Robert Whitcomb: The very profitable outrage eco-system
PROVIDENCE
Charlie Kirk, like his Great Gilded Leader Trump, found that demagoguery can be very lucrative, especially as the educational level continues to slide in the U.S. The very able organizer was making a nice pile as co-founder and CEO of the far-right, marketed-to-young-people Turning Point USA. That was before Tyler Robinson, 22, like Mr. Kirk a son of affluent Republican parents, allegedly shot the 31-year-old to death. Making such gruesome attacks easier is that America is awash in guns, to no small degree because of Republican antipathy to any gun control. (Robinson’s gun was apparently his grandfather’s.) In the past few decades, the National Rifle Association, the gun industry and the Republican Party have essentially merged.
Of course, America has always been heavily armed, but it has reached astronomical levels, with 400 million guns now; of course plenty of people don’t own any.
(I myself inherited from my father an 80-year-old 12-gauge shotgun and a .22 rifle; a late 19th Century shotgun (too dangerous to use!) from my maternal grandfather’s Upstate New York farm, and a revolver that my paternal grandfather carried on the train between Brockton and Boston as he was ferrying cash and checks for a shoe company. All since have been dispersed elsewhere. But we still have the Civil War rifle from Kentucky that my wife inherited. Kentucky was a Border State, and so we don’t know whether it was used by a Confederate or Union soldier, or just for hunting wild animals, or neighbors the owner didn’t like. The Bluegrass State, like many former Slave States, has always been a pretty violent place.)
In any event, it’s been noted that both Mr. Kirk and Robinson came from the same toxic digital/podcast/cable-TV/YouTube ecosystem, in which violent threats abound.
Mr. Kirk’s shows, rife with bigotry, brought him an estimated net worth of $12 million at his death. His salary for running his right-wing machine was $407,000 back in 2021, the last year for which his pay was reported. But then, he was a charismatic leader to his pumped-up followers, most of them young and overwhelmingly white, and few of whom were interested in researching, let alone challenging, his assertions. We seem to be heading into a post-literate society. Mr. Kirk was aided by many Americans’ staggering willful ignorance about the history of their own country.
Never let the facts get in the way of a story if that brings in more revenue! Just ask the remarkably cynical and amoral Rupert Murdoch, of Fox News, and Mark Zuckerberg, of Facebook, who have made BILLIONS from the lies-and-outrage industry.
The charismatic provocateur Kirk had famously said he didn’t like the word “empathy,’’ preferring the word “sympathy,’’ though in his vitriolic remarks he often showed little of either, though obviously he could be warm and charming when needed.
Here are the standard definitions of two kinds of empathy:
Cognitive empathy: The mental ability to understand another person's perspective, thoughts, and feelings without necessarily feeling them yourself.
Emotional empathy: When you “feel” another person's emotions. What they are experiencing emotionally has an impact on your emotional state.
Here’s one of self-proclaimed Christian Mr. Kirk’s not untypical remarks:
“Joe Biden is a bumbling, dementia-filled Alzheimer's, corrupt tyrant who should honestly be put in prison and/or given the death penalty for his crimes against America.”
Here’s a bunch of other interesting remarks by Mr. Kirk.
Of course, it will get worse.
Last Wednesday Britain’s Channel 4 ran a long fact-checking show on Trump’s lies so far in his current regime. But they’d need a helluva lot more time to play them all.
Robert Whitcomb is editor of New England Diary.
‘Sense of wonderment’
Work by Shiao-Ping Wang, in her show “Visual Inference,’’ at 3S Artspace, Portsmouth, N.H., through Sept. 28.
The gallery says:
“Imagination and curiosity are the unseen ingredients in Shiao-Ping Wang's process. They lead the paths behind and beyond appearances and patterns. As patterns proliferate, conjugate and transform, the artist's eye finds relational meanings between the abstract forms and its parallels in natural phenomena and in human lives.
“Shiao-Ping is drawn to materials that evoke a sense of wonderment. The strong material presence of linen canvases and handmade paper ‘speak’ to her in the process. They encourage her to explore ways in coloring, cutting and reaching under layers of the pulp.’’
