Summertime, and the living is easy?
— Photo by Robert Jack
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
I suspect that many year-round residents of, say, Newport and Cape Cod are already impatiently counting the days until the summer residents and vacationers leave, despite all the money they bring in (along with resort area gridlock).
Despite some brief thunderstorm-spawned downpours, much of New England is in a moderate drought. But there can be a good side to this: Fruits such as apples, grapes (ask wine makers) and peaches are a little smaller than usual but tastier in dry (but not too dry) summers.
Meanwhile, New Englanders should be thankful that its big sources of publicly owned fresh water, such as the Quabbin and Scituate reservoirs, are in no danger of drying up, unlike the water disaster Out West, which may well eventually lead to massive migration to wetter and cooler places.
And now the lilies are wilting along the roads. While global warming is extending our summers, if you’re over a certain age they still seem to go by a bit faster every year.
With New England’s hurricane season coming (mostly August and September), people in such low-lying places as Barrington and Warren, R.I. and the head of Buzzards Bay might want to consult a book I’ve mentioned here before that tells of how some of us will have to learn how to live not only along the water but over the water as seas continue to rise with global warming. The book, again, is More Water Less Land New Architecture: Sea Level Rise and the Future of Coastal Urbanism, by architect Weston Wright.
The beautiful Quabbin Reservoir, in central Massachusetts. Copious fresh water is more valuable than copious petroleum.
— Photo by Solarapex
Don Pesci: From a contrarian's journal
Andree, Don and Dublin
February 2022
It may be time for me to explain, if only to myself, what I think I have been about.
__________________
I woke up this morning thinking: Why should we not confess our joys as well as our sins?
Today, Feb. 6, 2022, is full of sunshine, following three or four days of gray skies. It snowed several days ago. This was followed by a light rain, followed by a freezing rain – very inconvenient. It is not the hammer blows of despair, but rather the water torture of inconvenience that, in the post-modern world, drive men to murder and mayhem.
The morning sun is burning brilliantly on what is left of the snow, Andree is snug in her bed – glad I was able to warm her, since I usually wake at about 7:30 and descend the stairs to write a column I suspect no one will print – and it seems just now, as Professor Pangloss often says in Voltaire’s Candide, “the best of all possible worlds.”
God is in his heaven and, while the world sleeps, politicians in Connecticut are plotting their campaigns. The snow and rain, unlike journalistic reports, fall indiscriminately on both the just and the unjust.
__________
Within the journalism “community”, everyone has become Candide, a victim of optimism crushed by a real-world pessimism and a kind of pretentious, wild-haired and goggle-eyed cynicism.
And hasn’t the “community” business has gone a bit too far? There is such a multiplicity of communities that it seems mankind can never gather joyfully under a common flag. We used to speak of families, of neighborhoods, of towns, of states, of nations. Now all the talk is of artificial, hastily assembled “communities.” Yesterday, someone mentioned the “academic community,” another the “felon community,” and I couldn’t help but wonder whether there is any important difference between the two.
___________
You wonder, my friend, why suddenly I have taken an interest in numbers.
Simple, “I am old, I am old; I wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled,’’ a T.S. Eliot wrote in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’’.
On July 15, 2021 the day following Bastille Day, I turned 78. After 65, numbers become inordinately important. You begin counting down the days and realize, with something of a shock, that all our days are numbered – and always have been -- whichever community we may belong to. There is no salvation in belonging to the academic community or the journalistic community, both swollen with what Jacques Maritain used to call “practical atheists,” people we might call cultural Christians and Jews, which is to say people who do not take either Christianity or Judaism seriously but wish merely to dress up in castoff robes so that, as Mathew 23:5 has it, they may be seen of men: “And they do all their deeds in order to be seen by men. For they broaden their phylacteries and enlarge their tassels,” a nearly perfect description of the twittering class.
Years ago someone inadvertently put the biblical injunction into a Louis Prima song -- “Just a Gigolo.”
I'm just a gigolo and everywhere I go
People know the part, I'm playin'
Paid for every dance, sellin' each romance
Ooh, what they're sayin'
There will come a day, and youth will pass away
What'll they say about me?
When the end comes, I know they'll say -- just a gigolo
And life goes on without me
Incumbent politicians of long standing in Connecticut and elsewhere, political gigolos, know how to twitterize and tasselate the crowds.
We have in Connecticut two prominent Catholics in the all-Democrat U.S. congressional delegation who, in respect of their church’s position on abortion, are heterodox. U.S Representatives John Larson and Rosa DeLauro are abortion enthusiasts, like U.S. Sen. Dick Blumenthal. Blumenthal’s present position on abortion – never under any circumstances should the practice be regulated – might have scandalized then President Bill Clinton in 1993, a pro-abortion visionary who said, "Our vision should be of an America where abortion is safe and legal but rare.”
Post-modern progressives, now in charge of the Democratic Party’s ship of state, like their abortion well-done – indeed, overdone. That is the chief problem with progressives: Whatever they do, they overdo. If progressives were a majority of chefs in restaurants in Connecticut, rare steaks would become a rarity. On the question of abortion alone, progressives are culturally libertarian. Otherwise, they are far left-of-center socialists or Gramsci Marxists.
____________
My nieces and nephews will have no personal memory of grandfather Carlo The Fox. He passed, as people who sidestep the word “died” say, before their time. He has no standing in their memories.
But I remember him coming and going to the homestead at 1 Suffield St., Windsor Locks, Conn. He used to stop by during his peregrinations every so often to touch base with my mother, the only person in the Mandrola family he could not frighten.
The Rose who stole my father's heart
One day he came by with a bunch of flowers and a handful of bills, both of which he shoved at Rose Pesci the indomitable. Giving dollars away – and so many dollars – struck her as out of character for “The Old Man,” an affectionate term within the family.
She was bewildered.
“What’s this?”
Carlo told her, in his somewhat broken English, that he was giving her money to purchase some flowers when he… umm … passed on. He did not want the funeral parlor to be bare of flowers. And, really, there was no one else to see to it but her.
She once told me, “Your grandfather had a green thumb. He could make roses grown from rocks, and not roses alone, but any green thing.” She said she would see to the flowers.
Carlo moved on towards Bianchi’s restaurant for another coffee-royal and, later in the day, a light lunch. One of his stops was the A&P on Main Street, where he usually bought a steak to be prepared for him in the afternoon by Armando Bianchi, the proprietor of the restaurant. The Windsor Locks Main Street was a casualty of a “redevelopment” scheme that began during the silly 1960s and ended with an antiseptic Main Street, new and useless after all the merchants had been displaced, their places of business lost to “redevelopment.”
The redevelopment plan, still in process in year 2022, was an idea that burned hotly in the indifferent brains of the “redevelopment community.” The idea was to sweep aside the entire Main Street and rebuild it anew from the ground up. It was not buildings but histories and memories that were plowed under, never again to see the light of day. When everything had been leveled, Windsor Locks looked somewhat like Sodom on the day following its God inspired destruction.
