‘A spider at his trade again’
“American Homestead Spring’’
An altered look about the hills;
A Tyrian light the village fills;
A wider sunrise in the dawn;
A deeper twilight on the lawn;
A print of a vermilion foot;
A purple finger on the slope;
A flippant fly upon the pane;
A spider at his trade again;
An added strut in chanticleer;
A flower expected everywhere;
An axe shrill singing in the woods;
Fern-odors on untravelled roads, —
All this, and more I cannot tell,
A furtive look you know as well,
And Nicodemus' mystery
Receives its annual reply.
— “April,’’ by Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), a poet whose imagination traveled widely in her home town, which she almost never left.
Amherst, most known for its colleges, in the year of Emily Dickinson’s death.
Mass. first in nation in Advanced Placement report
Edited from a report by the New England Council (newenglandcouncil.com)
“Massachusetts has once again ranked first in the nation with the highest percentage of graduating high school seniors who scored a 3 or higher on an Advanced Placement (AP) exam, according to results released by the College Board this week. Further, all six New England states rank in the top half of the nation’s AP results, with Connecticut standing out in the number four spot.
“Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey stated that she is ‘proud of the students and educators who worked hard to make sure Massachusetts remains a leader in student participation and success.’ Governor Healey went on to say that her administration ‘is committed to expanding access to AP courses for all students to enhance the opportunities available to them and set them on a path to a successful future.’
“Across the nation, only 21.6 percent of students scored a 3 or higher on their AP exams which are needed to pass. However, in Massachusetts alone, 30.5 percent of students had a passing score on their exams. Additional information on this recent New England success can be found here.’’
Hall of the Boston Latin School on Bedford Street, 1844–1881. Boston Latin, founded in 1635, is by far the oldest public school in the United States.
The ‘courage’ of a flea?
Mark Twain in Dublin, N.H., where he summered in 1905 and 1905. He loved that area.
He wrote: “Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear-not absence of fear. Except a creature be part coward it is not a compliment to say it is brave; it is merely a loose misapplication of the word. Consider the flea!-Incomparably the bravest of all the creatures of God, if ignorance of fear were courage. Whether you are asleep or awake he will attack you, caring nothing for the fact that in bulk and strength you are to him as are the massed armies of the earth to a sucking child; he lives both day and night and all days and nights in the very lap of peril and the immediate presence of death, and yet is no more afraid than is the man who walks the streets of a city that was threatened by an earthquake ten centuries before. When we speak of Clive, Nelson, and Putnam as men who ‘didn't know what fear was,’ we ought always to add the flea-and put him at the head of the procession.”
Can’t trust some photos
“Untitled” (gelatin silver print), by Hein Gravenhorst, in the group show “Seeing Is Not Believing: Ambiguity in Photography,’’ at the Currier Museum of Art, in Manchester, N.H.
The museum says:
“Many photographers play with ambiguities – creating images which question what is real. Perspective, lighting, and close-up details can radically distort the look of objects. These distortions can be both bewildering and delightful.
“This exhibition explores photographs that make us question what we are looking at. Still lifes, abstract images, and manipulated photographs heighten our sense of wonder. Can we ever trust what we see in a photograph?’’
Sonali Kolhatkar: Starbucks CEO Schultz -- union buster in chief
Starbucks workers protesting in Seattle, where the company is based.
—Photo by elliotstoller
Starbucks was named after Starbuck, the thoughtful Nantucket Quaker who was the first mate on the whaling ship Pequod in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick.
From OtherWords.org
Outgoing Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, in a recent interview with CNN, proudly showed off his newest invention: a tablespoon of olive oil added to a cup of coffee to bring out rich, complex flavors.
The conversation was meant to showcase Schultz’s commitment to Starbucks coffee as he prepared to step down as CEO of the company for the third time. But it took place in Italy, prompting his interviewer to ask: Why wasn’t Schultz sitting down with unionizing workers back home?
Indeed, Schultz — who is worth some $3.7 billion — has been operating as union-buster-in-chief of the iconic corporation.
Since the first group of Starbucks workers unionized a café in Buffalo in late 2021, more than 278 stores have done the same, according to Starbucks Workers United. Still, the number of unionized cafés remains a tiny fraction — about 3 percent — of all stores.
Early on, Schultz admitted to workers that the company had failed to give them the tools they needed, such as better staffing and training. But Schultz’s response was to create an uneven playing field and punish workers for daring to demand better conditions.