Congress Street in beautiful downtown Portsmouth, N.H.
— Photo by John Phelan
Chris Powell: Conn. Democrats are over-impressed by college; make it ‘military,’ not ‘defense’
Rotunda at Manchester (Conn.) Community College.
1933 movie
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Surely Connecticut state Rep. Eleni Kavros DeGraw, (D-Avon) doesn't represent the entirety of Connecticut's Democratic Party. But she is evidence of the party's transition from the party of the working class to the party of the arrogant elites.
Kavros DeGraw revealed herself last month with comments at a meeting of a General Assembly committee studying relief for college student debt. The Yankee Institute's Meghan Portfolio reports that Kavros DeGraw said “most important thing is to go to college … to have long-term earning power and to be able to start building generational wealth and to succeed."
Kavros DeGraw added: “If folks aren't going to college and getting the jobs that college educations fill, what jobs are they ending up in? They're ending up in jobs that do not pay them enough. And then they do become, quote, unquote, a burden on everyone else because of the services they might need."
That's not only a mistaken view of the lives of people without college degrees, many of whom make good livings and do jobs vital to society, but also a mistaken view of the lives of people with college degrees, many of whom are in debt and stuck in dead-end jobs after earning degrees of little financial value while many others make great incomes doing little good for society.
The higher education that so impresses Kavros DeGraw is full of such ironies.
Joshua Moon-Johnson, the new president of the community colleges in Manchester, Enfield, and Middletown touts his degree in “LQBT studies," which may get his political-correctness ticket punched but won't help him convey much useful learning to students.
Meanwhile, the former chancellor of the Connecticut Colleges and Universities System, Terrence Cheng, now a “strategic adviser" to the system's Board of Regents, which pushed him out of the chancellorship because of an expense-account scandal, is even more of a “burden on everyone else," since he is being paid just as much for doing nothing much. Cheng has degrees in English and, not so ironically, fiction.
The Cheng scandal has been continuing for more than a year but Kavros DeGraw seems to have said nothing about that burden on society.
Indeed, many pompous higher-ed types strut around calling each other “doctor” but to replace a lightbulb they have to call someone who knows how to use a ladder.
The problem with college student debt, as state Rep. Tammy Nuccio (R-Tolland) explained to the study committee, is simply that college is overpriced. It costs more than it's worth.
This doesn't mean that college degrees are worthless, nor that all college courses should facilitate entry to lucrative careers. College should not only teach work skills but also broaden appreciation of life in all respects.
But the bigger education problem in Connecticut and throughout the country is lower education. Standards in lower education have been eliminated. Half of high- school graduates never master what used to be considered high school work, and they enter adulthood qualified only for menial jobs.
The drag on society is not the lack of college education but the lack of primary and secondary education, and unfortunately it's too terrifying for elected officials like Kavros DeGraw to acknowledge, so it will get worse.
WAR, NOT DEFENSE: President Trump, who claimed a dubious medical exemption -- bone spurs -- to escape the military draft during the Vietnam War, wants to look tough and to make the country look tougher. Hence his plan to return the Defense Department to its original name, the War Department. Again he is right for the wrong reasons.
The country doesn't need more military toughness as much as it needs more military smarts. Its most recent wars -- Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan -- weren't defense. They were stupid imperial adventures. The country would have been far better off without them.
The same goes for “defense" contractors. They're really military contractors, including Connecticut's home team -- Pratt & Whitney, Electric Boat, and Sikorsky Aircraft. Journalism should stop playing along with the charade.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
Three Boston traffic rules
“The first rule of the road in Boston couldn’t be more clear: Get there as fast as possible. Rule two: Blow by as many people and cars as you can. Rule three: Ignore everything — yield signs, bumbling pedestrians, cracks in the Earth’s crust releasing molten lava — that gets in the way of rules one and two.’’