There were lots of flowers at Carlo’s wake.
Most of my boyhood past is gone now. I am visited from time to time by pale, ghostly memories stripped of flesh and blood.
The future, naturally, has become a Thermopylae pass, narrow, pinched, but still worth defending, even at the cost of one’s life and fortune: “Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, that here, obedient to their laws, we lie."
_____________
March 2022
The voice of a Blumenthal suppliant -- most reporters in the state -- shouts in my ear: “You numbskull, can’t you see? Our enlightened Senator Dick Blumenthal believes he need not listen to the people to know what is best for them, the dirge of the postmodern progressive afflatus.
Blumenthal, whose approval rating in the state has unaccountably plummeted for the first time in his long political career, is rich in money and purloined knowledge. Harvard, Yale and an auspicious marriage have blessed him with an abundance of riches. He claims to know what is best for the poor, without having gone through the trouble of living cheek by jowl with the poor unfortunates. It is much safer to view the apparent cultural anarchy of urban life in Connecticut from a Greenwich, Conn., safe house. There is little doubt that alms, furnished by Blumenthal and his sort from the public treasury, a down payment on future votes, are best for him.
For the politician who knows how to help voters help himself, the solutions to poverty are best when they are other directed and permanent rather than passing. That is the beginning and end of the moral acuity of postmodern progressives.
And if God does not exist, the central belief of practical atheists, well then Blumenthal is perfectly willing to step into the absent landlord’s empty shoes. The media has not painted a halo round the senator’s head for nothing. Half the troubles in the world arise from voters inattentive to Psalm 146:4:
Praise the LORD, O My Soul… Put not your trust in princes, in mortal man, who cannot save. When his spirit departs, he returns to the ground; on that very day his plans perish. Blessed is he whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the lord his God.
This Psalm, ascribed to King David or Solomon, first entered the rich Jewish literary canon during or after the Babylonian captivity and the subsequent liberation of God’s people. If this is cynicism, it is prophetic cynicism.
The cynic’s eye is the jeweler’s eye that sees without distortion the difference between good deeds and the pretense of good deeds. What the poor really lack is independence and self-sufficiency. The poorest man is not the one who is temporarily incapable of helping himself or his family, but the man permanently incapable of helping both himself and the stranger among us.
__________
Mark Twain, certainly more quotable that the average post-modern politician, said about New England weather, “If you don’t like it, wait a minute, it will change.”
This past April, the whole of New England was caught in a violent rain and wind storm -- sleepless nights, the rude, rough wind banging on our windows.
Dublin, Andree’s guide dog, slept through most of it and was triggered only twice. When Andree took him out in the early morning, gray and forlorn, the wind was still shaving dead branches off the trees. I battened down the tarp covering our wood pile, removed a few fallen branches, and headed off to Lance – great first name! – the eye doctor, who was pleased to note that the pressure in my right eye had been satisfactorily reduced from 33 to 11.
“Exactly where we want it,” he said. “We already have a blind wife in the family. We don’t need a blind husband.”
Could I discontinue the use of the eye drops he prescribed a couple of weeks ago?
“Well… no.”
“How long must I use them?”
“Pretty much forever.”
When I arrived home with the good/bad news, I saw two pileated woodpeckers doing what woodpeckers do, debarking a tree, both bathed in early morning sunlight, a red stripe marking the male’s bridge between beak and crimson crown. Pileateds, executioners of carpenter ants, fly to New England this time of year from Florida, where at least a half dozen of my neighbors, lashed by winds, wished they were just now.
A storm last year sheared off the top of a large oak tree fronting the street. There it stands now, a pillar of oak, a mere suggestion of a tree, its top open to the elements, a haven for carpenter ants. I thought to direct the pileateds to the meal but realized that, like state contractors, they were not always open to creative suggestions.
Our grandfather clock, with us for decades, has been cleaned and fixed. It was last cleaned by an old septuagenarian clockmaker several years ago. The current clockmaker is a young man, sprightly, full of opinions he is happy to share at the drop of a hat, and just a wee bit off kilter, both Andree and I agree, a compliment rather than a criticism. Tedious people are on-kilter most of their lives. And when they come to die, they discover they had only begun to live three minutes before passing on.
The current clockmaker will not feel his life had been wasted when the devils or angels come to drag him up or down. I have no idea which way he is headed.
He seems religious – not, thank God, “spiritual” -- as some people are these days.
The “practical atheists” scorned by Jacques Maritain are spiritual wastelands. St. Francis of Assisi, who appeared naked before his bishop after he had surrendered to Christ and given up unprofitable ways, along with his substantial fortune, was religious rather than spiritual.
One cannot imagine Senator Blumenthal waving farewell to his vast stores of wealth in this way, though he seems to have had little difficulty over the years as state attorney general persuading the moral mob to despoil his neighbors.
“I have become a socialist,” Perrot cries out in Edna St. Vincent Millay’s play, Aria DeCapo. “I love mankind – but I HATE! people.”
Our clockmaker does not hate people. He is amused by them, always a sign of mental stability. The comic playwright Aristophanes, writing during the Peloponnesian War, was possibly the sanest man in all of Greece. Agents of a powerful puffball he had been lampooning in his plays, Creon, stopped him on the street and asked imperiously, “Don’t you take anything seriously?” to which he replied, “Yes, I take comedy seriously.”
I tell him the story of Jonathan Swift’s missionary in Africa whose flock thought that his watch was his God, because he consulted it so often.
The clockmaker is young – but then, everyone under 65 seems young to me – and convivial. “You’re welcome to stay here and talk to me while I clean the clock,” he said. “I like talk. It passes the time.”
Dublin, holed up in the bedroom, was barking but stopped after a while.
Andrée explained that Dublin was a Fidelco guide dog. He came into our household after her previous guide dog, the mighty Titan, died, leaving her bereft and in tears for days.
Before her first guide dog, Jake, came to us, almost on Christmas Day more than 20 years ago, she had little commerce with any domestic animals, owing to her mother’s fear that dogs and cats might sully a clean and spotless house. Her mother, Margaret Descheneaux, was all of her life pure of heart, mind and hand.
Jake was Andrée’s first encounter with nature in the rough, though he was, of course, highly trained. He was a large dog, nearly 90 pounds, regal, indifferent to me – which we both appreciated – and fiercely loyal to Andrée. He lived to be about 14, all of his years a blessing to Andrée, who is, if such a thing can be imagined, as fiercely loyal to friends and family as Jake was to her. Naturally, a stickler on such things as “thank you” notes, she expects her affections to be unselfishly recompensed.
The two, a woman and her dog, also had in common a joy of life, a healthy intolerance of profound stupidity – in the age of Google, no one any longer can lay claim to innocent ignorance – and a brilliant intellect, as well as a fully functioning, inerrant intuition. Dogs are intuitive, anticipatory animals, and Andrée is now convinced that German Shepherds are the lion-kings of dogs.
Titan is in black, Jake dusted with gray at 13.