In 2022, Schultz reportedly rewarded nonunion workers with better wages and benefits, as well as credit card tipping, and denied the same to people working in union stores. As a result, the New York Times reported, “Filings for union elections dropped from more than 60 a month in March and April to under 10 in August.”
Meanwhile, the company is firing union leaders such as Starbucks worker Hannah Whitbeck in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Her termination prompted a lawsuit and a federal judge’s decision that prohibited the Ann Arbor store from firing workers for union activity.
The company has also been understaffing stores that are unionizing, a move that the union says is a deliberate ploy to make workers’ lives more difficult. Schultz has even closed entire stores that have dared to take up union activity, including the first store in Seattle to unionize.
“This is just the beginning. There are going to be many more,” warned Schultz in July 2022.
As long as an employer can abuse workers, there is a need for unions. And union activity is surging, with a 50 percent increase in strike activity last year compared to the year before, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Shultz apparently sees himself as above the law. He refused to testify about his company’s 75 documented violations of federal labor laws in front of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, chaired by Senator Bernie Sanders, until Sanders forced him to with a subpoena.
But not every company is fighting its own workers tooth and nail. When Toyota workers in Japan asked for the largest pay hike in 20 years, the automaker agreed to all the union’s demands in the very first round of negotiations.
Toyota’s head Koji Sato said the move was intended as an example “for the industry as a whole.” It worked. Hours after Toyota’s announcement, Honda accepted its own union’s demands in full.
No so for Starbucks. Schultz has ruined the company’s reputation for caring about its workers and become the poster child, even in the business world, of what not to do when faced with union activity.
Starbucks should take a page out of Toyota’s book. In his CNN interview, even Schultz admitted that what Starbucks workers want more than anything is “a seat at the table.” He added, “It’s hard to walk in someone else’s shoes, but you’ve got to do that a little bit.”
Instead of experimenting with olive oil in coffee, he could try something else that’s new for him — treating workers with the same respect that he commands.
Sonali Kolhatkar is the host of Rising Up With Sonali, a television and radio show on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations.
Philip K. Howard: Public-employee unions, unlike trade unions, corrupt democracy
Chicago teachers marching during a demonstration on Oct. 14, 2019
Massachusetts state militia enter Boston’s Scollay Square (RIP) to restore order during the city’s police union strike in 1919, which was broken, in large part by the rigorous actions by Gov. (and later Vice President and then President) Calvin Coolidge. The strike left a negative opinion amongst many citizens about public-employee unions for many years. There was much crime and other disorder during the strike. Coolidge famously said during the strike:
“There is no right to strike against the public safety by anyone, anywhere, any time. ... I am equally determined to defend the sovereignty of Massachusetts and to maintain the authority and jurisdiction over her public officers where it has been placed by the Constitution and laws of her people."
In a runoff election for mayor, Chicago voters on April 4 narrowly chose former teacher Brandon Johnson over former schools CEO Paul Vallas. Raising eyebrows was the funding of Johnson’s campaign: Over 90 percent came from teachers unions and other public-employee unions. Vallas had the endorsement of the police union, but his funding was more diverse, including business leaders and industrial unions. Just looking at the money, the race came down to this: Public employees vs. everyone else plus cops.
What is wrong with this picture? The new mayor is supposed to manage Chicago for all the citizens, not to benefit public employees. Chicago is not in good shape. In 37 of its schools, not one student is proficient in reading or math. Its transit system is stuck with schedules that serve no one at great expense. The crime rate in Chicago is among the highest in the country. But no recent Chicago mayor has been able to fix these and other endemic problems because the public unions have collective bargaining powers that give them a veto on how the city is run. Frustrated by the inability to get teachers back to the classroom during COVID, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot observed that the teachers union wanted “to take over not only Chicago Public Schools, but take over running the city government.”
This is not just a Chicago problem. Los Angeles teachers walked out of class rooms last month supposedly to support striking service personnel, but Los Angeles lacks the resources to help the service employees because of the indebted inefficiencies in the teachers union contract.
American government has a fatal flaw hiding in plain sight. Public employee unions in most states have a stranglehold on public operations. Voters elect governors and mayors who have been disempowered from fixing lousy schools, firing rogue cops, or eliminating notorious inefficiencies.
