times a week, that supply won’t go very far.

Since the start of the year, tension over the balance between safety and residents’ rights to visitation has intensified. In the week ended Jan. 9, 57,243 nursing home staffers reported covid infections, almost 10 times as many as three weeks before. During the same period, resident infections rose to 32,061, almost eight times as many as three weeks earlier.

But outbreaks are occurring against a different backdrop today. More than 87 percent of nursing-home residents have been fully vaccinated, according to CMS, and 63 percent have also received boosters, reducing the risk that covid poses. Also, nursing homes have gained experience handling outbreaks. And the toll of nursing home lockdowns — loneliness, despair, neglect, and physical deterioration — is now far better understood.

“We have all seen the negative effects of restricting visitation on residents’ health and well-being,” said Joseph Gaugler, a professor who studies long-term care at the University of Minnesota’s School of Public Health. “For nursing homes to go back into a bunker mentality and shut everything down, that’s not a solution.”

Amid egregious staffing shortages, “we need people in these buildings who can take care of residents, and often those are visitors who are basically functioning as unpaid certified nursing assistants: grooming and toileting residents, turning and repositioning them, feeding them, stretching, and exercising them,” said Tony Chicotel, a staff attorney at California Advocates for Nursing Home Reform.

Nearly 420,000 staffers have left nursing homes since February 2020, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, worsening existing shortages.

When DuBrow learned of California’s new testing requirement for visitors, she arranged to get a PCR test at a testing site on Jan. 6, expecting results within 48 hours. Instead, she waited 104 hours before getting a response. (Her test was negative.) Eager to visit her mother, DuBrow called every CVS, Walgreens, and Target in a 25-mile radius of her home asking for a test but came up empty.

In a statement, the California Department of Public Health said the state had established 6,288 covid testing sites and sent millions of at-home tests to counties and local jurisdictions.

In New York, Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul has pledged to deliver nearly 1 million COVID tests to nursing homes, where visitors can take them on the spot, but that presents its own problems. “We don’t want to test visitors who are lining up at the door. We don’t have the clinical staff to do that, and we need to focus all our staff on the care of residents,” said Stephen Hanse, president and CEO of the New York State Health Facilities Association, an industry organization.

With current staff shortages, trying to ensure that visitors are wearing masks, physical distancing, and adhering to infection control practices is “taxing on the staff,” said Janine Finck-Boyle, vice president of regulatory affairs at Leading Age, which represents not-for-profit long-term care providers.

“Really, the challenges are enormous,” said Gaugler, of the University of Minnesota, “and I wish there were easy answers.”

Judith Graham is a Kaiser Health News reporter.

\ khn.navigatingaging@gmail.com, @judith_graham

Use beets to battle ice

Brine sprayed on road before a snowstorm

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

Now that real winter seems to be here,  at least for a few days, let’s lobby cities and towns to go easier on pouring rock salt on the roads during and after ice and snowstorms. This stuff is highly corrosive and its runoff pollutes local water supplies.  And it hurts the feet of animals and kills plants.  Quite a few places are instead using a mix of  beet extract (!) with brine. That’s been found to be a very effective melter and somewhat biodegradable.

Boston’s Planned West End Street Railway system, 1885; consolidation of these lines was complete by 1887.

The Feds are expected to approve a two-year experiment in free fares on several MBTA lines in Boston. That’s good news. Worcester’s experiment in free fares has been underway since the start of the pandemic and has just been extended another year. But trying it in a big city, with a dense public-transit system, such as Boston, is much more important.

A big question is how much  savings  from the resulting decline (if there is one) in car traffic, and thus less wear and tear, and fewer accidents, on the roads,  can offset the loss of fare revenue? There would also be less air pollution. Give it a try!

Cloudy at Colby

“Cloudscape’’ (still, video, sound), by Lorna Simpson, in the show “The Poetics of Atmosphere: Lorna Simpson’s ‘Cloudscape’ and Other Works from The Collection,’’ at the (surprisingly large) Colby College Museum, Waterville, Maine, Feb 3.-April 17.

The museum says:

“Simpson’s work examines how identity, specifically Black identity, is formed, perceived, and experienced. ‘Cloudscape’ features a singular figure, the artist Terry Adkins, whistling as he is slowly engulfed in clouds. His seeming ability to fade—to appear ethereal, even to disappear—evokes the ways that race and gender inform a person’s capacity, or lack thereof, to determine their desired level of public visibility. ‘Cloudscape’ makes Adkins an apparition, more spirit than body, while distorting the viewer’s temporal and spatial understanding of the world within the video.

‘‘The artworks accompanying ‘Cloudscape’ allude to atmospheric conditions while also reflecting individualized articulations of weight. They challenge, and even circumvent, the embodied ways that we relate to our surroundings.’’

They overlooked the granite outcroppings

Looking east into The Berkshires from the New York state line

— Photo by BenFrantzDale~commonswiki

“I had known something of New England village life long before I made my home in the same county as my imaginary Starkfield; though, during the years spent there, certain of its aspects became much more familiar to me. Even before that final initiation, however, I had had an uneasy sense that the New England of fiction bore little — except a vague botanical and dialectical — resemblance to the harsh and beautiful land as I had seen it. Even the abundant enumeration of sweet-fern, asters and mountain-laurel, and the conscientious reproduction of the vernacular, left me with the feeling that the outcropping granite had in both cases been overlooked. I give the impression merely as a personal one; it accounts for Ethan Frome, and may, to some readers, in a measure justify it.’’