-Peter DeMarco, Boston Globe reporter
Probing the peculiar
“Tree, table, and Cat” (oil on canvas), by Gertrude Abercrombie, in the show “Gertrude Abercrombie: The Whole World Is a Mystery,’’ at the Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine, through Jan. 11.
— Photo by Michael Tropea
The museum explains:
“Gertrude Abercrombie (1909–1977) produced hundreds of paintings imbued with autobiography that revealed her emotional truth and declared it as real. A critical figure in the mid-20th-Century Chicago art and jazz scenes, Abercrombie made art to give her internal life visual form. She put herself into her painted world—in self-portraits, landscapes, interior scenes, and still lifes—through the use of personal symbols and enigmatic female figures. She probed her consciousness, mined her memories, drew on her dreams, and found the peculiar in everyday life, painting, as she said, ‘simple things that are a little strange.”’
‘‘Abercrombie lived in defiance of her era’s social norms. By blending layers of reality, her paintings similarly question existence as commonly understood and posit alternate dimensions. Though she had a singular vision, her reliance on her inner consciousness and use of a fantastical style connected her to broader developments in American modernism.’’
Changes coming to The Fens
View from Boylston Street bridge, in the Back Bay Fens.
— Photo by King of Hearts
The Fens
Excerpted from The Boston Guardian
New pathways, drainage systems, and more accessible routes to monuments and memorials are coming to the Back Bay Fens this year through the Pathways Project, introduced by the Boston Parks Department.
Filed in July and reviewed by the Conservation Commission this past month, the project has been years in the making and will build upon the 2023 completion of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineer’s multi-phased, Muddy River Restoration project that focused on flood mitigation and reconstruction and replanting of the banks along the river.
The two-year long project will lead to specific areas and paths to be shut down momentarily from Avenue Louis Pasteur to Boylston Street to install gravel walkways with “ADA-compliant” asphalt, plant new trees, and add infiltration trenches and areas for stormwater drainage.
Charlie Kirk’s campaign to ‘de-woke’ colleges and some deeper history
Charlie Kirk at a college event in 2024.
From The Conversation Web site (not including picture above)
Conservative activist Charlie Kirk was assassinated on Sept. 10, 2025, at the start of a college campus tour that centered on Kirk discussing politics – and education – with students.
A large part of Kirk’s political activism centered on what education should look like. Amy Lieberman, The Conversation’s education editor, spoke with Daniel Ruggles, a scholar at Brandeis University, in Waltham, Mass., of conservative youth activism, to better understand the beliefs about education that influenced Kirk and the connection he tried to make with young people.
What is most important to understand about Charlie Kirk’s views on education?
Charlie Kirk’s education philosophy was founded upon the idea of not being on the left. One of the problems with that approach is that it’s harder to explain your ideas and values in a positive way instead of just being “anti” left.
Conservatives, well before Kirk’s time, have been trying to reclaim education from liberals whom they view as valuing equity and belonging instead of timeless values of order and traditional values in society. This philosophy overall focuses on reclaiming education from liberals.
There is a lot of alignment with Kirk’s education philosophy and the Make America Great Again movement, but his approach predates Donald Trump’s rise. It is focused on returning to what conservatives call Western and “traditional” values. This means rolling back the clock to an idealized time when men and women had set gender roles in society and life was more harmonious and wholesome. At its best, this education philosophy can be valuable – teaching what society views as virtuous behavior, ethics and tradition – but it can also prioritize tradition and privilege over justice and equity.
This philosophy also has to do with not feeling a need to apologize for one’s identity. A big divide between liberals and conservatives is how they explain disadvantage. Conservatives like Kirk believe they should not have to apologize for their identities, and other people’s identities should not be a reason for special treatment.
This philosophy is not so much about making education more effective as much as it is about not being “woke.”
De-woking the classroom is usually the overall goal. This involves ridding the classroom of what is known as grievance politics – meaning someone believes they have been marginalized because of their identity, race, gender or sexuality.
How far back can you trace this educational philosophy?