Mark Twain, incidentally, felt the same way about dogs: “The more I learn about people, the more I like my dog.”
One wonders, did Homer have a dog? Did Dante or Milton? What of Shakespeare? Google is silent on the necessary connection between dogs and poetry, so we may assume a connection, an assumption that takes no great leap of the imagination. The mistreatment of a horse brought Nietzsche to tears. T.S. Eliot’s connection with cats is well known. Surely, some bubble-enclosed, monkish academic has researched the question, yet academia remains unaccountably silent.
Jake died more than 14 years ago, noble and valiant to the end.
When we arrived home 3:00 in the morning from a trip to Arizona, we found posted on the door a note that said, “Go to the vets immediately,” this written by friends with whom we had left Jake.
The vet led us to a metal table cushioned with a towel where Jake was stretched out breathing softly. He had been there for a dozen hours – waiting, I believe, for the touch of Andree’s hand. She leaned over him, breathed into his ear a message I could not hear, and then he left us.
Titan came to us two years before Jake died, his body a shining ebony unmarred by a single spike of grey hair when he died at 14.
Bill Buckley asked me once, “Do you suppose there are dogs in Heaven?” My answer, stupidly sophistic – maybe doggyness exists in Heaven – failed to satisfy him, because he was hoping that he might encounter on the other side of the pearly gates the dog he loved when he was a boy.
Why must love and beauty die? Do they die? Is not beauty the face of God that even Moses was not privileged to see?
“You cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live."
_____________
U.S. Senator from Connecticut Dick Blumenthal gave up thinking for himself about midway through his 20 year stretch as attorney general. He found it more convenient to let others, the 200-plus lawyers in the attorney general’s office, think and do for him. Naturally, he was always available to take credit for the wins and write off the losses, few in number, as a predictable consequence of righteous action.
The front line troops in the office all were eager to do the bidding of their boss. Perhaps they too in the future might become attorney general, at which point they too might luxuriate in the soft media glow produced by eager-to-please journalists. So all-surrounding is media adulation of Blumenthal, that he cast no shadow.
The trick in both politics and business is to get others to do your work for you, on condition that the worker retires into the woodwork and allow you to reap the glory. Months and years of this sort of thing blunts the brain and makes Jack a dull boy.
Blumenthal looks like a Harvard/Yale graduated pedant, and an unruffled multimillionaire, both of which he is. Some are born pedants, some achieve pedantry, and others have pedantry thrust upon them. This persona is one Blumenthal has chosen for himself.
Blumenthal never has had an ardent and effective political opponent. His more promising Republican Party opponents have been driven from the field by money or a media adoration approaching worship.
Blumenthal drifted into the U.S. Senate, as did Senator and stated Attorney General Joe Lieberman before him. The path to glory from the Connecticut attorney general’s office to the U.S Senate is a well-worn one. This red carpet has deep grooves in it.
If some political-psychologist were to lay Blumenthal on his couch and do a deep dive into his political persona, he would uncover a frightening vacuity, all polished surfaces but no depth -- pedantry perfected.
Less accomplished political pedants, President Joe Biden comes to mind, might well be jealous. Biden is such an unoriginal thinker that he must borrow from others to rise to the level of pedantry. He has been caught plagiarizing a few times by journalists in forgiving moods who now find his inattention to detail amusing or endearing.
Plagiarism and pedantry go hand in hand.
To give but one example: Blumenthal’s position on abortion, unoriginal and self-contradictory, has been lifted from Planned Parenthood, which is why I have referred to him several times as “the Senator from Planned Parenthood.”
His position on abortion is the same as that of any chief executive officer of a large, profitable enterprise -- no impediment should get in the way of the business we support.
With regard to their own big businesses, CEOs are libertarians, shouting from the rooftops their adulation of freedom and liberty. In respect to their competitors, they are executioners very much in need of bought politicians who, their hands having been greased with campaign donations, may assist them in reordering the free market to their advantage, for the most closely guarded secret among clever big business “free marketers” is that politicians may be called upon to help them crush their creative and inventive competitors.
I sometimes think of Hilaire Belloc’s “Advice to the Rich” in connection with Blumenthal: “Get to know something about the internal combustion engine, and remember – soon you will die.” Blumenthal, one may be certain, knows far less about the internal combustion engine than his chauffeur. As to the free market – are we not all Keynesians now?
Blumenthal’s cadaverous aspect – Is he a biker? -- fairly screams, “I will live forever!”
A Democratic Party political hack, he and Biden are pretty much on the same page politically concerning the necessity to end fossil fuel as an energy source, as soon as inconveniently possible. As attorney general of Connecticut for two decades, Blumenthal was accomplished in shutting down small businesses, easy political targets, and extorting campaign funding from large businesses. His long tenure in Connecticut politics suggests that the prospect of death and a final reckoning still lies, God willing, very far in the future.
_____________
July 2022
How is it possible that the establishment media in Connecticut so infrequently reports the obvious? During his basement campaign for the presidency, Biden, one eye cocked on pseudo-anarchists such as Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and her “Squad”, pledged to do away with fossil fuel. He abandoned a nearly completed pipeline and reduced the possibility of supply -- a surety of his pledge. It worked. In no time at all, gas at the pump being in short supply, the price of gas rose from a low during the Trump regime of $2.96 in May 2018 to its present level, a brain rattling $4.84 per gallon. In concert with high energy prices, increased costs in the price of goods and services, owing largely to exorbitant spending, a historic rise in inflation, rhetorical buffoonery some ascribe to mental deterioration, and a pending recession, Biden’s approval rating has dropped to 38 percent, and “an early June poll from Ipsos/ABC News found that only 28 percent of Americans approved of Biden’s handling of inflation; along with his handling of gas prices (27 percent approved), inflation ranked lowest of any of the issues the poll asked about.”
See Biden, Lamont, Connecticut Democrats – Meet Gresham’s Law.
_______________________
We are off today to visit my cousin Bill Mandrola, at his son’s house in Suffield, Conn. Anthony and Amy Mandrola have moved from Los Angeles. Bill and all the first-family Mandrolas – two daughters of Carlo the Fox and four sons -- lived for many years in the homestead on Center Street, Windsor Locks, before he and his wife migrated to Arizona, after he had retired from a prominent Hartford insurance company.
My brother Jim, who worked for many years at Travelers Insurance Co. – bumped, as was my father, after the company had been mismanaged for years by an inept CEO – moved to Columbia, S.C., his son, David, following in his father’s footsteps a few years later. David and his wife, Corin, moved to North Carolina.
These moves I regard as the Great Unmooring. Somewhat like a shipwrecked Ishmael, I , not quite alone, am left in Connecticut “to tell the tale.”
And what a tale it is, part of it told by Bill in a personal memoir, Dampadog, Johnny Mandrola, Storyteller. My uncle John, Bill’s father, is the storyteller of the memoir.
