Too hot not to cool down
"But now in September the garden has cooled, and with it my possessiveness. The sun warms my back instead of beating on my head ... The harvest has dwindled, and I have grown apart from the intense midsummer relationship that brought it on."
-- Robert Finch
Robert Whitcomb: Banned and enjoyed in Boston
Scollay Square, Boston, in the late 19th Century. The neighborhood was a center of "sin'' for many decades. The square is long gone.
A version of this first ran in The Boston Guardian
Wicked Victorian Boston, by Robert Wilhelm (History Press, $21.99)
In this entertaining and well-illustrated, if sometimes repetitive, anecdotal survey of “vice’’ and efforts to control it in mid- and late 19th-Century Boston, Mr. Wilhelm looks at how the remnants of Puritan Boston sought to suppress the widespread prostitution, drunkenness, drug abuse, gambling and occasional murder and mayhem that you'd find in any large American city of that time – and ours.
All this titillated residents of other, more, er, relaxed cities given Boston’s reputation for straight-backed rectitude, which wentback to the 17th Century.
The author tries to put the behavior in the context of the city’s rapidly changing ethnic and socio-economic environment. For instance: “The changing ethnic complexion of Boston in the Victorian era was also altering the nature of vice in the city. The rapid influx of Irish immigrants was disconcerting for the old Yankees; they despaired at the newcomers’ fondness for hard drink and gambling and feared that the Catholic newcomers would owe their first allegiance to the pope….’’
But some members of the Yankee community, both Brahmins and middle class, also enthusiastically participated in the sin community, as “young debutantes dabbled in pornography; civic leaders were sued for domestic abuse and {mostly Protestant} clergymen were charged with adultery.’’
Mr. Wilhelm often focuses on such centers of sin and iniquity as “The Black Sea,’’ along the waterfront, and later, the West End. In these places illegal gambling, prostitution, drunks, violence and con men were thick on the ground. Later on, a thriving Chinatown offered such new services as opium dens. Gambling activities included such ghastly spectator “sports’’ as betting on how many rats a dog could kill in a “rat pit’’. Meanwhile, the “third tier’’ of theaters became venues for prostitution. Even such seemingly innocent (if bizarre) sporting events as “pedestrian races’’ would be tinctured with corruption.
Then there were such scams as spiritualists promising access to the dead and quack “doctors’’ selling their services to the gullible. I particularly enjoyed reading about the latter professionals, who provided “oxygenized air’’ (nitrous oxide) for all matter of ailments.
To confront the perceived moral collapse were such anti-vice crusaders as the Methodist minister Henry Morgan and the wonderfully named New England Society for the Suppression of Vice, later to be called the Watch and Ward Society. But, as Mr. Wilhelm writes, that “{The} lines of morality were becoming blurred, and social standing was not a solid indicator of righteous behavior’’ made the war more difficult to wage. (When and where was social standing a “solid indicator of righteous behavior”?)
The anti-vice community succeeded in driving some gambling establishments and brothels out of business, and temperance organizations, in which women had major roles, succeeded in closing some of the worst saloons. Still, human nature remained human nature and new criminal enterprises arose as Boston entered the 20th Century, especially what we now call “organized crime’’.
Now that Boston has become a much more secular and international city these battles over morality seem rather quaint.
Robert Whitcomb is editor of New England Diary and president of the board of Guard Dog Media, which owns The Boston Guardian.
Giving at the 'giving meter'
A "giving meter'' in Atlanta.
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary,'' at GoLocal24.com
The City of Providence will install 10 “giving meters’’ in the city where people can make donations to assist people who need housing and other help. The meters seem particularly aimed at trying to help get panhandlers off the streets via expanding social-service programs for them. A new agency called the PVD Gives Commission will oversee the distribution of the gifts. Giving meters are being tried in a number of cities across America.
I doubt if the program will raise much money or that we’ll see a sharp drop in panhandling. Most of the street beggars have mental-illness and/or alcohol and other drug problems and tend to be resistant to being helped. And some may even find panhandling to be more lucrative than other jobs. Still, just the existence of the meters may encourage people in the city to be kinder. Will these meters offer paper receipts that donors can use for tax deductions?