The 1960s had an explosion of progressive activism amid the New Left and antiwar movements as young adults realized that they could now demand certain rights. At the same time, there were a lot of young conservatives on campuses who felt fine with the way things were or who were concerned about some of the more radical ideas promoted by the New Left.
Universities became more inclusive in the 1960s, too. Generally, there were not any gender studies programs at American universities until the 1960s and 1970s, nor were there any race and ethnicity programs. Some conservatives pushed back on the emergence of these programs, saying that if there is an African American studies department, they want to see a conservative studies department, too.
After the 1960s, conservative education fights died down. Conservatives still wanted their voices heard on campus, but their merit-only based education philosophy seemed less relevant when left-wing campus protests had declined significantly.
How did Charlie Kirk capitalize on the conservative feelings regarding education?
Kirk founded his political nonprofit, Turning Point USA, in 2012. Kirk didn’t originally support Trump, but he became friends with Donald Trump Jr., and eventually became close with the president. Like Trump, Kirk saw academia as the source of a plethora of problems in American society. His goal was to make college campuses more friendly to conservative students by making conservative ideas like free market economics and traditional gender roles more popular.
There was a lot of foundation laying over time for Kirk’s conservative education philosophy. Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack in Israel, as well as the subsequent war in Gaza and Palestinian rights protests in the U.S., offered a moment for conservatives like Kirk to brand progressives at schools as this huge threat.
What was Kirk’s tour focused on accomplishing?
Kirk and others in the conservative youth movement want their followers to have a close relationship with them. This helps conservatives influence government and society, using college campuses to recruit young adults as conservative voters and activists, making the university appear less progressive in the process. Let’s say progressive college kids have Bernie Sanders or Che Guevara posters hanging in their dorm rooms.
Conservatives such as Kirk have built an all-encompassing, alternative world for young conservatives to become involved in, where they have proximity to political and thought leaders, including Kirk. Turning Point has used flashy slogans, signs and bumper stickers to help make conservatism cool on campus.
Kirk’s tour had just begun, but he had planned to make stops at universities in Colorado, Utah, Minnesota, Montana and New Hampshire (at Dartmouth College) and other states. It was important that Kirk himself was in the room with young people, and that they could ask him questions and talk with him. He was considered approachable in a way that most politicians would not be.
Conservatives have used this strategy for a long time. My own research shows how college students would write to conservative leaders such as Ronald Reagan and William F. Buckley Jr. in the 1960s and 1970s and these figures would write back. This kind of proximity between leaders and young supporters isn’t seen on the left. The goal is to cultivate a conservative movement community. Many of those conservative college students later worked for the government. Kirk’s tour was about continuing that kind of direct relationship between conservative leaders and young people.
Conservatives have a pipeline – meaning, let’s say you’re in high school and you discover conservative ideas by watching Charlie Kirk on YouTube. In college, you can go to Turning Point events and meet conservative leaders. After you graduate, you can even get a job with a conservative group through websites like ConservativeJobs.com. The point of the pipeline is to always give young conservatives a next step to becoming more involved in politics. While not everyone follows this pipeline, it helps the conservative movement cultivate new generations of talent. I think Kirk had a lot he was trying to accomplish, including building up a reservoir of young talent through Turning Point.
How is Turning Point distinct from the Republican Party and MAGA?
Turning Point isn’t the same as the Republican Party, but it’s helping to push the party further to the right. Turning Point has alienated other members of the conservative movement in certain ways. In 2018, the conservative youth group Young America’s Foundation accused Turning Point of taking over the conservative youth movement and crowding out other groups.
Turning Point’s total revenue has grown considerably in the last few years, topping US$85 million in 2024 – that matters because money and attention help Turning Point push out other conservative voices.
Kirk and Trump agreed on a lot of policy issues. Kirk used Turning Point to define conservatism on his terms and to defend Trump. Education is the bulk of Turning Point’s work, a continuation of what has historically also been been the most important cultural issue on the right since the 1960s.
