Slung along the sound
Long Island Sound from Calf Pasture Beach in Norwalk, Conn.
“Catechist of gnarled oak trees, marshes, small suburban marinas,
cinders, and gutted mattresses, I let myself be slung
along tracks from one city toward another. Stain
of rose water where the Sound remembers the sun….’’
From “Northeast Corridor,’’ by Rosanna Warren (born 1953), daughter of the novelist and poet Robert Penn Warren, she grew up in Connecticut.
Exterior freedom
“Liberation” (photo) by Eileen McCarney Muldoon, a Rhode Island-based fine-art photographer, in the Providence Art Club’s “Winter Member’ Exhibition,’’ through Feb. 10. This picture won the “Best of Show’’ prize.
Frank Carini: Invasive plants are winning in R.I.
Japanese barberry in Penwood State Park, in Connecticut
— Photo by Sage Ross
From ecoRI News (ecori.org)
This intrusive plant was brought to the United States from Japan and eastern Asia in the late 1800s. The ornamental is still used in residential and commercial landscapes because of its fall coloring and deer resistance. But the prickly shrub easily spreads into woodlands, pastures and meadows, where, like many invasives imported from faraway lands, it chokes out native species.
Japanese barberry can also be popular with ticks. A multiyear study conducted in Connecticut looked at the relationship between the deciduous shrub, white-tailed deer, white-footed mice, and deer ticks, also known as black-legged ticks. It found that the larger amount of barberry in an area, the higher the prevalence of deer ticks, which can carry Lyme disease.
The hearty species, which can grow up to 6 feet tall, has denser foliage than most native species and, as a result, the invasive bush retains higher humidity levels that ticks crave, according to the study published in 2010. The shrubs also provide nesting areas for white-footed mice, which are a main source for larval ticks’ first blood meal.
Follow-up research in 2011 found that barberry-infested forests are about 12 times more likely to harbor deer ticks than forests without barberry.
This past fall Pennsylvania became the most recent state to include Japanese barberry on its list of invasive plants that can’t be legally sold or cultivated. The sale of the multi-stemmed shrub with needle-sharp spines has been banned in Massachusetts since 2009 and in New Hampshire since 2007. The sale of the plant is also prohibited in Maine and Vermont.
Connecticut recognizes it as an invasive, but nurseries there can grow and sell it. Connecticut does prohibit the sale of other plants on its invasive species list, but barberry is popular and the nursery industry lobbied against a ban. Big-box stores are still selling it, even after the Connecticut Nursery & Landscape Association agreed to phase out the most invasive barberry plants.
The sale of barberry is allowed in Rhode Island. In fact, the Ocean State is the only New England state that doesn’t have a complete list of noxious plants. While the other five states have a long list of invasive species that are banned or at least identified in Connecticut’s case, the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management’s invasive plants webpage notes the damage inflicted by non-native species but only mentions one: phragmites, which aren’t sold at nurseries and garden centers.
“For more information and resources about invasive plant species in Rhode Island,” the state’s environmental agency directs those interested in the problem to a broken link on the website of the Rhode Island Natural History Survey, a small nonprofit that over the years, as DEM staffing and funding have been cut, has become increasingly relied on to help protect the local environment.
The organization’s executive director, David Gregg, said the Natural History Survey and others have been working since the early 2000s to get Rhode Island to at least create a list of invasive plants that should be avoided, such as burning bush, privet and Japanese barberry.
Those efforts have continually stalled, thanks in part from pushback from lobbyists representing nurseries, garden centers and growers who have developed their businesses based on consumer demand.
This snarl of oriental bittersweet has climbed into trees along a roadside in Portsmouth, R.I.
— Photo by Frank Carini/ecoRI News
Shannon Brawley, executive director of the Rhode Island Nursery & Landscape Association (RINLA), said the organization favors a list but wants the industry to have a significant say in what species are listed or banned.
“We have to make sure we’re not collapsing someone’s business by outlawing particular plants,” she said. “It takes a long time to grow them. Nurseries are growing it and then they have to tear out acres and acres of product, and it takes five to eight years to grow something else to sell. If it’s not done carefully, there’s going to be an economic impact on these businesses.”
Gregg said if that is the case then there needs to be a plan to deal with the issue of economic hardship. But maintaining the status quo, he added, can’t be an option.
Like many other non-native species, Japanese barberry can tolerate a range of site and soil conditions, which means, like multiflora rose, oriental bittersweet and autumn olive, it comes to dominate the landscape, and can change soil chemistry.
