‘Unseen energy and forms’
“Wave Function I’’ (1993) (Vitreograph print from glass plates), by Mildred Thompson (1936-2003), in the show of her work, “Cosmic Flow,’’ at the New Britain (Conn.) Museum of American Art through Nov. 27
The gallery says:
“Mildred Thompson sought to represent natural phenomena through a distinctly unique language of abstraction. Her dynamic mark-making, color, and compositions visualize the force of unseen energy and forms in the universe, as reflected in this suite of 14 prints, on view at the NBMAA for the first time ever.’’
Llewellyn King: Show the children’s shattered bodies
Memorial to the 19 children murdered by means of an assault rifle at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, on May 24. Two teachers were also murdered.
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
America, spare me your thoughts and prayers. Get off your backsides and do something. Wringing hands over the gun lobby, lamenting the love of guns by so many Americans, these won’t do anymore.
The best argument against a bad argument is a better argument. Let us unpack that argument and make it.
I understand the love of guns. I grew up in Africa and I enjoy firing them, love handling them, thrill at their majesty, and admire their craftsmanship. When you handle a firearm, you are handling something awesome, refined power in a form that you can carry.
Therefore, let us start the argument for a new gun regime by eschewing any idea that we are going to ban guns outright, take them away from their owners and collectors who treasure them; no federal marshals will be going door to door confiscating weapons.
You can dream of that, but it won’t happen. You can dream that like Australia, Britain and most of Europe, guns will be kept under lock and key for the enthusiasts. It won’t happen either, though we can start down that road by ending the disingenuous claim that guns make you safe.
Instead, dream of a country where certain guns aren’t available to the public; where guns have better safety devices; where our children aren’t slaughtered, whether it is in Uvalde, Texas, or Newtown, Connecticut; and where the Constitution is honored as written.
First, we should clamp down on assault rifles, designed for use in war, not for sport or self-defense. We should cherish marksmanship, even teach it in schools, which is where I learned to shoot one round at a time. We should inspire the National Rifle Association to return to its original purpose: teaching marksmanship and gun safety.
We should disentangle masculinity, patriotism, fear of government and love of freedom from the possession of automatic weapons, now so promiscuously available. Buyback schemes could take millions of them off the streets.
I offer these as ideas, but they’re not prescriptions. Before we solve the gun carnage in homes, in schools and other places, and on the streets of our great cities like Chicago, we need to think. We need to think about what can be done, not what is inarguably out of reach: With 400 million guns in private hands, to think about confiscation is insane.
Some more thoughts:
Traditionally, social engineering has been practiced through taxation: Introduce it to guns. Tax gun sales heavily, just as we tax liquor and tobacco. But exempt gun clubs, where weapons are kept safely, as happens in many countries.
Then tax ammunition equally severely, but exempt ammunition used at ranges and in controlled gun-sport environments.
Draw a firm line between sporting weapons and automatic weapons of mass destruction, which is what they are. A quail hunter in Georgia shouldn’t have a problem applying for and getting a tax exemption on a shotgun and ammunition.
Take the profit out of selling guns. Eight states operate liquor stores. That worked fine when I lived in Virginia, and it did offer society some control; a kind of check on excess because there is no pressure to make a profit.
If you think nothing can be done because of the Second Amendment, go to the Constitution and read it. Over the decades, it has been alleged to extend a banal entitlement for all and any to carry the latest military weapons. The framers couldn’t have intended that because they couldn’t have conceived of the vast improvement in the lethality of weaponry that has occurred over time.
The bit about “a well regulated Militia”? Let us have some realistic originalism about what the framers meant.
It is a tough thing to do, but the media can make the case for gun-smarts by showing the shattered bodies of the little victims: torn limbs, scattered brains, young, beautiful, innocent, precious blood everywhere.
If we don’t get gun-smarter, this will be a new normal: dead children, randomly slaughtered, sometimes by children. Thoughts and prayers will neither save their lives nor ameliorate the unbearable suffering of their parents. They are weeping today in Texas. Where will they weep tomorrow?
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.
There’s never enough
Detail of “Give Your Blood, They are Giving Theirs (Sketch for Blood Donation Poster)” (watercolor on cardboard; 1944), by Virginia Lee Burton Demetrios (1909-1968). Collection of the Cape Ann Museum, Gloucester, Mass.
A charming guide on a New England road trip
William (“Willit’’ ) Mason, M.D., has written has a delightful – and very handy -- book rich with photos and colorful anecdotes, called Guidebook to Historic Houses and Gardens in New England: 71 Sites from the Hudson Valley East (iUniverse, 240 pages. Paperback. $22.95). Oddly, given the cultural and historical richness of New England and the Hudson Valley, no one else has done a book quite like this before.