Expressing loss
“Are You Staying for Me” (mixed media), by Jamel Robinson, in the group show “Do We Say Goodbye? Grief, Loss, and Mourning,’’ at Burlington (Vt.) City Arts, Sept. 26-Jan. 24
The gallery explains:
“Grief, loss, and mourning are universal experiences and integral to the human condition. Yet in today’s society, grief often remains a taboo, almost unmentionable subject. The ways we express loss, and the extent to which it is socially accepted, can stir unease, discomfort, and apprehension. Whether for those we love, a way of life, a sense of belonging, or an aspect of our identity, how we navigate grief profoundly shapes our physical and mental well-being.
“Working in photography, painting, video, and installation, exhibition artists convey both personal and collective encounters with grief as they interrogate themes of memory, empowerment, transition, and endurance. “Do We Say Goodbye?’’ challenges the finality of loss, inviting us to embrace grief as a shared yet deeply individual journey.’’
Prose beyond purple
“We dare not be original; our American Pine must be cut to the trim pattern of the English Yew, though the Pine bleed at every clip. This poet tunes his lyre at the harp of Goethe, Milton, Pope, or Tennyson. His songs might better be sung on the Rhine than the Kennebec.
“They are not American in form or feeling; they have not the breath of our air; the smell of our ground is not in them. Hence our poet seems cold and poor. He loves the old mythology; talks about Pluto—the Greek devil,—— the Fates and Furies—witches of old time in Greece,—-but would blush to use our mythology, or breathe the name in verse of our Devil, or our own Witches, lest he should be thought to believe what he wrote. The mother and sisters, who with many a pinch and pain sent the hopeful boy to college, must turn over the Classical Dictionary before they can find out what the youth would be at in his rhymes. Our Poet is not deep enough to see that Aphrodite came from the ordinary waters, that Homer only hitched into rhythm and furnished the accomplishment of verse to street talk, nursery tales, and old men’s gossip, in the Ionian towns; he thinks what is common is unclean. So he sings of Corinth and Athens, which he never saw, but has not a word to say of Boston, and Fall River, and Baltimore, and New York, which are just as meet for song. He raves of
Thermopylae and Marathon, with never a word for Lexington and Bunkerhill, for Cowpens, and Lundy’s Lane, and Bemis’s Heights. He loves to tell of the Ilyssus, of “smooth sliding Mincius, crowned with vocal reeds,” yet sings not of the Petapsco, the Susquehannah, the Aroostook, and the Willimantick. He prates of the narcissus, and the daisy, never of American dandelions and blue-eyed grass; he dwells on the lark and the nightingale, but has not a thought for the brown thrasher and the bobolink, who every morning in June rain down such showers of melody on his affected head.
What a lesson Burns teaches us addressing his “rough bur thistle,” his daisy, “wee crimson tippit thing,” and finding marvellous poetry in the mouse whose nest his plough turned over! Nay, how beautifully has even our sweet Poet sung of our own Green river, our waterfowl,of the blue and fringed gentian, the glory of autumnal days.”
― Massachussetts Quarterly Review, 1849
“Eschew the skylark and the nightingale, birds that Audubon never found. A national literature ought to be built, as the robin builds its nest, out of the twigs and straws of one's native meadows.”
― Van Wyck Brooks (1886-1963), in The Flowering of New England: 1815-1865
Metallic magic
Kenneth Snelson in 1968 with his “Needle Tower”.
Morrison Gallery, in Kent, Conn., is pleased to announce the representation of the estate of Kenneth Snelson.
The gallery says (slightly edited):
“Snelson (1927-2016) was originally an engineering student, and the forces of tension are fundamental to his sculptures, seemingly defying the laws of physics.
“Snelson was guided toward experimental architect and faculty member Buckminster Fuller by Josef Albers while attending the summer session at Black Mountain College, near Asheville, N.C. During his second summer session he presented an early kinetic model of plywood pieces suspended on over another by nylon tension lines, which Fuller translated into metal and exhibited as his own work.