Look at almost any public scandal in recent years—failing schools in Baltimore, police killings in Minneapolis and Memphis—and you will find public supervisors who, under union controls, have lost basic managerial tools. Democracy is supposed to be a process of accountability. But there’s near-zero accountability in American government—between .01 and .02 percent in most jurisdictions. Two out of 95,000 teachers in Illinois were dismissed annually for poor performance over an 18-year study period. In the decade prior to the killing of George Floyd, of the 2,600 police complaints in Minneapolis only 12 merited discipline, of which the most severe was a 40-hour suspension.
No wonder democracy is working so badly. Elected leaders come and go, but public unions just say no. How did public employee unions get this power?
Rewinding the Clock
Until the 1960s, public employees were organized like lawyers, doctors and other voluntary professional associations. They had no legal right to compel government to enter into contracts. Many already enjoyed civil service protections, and government work was generally sleepy, not ruthless. But public employees had become a huge voting bloc, and leaders of public employee associations wanted power over how government was run.
Until then, the idea of public employees bargaining against government was inconceivable. FDR, a strong supporter of trade unions, firmly rejected government bargaining: “The process of collective bargaining…cannot be transplanted into the public service.” Early labor leader Samuel Gompers refused to let police join the industrial union because, having sworn to serve the public, police would have a conflict of interest. As late as the 1950s, union leader George Meany stated unequivocally that it is “impossible to bargain collectively with the Government.”
But the strong tide of the 1960s rights revolution provided ample cover for government unions to get similar statutory powers as industrial unions. No one conceived back then that these powers would make government unmanageable. It was just considered a matter of “elementary justice” to treat them the same.
Government bargaining, however, is radically different from trade union bargaining:
A trade union must honor efficiency, or else the jobs are lost when the business moves out of town or fails. Government can’t go out of business or move, so public employee bargaining is aimed at creating deliberate inefficiencies to foster more jobs.Multi-hundred-page contracts that are designed for featherbedding and overtime excesses. Taxpayers must foot the bill.
Trade union bargaining is limited to dividing the pie of profit between capital and labor. There is no profit in government, so the scope of government bargaining has no defined limits. Again, the taxpayers must pay.
In trade union bargaining, it would be unlawful for management to collude with a complicit workers group. In government bargaining, overt collusion is how the game is played. In exchange for huge union campaign support, politicians agree to give unions control over public operations and pensions. As unions like to say, “we elect our own bosses.” At a rally with public unions, New Jersey’s then-Governor Jon Corzine called out that “We will fight for a fair contract!” Who was he going to fight? Collective bargaining with government unions is not a real negotiation. It’s a pay-off.
For fifty years, government union controls have gotten ever-tighter. Unlike all other interest groups, government unions have a binding contractual veto over how government operates, and are first in line for public resources. They keep it that way with preemptive political force. Stanford political scientist Terry Moe found that in 36 states teachers unions contributed more than all business groups combined.
The Disempowerment of Elected Executives
Newly-elected governors and mayors in most states quickly discover that they have no managerial control over schools, police, and other government operations. If an elected executive has the backbone to try to buck the union, and restore managerial powers when an agreement comes up for renegotiation, the executive in many states will find that unelected arbitrators have the final say.
Near-zero accountability makes its practically impossible to transform a lousy school, or an abusive police culture, because the supervisor can’t enforce good values and standards. No accountability also removes the mutual trust needed for any healthy organization. Why try hard, or go the extra mile, when others just go through the motions? The absence of accountability is like releasing a nerve gas into the agency or school.
Rigid work rules guarantee massive inefficiency. Basic services such as trash collection, and road and transit maintenance, cost two to three times what it would cost in the private sector. Need someone to help out or fill in? Sorry, not permitted. Need teachers to do remote teaching during the pandemic? There’s nothing about that in the agreement, so it must be negotiated.
No public purpose is served by union controls. Nor do union controls make government an attractive employer. Good candidates are repelled by toxic public cultures without energy or pride. Union controls serve only to transfer governing authority to union officials, who exercise that authority mainly to pad public employment and insulate government workers from supervisory judgments.