Get a copy of the book and hit the road.
The blurb on the back of the book neatly summarizes his story.
“When Willit Mason retired in the summer of 2015, he and his wife decided to celebrate with a grand tour of the Berkshires and the Hudson Valley of New York.
“While they intended to enjoy the area’s natural beauty, they also wanted to visit the numerous historic estates and gardens that lie along the Hudson River and the hills of the Berkshires.
“But Mason could not find a guidebook highlighting the region’s houses and gardens, including their geographic context, strengths, and weaknesses. He had no way of knowing if one location offered a terrific horticultural experience with less historical value or vice versa.
“Mason wrote this comprehensive guide of 71 historic New England houses and gardens to provide an overview of each site. Organized by region, it makes it easy to see as many historic houses and gardens in a limited time.
“Filled with family histories, information on the architectural development of properties and overviews of gardens and their surroundings, this is a must-have guide for any New England traveler.’’
Dr. Mason noted of his tours: “Each visit has captured me in different ways, whether it be the scenic views, architecture of the houses, gardens and landscape architecture or collections of art. As we have learned from Downton Abbey, every house has its own personal story. And most of the original owners of the houses I visited in preparing the book have made significant contributions to American history.’’
To order a book, please go to www.willitmason.com
Don Pesci: Conn. should impose death penalty for mass murderers
Police at the site of the Sandy Hook massacre, Dec. 14, 2012.
VERNON, Conn.
Following the May 24 massacre (19 children; two teachers shot to death) in Uvalde, Texas, eerily similar to the Sandy Hook slaughter, in Newtown, Conn. (20 children, six staffers shot to death), in 2012, the state’s two U.S. senators, Dick Blumenthal and Chris Murphy, have been out on the political stump pedaling their solutions to mass murders
Democrat Gov. Ned Lamont, we find from a news report, “has been pushing for gun restrictions earlier this year, but the recent legislative session expired in early May without action.” The report quotes him: “… there are so many illegal guns on the street right now. I’d like to think we could have done a better job here in Connecticut and send a message far afield, especially when it comes to those ghost guns.”
Was Lamont suggesting that the elimination of ghost guns would have prevented the most recent slaughter of the innocents in Texas? Was he suggesting that black-market gunrunners would cease and desist their already illegal activities should Congress pass gun laws favored by Blumenthal and Murphy?
One almost feels indecent in pointing out that ghost guns played no part in the assault on elementary schools in Texas or Sandy Hook. The elimination of ghost guns may provide a solution to some problem – but not this problem.
Another story in today’s paper, “Schumer rips GOP after school shooting in Texas,” reports that New York Sen. Charles Schumer has implored “his Republican colleagues to cast aside the powerful gun lobby,” the National Rifle Association (NRA), “and reach across the aisle for even a modest compromise bill. Schumer is quoted: “If the slaughter of schoolchildren can’t convince Republicans to buck the NRA, what can we do?”
In the face of a still raw mass murder, Schumer might try to temper his politicking. Neither of the mass murderers in Texas or Sandy Hook were responsible gun owners, and it is doubtful that either were dues-paying members of the NRA.
Generally we do not blame bank robberies on banking associations. Schumer is asking us to believe that, in respect of mass shootings, it is better to do something – anything, though his plan may not reduce mass murders or urban killings -- than to “do nothing at all.”
Following the Sandy Hook massacre, Connecticut legislators, arguing that “something must be done,” passed a slew of legislation regulating gun sales. Those laws have had no appreciable effect on multiple killings in Hartford, the seat of the General Assembly. And there are those in the state who argue that if you cannot pass a bill preventing 14-year-old-children in urban areas from shooting other 14-year-old-children in urban areas, you will not be successful in curbing mass shootings anywhere in the state.
What might such a bill look like?
In Sandy Hook and Texas, both killers were young men from broken households who spent an inordinate amount of time on the Internet indulging their violent tendencies.
The Sandy Hook killer shot his mother, stole her guns, an AR-15, a shotgun, and an automatic pistol with which he killed himself, and shot his way through the front entrance to Sandy Hook elementary school.
He was a loner, monkish, somewhat withdrawn from school life and other life-affirming social interactions. He had no arrest record and there were no reports that he was under mental duress.
The Texas murderer procured his guns legally, shot his grandmother in the face and proceeded to an elementary school that was, so to speak, a gun-free zone, where he locked himself in a room with his victims and opened fire.
endment rights, cherished by reporters and political commentators.