The Mandrolas are suburb storytellers. Family stories are, in part, factual accounts graced with what Mark Twain used to call “stretchers.” The purpose of a stretcher, not in the least a distorting conscious lie, is to emphasize the truth of an event. One cannot trust memory to preserve the integrity of important, life shaping events. The memory is refined – corrected, amended -- always in the telling. And, of course, in the case of Italian families, some things are better left unsaid. But over the supper table, nothing is left unsaid.
My mother rarely left anything unsaid. If you asked her for the truth or not, you would get it.
Bill, an inveterate traveler, wears his age well. The kitchen table at Anthony and Amy’s house was well laid with antipasto – some hard cheese, Soppressata, shaved Genoa, crackers that crunched in your mouth, wine – always wine – and company. What begins in the kitchen never stays in the kitchen of an Italian household, and this includes stories told and retold, until they are as smooth in the telling of them as stones in a brook, polished and glowing beneath the flowing water.
Stories were told about the two first families, the Mandrolas and the Pescis, the Windsor Locks Canal, a swimming hole with a dangerous undertow before my father Frank, the town’s first park commissioner, put a pool in Pesci Park, visited by all on sun-drenched summer days, the nuns of Saint Mary’s parochial school, now a refurbished apartment building, Carlo’s, as it seemed to us, irrational fear of nuns, Marconi’s soda shop on Main Street, friendly idiots, unfriendly antagonists.
My sister: The Pertusi brothers, John and Anthony, came to visit us on Christmas, and other times as well. John Pertusi cornered Carlo on the Pesci porch and began, in his usual manner, to philosophize and gush over nature. Flowers were beautiful, the skies of New England, God’s blue fingerprint, were especially beautiful… and so on and so on. Carlo listened to him patiently, smiling his usual inscrutable smile, until John struck a nerve with a question. What do you think happens to us after we die?
Carlo: The worms get you.
Anthony, Bill’s son: I like the way you talk about Nellie, his grandmother.
Me: When I was small, very small, I told my mother one day that I was dissatisfied with her treatment of me. I wanted to go and live with Nellie and John on Center Street. She never hesitated a moment. Okay. She packed a small cardboard suitcase, and I was away down the stairs, where I met Carlo, returning home from Bianchi’s restaurant.
Carlo’s habits were almost mechanical, like the works of a grandfather clock, and unvarying. He was, I thought, on his way home from Bianchi’s.
Someone else: Every day, he’d go to the A&P on Main Street, buy a slab of meat, hang out at Bianchi’s with his friends, drinking and playing cards, eat a light lunch, then return up Suffield Street on his way back home to Center Street.
Me: He found me on the sidewalk and asked in his broken English, studying my suitcase, “Where you go?”
I told him I was going to live with Nellie and John. So, he took my hand and led me to my preferred home. Nellie loved me. She had taken care of me when I was a small baby. The Mandrola homestead was for me Eden without the serpent, a paradise of roses and cherry trees, and Nellie’s meals, cooked always the way I liked them. But at that age I used to walk in my sleep. And thinking I was on my way to the bathroom, I fell down the stairs. I woke the whole house with my wailing, but I was unhurt. Nellie put me back to bed. At the touch of her hand, I fell asleep. Of course, everyone understood that nothing of this was to be mentioned to my mother. However, I suspected that she knew every detail. She and Nellie were fast friends, and there could be no secrets between friends. When I returned home, my subdued mother was, I liked to imagine, properly chastened.
Bill’s Ponzi story: “He was a bit,” hesitatingly, “fussy.”
Fussy? Ponzi was a hypochondriac.
Ponzi and Dampadog made friends with a woman, widowed, who owned a house on a fish-filled pond near Stony Brook. They wanted to use her boat to catch bullheads, the pond’s bottom feeders. Ponzi was in the front of the boat, my father in the back. And Ponzi was catching fish after fish, my father nothing – very distressing. So when Ponzi passed the line to my father to bait his hook, he clipped the line, leaving only the sinkers to tempt the bullheads. But they were not biting sinkers that day. And my father began to catch all the fish, Ponzi nothing. After the catch had evened, my father said, “I think the pond has been overfished. Let’s go.” But the wondrous thing about all my father’s stories were – they had no endings. The narrative was just left there for you, tempting, dangling, unfinished….
Like those succulent apples – “experts” now have told us they may have been pomegranates – in the Garden of Eden. God, when all is said and done, is the author of final things. We poor mortals can only aspire to be honest recorders of the beginning and middle of things.
Don Pesci is a Vernon, Conn.-based columnist.
Repurposing religious symbols
“Good Intentions’’ (mixed media), by Boston area artist Steve Sangapore, at Fountain Street Fine Art, Boston
He writes:
“While I typically work in oils, I have recently begun creating sculptures as a means to further investigate intellectual concepts that interest me. One theme that has gripped me for the past several years is appropriating, re-purposing and recontextualizing universally recognized religious symbols and imagery. In doing so, I am able to begin a dialogue using symbols which already have emotional, intellectual and spiritual significance with viewers and ask them to view the symbols and icons from different perspectives and in new contexts.
'‘When the Christian cross is viewed in its typical upright position, viewers both secular and faithful might instantly ascribe to it key Christian (and generally religious) concepts such as faithfulness, righteousness, sacrifice, primacy of the individual and, of course, God. But the Christian cross is a unique symbol in that it is one of very few supremely well-known and iconic symbols that, when inverted, has an equally strong oppositional meaning.
"‘Intentions’ was an elegant way of illustrating this moral dichotomy within the narrative of having one's seemingly righteous intentions ultimately having bad or even evil outcomes. We have seen this story played out time and again throughout history, and it remains relevant today. Too often we witness destructive and divisive results from actions and ideas masked in rosy buzzwords and catchy slogans. This sculpture prods us to reassess precisely what we believe and what we are aiming at in order to ensure that our words and actions are truly having the results we desire. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.’’
Cross-generational music from the Outer Cape
Hot summer? Check. Cool tunes? Check.
The Chill & Dream radio show returns to the airwaves on Friday, July 22, at 7-9 p.m., heard exclusively on WOMR (92.1 FM Provincetown, Mass.) and WFMR (91.3 FM Orleans, Mass.) and streaming everywhere on womr.org.
"I just saw the CEO {Chris Cocks} of Hasbro on CNBC the other day," DJ "Braintree Jim," the show's host, said. "And he was talking about this very basic idea that struck a chord with me. The company is having success with what he called 'multi-generational' play and entertainment. If you look at the games, the cars and even the music that is resonating with people today, it is rooted in nostalgia."
He senses that the CEO must have been listening to one of his shows. "The music I play also has this cross-generational appeal to it. Some of the older music is new to Millennials and Gen-Z. Conversely, some of the newer music is old to these very generations. It's fun to see that first light of discovery in music for people. A song may be an oldie but it might be new to someone just hearing it for the first time."
"I find it amusing that not long ago, kids would use their generation's music to rebel against their parents," he muses. "Now, it seems like kids are rebelling against their parents but using their parents' music. We've come full circle. That's the universal appeal with music. And the great thing about WOMR is that there is music for virtually every kind of taste. Whether you are rebelling or not."