Public unions have turned public operations into a permanent spoils system: Unions have control over public operations and have insulated public employees from accountability, no matter how poorly they perform. That’s why democratically-elected leaders almost never fix what’s broken.\
All government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management. The very nature and purposes of government make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the employer in mutual discussions with government employee organizations. The employer is the whole people, who speak by means of laws enacted by their representatives in Congress. Accordingly, administrative officials and employees alike are governed and guided, and in many instances restricted, by laws which establish policies, procedures, or rules in personnel matters. Particularly, I want to emphasize my conviction that militant tactics have no place in the functions of any organization of government employees. Upon employees in the Federal service rests the obligation to serve the whole people, whose interests and welfare require orderliness and continuity in the conduct of government activities. This obligation is paramount. Since their own services have to do with the functioning of the government, a strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to prevent or obstruct the operations of Government until their demands are satisfied. Such action, looking toward the paralysis of government by those who have sworn to support it, is unthinkable and intolerable.
Philip K. Howard, a New York-based lawyer, writer and civic leader, is author most recently of Not Accountable: Rethinking the Constitutionality of Public Employee Unions (Rodin Books, 2023). He is chairman of Common Good (commongood.org), a legal-and-regulatory-reform organization.
Read here Franklin Roosevelt’s views on public-employee unions.
‘Drive the white folks crazy’
Gingerbread Cottages at Wesleyan Grove, in Oak Bluffs.
— Photo by LisaHendricks
“We were always stared at. Whenever we went outside the neighborhood that knew us, we were inspected like specimens under glass. My mother prepared us. As she marched us down our front stairs, she would say what our smiles were on tiptoe to hear, ‘Come on, children, let’s go out and drive the white folks crazy.”’
— From African-American writer Dorothy West’s (1907-1998) book The Richer, the Poorer (1995). Here, she’s remembering summering in Oak Bluffs, on Martha’s Vineyard.
New joys
“Release” (charcoal and pastel), by Lesley Cohen, in her show “Light Matters,’’ at Bromfield Gallery, Boston, through April 30.
The gallery says:
“This series of drawings serve as a metaphor for the new possibilities of joy that can be received as we re-enter and re-engage with the world outside. The world is generously reopening its magical portal for us in shimmering waves that surprise and delight. The inspirational effects can be almost breathtaking and we can rejoice in finally being able to attend. And as we reemerge, the light enters. We have plenty to celebrate. Let the magic begin.’’
The thing is to focus on the shimmer
“One Thing’’ (water-based paints and acrylic matte media on stretched canvas), by Renee Khatami, in the big group show “Abstract Visions,’’ at the Silvermine Arts Center, New Canaan, Conn., through April 20.
The name "Silvermine" comes from old legends of a silver mine in the area, although no silver has ever been found. The Silvermine area was long an arts colony.
Silvermine Tavern and mill pond.
April angst
“The sun was warm but the wind was chill.
You know how it is with an April day
When the sun is out and the wind is still,
You’re one month on in the middle of May.
But if you so much as dare to speak,
A cloud comes over the sunlit arch,
A wind comes off a frozen peak,
And you’re two months back in the middle of March.’’
— From “Two Tramps in Mud Time,’’ by Robert Frost (1874-1963)
Old books, old industries
“The Bookworm’’ by Carl Spitzweg (1850)
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
I was a guest the other week of a group of bibliophiles in Boston. Members’ passion for (mostly old) books, for their physical charms as well as their content, was endearing, as was the droll humor of some of the members I talked with.
At each of these dinner meetings, a member gives a talk. The speaker when I was there discussed a narrative about a Pacific island covered with guano, which for part of the 19th Century was used to make a highly profitable product in New England. Yankee businessmen would ship the stuff from the Pacific or the Caribbean, mix it with fish meal and market it as the best fertilizer, which it was until manmade ones came along (to eventually pose serious environmental problems). Some of my ancestors were investors in the Pacific Guano Co., in Woods Hole, on Cape Cod. (“Whitcomb, I always knew you were full of….”). The company occupied land where you now get the ferries to Martha’s Vineyard.
Pacific Guano Works, Woods Hole, Mass., circa 1860s; engraving by S.S. Kilburn. Woods Hole is a village in Falmouth.
Most industries eventually shrink or even disappear. In New England, the best examples are the shoe and textile sectors. (No comment on the slave trade or “The China Trade,’’ some of which involved selling opium.) So always diversify! Mix it up!
I thought of that while reading a Commonwealth Magazine article about Greater Boston losing manufacturing jobs and industrial land at an alarming pace. This needs to be reversed. We need more than white-collar jobs. And having local factories can help reduce supply-chain costs.