Nor have partisan politicians – Murphy, in particular, now seems eager to entangle all Republicans in the U.S. Senate in a far-fetched moral complicity in mass murders -- suggested sensible precautions, the hardening of access to schools, for instance. We post armed interveners in banks because we wish to prevent bank robberies and secure valuable assets. Are our children less valuable than our bank account savings?
In the Texas mass-murder case, we now know, the school was not properly hardened to prevent a mass assault; the school’s guard was not present at the time of the attack; multiple doors were unlocked; police waited too long before storming the building; neither children nor school staff were taught how to respond in case of such attacks; the perimeter fence surrounding the school was easily penetrated; there was no centrally activated room locking system available – in other words, mistakes were made.
It may be nearly impossible to prevent every instance of mass murder in schools, just as it is impossible to prevent all bank robberies. But illegal activities in both cases can be justly punished. And the most successful tool of mitigation, we know, is the swift and certain imprisonment of convicted criminals. Just punishment does deter crime – which is why senators such as Blumenthal, Murphy and Schumer provide us with an endless stream of laws designed to frustrate unwonted activity.
But, as yet, no one is screaming from the rooftops that just punishment delayed is just punishment denied. Would Blumenthal and Murphy welcome a reinstitution of Connecticut’s death penalty for mass murderers?
Likely not, but why not? Connecticut’s Supreme Court years ago found that even a just capital punishment violated an assumed moral resistance on the part of Connecticut citizens against capital punishment. Since then, capital punishment has become a very back-bench issue in Connecticut politics, the legislative equivalent of the sin that dare not speak its name. Some suspect that moral exemplars among our politicians no longer believe in the utility of just punishment. It is much easier politically to find guns rather than murderers guilty of and punishable for mass murder.
Don Pesci is a Vernon-based columnist.
Fungus in the forest
“Sulphur Shelf” (oil on canvas), by Owen Krzyzaniak Geary, a New York-based painter, in his show “Night Vision,’’ at Two Villages Art Society, in the Hopkinton, N.H., village of Contoocook (his hometown), through June 18.
He says:
"Paintings of fluttering bats and glowing fungus [that] remind me of exploring the forest at night when I was younger."
Stone arch bridge over the Contoocook River in the village center.
Hopkinton Fair in 2016.
On which the lichens grow
"Many New England stone fences built between 1700 and 1875 were laid by gangs of workers who piled stone at the rate of so much a rod. Edwin Way Teale says that in the latter years of the past century, before economic and social developments began obliterating some of the walls, there were a hundred thousand miles of stone fences in New England. Even today, for many of them, the only change has been the size of the lichens, those delicate rock-eating algae that can live nine hundred years."
— William Least Heat Moon, in Blue Highways
Gamble, drink, smoke
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
It’s good to see an effort by some local casino workers to get those establishments to ban smoking. Smoking not only causes lung cancer and other illnesses in smokers, it can sicken nonsmokers near them. That’s particularly true for casino workers, who must be there 40 hours a week.
Casino operators love smokers because they tend to be more prone to addictions in general, including gambling and booze. Drinking, smoking and gambling neurologically reinforce each other.
Consider that Spectrum Gaming Group estimates that 21 percent of Atlantic City casino visitors are smokers but account for 26.1-31.3 percent of the casinos’ revenue. The casino owners and executives, seeking to maximize profits, and the states, seeking to maximize tax revenues from the industry, don’t want to discourage any high rollers.
As with such things as legalizing “medical” and “recreational” marijuana (which in some people is a gateway to harder drugs) – more tax revenue! -- government promotion of gambling tends to poison society.
If you think that drivers are bad now, just wait until full-bodied legalized “recreational” marijuana takes over the roads.
‘Tension beneath the calm’
“Spring Fling 2’’ (oil, cold wax on wood), painted in 2020 by Dona Mara Friedman, who lives in tiny Rupert, Vt.
Ms. Friedman says:
“{My] recent work is influenced by my surroundings, as solitary time became all the more important in 2020. Living in a country setting surrounded by the wonder of nature I spend time watching the changing light, wind rustling the tree leaves and rain on plants that provide a full palette of colors. These careful observations become take off points for work that is process based while holding the intention of communicating an emotional response. The choosing of materials, marks, colors and images is directed by my interior dialogue and a continual desire to experiment.
“This quote from Richard Diebenkorn, a painter who inspires me, resonates with my findings.
“‘I came to mistrust my desire to explode the picture and super charge it in some way – what is more important is a feeling of strength in reserve – tension beneath calm.’
“The tension beneath the calm speaks clearly to me of my experience in modern day living. The paintings offer the viewer a possibility to be drawn in, taking another look and perhaps understanding this artist’s view of the complexities of modern life.
“This connection of artist to viewer completes my process.’’