“In 1964 Snelson was commissioned to create a major aerial piece measuring 30 by 35 feet for the World's Fair in New York. He went on to develop a specialty of airy public outdoor sculptures constructed of stainless steel and aluminum, which illustrate his theories of compression and tension. He held five United States patents, and in 1999 the International Sculpture Center presented him with the Lifetime Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award.’’
Beware ‘pure democracy’
An 1833 portrait of Noah Webster by James Herring.
Scrawl on concrete wall with the anarchist “A" symbol in Munich in 2022.
“In democracy…there are commonly tumults and disorders…. Therefore a pure democracy is generally a very bad government. It is often the most tyrannical government on earth; for a multitude is often rash, and will not hear reason.’’
— Noah Webster (1758-1843), Connecticut-based lexicographer, textbook pioneer, English-language spelling reformer, political writer and editor. Think Webster’s Dictionary
Two toxic pleasures
“Smoke Shop, Liquor Store’’ (watercolor), by Sonja Holmberg, at the Guild of Boston Artists’ “New England Regional Exhibition,’’ through Sept.27.
We live like ants
“Colony” (detail) (ink on paper), by Catherine Chalmers, in her current show at the Lamont Gallery, Exeter, N.H.
She says:
“We have compared ourselves to ants, in our stories and fables, for thousands of years. As our cities grow larger and humanity becomes a predominantly urban species, we live more and more like ants do. The features of city life—dense urban environments, frequent physical contact, fixed homes used day after day—have countless advantages, but as we have witnessed with the COVID- 19 pandemic, they make it much easier for disease to spread to all members of a society, whether anthropoid or arthropod.’’
Llewellyn King: The agony of statelessness
Stateless children at at the Schauenstein, Germany, displaced-persons camp in about 1946. There were millions of displaced and stateless people in Europe as World War II ended.
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
I have only known one stateless person. You don't get a medal for it or wear a lapel pin.
The stateless are the hapless who live in the shadows, in fear.
They don't know where the next misadventure will come from: It could be deportation, imprisonment or an enslavement of the kind the late Johnny Prokov suffered as a shipboard stowaway for seven years.
His story ended well, but few do.
When I knew Johnny, he was a revered bartender at the National Press Club in Washington. By then, he had American citizenship, was married and lived a normal life.
It hadn't always been that way. He told me that he had come from Dalmatia, when that area was so poor people took their clothes to a specialist who would kill the lice in the seams with a little wooden mallet, which wouldn't damage the cloth.
To escape that extreme poverty, Prokov became a stowaway on a ship.
So began his seven-year odyssey of exploitation and fear of violence. The captains took advantage of the free labor and total servitude of the stowaways.
Eventually, Prokov jumped ship in Mexico. He made his way to the United States, where a life worth living was available.
I don't know the details of how he became a citizen, but he dreamed the American dream — and it came true for him.
An odd legacy of his years at sea was that Prokov had become a brilliant chess player. He would often have as many as a dozen chess games going along the bar in the National Press Club. He always won. He had had time to practice.
The United Nations says there are 4 million stateless people in the world, but that is a massive undercount. Many of those who are stateless are refugees and have no idea if they are entitled to claim citizenship of the countries they are desperate to escape from. Citizenship in Gaza?
Now the Trump administration wants to add to the number of stateless people by denying birthright citizenship to children born of illegal immigrants in the United States.
It wants to deny people — who are in all ways Americans — their constitutional right of citizenship. Their lives will be lived on a lower rung than their friends and contemporaries. They will be denied passports, maybe education, possibly medical care, and the ability to emigrate to any country that otherwise might have received them.
Instead, they will live their lives in the shadows, children of a lesser God, probably destined to have children of their own who might also be deemed noncitizens. They didn't choose the womb that bore them, nor did they sanction the actions of their parents.
The world is awash in refugees fleeing war, crime and violence, and environmental collapse. Those desperate people will seek refuge in countries which can't absorb them and will take strong actions to keep them out, as have the United States and, increasingly, countries in Europe.
There is a point, particularly in Europe, where the culture, including established religion, is threatened by different cultures and clashing religions.