Edith Wharton (1867-1937), in the introduction to her novel Ethan Frome (1911). The town of Starkfield is based on Lenox, Mass., in The Berkshires, where Mrs. Wharton had a large country mansion called The Mount, which is now a museum.

Similar worlds, actually

In Monument Square Historic District, a city park and its surrounding buildings at the top of Breed's Hill in the Charlestown neighborhood of Boston. The location is the site of the 1775 Battle of Bunker Hill. Monument Square was laid out in the 19th Century, when the Bunker Hill Monument (a National Historic Landmark) was erected there. The neighborhood has in recent decades been intensely gentrified.

 “I grew up, as I joke around, in the 'People's Republic of Charlestown' in the city of Boston. And I was blessed to be raised right there on Monument Square in Charlestown, and every morning I'd hop on the bus and go on a 45-minute ride out to the suburbs in Brookline for elementary school. And I got to have my seat, really, in both worlds.’’

— Jonathan Tucker (born 1982), American actor

Frozen food indeed

“Ready for work on the Trawler Saturn” (January 1928). Collection of the Cape Ann Museum Library & Archives, Gloucester, Mass.

Chris Powell: On whom will pandemic resentments fall?

Representation of resentment

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Teachers and nurses in Connecticut who are government employees, along with employees of nursing homes, whose industry is mostly funded by government, are feeling so overworked because of the virus epidemic that their allegiance to Gov. Ned Lamont and the Democratic Party is coming into question.

Surveying leaders of the teachers and nurses unions last week, the Connecticut Post's Ken Dixon found no rebellion but little enthusiasm. Some union leaders acknowledged that state government had made special efforts for their members but insisted that more was owed to them. Prison workers weren't surveyed but might have expressed the greatest bitterness, since the prisons are full of virus cases.

But beyond government's employees and quasi-employees, parents of schoolchildren and relatives of people ailing with something other than the virus have resentments too. For the more safety measures are demanded by teachers and nurses, the less schooling will be delivered and the less medical care will be available to people afflicted with something other than the virus. Some people whose treatment was delayed have died.

While teachers and nurses think of themselves as workplace martyrs to the epidemic, they are hardly alone.

Restaurants, bars, and the rest of the hospitality industry have been devastated. Even when restaurants and bars have been allowed to reopen, many customers have stayed away.

Retailers have been devastated too, as personal incomes were cut throughout the nation by a decline in working hours. Even when hours were restored, wages were overtaken by inflation, which in part is a result of the government's distributing so much free money even as millions of people have stopped working and producing things to buy.

Amid the hysteria of the government and news organizations, which treat even asymptomatic virus cases as the plague, workers in all sectors of the economy increasingly call out sick. This hobbles far more than schools, as society discovers that school bus drivers and trash haulers are really "essential workers" too.

Are those electrons over the state capitol dome?

There may be only one set of workers who are neither overworked nor forced to sacrifice income and benefits: employees of the government bureaucracy, many of whom, in Connecticut, are allowed to work from home most of the time, pushing electrons when they are not pushing paper.

In the name of "solidarity forever" could these employees sacrifice a little income or time on the job in favor of the government employees and quasi-employees who are overwhelmed in schools, hospitals, and nursing homes? Of course not; the paper and electron pushers will insist on every last cent of their wages and every last restriction on their working conditions as promised by their union contract. And since the paper and electron pushers are represented by unions affiliated with the unions of the teachers and nurses, the teachers and nurses will give them a pass anyway -- in the name of "solidarity forever."

So now that the epidemic in Connecticut is suddenly worsening after fading for many months, on whom should the state's political resentments fall?

The Communist government of China might be the place to start, since the virus may have originated from bio-weapons research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. But Americans can't vote for the Chinese government; even the Chinese themselves can't.

Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has gotten off easy for funding research at the Wuhan laboratory. Americans might be tired of Fauci, but he's not elected either.

President Biden ordinarily would be a prime target of resentment, but as he dodders ineffectually from day to day -- spending a quarter of his time away from the office, apparently to regain his senses -- what would be the point of bashing him?

That leaves Governor Lamont, who got all the credit when the epidemic was fading and who is up for re-election this year and thus the most available target. At least Lamont didn't constantly make a mess of things as New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio did, but how much enthusiasm will be sparked by a campaign slogan like "It Could Have Been Worse"?

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

Welcome wintry wakeup

Sugarloaf Mountain, Maine, seen from Routes 16 and 27. The mountain, as you can see, is a large ski area.

“I like waking up by the lake

frozen over, the frosty meadow

where a white horse still huffs and chafes

by the fence post and a few fog clouds

cling to the tree line of the Sugar Loaf range.’’

— From “I Like Waking Up,’’ by Ira Sadoff (born 1945), an American poet and professor of literature at Colby College, in Waterville, Maine.