WOMR is launching its summer pledge drive beginning July 22 and running for two weeks. It celebrated being on the air for 40 years this past spring. The majority of its operating budget comes from individual listeners and small businesses.
"We'll certainly be in a celebratory mood Friday," Braintree Jim said. "This is a sonic sanctuary. All are welcome. This is radio of the people, by the people, and for the people. And my show is multi-generational."
Mitchell Zimmerman: Don’t let America became a kind of corrupt theocracy
“The Puritan” (1887), a statue in Springfield, Mass., by Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848-1907), one of America’s greatest sculptors. The term theocracy has been applied to the colonial governments established in the Massachusetts Bay and New Haven colonies in the early 17th Century. However, they were not theocracies in the traditional sense: There was a clear separation of church and state. Both colonies maintained separate systems of political and religious leadership; clergy did not hold government offices. Still, it was expected that families, the church and the magistracy—would act together to maintain a society based on Calvinist theology and religious practice.
That faded by the early 18th Century.
From OtherWords.org
Barely a month ago we lived in a world where all Americans had the right to decide for themselves whether to continue a pregnancy. For much of the country, that’s now history.
Just weeks ago, states could implement at least some common-sense limits on carrying guns. Public school employees couldn’t impose their religious practices on students. And the EPA could hold back our climate disaster by regulating planet-heating carbon emissions from coal plants.
Thanks to an appalling power grab by the Supreme Court’s conservatives, all that’s been demolished too. And they’ve hinted that the right to take contraception, marry someone regardless of your sexual orientation, and even to choose your own elected representatives could be next.
How did we get to this place? Because Republicans spent decades cheating their way to a right-wing Supreme Court majority that enacts an extremist agenda, rather than interpreting the law.
When the very close presidential election in 2000 turned on Florida, five GOP justices halted the vote count, stealing the election for the man most voters rejected, George W. Bush. In return, Bush appointed right-wing judges John Roberts and Samuel Alito.
In 2016, the Republican Senate defied the Constitution by refusing to let President Obama fill a Supreme Court vacancy. Instead, they let another voter-rejected president, Donald Trump, install right-winger Neil Gorsuch. Finally, even as voting was underway in the 2020 election, Republicans rush-approved Amy Coney Barrett’s appointment.
So we now have a hard-right Supreme Court drunk on its own power.
We need a fair balance — and we don’t have decades to set things right. We need to expand the Supreme Court to 13 justices right now, so we have judges who believe in privacy, who allow our government to protect our children from gun massacres, and who allow common sense steps to protect our future from climate change.
Republican politicians will say that changing the number of justices represents “politicizing” the Court. But it is the Republican-appointed justices who have entered politics, unleashing gun lovers to run wild, vetoing climate change regulations, canceling abortion rights, and threatening other personal freedoms.
The danger from the Republican judges is only growing.
Their latest project is destroying the power of regulatory agencies. We will be left with a government that cannot protect babies from dangerous cribs and hazardous toys, cannot prohibit unsafe drugs and contaminated food, cannot protect workers from dangerous workplaces, and cannot limit climate-ravaging carbon emissions.
If we allow this to continue, our political system will look a good deal more like Iran’s theocracy. Like the United States, Iran has elections. But reactionary, fundamentalist religious leaders there set election rules, decide who can run, and often override the decisions of the elected government.
The Supreme Court’s six conservative justices seem dead-set on playing this role here in our system. So the best way to curtail the power of our own black-robed fundamentalists is to increase the size of the Supreme Court.
Under the Constitution, it is for Congress to decide how many justices there will be. Over the years Congress has changed the number six times. It’s time to change them again.
For much of American history, there’s been one justice for each judicial circuit. Today we have 13 circuits, so we should have 13 justices. We cannot simply accept the unfairness of the Republican judicial takeover. We can and must act to restore balance to protect our rights, our lives, and our planet.
Mitchell Zimmerman is a lawyer, social activist and novelist.
Hey, that was then!
In the 19th Century, the Old Corner Bookstore, in downtown Boston, became a gathering place for writers, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Margaret Fuller. Here James Russell Lowell edited the first editions of The Atlantic Monthly.
“Boston - wrinkled, spindly-legged, depleted of nearly all her spiritual and cutaneous oils, provincial, self-esteeming - has gone on spending and spending her inflated bills of pure reputation, decade after decade.”
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“Harvard (across the river in Cambridge) and Boston are two ends of one mustache. ... Without the faculty, the visitors, the events that Harvard brings to the life here, Boston would be intolerable to anyone except genealogists, antique dealers, and those who find repletion in a closed local society.’’
— Elizabeth Hardwick (1916-2007), American literary critic and novelist
Gay Pride parade in Boston
Cynthia Drummond: These clingers might send you to the ER
Clinging jellyfish
From ecoRI News (ecori.org)
CHARLESTOWN, R.I. — Recent warnings about the presence of clinging jellyfish in some coastal ponds have caused a stir, because the tiny organisms sting, and they are difficult to spot.
People who use the ponds should be aware of the possibility they might encounter clinging jellyfish, or gonionemus vertens.
Katie Rodrigue, principal marine biologist with the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management’s Division of Marine Fisheries, has been monitoring clinging jellyfish, because while their sting is an unpleasant nuisance for most people, others may experience serious allergic reactions.
“The reason it’s a cause for concern is because, for some individuals, it can cause a severe sting,” she said. “In 2019, I believe it was, we had a couple of people end up in South County Hospital after being stung, because they had a pretty severe reaction to it.”
Clinging jellyfish have two life stages — a polyp and a medusa, which is produced by the polyp. The polyps, which are only about half a millimeter in size, are found in Rhode Island throughout the year and produce medusae in mid- to late summer. A single polyp will produce multiple medusae, and it is during this medusa stage that the organisms develop tentacles, and become jellyfish that sting.
“There’s two life stages of it, and the medusa stage is what we would recognize as the jellyfish — the bell with the tentacles,” Rodrigue said.
The clinging jellyfish is an invasive species that was first recorded on Cape Cod and in Groton, Conn., in the late 1800s. That population, which originated in the Eastern Pacific, declined as eelgrass beds died.
In the 1990s, clinging jellyfish began to make a comeback and are associated with a North Pacific species that produces more toxic stings.
How did this species get all the way to New England? Rodrigue said it could have made the trip as a polyp.
“Because that polyp stage can latch onto hard surfaces, it could have latched onto a ship’s hull,” she said. “I think one theory I read about was bringing oysters in. That could have brought in some of those polyps.”
What distinguishes clinging jellyfish is a reddish-brown “x” mark on the bell, but that marking doesn’t mean they are easy to detect.
“They’re really tough to see, especially during the day, and they get their name ‘clinging jellyfish’ because they like to hold on to eelgrass and other submerged vegetation,” Rodrigue said. “They sort of hide during the day and hang on, but if they get disturbed, say, if somebody’s walking through an eelgrass bed or something, they would release off of it and swim into the water column, and that’s when somebody would be able to encounter them.”