The article noted:
“A deteriorating regional industrial base has the potential to damage our region’s economic strength, pricing smaller companies out of the area and disproportionately impacting workers of color and those without college degrees. Economic studies tie healthy manufacturing employment and ecosystems to greater economic resilience and innovation, and the revitalization of American industry is key to building a middle class and addressing wage disparities. And yet, we are already facing a large-scale loss of space that could impact our state for many generations.’’
The region’s bio-tech biz has shown great growth in the past couple of decades, but it’s dangerous to depend on one sector. Just ask the folks in Silicon Valley.
Into a confusing new century
A great show, even for nonhistory buffs.
The tenth annual Decades Ball takes up the years 1900 to 1910. The evening features renowned actors and musicians performing signature works from the decade—and celebrates the 15th anniversary of Lapham’s Quarterly.
John S. Long: On a chilly beach, I see my first ospreys of 2023
An osprey, a great fish eater
I walked along Gaspee Point,* in Warwick, R.I., late this morning. The ospreys, in my first sighting this year, are back, and they are rebuilding their platform nest. It looked as if the male was bringing some small branches, clasped in his talons, toward the nest (perched high on a telephone pole). He hovered in the northwest wind and then dropped down onto the nesting platform.
I walked to Occupessatuxet Cove, toward the nearly submerged Greene Island, which was 14 acres before the 1938 Hurricane. Now, it’s almost gone. The chilly wind was about 15 mph, and the bay was shimmering gold as cat's paws swept across its surface. I could see Mt. Hope Bridge, connecting Bristol and Portsmouth, about 10 miles to the southeast. There seemed to be no marine traffic today as fluffy clouds drifted toward Bristol and Middletown. There's a 270-degree view from the High Banks at Gaspee Point. I gazed at the shades of ultramarine and indigo that uncoiled toward the shipping channel.
*A concave beach perhaps a mile long from north to south on the west side of Narragansett Bay; it’s famous for the burning of the burning of the HMS Gaspee, in 1772. For readers not familiar with Narragansett Bay, the point is bounded on the north by Passeonkquis Cove and on the south by Occupessatuxet Cove, and it’s reached via Namquid Drive in Warwick.
On Gaspee Point
‘Vehicle for self-knowledge’
“I think you are the bravest person I know, in that I can't predict” (hand-cut paper), by Antonius Bui, in the show “New Explorations in Mediascapes and Memoryscapes, at the Bannister Gallery, Providence, through April 21.
— Photo courtesy Bannister Gallery
The gallery explains that the show presents the work of Karen Azoulay, Antonius Bui, Natalia Nakazawa, Sagarika Sundaram, Yelaine Rodriguez and Ayoung Yu as they "interpret their personal histories" through a wide array of mixed media. Through this diverse collection of works, these artists explore "human perception and connection as a vehicle for self-knowledge."
Chris Powell: If sex changes become routine, America will get even crazier
MANCHESTER, Conn.
According to an assistant secretary of the U.S. Health and Human Services Department, Rachel Levine, who spoke the other day at the Connecticut Children's Medical Center, in Hartford, "gender-affirming care" -- the euphemism for sex-change therapy -- will be common and considered normal before too long.
Levine may be right but no one should hope so.
For it would signify profound national unhappiness if many people were so uncomfortable in their own skin that they would want to undergo physique-altering drug treatments and even mutilation. The law should prohibit this kind of thing for minors, for the same reason that it prohibits minors from making contracts and should prohibit minors from marrying, as is increasingly being urged. Minors aren't prepared to make such decisions.
Children may grow out of gender dysphoria, as they grow out of many other things, and evidence that sex-change therapy increases the long-term happiness of those who undertake it is lacking, even as the therapy may have irreversible effects.
While it does not seem to have been noted, the rise in gender dysphoria among children corresponds with the explosion of mental illness generally among the young. This may not be a coincidence.
After all, about a third of children in the United States live in a home without two parents and thus with less parenting and support than most children used to get. Many of those children are living in poverty. In cities the percentage of children living in poverty without fathers approaches 90 percent.
Meanwhile, school performance is crashing throughout the country.
The explosion in youthful mental illness (and mental illness in the adult population as well) would seem to invite government to inquire urgently into its cause.
Indeed, the mental illness epidemic may be more damaging than the recent virus epidemic was. But no.
Instead Assistant Secretary Levine remarked in Hartford that sex-change therapy for minors has the "highest support" of the Biden administration.