But when it comes to children born in America to mothers who live in America, why mint a new class of stateless people, condemned to a second-class life here, or deport them to some country, such as Rwanda or Uganda, where its own people are already living in abject poverty?
All immigrants can't be accommodated, but the cruelty that now passes for policy is hurtful to those who have worked hard and dared to seek a better life for themselves and their children.
It is bad enough that millions of people are seeking somewhere to live and perchance a better life, due to war or crime or drought or political follies.
To extend the numbers by denying citizenship to the children of parents who live and work here isn't good policy. It is also unconstitutional.
If the Supreme Court rules in favor of the administration, it will add social instability of haunting proportions.
Children are proud of their native lands. What will the new second class be proud of — the home that denied them?
On X: @llewellynking2
Llewellyn King, based in Rhode Island, is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS, and an international energy-sector consultant.
Nice idea, for someplace
“The MacDonald boys playing golf,’’ attributed to William Mosman, 18th Century, at National Galleries of Scotland.
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
To no one’s surprise, the Westerly (R.I) Planning Board, now backed by a state court decision, rejected Winn Properties’ proposal to create a 2,300-unit housing project to replace the well-known 18-hole Winnapaug Country Club; some 30 percent are supposed to fall under that oft-nebulous term “affordable’’.
Of course, most Westerly folks back the idea of affordable housing – somewhere. But the proposed project would be mighty big for the town of about 23,000, which has a lot of rich people, many of them seasonal and most near or along water, as is the golf course. The richest are in the Watch Hill section. And rich people generally don’t want poorer, let alone truly poor, people near them. Further, they pay big piles of property taxes, drawing the affectionate attention of local officials.
One reason that foes presented for opposing the project was fear of pollution into Winnapaug Pond. But most golf courses, for all their verdant beauty, are sources of much pollution from fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides.
In any event, I wouldn’t be surprised if the golf course eventually becomes a development of McMansions and/or some big resort spa. Maybe with a nine-hole course to aid marketing.
Still looking back
“I Carry It With Me,’’ by Pr0vidence-based Georgia native Becci Davis, in her show “Bloodstone + Home,’’ at Jamestown (R.I.) Arts Center through Nov. 8
— Image courtesy of Jamestown Arts Center
The arts center explains:
“Through a layered and striking ‘collage aesthetic,’ Davis explores her own ancestral history and, she says, documents the contradiction between the natural beauty that her ancestral land bares and the architectural beauty of historic monumental buildings built by the labor of slaves. This exhibition is shown in tandem with ‘Bohemian Ossuary,’ by artist D.S. Kinsel.’’
Chris Powell: Raising Conn. minimum wager is an expression of failure
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Gov. Ned Lamont, Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz, and state Labor Commissioner Dante Bartolomeo last week announced gleefully that Connecticut's minimum wage will increase on Jan. 1 by 3.6%, from $16.35 to $16.94 an hour, being tied by state law to the federal employment cost index. The justifications they offered were not persuasive. Indeed, they were based on false premises.
“Nobody who works full-time should have to live in poverty," the governor said, as if working full-time necessarily has some connection to the monetary value of the work.
All honest work may be honorable, but menial work -- work that can be done by anyone -- is not worth $16.94 an hour if someone can be found to do it for less. The minimum wage is government's idea of what menial work should be worth in an ideal world, an aspiration -- well-meaning in some cases, perhaps, but mostly just government's striking a pose about its own goodness.
The governor's statement about not living in poverty is just liberal blather, especially in Connecticut, as the governor should know well. That $16.94 per hour is $654 a week, even as social-work and economic research groups long have calculated that to live decently in Connecticut a single person needs an income of at least three times as much.
The governor's economic principle about the minimum wage is no more meaningful than everyone else's principle that it shouldn't rain on weekends.
Despite the minimum-wage increase, tens of thousands of people in Connecticut will keep working for pay well above minimum wage while still living in or on the edge of poverty. Part of it will be their own fault, their living beyond their means, and part of it the government's.