Common barberry, a European invasive first brought to this country during the 17th Century, is shade-tolerant, which allows it to easily invade woodlands. It can reach a height of 13 feet.
Barberry, like other ornamentals brought in from overseas, spreads from home and commercial gardens to open spaces and areas that have been disturbed, such as roadsides. Barberry produces a lot of seeds and has a high germination rate. Its seeds aren’t very nutritious for wildlife, but they are eaten anyway and deposited in more areas, where more of the invasive becomes established — part of a larger cycle that is crowding out native plants, destroying habitat, and starving native insects and wildlife.
Tangles of bittersweet, forests of burning bush and heaps of multiflora rose mar much of Rhode Island’s landscape.
“Invasive species are the second-greatest threat to biodiversity after development when it comes to areas of habitat they wipe out,” Gregg said, “It’s what wrecks the outdoor experience for people who want to relax in green space. There’s a crack ton of it. It’s a physiological and cultural problem, as well as an environmental and economic one.”
He noted that both sides of the East Bay Bike Path from end to end are full of invasives. “Good luck getting a view of the water. It’s like going through a tunnel of phragmites.”
Brawley noted she gets out-of-state phone calls from people looking to buy burning bush because of its intense red foliage. She provides them with native alternatives that are similar but don’t suffocate woodlands and coastal scrublands.
“I couldn’t in good conscience recommend the purchase of this plant,” said Brawley.
She said most Rhode Island nurseries and garden centers don’t sell burning bush, or if they do, it’s a sterile variety.
Burning bush was introduced to the United States in the mid-1800s as an ornamental plant for use in landscaping. The sale of it is prohibited in Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Maine, and the invasive is on watch lists in Connecticut and Vermont.
— Photo by Chris Barton/Gif absarnt
Douglas Tallamy, a University of Delaware entomologist and author of Bringing Nature Home: How You Can Sustain Wildlife with Native Plants and Nature’s Best Hope: A New Approach to Conservation That Starts in Your Yard, has been researching and writing for years about the threat invasives pose to native insects and wildlife habitat.
His work has shown that the transformation of native plant communities into landscapes dominated by imported species and lawns imperil insects, most notably caterpillars, and the birds and other animals that depend on them for survival.
A paper he co-authored in 2020 reviewed the research supporting the theory — which has had its detractors — that the widespread displacement of native plant communities by non-native species is contributing to insect decline. It found that our longtime fascination with ornamentals over native plants is degrading the local environment.
Japanese knotweed can grow 3 inches a day and reach 10 feet in height. Oriental bittersweet can climb to 60 feet, strangling host trees. Tree-of-heaven can reach a height of 80 feet and grow to be 35-50 feet wide. Glossy buckthorn can colonize without disturbance, and its dense foliage and ability to mature quickly allows it to easily outcompete native plants. Extensive stands of it can also produce conditions favored by deer ticks.
These four invasives and most others don’t have natural predators feeding on or killing them. The vast majority of native insects can’t eat or reproduce on these invaders — native plants and insects co-evolved over thousands of years — creating a food desert for invertebrates and the birds and animals that feed on them. They provide little support for pollinators.
Many of the worst invasives strangling Rhode Island, such as bittersweet, knotweed and glossy buckthorn, are no longer sold, but the lack of diversity created by the totality of the state’s invasive species problem, including the continued sale of many intrusive plants, makes the local environment much less resilient, by leaving it, for example, with fewer options when responding to the climate crisis.
The continued sale of invasives is directly tied to consumer demand and the Rhode Island landscape and nursery industry responding to those wants.
Catherine Weaver, a RINLA board member and past president who owns a North Kingstown-based landscape design studio, said her clients often request miscanthus, also known as Chinese silvergrass, a popular ornamental grass she called “a nuisance.” Hedges of invasive privet are also a high-demand request by her clients. She called privet “a nasty invasive,” and said she instead recommends the use of natives like sweet pepperbush or viburnums.
“We need to prioritize environmental integrity over aesthetics,” Weaver said, “but we’re so used to using aesthetics to judge if a plant is good. Planting something beautiful is pleasing … but we have to use other criteria when we’re making these decisions. We shouldn’t be sacrificing ecosystem function for beauty. We can have both. There are so many great native plants.”
Both Weaver and Brawley said the public needs to be better educated about the importance of native plants to create more demand. They believe progress is being made on that front, albeit slowly.