If such an administration remains in power, the assistant secretary's prophecy that sex-change therapy for children will become normal could be self-fulfilling, whether such therapy is really needed or not and though the country won't be any saner for it.
xxx
MORE URGENT THAN BONUSES: While state government has begun paying $45 million in bonuses to 36,000 of its "essential" employees, a couple of sad news reports related to government finance were largely overlooked.
The housing authority in Bridgeport is evicting about a fifth of its households, 502 of 2,500, because they haven't been paying rent and are already about $1.5 million in arrears. In New Haven a longstanding camp of homeless people in a city park, considered a sanitation and fire hazard, was dismantled and bulldozed by city employees.
The city governments didn't mean to be cruel. They are striving to find other accommodations for the people being displaced, some of whom of course have drug and other mental problems. Even so, people living in a homeless camp are probably not in a condition to support themselves, just as people who can't cover the rent in government housing for the poor probably aren't either.
That doesn't mean that with some temporary support, rehabilitation, and training these people couldn't support themselves eventually, but their present is desperate. They need shelter immediately, and in Connecticut shelter is scarcer and more expensive than ever.
Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont is not indifferent to the problem. His administration has just given $2.45 million to Pacific House, a social-service organization that operates emergency shelters, to build 39 inexpensive apartments to become "supportive housing" in Stamford. But as the evictions in Bridgeport and New Haven show, that housing will not be nearly enough for immediate needs.
So Connecticut should consider opening a few emergency shelters such as the field hospitals the National Guard set up quickly during the COVID pandemic. Much vacant retail, school and church property might be adapted for this purpose. Of course, supervisory staff would have to be hired, and rules devised and enforced to keep the facilities clean and orderly, but such a project would not be complicated, except maybe for assuaging the neighbors.
Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester. (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com)\
Plants as metaphor
“Journey “ (Japanese barberry) (detail work in process), by Boston-based artist Ann Wessmann, in her show “Cycle,’’ at Kingston Gallery, Boston, May 31-July 2.
The gallery says (this has been edited):
“In her studio practice, Ann Wessmann explores themes relating to time, memory, beauty and the ephemeral, with a focus on the strength and fragility of human beings and the natural world. Her most recent work pays tribute to trees, and the natural world by extension, by focusing on a horse chestnut tree at her childhood home, in Scituate, Mass., and the 170-foot-long hedge on two sides of the yard. This tree and hedge have been a part of her life for almost 70 years, going through their cycle of life as Wessmann goes through hers. While Wessmann no longer lives full time at her childhood home, she takes care of the yard year after year in the continuing seasonal cycle.
“Wessmann’s process is close observation and discovery, gathering and sorting various plant materials — leaves, flowers, twigs, nuts and hulls — that fall to the ground from the horse chestnut tree. These materials are essential to the life of the tree, but they have served their natural purpose and are generally overlooked and discarded by humans. Wessmann finds them beautiful and compelling. The thorny hedge, which she has struggled to maintain for many years, caught her attention in the past year, and the installation “Journey,’’ made with hedge clippings, for Wessmann became a metaphor for the times in which we live.”
Leaves and trunk of a horse chestnut tree. There are far fewer such trees these days.
— Photo by Alvesgaspar
The fruit of the Horse chestnut tree. They are not true nuts, but rather capsules.
— Photo by Solipsist
Free time for drinking
Franklin Pierce
“Frequently the more trifling the subject, the more animated and protracted the discussion.’’
xxx
“After the White House what is there to do but drink?’’
Franklin Pierce (1804-1869), the 14th president (1853-1857), who historians generally consider one of the worst. He was the only president to hail from New Hampshire. He grew up in Hillsboro and died in Concord, of alcoholism.
Pierce was a Northern Democrat who believed that the abolitionist movement was a fundamental threat to the nation's unity, and he alienated anti-slavery groups by signing the Kansas–Nebraska Act and enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act.
The Franklin Pierce Homestead, in Hillsboro, N.H., where Pierce grew up, is now a National Historic Landmark. He was born in a nearby log cabin as the homestead was being completed.
Odd that even a New Hampshire college would name itself after Pierce but you have such a place in Rindge.
‘To buffer the passage of time’
Center field bleachers at Fenway Park during a 2014 game.
— Photo by Vegasjon
“[Baseball] breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall all alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.”