Clinging jellyfish have sticky tentacles, armed with cells with barbed structures called nematocysts, which contain venom.
“Those tentacles can kind of stick to your skin, and those nematocysts will fire,” Rodrigue said. “It’s almost like a tiny needle that penetrates the skin and it releases that venom into your skin, and that’s what causes the stinging sensation, and the tentacles have tons of nematocysts on them. Many jellyfish have this, and anemones, and other animals like that.”
Clinging jellyfish are active at night, hunting zooplankton.
“At night is when they’ll release themselves off of the eelgrass and then they’re in the water column, feeding on zooplankton,” Rodrigue said. “And so, they’ll be a little bit more mobile at night.”
So far this summer, clinging jellyfish have been recorded in Potter Pond in South Kingstown and parts of Ninigret Pond. In previous years, they have been documented in Point Judith Pond and the Narrow River. It’s important to keep in mind, however, that they could be living in other waterbodies and just haven’t been spotted yet.
Clinging jellyfish are not the only species that people should be watching for. Salt Ponds Coalition president Arthur Ganz, a retired marine biologist, said he had not been notified of any encounters with clinging jellyfish this summer and described the stinging sea nettle jellyfish as being far more numerous.
“Sea nettles are very abundant in the ponds, more so, I’m going to say, over the last 20 years,” Ganz said. “Their numbers have very much increased. We’d see them occasionally in the real hot summer, but now, they’re everywhere. I was out on my boat and I just looked down at my mooring and there was probably 20 within a square meter. So, they are the ones that are the biggest nuisance.”
More benign, non-stinging jellyfish species such as comb and moon jellies also inhabit the Ocean State’s coastal ponds.
“They don’t have obvious tentacles and they don’t bother people,” Ganz said. “It’s essentially the sea nettles that are the biggest problem.”
On the ocean side, beachgoers should steer clear of the cyanea, or lion’s mane jellyfish, which can grow to be very large and is armed with long, stinging tentacles.
“They’ll give you a nasty sting, and what happens with the cyanea is, on the ocean side, they’ll break up in the surf, so the tentacles are floating free, so even though you don’t have one right there in your vision, you could get nailed by the broken-up tentacles,” Rodrigue said.
She suggests people who plan to spend time in the calmer areas of the salt ponds, especially near eelgrass beds, wear protective clothing.
“If you’re going to be in one of these coastal-pond environments, an area that’s very calm and protected and has a lot of submerged vegetation, I suggest just covering up,” she said. “If there’s a barrier between the jellyfish and your skin, that’s going to be the best bet to avoid getting stung; waders, wet suit, even leggings will all help with that.”
People who are stung should apply plain, white vinegar to the affected area.
“What that’ll do is at least prevent any more stinging cells from firing,” Rodrigue said, adding that the old remedy of pouring urine on a sting is definitely not recommended.
“Do not do that,” she said. “If anything, that can actually make it worse. That, or using fresh water. A lot of people, because of the irritation, they might want to dump some cool, fresh water on it, but that’ll actually cause more stinging cells to fire on your skin.”
DEM asks people who encounter clinging jellyfish to contact the agency at 401-423-1923 or by email at DEM.MarineFisheries@dem.ri.gov. Reports can also be posted on Facebook or Instagram.
Cynthia Drummond is an ecoRI News contributor.
Provincetown patroness of art
“Mary Heaton Vorse” (maquette, mixed media), by Penelope Jencks, in the show “Mary’s Friends: An Artists Renunion,’’ at Berta Walker Gallery, Provincetown, Mass., through Aug. 7
The gallery explains:
“Mary Heaton Vorse (1874-1966) was a journalist, labor organizer, war correspondent and arts patron, co-founding the Provincetown Players, and donating her old fishermen’s tackle house on Cape Cod Bay in 1915 as a home for their plays. Penelope Jencks is an internationally renowned sculptor, commissioned over the years to create numerous portraits, including those of Eleanor Roosevelt, Serge Koussevitsky, Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copeland, and Seiji Ozawa.
“In her book Time and the Town Mary Heaton Vorse writes about the fascinating and very different schools of art in Provincetown in the early 20th Century — Traditionalists and Modernists She notes: ‘The profound gulf between the two schools in Provincetown is so deep that the respective members fight freely together, pound tables, and even heads...The old school shouts the loudest, but the new school flies its nose highest.”
And well worth staring at
Acworth (N.H.) Congregational Church
— Photo by John Phelan
Acworth Post Office in 1907
“Tables of books line the walk by the library.
He remembers their wedding day.
Children play next to the clapboard school.
The old man stares at the steeple.’’
— From “Old Home Week in Acworth, 2008,’’ by Betsy Snider, a New Hampshire-based poet and retired lawyer.
Old Home Week or Old Home Day originated in New England and is rather similar to a harvest holiday or festival. In its beginning, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it involved a municipal effort to invite former residents of a village, town or city—usually individuals who grew up in the municipality and moved elsewhere in adulthood—to visit the "Old Home", the parental household and hometown. Some municipalities celebrate the holiday annually, while others celebrate it every few years.
Mass. Blue Cross to help health-care startups of people of color
From The New England Council (newenglandcouncil.com)
“New England Council member, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, recently announced their Health Equity Business Accelerator program. This program provides financial support and mentors to founders of color who are focused on creating equitable health care.
“Startups in the accelerator receive a $150,000 investment and participate in nine months of programming from Blue Cross, The Capital Network and Healthbox. This program serves to support founders who are people of color, who have historically been excluded from funding and networking opportunities. For example, in 2021 only 0.4 percent of venture capital in Massachusetts went to Black-founded startups. This accelerator is looking to increase this number through recruiting cohorts. The first round included five companies, Bloomer Tech, MedHaul, Quality Interactions, SoHookd and TQIntelligence, respectively. The second round is looking to increase this number accepting up to seven companies from around the U.S.
“‘Each company was assigned an executive mentor who gave them access to demystifying how health plans make decisions and gave them access to our supplier diversity program leads, our marketing and sales leaders and our other business leaders,’ said Courton Brown, the vice president for business development at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts.
“The New England Council would like to commend Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts for their work to increase equity in health care.
“Read more from the Boston Business Journal.’’
Finding quiet peace in the pandemic
“Move and Flow” (oil and graphite on panel), by Rose Umerlik, in her show “Repose,’’ at Atelier Newport, July 30-Aug. 31.
The gallery says:
“Rose Umerlik is an internationally recognized artist, who maintains a full-time studio practice in Vermont. Her work has always been based on strong ideals she has long held, such as the importance of being able to self-evaluate in a spirit of honesty and having a strong work ethic that helps her be fully present to life. These core values are always reflected in her work.
“During the worldwide pandemic, Rose spent much of the early months of lockdown with her family in quiet peace on their mountainside homestead, raising their firstborn into a world in disrepair. And while in isolation, Rose and her husband only had one task to fulfill: Revel and marinate in their love for their daughter as they watch her grow. Happiness and repose entered the home and established roots there. Their daughter is now almost two years old.