Rupert is in the Taconic Range, whose high point, 3,840-foot Mt. Equinox, is in nearby Manchester. Vt.
Cynthia Drummond: Learning to bear it in southern N.E.
An Eastern Black Bear. Increasingly common in the eastern U.S. wherever suitable wooded habitat is found. It’s a large-bodied subspecies. Almost all specimens have black fur while a few may sport a white blaze on the chest.
Photo by Cephas
From ecoRI News (ecori.org)
In what has become a rite of spring, Rhode Island residents are once again reporting black bear sightings. This is the time of year when young, male black bears are searching for mates, and because there isn’t much natural food available yet, they will eat just about anything they find, including bird seed.
David Kalb, supervising biologist in the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management’s Division of Fish and Wildlife, said it’s difficult to predict how much the bear population in Rhode Island will grow, but with no natural bear predators and abundant food sources, it is expected to get larger.
“It’s hard to say for sure if there are more of them,” he said. “We anticipate that over the next five to ten years, we are going to see an increase in the number of bears, but because we’re still at such a low population level, it’s hard to evaluate what are the true numbers.”
Hunted relentlessly by European settlers, black bears had disappeared in Rhode Island by 1800, but began to rebound as bear hunting ended and their habitat was restored. With healthy bear populations in Massachusetts and Connecticut, Kalb said it wouldn’t be long before sows and cubs join the transient male bears and begin to settle in Rhode Island.
“We have thus far been lucky, honestly, not to see some sows and cubs, given the number of years we’ve had lone males in Rhode Island and with the density of bears in eastern Connecticut and southern Massachusetts,” he said. “But they will be here. We have great habitat for bears and with them being populated on the borders, it won’t be long before we do start to see them.”
Black bears do not truly hibernate, instead going into a lowered metabolic state known as winter torpor from which they frequently emerge during warm spells. As Rhode Island winters get warmer, bears could remain more active year-round, like bears living in southern states.
Bears, many of them plundering bird feeders, have been observed throughout southern Rhode Island this spring. Despite DEM’s efforts to persuade residents to remove bird feeders in early March, many people aren’t getting the message.
“We like to get people’s attention before they have an incident, but sometimes, having a neighbor’s bird feeder hit will often encourage homeowners to remove their bird feeder or if they see it happen in the neighborhood, generally you can get that neighborhood on board pretty quickly,” Kalb said. “But without having any incidents around your house or in your neighbors’ area that you know about, it’s going to be hard to convince people that they’re in bear area right now.”
What Kalb means by “bear area” are the more rural, wooded northern and southwestern parts of Rhode Island.
“It’s a rare occurrence, and it has happened, where a bear would move closer to the city just because they’ve been scared out of a certain area, or for some reason or another, but generally, I would not consider that bear habitat,” Kalb said.
As executive director of the Rhode Island Natural History Survey, David Gregg knows more than the average Rhode Islander about black bears and their habitat, so living near the Saugatucket River in the more urban municipality of South Kingstown, he was not expecting to see one in his back yard.
“I went out after dinner, and I wanted to do a little birding, so I grabbed my binoculars and I started out into the field by my house and I got 30 feet from the back door and I saw something large and dark brown through the woods, and there was a bear, about 100 feet from me,” he said.
Gregg went back to the house to tell his family and they watched it from a safe distance.
“It could tell we were there,” he said. “It sort of sniffed and it decided to move away from us and it gradually disappeared into the bushes.”
Gregg said he wondered what had drawn the bear to the more urban neighborhood. He got his answer the next day when he found the bear’s scat — full of sunflower seeds, almost certainly from bird feeders.
With education key to coexisting with bears, DEM recently partnered with BearWise, a company founded by bear biologists in the southeastern United States that specializes in public outreach.
“They’ve done a lot of really nice publications and produced other really interesting and user-friendly packets about living with black bears,” Kalb said.
DEM chief public affairs officer Michael Healey said it was important for Rhode Islanders to begin planning now for a future with bears.
“Where we are now as a state is, people see bears, which isn’t a problem or doesn’t pose a safety threat in and of itself, and there are some bear interactions with humans, probably livestock and pets, and agricultural products, beehives, feeds, that may at times constitute a problem,” he said. “We want to educate Rhode Islanders that these kinds of scenarios will become more typical as more bears become established in Rhode Island.”
Bears are not usually interested in encounters with humans.
As furry and charismatic as black bears may be, they are also large, powerful wild animals. Male black bears, or boars, can weigh up to 450 ponds and sows can weigh up to 250 pounds.
“Most of the time, we will never have major issues with bears,” Kalb said. “What we will have, though, is damage to people’s property, beehives and gardens, chicken coops and things along that line where a bear is looking for an easy meal and someone hasn’t taken care of their stuff and the bear takes advantage of that.”