— A. Bartlett Giamatti (1938-1989), a lifelong Red Sox fan who served as president of Yale and baseball commissioner
1917 map of Fenway Park.
1919 rally at Fenway for Irish independence from Britain. Boston had a huge concentration of Irish-Americans.
Masculine material
“Sharrod Hosten Study III” (archival ink on paper), by Kehinde Wiley, in the show “Masculine Identities: Filling in the Blank,’’ at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst Fine Arts Center through May 14.
The gallery says that the show explores masculinity and its place in art. “Featuring work by Carlos Villa, Andy Warhol, Kehinde Wiley and Nicole Eisenman, this exhibition aims to take the traditionally masculine traits of rigidity, roughness, strength and control and interpret them in new ways.’’
Llewellyn King: A shrug when it comes to mass murder with guns
AR-15-style assault rifle made by Southport, Conn.-based Sturm, Ruger & Co.
A Smith & Wesson AR-15-style assault rifle, designed to tear apart as many people as possible as fast as possible.
In Maryville, Tenn., where long -Springfield, Mass.-based gun maker Smith & Wesson’s is moving its headquarters. The company makes assault rifles beloved by mass murderers. That has bothered folks in Massachusetts but makes the company popular in gun-cult-dominated Tennessee and other violent Red States.
— Photo by Brian Stansberry
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
“Murder most foul,” cries the ghost of Hamlet’s father to explain his own killing in Shakespeare’s play.
We shudder in the United States when yet more children are slain by deranged shooters. Yet we are determined to keep a ready supply of AR-15-type assault rifles on hand to facilitate the crazy when the insanity seizes them.
The murder in Nashville of three nine-year-olds and three adults should have us at the barricades, yelling bloody murder. Enough! Never again!
But we have mustered a national shrug, concluding that nothing can be done.
Clearly, something can be done; something like reviving the assault rifle ban, which expired after 10 years of statistically proven success.
We are culpable. We think that our invented entitlement to own these weapons, designed for war, is a divine right, outdistancing reason, compassion, and any possible form of control.
The blame rests primarily on something in American exceptionalism that loves guns. I mostly understand that; I like them myself, as I write from time to time. I also like fast cars, small airplanes, strong drink, and other hair-raising things.
But society has said these need controls — from speed limits to flying instruction — and has severe penalties for mixing the first two with the last. Those controls make sense. We abide by them.
When it comes to that other great national indulgence, guns, society has said safety doesn’t count. So far this year, more than 10,000 people have been killed in gun violence. If that were the number of fatalities from disease, we would again be in lockdown.
We have concocted this scared right to keep and use guns. To ensure this, the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution has been manhandled by lawyers into being a justification for putting something deadly out of the reach of social control or even rudimentary discipline.
The latest school shooting has raised our hackles, but not our capacity to act. This national shrug at something which can be fixed is a stain on the body politic.
Most of the conservative wing of the establishment, represented by the Republican Party, has dismissed it as one might a natural disaster.
But the routine murder of innocents in school shootings is a man-made disaster. Worse, it is sanctified by a particular interpretation of the Second Amendment.
It is an interpretation which has demanded, and continues to demand, legal contortionism. This is used to justify the citizenry owning and using weapons of war.
This latest school shooting, which happened in this young year, was shocking, but what was more shocking was the political reaction.
President Biden wrung his hands and said nothing could be done without the support of Congress — thus endorsing a national fatalism.
Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina suggested more policemen in schools, and Rep. Thomas Massie (R.-Tenn.) said teachers needed to be armed. His children are homeschooled.
In personal life and in national life perceived impossibility is hugely debilitating.
Imagine if the Founding Fathers had said the British Empire was too strong to challenge, if FDR had said America couldn’t rise against the forces of the economic chaos of the 1930s, or if Margaret Thatcher had said British trade unions were too strong to be opposed?
These are incidents where perceived reality was, with struggle, trounced for the general good.
Guns along with drugs are the largest killer of young people. They aren’t unrelated. Unregulated guns find their way to the drug gangs of Central America, facilitating the flow of drugs.
On the Senate floor, the chamber’s longtime chaplain, retired Rear Adm. Barry C. Black, took on the pusillanimous members of his flock after the Nashville murders, quoting the 18th-century Anglo-Irish statesman Edmund Burke’s admonition, “The only thing needed for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.” Indubitably.
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.