“One of the most trying times in history prevailed yet, through it all, as a new mother with her cherished blossoming family, Rose was able to find an unwavering peace and calm repose.”
And in our next Civil War?
St. Albans , Vt., bank tellers being forced to pledge allegiance to the Confederacy on Oct. 19, 1864.
The St. Albans Raid, the northernmost land action of the American Civil War, was a raid from Canada by 21 Confederate soldiers. Their mission was to rob banks to raise money, and to trick the Union Army into diverting troops to defend their northern border against further raids. They got the money, killed a local and escaped back to Canada.
It’s not all about us
Bread Loaf Mountain, in Ripton, Vt. Middlebury College’s Broad Loaf School of English is named for the mountain.
— Photo by Aiken1986
“Human beings—any one of us, and our species as a whole—are not all-important, not at the center of the world. That is the one essential piece of information, the one great secret, offered by any encounter with the woods or the mountains or the ocean or any wilderness or chunk of nature or patch of night sky.”
— Bill McKibben (born 1960), in his book The Age of Missing Information, is an environmentalist and writer and a scholar at Middlebury (Vt.) College, where he also directs the Middlebury Fellowships in Environmental Journalism.
He lives in Ripton, Vt., where Robert Frost (1874-1963) lived during summers and falls in 1939-1963.
Robert Frost’s writing cabin in Ripton.
— Photo by Aiken1986
Chris Powell: New Haven’s silly attempt at foreign policy; hysteria about alleged ‘white-supremacist’ threat
New Haven’s very unusual City Hall, designed by Henry Austin in a Victorian Gothic style, was built in 1861.
— Photo by Sage Ross
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Recently New Haven's big news has included the usual shootings, the continued inability of the city's students to read at anything close to grade level despite their school system's ever-increasing budgets, controversy over the selection of a new police chief, and, of course, the paralyzing injury suffered by a man in police custody because the city never got around to installing seat belts in a van used to convey prisoners. (Elsewhere in the United States seat belts have been standard equipment in motor vehicles for more than 50 years.)
But last week New Haven's Board of Alders -- what less pretentious jurisdictions would call the city council -- took another break from hard local reality. The board accepted the recommendation of the city's Peace Commission and approved a resolution urging President Biden to end the U.S. economic embargo of Cuba.
There were no signs that the State Department, the United Nations and the Cuban government were hanging on the resolution's fate. There were signs that city residents were concerned about the shootings, education failure and the police department.
The objective of New Haven's Peace Commission is -- really -- to protect the city against nuclear war. In that respect maybe the commission can claim to be doing a great job.
Peace on the city's own streets has been much more difficult to achieve, and despite the political correctness and self-righteousness that characterize the city's intelligentsia, even a few city residents might be wondering why these days anyone in city government has time to worry about Cuba.
The P.C. distractions in New Haven city government go well beyond Cuba. Two years ago the city established a Climate Emergency Mobilization Task Force. The emergency was so urgent that the task force wasn't appointed for more than a year after the Board of Alders authorized it. The task force's objective is "to end community-wide greenhouse gas emissions" by 2031 and figure out how "to safely draw down carbon from the atmosphere."
And why not? Those problems, challenging as they seem, may be easier to solve than making city streets safe, the schools effective, and city government more competent generally. Since the latter problems are so difficult, addressing them usually fails, so addressing them won't make the intelligentsia feel as good about itself as devotion to Cuba, climate change, and facilitating illegal immigration, New Haven having declared itself a "sanctuary city."
Indeed, New Haven's political correctness may be a big part of what makes the city's problems so intractable, shielding city government against the possibility of criticism from local news organizations, which embrace city government's leftward tilt despite its chronic deficiencies.
Really, how fair is it to criticize city government over the basics when it's trying so hard with Cuba, climate change, and nullifying immigration law?
But if its news organizations won't do the job, who will help New Haven residents understand that political correctness is no substitute for public administration?
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Connecticut's news organizations outside New Haven aren't always much help either. Despite the constant mayhem in New Haven and the state's other cities, news organizations lately are paying more attention to what is being called a sharp rise in distribution of "white supremacist" flyers, which recently have been found in 15 towns.
But the flyers don't accomplish anything beyond stoking more leftist hysteria about the "right wing," which, without evidence, is accused of being the source of the flyers, though the flyers are distributed anonymously and don't provide accurate attribution. Police are investigating but even if a source is discovered, nothing could be done unless the flyers directly threaten people. So far they don't.
Connecticut has had some bloody crimes while the flyers have been distributed but the flyers weren't the perpetrators. Thanks to news organizations, the flyers have just distracted from the worsening mayhem.
For all anybody knows, the flyers could be distributed by some left-wing group as a false-flag operation. In any case they might not be distributed as much if news organizations weren't so eager to publicize them.
Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester.
Not your typical beach day
Video still from Kledio Spiro’s show “Which Way, “ at Kingston Gallery, Boston, Oct. 5-Nov. 5.
The gallery says:
“Kledia Spiro creates videos, performances, installations and multimedia experiences. In ‘Which Way,’ Spiro tackles the need to ‘mark your territory’ to survive in a changing landscape as both an immigrant {from Albania} and a woman. For immigrants, home is a constantly changing territory. The video installation depicts Spiro crawling through sand with stilettos and a weightlifting belt, trying to make it to an undetermined side. Spiro wants to confront her viewers with a new path — one that might be more difficult to walk but by the end of it they will gain a new perspective and appreciation.’’
Species of the battle for liberty
“The Stamp Act was to go into operation on the first day of November. On the previous morning, the 'New Hampshire Gazette' appeared with a deep black border and all the typographical emblems of affliction, for was not Liberty dead?’’
— Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1836-1907), American writer, including as poet and critic, and editor. The Portsmouth, N.H., native is notable, among other achievements, for his editorship of the Boston-based The Atlantic Monthly magazine.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich House, part of Strawberry Banke Museum, Portsmouth, N.H.
Sullivan Ballou
“I have no misgivings about, or lack of confidence in the cause in which I am engaged, and my courage does not halt or falter. I know how strongly American Civilization now leans on the triumph of the Government and how great a debt we owe to those who went before us through the blood and sufferings of the Revolution. And I am willing—perfectly willing—to lay down all my joys in this life, to help maintain this Government, and to pay that debt.’’
—Sullivan Ballou (1829-1861), Rhode Island lawyer, politician and major in the Union Army in a letter to his wife, Sarah, shortly before he died of wounds suffered in the First Battle of Bull Run.
Lunar and life
“Rush to the Sea” (encaustic), by Boston-based artist Deniz Ozan-George, in her show “Wax and Wane…Ebb and Flow,’’ at Galatea Fine Art, Boston, through July 31.
She says:
“‘Wax and Wane...Ebb and Flow’ is a personal exploration of the magical and enduring presence of the Moon through its many phases, its pull on the ocean tides and its effect on the life cycles of all living things. These mysteries are expressed through the medium of encaustic wax.’’