Bears are not interested in encounters with humans and will usually run away from people, but human-bear conflicts sometimes do occur. DEM describes a dangerous bear as “one that has attacked or has attempted to make personal contact with a person or an attended [leashed] pet.”
It is illegal to feed or kill black bears in Rhode Island, and coexistence with bears involves removing food sources that will attract them.
“It’s important to recognize that bears were here in Rhode Island, historically,” Kalb said. “This is their natural zone. We are surrounded by bears from Maine to Florida and it’s not going to be long before Rhode Island is considered a standard bear state, just like every other state, and we’re going to have breeding and bears will be a common site. They’re here. They’re a natural part of the ecosystem. They serve a function in Rhode Island and people should be excited about that and look forward to opportunities to observe bears from a safe distance.”
Gregg agreed that it wouldn’t be long before Rhode Island had its own resident black bear population.
“Eventually, the sows’ range, they roam less than the males, but they roam enough to find good food and better den sites,” he said. “Yeah, they’ll get here. It’s only a matter of time.”
Healey said DEM planned to ramp up its effort to educate residents about the importance of removing food sources that attract bears.
“We’re going to become more vocal about this issue because we really don’t want to see it escalate to the point where bears are attacking pets and livestock, or, God forbid, injuring or killing a person,” he said. “We know it’s going to take time — years, really — to prime this message with the public, but we’re committed to doing that.”
Cynthia Drummond is an ecoRI News contributor.
Enjoying Quincy’s 19th Century ‘multiplicity of nature’
Still pretty: View looking east on Quincy Bay
— Photo by Sswonk
Quincy, Massachusetts (oil on canvas), by Childe Hassam, 1892
“Winter and summer, then, were two hostile lives, and bred two separate natures. Winter was always the effort to live; summer was tropical license. Whether the children rolled in the grass, or waded in the brook, or swam in the salt ocean, or sailed in the bay, or fished for smelts in the creeks, or netted minnows in the salt-marshes, or took to the pine-woods and the granite quarries, or chased musk-rats and hunted snapping turtles in the swamps, or mushrooms or nuts on the autumn hills, summer and country were always sensual living, while winter was always compulsory learning. Summer was the multiplicity of nature; winter was school.”
Henry Adams on growing up in and around Boston, in The Education of Henry Adams. Adams ( 1838-1918) was an American historian and a member of the Adams political family, which included his paternal grandfather, President John Quincy Adams, and great-grandfather, President (and a U.S. founding father) John Adams.
Adams’s book, published posthumously, won the 1919 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction and The Modern Library placed it first in a list of the top 100 English-language nonfiction books of the 20th Century.
As a boy he spent his summers in Quincy, just outside of Boston but large parts of which were still quite bucolic then.
Quincy Quarries Reservation, in West Quincy.
— Photo by Sswonk
National Grid seeks to convert many Massachusetts customers to geothermal heating
Geothermal drilling machine
Adapted from a New England Council (newenglandcouncil.com) report:
BOSTON
National Grid filed a plan aimed at converting many of Massachusetts’s natural gas customers to geothermal heating, reducing emissions in the process. The aim is to develop four separate shared geothermal networks to tap into the heat under the earth’s surface, without having to replace natural gas pipes.
The five-year demonstration project received initial approval from the administration of Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker in December. Now the state Department of Public Utilities will conduct a full review of National Grid’s implementation plan.
National Grid is hoping to select its first networked geothermal site by early 2023, pending regulatory approval. National Grid is looking to prioritize converting gas customers to geothermal in low-income communities, but no sites have been picked yet.
“National Grid is focused on tackling greenhouse gas emissions reductions across the buildingpheat sector and geothermal is an important component of that plan,” said Caroline Hon, National Grid’s chief operating officer for its New England gas operations.
‘Recalled as fragments’
“Total Immersion” (mixed media on sculpted board), by Norman Finn, in his show “Fragments of My Life and Thoughts Past and Present,’’ at Galatea Fine Art, Boston, June 3-26.
He tells the gallery:
"My body of work depicts, in many ways, the events and thoughts that reflect the areas of my life. The images appear and are recalled as fragments. Some of those fragments are developed as what I call ‘Modular Art’. They are pieces applied to the painting that gives it not only depth but a sense of movement and clarity. There is an attempt to put them in order and sequence for they are there vividly. They somehow tumble onto the canvas and I try to hold them on my brush strokes. There are too many in motion, an endless array of life's happenings rushing to the surface. Life is complicated and my work is a vision of that complexity in all its forms. My painting tries to convey that message, for they are only pieces of life's puzzle in a constantly changing vista."