“Five clients in the past year have asked for mostly native plants,” Weaver said. “That almost never happened before.”
Not every non-native species is invasive, however. Invasives are those that, reproducing outside their native range, actively cause ecological or economic harm, according to the Invasives Species Act of 1996.
Species exchange is natural, as there has always been drift — plants moving with the tides and seeds scattered by birds and storms. Ecosystems change over time. Early humans brought hitchhikers with them as they migrated. But comparatively, today’s invasive species levels are monstrous, because of growing human globalization, including two-plus centuries of importation of ornamentals from exotic places to show off wealth and later to keep up with the Joneses.
In Rhode Island, the limited amount of attention being paid to invasive plants is largely focused on aquatic invaders, which interfere with boating, paddling, fishing and other recreational activities. More than 100 lakes and 27 river segments in Rhode Island are plagued with at least one species of invasive plant, according to DEM.
The agency’s webpage for aquatic invasives includes a list of the problem species. Many only need a couple of cells or a leaf to reproduce. They can take over a waterbody quickly.
In its 2020 fishing regulations, DEM prohibited the transport of invasive plants on any type of boat, motor, trailer or fishing gear to help prevent the inadvertent movement of aquatic invasives from one waterbody to another.
DEM also has proposed regulations to ban their sale, purchase, importation and distribution. The proposed regulations list 48 species of aquatic invasive species whose sale would be prohibited, such as Carolina fanwort, a problem species in Smithfield’s Stump Pond; American lotus, which covers 18 acres of Chapman Pond in Westerly; Brazilian waterweed, which has invaded Hundred Acre Pond in South Kingstown; and common water hyacinth, an Amazonian species now found in the Pawcatuck River.
DEM’s proposal to limit aquatic invasives is still under review, according to an agency spokesperson. Enacting the proposal doesn’t require enabling legislation.
Gregg said Rhode Island should be taking the same precautions when it comes to terrestrial invasives, as they inflict as much damage to the environment and local economy. He noted the fact Rhode Island hasn’t banned the sale of many invasives or even bothered to compile a complete list doesn’t paint the state as very neighborly.
He said it was also unfair that as taxpayers fund efforts to eradicate invasives, nonprofits create programs to battle their spread and volunteers spend their free time cutting and pulling them from the landscape, their local garden center is selling more intrusive non-natives to be unwittingly planted at homes and businesses.
“We’re spending good money and time removing invasives from the woods to maintain the status quo,” Gregg said. “It would make more sense to have a regulation that banned the sale of these plants.”
Gregg offered a solution: remove the word “aquatic” from DEM’s invasive plant proposal.
“It’s pretty clean and simple,” he said. “Delete a single word and create an invasives species list.”
A bill filed last year would have done just that, making it illegal to import, transport, disperse, distribute, introduce, sell or purchase in the state any invasive plant species.
Black swallow-wort, an invasive vine from Europe, reproduces by sprouting new stems from existing roots and by spreading seeds. Inside this seed pod are thousands of seeds that will float on the wind or hitch rides on animals to other areas. Removing and disposing of seed pods before they open is one way of slowing the spread of this invader. (ecoRI News)
Two years earlier, in 2019, the Protection From Invasive Plant Species Act would have prohibited the planting of running bamboo within 100 feet of a property line. The fast-spreading invasive can penetrate asphalt and the siding of buildings. Many homeowners, not knowing the unintended consequence, plant running bamboo as a natural barrier that offers privacy and blocks out animals such as deer. But some bamboo species can grow 40 feet high and their roots can travel 15 feet in a year.
Violators would have been liable for the cost of removing the plant from a neighbor’s property, plus any damages. Rhode Island retailers and landscapers would have been required to provide customers written notice of the risks of running bamboo.
To address other non-native invaders, the legislation would have required DEM to create a list of invasive plant species, regulate their sale and enforce compliance.
DEM, however, was opposed to the legislation. The state agency said it already regulates invaders and can assess fines of up to $500 for transporting invasive aquatic plants. It noted it doesn’t allow federally designated noxious weeds to enter the state. The U.S. Department of Agriculture list doesn’t include Japanese barberry, privet or burning bush. It doesn’t even include multiflora rose, oriental bittersweet or phragmites.
The Rhode Island Farm Bureau feared the bill would punish farmers for invasive species they didn’t actually plant. It suggested the state — that is, taxpayers — instead offer money to farmers and property owners for the removal of invasive plants, of which some were likely bought in Rhode Island and planted by the current landowner.