From Suicide to Saskadena
Adapted/updated from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
It’s a sensitive time indeed.
The small South Pomfret, Vt., ski area Suicide Six, one of America’s oldest ski areas, has changed its “insensitive” name to Saskadena Six.
“Much time, care and thought has been invested in the process to choose a name more representative of our values, one that celebrates its 86-year history, honors the Abenaki tradition, and will welcome future generations,” Courtney Lowe, president of the Woodstock Inn & Resort, which owns the ski area, said. “While the name might be changing, the experiences offered on this beloved mountain are not.”
According to a statement on the ski area’s Web site, “In the Abenaki language, “saskadena” (sahs-kah-deena) means “standing mountain.” (As opposed to a sitting or falling one?)
“Our resort team embraces the increasing awareness surrounding mental health and shares the growing concerns about the insensitive nature of the historical name,” says the Web site. “The feelings that the word ‘suicide’ evokes can have a significant impact on many in our community.” Especially these days? Of course, some will snarl that this is “politically correct.’’
The first rope tow, at the start powered by a Ford Model T engine, was installed at the former Suicide Six in 1936 on “Hill No. 6,” from which the area derived its name. Its founder, Wallace “Bunny” Bertram, a Rhode Island native, had joked that to ski down Hill No. 6 would be suicide. Bertram had been captain of the ski team at Dartmouth College, just up the road in Hanover, N.H.
Llewellyn King: To be serious about global warming be serious about the need for nuclear energy
The Seabrook Nuclear Power Station, behind the Blackwater River, as seen from Route 1A in Seabrook, N.H. The two remaining nuclear plants in New England — the 2,073-megawatt Millstone plant, in Waterford, Conn., (see below) and the 1,251.4-megawatt Seabrook plant, together provide about 26 percent of the region’s electricity.
— Photo by ThePessimus
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
If you have gasped in Dallas, sweltered in London, or baked in Tokyo this summer, you are likely to believe that global warming is real.
You are also likely to believe that governments -- at least the caring ones -- are desperate to cut the amount of carbon released into the atmosphere from power plants and vehicles.
More electricity is needed to cut the greenhouse-gas emissions from cars, trucks, buses, trains, and, eventually, aircraft. The government figures that U.S. electricity demand will double by 2050, even as the fuels producing it change.
There are three technologies for producing new large quantities of electricity without producing greenhouse gases: wind, solar and nuclear.
Leading global energy institutions, including the International Energy Agency, are adamant that nuclear must be part of the future energy mix.
Nuclear is desirable in many ways:
· It isn’t dependent on foreign supply except for some heavy components, like the castings for large pressure vessels. These, if needed in newer reactors, can be acquired from reliable allies, including South Korea and Japan. Alternatively, we could reinvigorate our large component industry.
· When it comes to supply chains, nuclear component manufacture can be brought to America. It doesn’t have a Chinese component. Wind power is dependent on rare earths -- they are a multiplier in wind turbines, increasing output up to five times. Over 90 percent of rare earths are processed in China, even if they are mined elsewhere. It will take precious decades to replicate the Chinese rare earths infrastructure. Also, China dominates the manufacture of cheap solar cells.
· Nuclear offers long-term planning: The design life of a plant can be as long as 100 years. These plants are clean, safe -- and getting safer. They have a high energy density and low land use, both of which contrast with solar and wind.
Incredibly, the world, outside of China and Russia, seems to have lost the ability to build nuclear plants. It is as though talent and institutional knowledge have disappeared. Those under construction are running many times over their projected costs, and a decade or more behind schedule. They represent a systemic industrial failure, whether it is Plant Vogtle in Georgia, Flamanville-3 in France (a nation that gets 70 percent of its electricity from nuclear; we get 19 percent), or Olkiluoto 3, in Finland.
At the heart of these failures -- and they are complex and far-reaching -- is a failure of welds, and a shortage of welders.
As a first step, the United States, in conjunction with the nuclear manufacturing industry, needs to find out what it is that we have lost in expertise and how to recapture it. We built more than 100 reactors in the 1960s and 1970s. There were some delays back then, but they were nothing like the catastrophic ones of today.
Particularly, the examination of what has gone wrong with nuclear building needs to concentrate on welding. Is this an old trade that needs updating? Can we fix some of the human error that has plagued big industrial welding, from nuclear plants to new ships, through automation and AI?
Not since the 1960s, I am told by nuclear lobbyists, has the public policy apparatus been so aligned to favor nuclear. One of these lobbyists said, “Both houses of Congress are on board, the administration is on board, the regulatory agencies are on board, and public acceptance is greater than it has been in years. But the industry is on its back.”
The issue, to my mind, is not whether we can relearn how do what we used to do, but that there is no mechanism for the utilities to buy and build new nuclear plants, whether they are the new generation of small modular reactors now under development or updated, large (about 1,000 megawatts), more traditional light water reactors. No utility can take the risk in the deregulated world. It is too much to ask.
The nation needs a coherent plan whereby a new generation of nuclear power can be built quickly. It has been done in the past, and it can be done again.
I would suggest -- as I have suggested over many years -- that as nuclear needs government safety oversight, proliferation safeguards, and approval that a tranche of reactors be built on government sites, financed by the government, and sold to commercial consortia to operate. These needn’t necessarily be utility companies. Wind and solar are being developed by merchant companies in many cases.
There is a national climate crisis, and a national electricity crisis is building. Utilities are having to produce more electricity while giving up coal and gas to do it. Nuclear is the strong third leg of the future electricity stool.
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.
The Millstone Nuclear Power Station, in Waterford, Conn., on Long Island Sound.
‘Patterns of occupation’
”Salt Marsh Skiff’’ (archival pigment print), by Shelburne, Vt.-based Jim Westphalen, in his show “Land & Tide: Scenes From New England,’’ at Edgewater Gallery, Middlebury, Vt., through Aug. 9.
His Web site says:
“Jim Westphalen has always had an affinity for the built landscape — those features and patterns reflecting human occupation within the natural surroundings. His current body of work, entitled “Vanish,’’ is an ongoing narrative that speaks to the decay of iconic structures across rural America. Inspired by such painters as Andrew Wyeth, Edward Hopper and A. Hale Johnson, Jim’s photographs open like windows to a world that is rapidly disappearing before our eyes. He captures his dynamic images using a vintage 4x5 view camera adapted for digital capture and then creates his large-scale archival prints using a variety of acid-free rag papers.
Largely self-taught, Westphalen has been a professional photographer for over 30 years. Born and raised on Long Island, in 1996 he moved to Vermont to be closer to the rural landscape that he loves.’’
At Shelburne Farms, a nonprofit education center for sustainability, a 1,400-acre working farm and National Historic Landmark on the shores of Lake Champlain in Shelburne. The property is nationally significant as a well-preserved example of a Gilded Age "ornamental farm", developed in the late 19th Century with architecture by Robert Henderson Robertson and landscaping by Frederick Law Olmsted.