His artist statement says:
“Norman Finn grew up in the domestic shoe industry and worked in Florence, Italy. He became corporate vice president for product development for U.S. Shoe in 1976 and helped take the company to $2.7 billion in revenue. This led to his developing and pioneering better footwear in Asia. In 1987, he started AmAsia International, developing major brands with his son and daughter-in-law. Norman lives in Chestnut Hill, Mass., with his wife. Their grandson, Taylor, is their pride and joy.’’
Holy Cross naming science complex after Fauci
Edited from a New England Council (newenglandcouncil.com) report:
“TheCollege of the Holy Cross, in Worcester, is renaming its Integrated Science Complex after its alumni, Dr. Anthony Fauci. Fauci graduated from Holy Cross in 1962 and has since gone on to help guide top federal officials through the coronavirus pandemic. Now, he is serving as chief medical adviser to President Biden.
“Fauci was one of the lead members of the White House Coronavirus Task Force under then- President Donald Trump in the early days of the pandemic. He has served as an adviser to every U.S. president since Ronald Reagan and has been director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984. The newly named Anthony S. Fauci Integrated Science Complex will officially be dedicated to the physician during his 60th Holy Cross class reunion weekend.
“We are thrilled to celebrate Dr. Fauci in such a public and enduring way,” said Holy Cross President Vincent Rougeau, in a written statement. “It’s fitting that Dr. Fauci’s name will adorn a complex designed to foster integrated learning across multiple academic disciplines – the kind of broad, collaborative and holistic thinking one needs to manage health crises such as HIV/AIDS, Ebola and Zika, or the current COVID-19 pandemic.”
Blue roof of New England
“Mt. Washington Spring’’ (painting), by Susan Wadsworth, at Southern Vermont Arts Center, in Manchester, May 28-July 17.
Drifting through her thoughts
“On the Saco,’’ (which flows from New Hampshire’s White Mountains to the Gulf of Maine), by Benjamin Champney (1817-1907)
“I drift along aloof,
lost in the currents
of thoughts, floating
through a timeless
memory in the making.’’
— From “Kayaking— Saco River,’’ by New Hampshire-based poet Julie A. Dickson
David Warsh: South Sea Bubble — Economists, historians and journalists -- who has the last word?
Hogarthian image of the South Sea Bubble from the mid-19th Century, by Edward Matthew Ward.
DURHAM, N.C.
I’m participating in a conference here on one of its favorite topics – the relationship between professional economics and the news business. A few durable themes stand out. One is the susceptibility of market systems to manias, panics, and crashes.
The most interesting draft paper presented here goes back to the beginnings of modern times to ask, what did London newspapers know, and when did they know it, about the disaster we know today as the South Sea Bubble.
In “British Lions Crouched to a Nest of Owls,” Carl Wennerlind, of Columbia University’s Barnard College, describes the episode as “one of the most iconic economic events in history.” In the summer of 1720, shares in the South Seas Company were offered to the public at £170. The stock’s price rose to £1,000, before falling to £200 by September, with ruinous effects on the hopes and dreams of families of London emerging upper middle class. A hundred other lesser public offerings had amplified the boom and turned it into a high fever.
What we remember is the outpouring of scorn and blame dished out after the fever broke – in printed ballads, poems, satirical plays, novels and pamphlets, including works by Jonathan Swift and Daniel Dafoe.
Usually overlooked is the expectation that puffed up the mania – Britain’s entry into new markets for slaves. Realistically speaking, the formation of the South Sea Company was motivated out of practical concerns with the expensive financing. But what remains is the memory of the Crash.
In 2001, historian Julian Hoppit published “The Myths of the South Sea Bubble.” He argued that the effects of the incident had been overblown in those famous accounts in its aftermath. Hoppit identified three commonplace views that showed types of misunderstandings to which the Bubble had been prey.
[F]irst, that investors came from far and wide, but blindly left behind all reason and prudence, skepticism and caution; second, that it produced considerable social mobility by enriching any and impoverishing more still; and, third, that its collapse led to widespread and profound economic dislocation.
Wetterlind himself is author of a well-received book in which the Bubble plays a part: Casualties of Credit: The English Financial Revolution 1620-1720 (Harvard, 2011). His curiosity reawakened, Wetterlind did something no one had done before. He read everything written in London newspapers about financial markets during that fateful year.
His conclusion: newspapers had been slow to share the growing exuberance, but quick to assign blame when it went awry, “Courageous and noble English people had fallen victim to the dark and sinister forces of stock-jobbers,” is how he rephrased the headline that gave him his title. The lead-up to the Bubble he found reported in January-April 1720; the Bubble itself began to inflate in May as the public learned that there would be more shares to be had, and reached its highest level by the end of June. It burst in Auges and continued to deflate throughout September. In October, the aftermath began.