Like past attempts to tackle the problem of invasive plants, such as the 2021 bill that would have removed the word aquatic, the Protection From Invasive Plant Species Act didn’t go anywhere.
Since the state seems unwilling to address the problem, Gregg said the key to reducing the impact of invasives is educating the public about the environmental harm many non-native plants cause.
“It’s in the public’s interest that we grow the right plants,” he said. “The importance of native species has come a long way in the past 15 years, but we need an invasive species list so we can have conversations that educate the public and bring awareness to the problem. It’s a complex issue, but at the end of the day we’re spending money to remove stuff people are buying at garden centers.”
Frank Carini is senior reporter and co-founder of ecoRI News.
David Warsh: How America can get out of its political mess
Not much “unum’’ lately
SOMERVILLE, Mass.
The end of Joe Biden’s difficult first year in office evoked all kinds of comparisons. New York Times columnist Bret Stephens recalled successful presidential partnerships with strong chiefs of staff – Ronald Reagan and Howard Baker, George H.W. Bush and James Baker. Stephens asked, “What’s Tom Daschle up to these days?” Nate Cohn, also in The Times, compared Biden’s legislative strategy to that of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933, to Biden’s disadvantage. I asked a friend who has known Biden for forty years.
I don’t think you can pin the things that Bret Stephens doesn’t like about the Biden presidency on the staff…. Is Biden missing someone who could talk him out of bad calls? Could a Tom Daschle serve as a keel for Biden the way Leon Panetta did for Bill Clinton? … Doubtful. Think back on how Biden ran his campaign in 1987 and in 2020: lots of cooks in the kitchen. The only one he really trusted was his sister. He delegated authority to nobody. His campaigns were organizational [smash-ups]. Some people never change. At least his heart is in the right place.
Myself, I thought of the two-year presidency of Gerald Ford. The common denominator is that both Ford and Biden had to deal with long national nightmares.
As president, Ford had it easy. After 25 years as a Michigan congressman from Grand Rapids, Republican minority leader for the last nine of them, he was the first political figure to be appointed vice president, under the terms of the 25th Amendment. Vice President Spiro Agnew resigned in October 1973, having plead guilty to a felony charge of tax evasion. Ford succeeded him in December. When Richard Nixon resigned the presidency in August, 1974, after an especially damaging White House tape recording was released, Ford was sworn in.
In his inaugural address, Ford stated “[O]ur long national nightmare is over. Our Constitution works; our great republic is a government of laws and not of men.” A month later he pardoned Nixon for any crimes he might have committed as president. Nixon’s acceptance was widely viewed as tantamount to an admission of guilt, and the former president withdrew from public life pretty much altogether. Ford’s two years in office were a stream of politics as usual. Disapproval of the pardon weighed against him; so did the fall of Saigon, in April 1975. He ran for the presidency in 1976, but was defeated by Jimmy Carter, governor of Georgia.
As president, Biden faces almost the opposite situation. First, Trump lost the 2020 election, which he then falsely claimed he had won, Next, he apparently sought to interfere with the vote of the Electoral College, for which he is now under investigation. He continues to interfere in Republican primaries, and has threatened to mount a second presidential campaign. Meanwhile, much of Biden’s ambitious legislative agenda has bogged down and his popularity has dwindled in public opinion polls.
What chain of events will allow some future president to pronounce a benediction on the Trump nightmare? My hunch is that a relatively moderate Republican with no previous ties to Trump can be elected, possibly in 2024; if not, in 2028. That is easier said than done. The problem is getting by the Republican convention. It all depends in large measure on the results of the mid-term elections; on the Republican primaries in 2024; and on Biden’s standing at the end of his term, when he will be 82 years old. .
Republican contenders are already edging away from Trump, Gov. Glenn Youngkin, in Virginia; Gov. Ron DeSantis, in Florida. It is not necessary to disavow Trump’s political platform, if anyone besides Joe Biden remembers what it was – less supply-chain globalization; more domestic infrastructure investment; immigration reform (whatever that is!); recalibration of foreign relations, China and Russia in particular. All these positions are capable of commanding support among independent voters
It is Trump himself whose character must be thoroughly rejected. That will happen by degrees. There will be no pardon this time. The next president, whoever it is, will continue to leave matters up to the courts. And, sooner or later, the lingering nightmare will end.
David Warsh, a veteran columnist and an economic historian, is proprietor of Somerville-based economicprincipals.com, where this essay first ran.
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.
xxx
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’
— 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
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.
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.