Lt. Gov. Bysiewicz did no better. “The minimum wage," she said, “was established to provide a fair, livable baseline of income for those who work." The lieutenant governor's pay, about $190,000 a year, is 5½ times more than Connecticut's new full-time minimum-wage salary, $34,000. If she ever did the numbers seriously, how fair and livable would minimum wage sound to her?
Bysiewicz added, “This is a fair, gradual increase for workers that ensures that as the economy grows, our minimum wage grows with it -- and that's good for everyone."
Except that the economy really isn't growing much at all. What's growing is mainly inflation, the devaluation of the money that workers earn.
At least Commissioner Bartolomeo approached this point. Raising the minimum wage, she said, “helps protect the most vulnerable earners from inflation and cost increases, and helps keeps wage gaps from widening."
Hardly. Inflation long has been underreported by the federal government, with price criteria frequently revised in the hope that people wouldn't believe the evidence of their own lives, the decline in their standard of living. Most of those voting in the last election seem to have stopped believing official inflation data. And even liberals in Connecticut acknowledge that the wage gap keeps widening.
The minimum wage was never meant to be fully supportive for a single person. It functioned as a standard of entry-level pay for the unskilled, especially teenagers, so people wouldn't be too demoralized by their first jobs and would strive to gain skills and advance.
Today in Connecticut the need for a minimum-wage increase is mainly political -- to camouflage the declining skill level of much of the workforce, the fatherless urban underclass -- the increasing numbers of young people who attend schools without standards and graduate uneducated but who, it is hoped, remain full of self-esteem.
Connecticut has tens of thousands of job openings -- for skilled workers -- in manufacturing, nursing, teaching, and other fields, jobs that pay far above minimum wage, for which enough qualified applicants can't be found.
Raising the minimum wage is actually a proclamation that Connecticut has given up on a skilled workforce, a proclamation that the jobs of the state's future will be at the fast-food window -- until the robots take over.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
Bycatching by ocean fishermen may imperil river herring stocks
Alewife species of river herring.
Excerpted and edited from an article by Colleen Cronin in ecoRI News. Picture above is from elsewhere.
“River herring, both the blueback and alewife species found in Rhode Island, are diadromous fish, meaning they spawn in freshwater but live their adult lives in the ocean.
“A foundational species, river herring sit at the bottom of the aquatic food chain, helping to feed larger animals like striped bass and osprey. In past generations, they swam up many New England rivers in the millions, providing a source of food and income for locals; herring are considered an important food in Narragansett culture.
“Efforts to improve their spawning habitat have brought the fish back to environments they haven’t lived in since before the Industrial Revolution. However, experts and stakeholders who spoke with ecoRI News said that what’s happening to river herring when they’re in the ocean has a huge and potentially negative impact on their survival: bycatch.’’
Abstractly granular
“Sylvia (Spring, Rocks, and Daffodils)” (acrylic paint over aquatint, with scraping, printed in dark-gray ink on wove paper) in the show “Altered States: The Etchings of Richard Pousette-Dart,’’ at the New Britain (Conn.)Museum of American Art, through next April 26.
The museum says:
“First-generation Abstract Expressionist artist Richard Pousette-Dart (1916–1992) excelled in a wide variety of media, including painting, drawing, sculpture, and photography. In 1979, he embarked on an extraordinary foray into printmaking, afforded by the opportunity to work with traditional etching techniques and tools at the Rockland Foundation, near his home and studio in Suffern, New York. By this time, his dense and complex abstract compositions of the 1940s and 1950s had transitioned to all-over fields composed of small gestures and marks, often organized around a central geometric or organic shape.’’
‘Place and displacement’
Work by Mike Howat, in his show “Home, Disassambled,’’ at AVA Gallery and Art Center, Lebanon, N.H., through Sept. 27
The gallery explains that the show “explores the meanings of home, place and displacement. Through his work, Howat uses architectural forms as a framework to delve into both personal and collective narratives. He is particularly interested in how built environments reflect their inhabitants and how buildings become records of those who occupy them.’’