The day-to-day newspaper time-line that Wetterlind produced seemed valuable to me, given the significance that has been assigned to the Bubble for centuries. But a second dividend came clear when I read over Hoppit’s account. The narrative timeline of inside information he assembled from archival sources, seemed top recede information available to newspaper readers by a month or two.
This Robert Harley, the Earl of Oxford, heard from his daughter by letter in March, “The town is write mad about the South Sea, some losers, many great gainers, one can hear nothing else talked of.” A month later, his son reported, “The madness of stock-jobbing is inconceivable. The wildness is beyond my thought” And a month later,” as newspapers began to recognize the Bubble’s beginning, .“The demon of stock-jobbing is the genius of this place. This fills all hearts, tongues, and thoughts. , and nothing is so like Bedlam as the present humour which has seized all parties: Whigs, Tories, Jacobites, Papists and all sects.”
Evidence, of more were needed, that newspapers often lag well behind the insiders in whatever story they are seeking to cover, but well ahead of those who lack newspapers to read. The, as now, journalists wrote the first draft of history. Economists then interpret the available data and fit their findings into pre-existing analytic frameworks
Bu historians, in this case economic historians as well as historians of economics, have the last word in assessing significance. The conference was a promising beginning to a long-range reconnaissance patrol.
David Warsh, a veteran columnist and an economic historian, is proprietor of Somerville, Mass.-based economicprincipals.com, where this essay first ran.
Chris Powell: Abortion deal possible but Democrats prefer acrimony
Soviet poster circa 1925, warning against midwives performing abortions. Title translation: "Miscarriages induced by either grandma or self-taught midwives not only maim the woman, they also often lead to death."
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Both political parties in Congress want to sustain the immigration controversy for partisan purposes more than they want a compromise that could resolve the controversy's two major components -- securing the borders while providing a path to citizenship for longtime illegal residents and their children, whose violation of immigration law was not their fault and who, as a practical matter, know no other home.
The other week in Congress it was the same way with abortion. A majority could have been cobbled together in the Senate in favor of legislation nationalizing a broad but limited right to abortion, but the Democratic caucus in the Senate sought to go way beyond its purported objective of codifying the Supreme Court's 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade. The Democratic majority in the House already had passed a bill extending abortion rights beyond those laid out by Roe.
Among other things, the Democratic bill, supported in the Senate by Connecticut abortion fanatics Richard Blumenthal and Chris Murphy and endorsed by Gov. Ned Lamont, would have left to a doctor's discretion an abortion after the viability of the fetus, forbidden any parental notification requirements for abortions for minors, and forbidden even a 24-hour waiting period between a woman's first medical consultation and her abortion. The bill would have nullified even the lesser restraints of Connecticut's own very permissive abortion law.
The Democratic objective is all abortion all the time and any time, immediately on the spot and right up to the moment of birth.
The bill failed to get a majority of votes in the Senate. Several senators who voted against it indicated that they would support a less expansive bill, but the Democrats were not interested in negotiating such a compromise, even though it would have left them free to keep pressing for a more permissive law and though polls long have suggested that a compromise would reflect national opinion. Few people support unrestricted abortion just as few support prohibiting it -- the extremes that dominate the two parties on the issue.
With their all-or-nothing approach, the Democrats wanted to sustain the acrimonious controversy, perhaps to distract from the roaring inflation, shortages, and social disintegration that are making the Biden administration so unpopular and threatening a Republican takeover of Congress in November's election.
Neither side can acknowledge that the abortion issue is full of fair concerns and complications of law and morality that don't lend themselves to the usual sloganeering and posturing.
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Much complaining in Connecticut politics and journalism has been done lately about the huge share of urban real estate that is exempt from municipal property taxes -- government property and property belonging to nonprofit schools and colleges, churches, social-service agencies, and so forth.
The most recent reminder came the other day from a report in The Hartford Courant, which noted that 51 percent of the value of real estate in the city is tax-exempt even as state government never gives the city all that is supposedly due under the state's payment-in-lieu-of-taxes program, or PILOT.
But the complainers fail to note, as The Courant failed to note, that quite apart from PILOT payments state government already reimburses Hartford and other cities about half their annual budgets.
Nor did the newspaper note that in 2018 under the administration of Gov. Dannel P. Malloy state government assumed Hartford's general-obligation bonded debt of more than $500 million -- a bailout of the city's decades of mismanagement. In effect state government also paid for the minor-league baseball stadium Hartford had just committed to build while on the brink of bankruptcy, and did build with serious delay and cost-overrun.
Connecticut's cities have been failing not because of any lack of money, since state government long has been throwing ever-increasing amounts at them. The cities have been failing because the ways the money is spent -- largely at state government's direction -- perpetuate poverty more than they eradicate it.
Perpetuating poverty, the spending also perpetuates political dependence. The cities never improve but that's OK, since they never stop providing huge Democratic pluralities.
Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester.
Llewellyn King: Censorship isn’t the solution to the ills spread by social media
Censorship came to British America when the governor of Plymouth, William Bradford, learned in 1629 that Thomas Morton, founder of the relaxed settlement of Merrymount (now part of Quincy), had '‘composed sundry rhymes and verses, some tending to lasciviousness.’’ The solution was to send a military expedition to arrest him (above) and stop the good times at Merrymount.
This society, founded in 1879 and dissolved in 1975, pushed to censor material it saw as immoral.
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
Technology is tampering with freedom of speech, and we don’t know what to do about it. At issue are the global platforms Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and the disturbing propaganda, disinformation and lies propagated on them.
The inclination, on the left and the right, is to censor. It is a terrible solution, more toxic and damaging to the body politic than the disease.
The left would like to shut down Fox Cable News and its principal commentator, Tucker Carlson. The right would like to have Twitter sold, presumably to Elon Musk, so that it stops blocking tweets from the right, notably those from former President Trump.
How our society and others deal with the downside of social media — racial incitement, disinformation, mendacity and opinions that are offensive to a minority, whether that is the disabled or an ethnic group — is a work in progress. The instinct is to shut them down, shut them up. The tool — that old monster solution — is censorship.
The first trouble with censorship is that it has to define what is to be eradicated. Take hate speech. The British Parliament is struggling with a bill to limit it. The social networks seek to exclude it, and there are U.S. laws against crimes inspired by it.
How do you define it, hate speech? When is it fair comment? When is it satire? When is it truth taken as hate?
I say if you can untie that knot, go ahead and censor. But I also know you can’t untie it without savaging free speech, doing violence to the First Amendment, arresting creativity and hobbling humor.
The censor is often as much clothed in moral raiment as in political garb. Take Thomas Bowdler and his sister, Henrietta, who in 1807 published an expurgated version of the works of Shakespeare. Henrietta did most of the work on the first 20 plays, later Thomas finished all 36. They expunged sex, blasphemy and double entendre. Thomas was an admired scholar, not a crackpot, although that might be today’s judgment.
Oddly, the Bowdlers are credited with increasing the readership of Shakespeare. People reached for the forbidden fruit; they always do.
Likewise, many a novel would have avoided success if it hadn’t been serially banned, like D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The moral censorship of movies by the Hays Office, starting in 1934, didn’t save the audiences from moral turpitude. It just led to bad movies.
The censors often begin with specific words; words, which it can be argued, represent offense to some group or some social standing. So specific words become demonized — whether it is the naming of a sports team or a colloquial word for sex, the urge to censor them is strong.
Jokes, like the English ones about the Welsh or the Scots ones about the English, became victim to a newly minted sensitivity, where political activists sell the idea that the joked about are victims. The only victim is levity, to my mind.
When you start down this slope there is no apparent end. Euphemisms take over from plain speech, and we live in a society in which the use of the wrong word can suggest that you are not fit for public office or to teach. Areas around ethnicity and sexual orientation are particularly fraught.
Until the 1960s and the civil rights movement, newspapers de facto censored people of color: They ignored them — a particularly egregious kind of censorship. At The Washington Daily News, where I once worked, a now defunct but lively evening newspaper in the nation’s capital, some of us once ransacked the library for photos of Blacks. There were none. From its founding in 1927 until the civil rights movement took off, the newspaper simply hadn’t published news of that community in a city that had a burgeoning African-American population.
That was collective censorship as pernicious as the kind that both political extremes would now like to impose on speech.
Alas, censorship — banning someone else’s speech — isn’t going to redress the issue of the rights of those maligned or lied to or excluded from social media. In print and traditional broadcasting, libel has been the last defense.
Libel laws are clearly inadequate and puny against the enormity of social media, but they are a place to begin. A new reality must, and will in time, get new mechanisms to contend with it.
One of those mechanisms shouldn’t be censorship. It is always the first tool of dictatorship but should be an anathema in democracies. For example, it is an open issue as to whether Russian President Vladimir Putin would have been able to invade Ukraine if he hadn’t first censored the Russian media.
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.
Know its futility
Collection, first published in 1891, that made Mrs. Freeman well known.
— Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman (1852-1930), New England native, in her story “The Amethyst Comb’’.