Joint human-insect anxiety
"It is the air of urgency which strikes a responsive chord in me when I see him (a wooly caterpillar} on a garden path in late September. His consciousness, if any, must be dim. He cannot know why he is in a hurry, only that he is. But I recognize in myself a similar vague uneasiness. My preparations for the winter have been made.....But the confidence of summer has imperceptibly faded. Something impends.
"When I was a boy I used to attribute this feelings of uneasiness to the knowledge that I would be going unwillingly to school again. As a matter of fact, I still have to do just that, and perhaps this is part of the reason why something within me begins to grow tense. But it is certainly no more than a factor or even a rationalization. Isia isabella (wooly caterpillar} and I know in our nerves and our muscles that something pretty drastic is going to happen and we are not sure that the most we can do about will be enough.''
'Basic interactions'
"Multicolor Installation'' (painted steel), by Carolina Sardi, in her show at the Lanoue Gallery, Boston, through Oct. 15. She says: "My art is my way of expressing my world vision. I try to convey maximum information in the most minimal but essential forms. Although I work mainly with steel, my sculptures and installations have an organic sensibility that reflects my interest in the basic interactions of life. The reference to geometry, natural shapes and the use of positive and negative spaces are a response to my search for a balance between opposites."
'You get used to it'
"I conversed with a young lobster fisherman who gets up at 5in the morning and is home again from the sea at 3 in the afternoon. I asked him if he liked lobstering. 'You get used to it,' was his reply.''
-- Earl Thollander, in Back Roads of New England.
Incidentally
"Balance'' (spackle, paper pencil and canvas on three panels), by Julie S. Graham, in her show "Incidental Matters,'' at Kingston Gallery, Boston, Oct. 4-29. She likes to use unlikely color, geometric and materials combinations to evoke the strange connections in our incomprehensibe world.
Still, in many ways the best month
1940 WPA poster.
"The leaves of brown came tumblin' down, remember
In September in the rain
The sun went out just like a dying ember
That September in the rain.''
From the song "September in the Rain,'' by Harry Warren and Al Dubin. To hear it, hit this link.
New England hill country shopping areas
The main drag of the resort town of Lincoln, N.H.
-- Photo by P199
''When we look at the economic character of the New England hill country today, we see that one of the best ways of breaking the region into separate sections is to see the kind of communities in which one finds the larger shopping areas, with the nationally known supermarkets and chain stores. Categorized in this way, the New England hill country falls roughly into three regions: south, middle and north. In the southernmost region, it is the factory and mills towns which contain the active business centers. In the middle region, agricultural towns, with their grain towers and rail sidings, are where the larger stores serve the local population. Farthest north, the upper region concentrates its metropolises around resort areas and wood-product mills.''
-- From Mountain New England: Life Past and Present, by William F. Robinson (1988)
Sam Pizzigati: Retailers connive to tighten screws on public-school budgets
"The Old Beggar,'' by Lewis Dewis.
Via OtherWords.org
Back to school! These three simple words used to leave America’s public-school teachers giddy with anticipation. Now they leave them opening up their wallets and worrying.
The problem? Teachers have been spending out of their own pockets for generations to decorate their classrooms and the like. Now many have to spend their own money for basic school supplies — everything from pens and pencils to cleaning supplies.
One national study last year by Scholastic and YouGov found teachers spending an average of $530 a year on classroom supplies. The number of teachers who spend over $1,000 out of pocket, adds a National School Supply and Equipment Association report, has doubled.
In Oklahoma, third grade teacher Teresa Danks has been spending $2,000 annually of her own money. Earlier this summer, with her school district facing a $10 million budget cut, Danks actually started panhandling. She took to a busy street corner with a simple hand-made sign: “Teacher Needs School Supplies! Anything Helps.”)
Many passers-by did help. But the fiscal squeeze on America’s public-school budgets and teacher wallets is now threatening to get even worse.
That’s because big-box retail giants — the very stores where many teachers go to buy school supplies — have unleashed a fierce lawsuit offensive to significantly lower their local property- tax bills.
Property taxes remain, in most of the country, the single most pivotal source of local public school funding. If corporate retail powers like Home Depot and Target succeed in their new greed grab, the state comptroller in Texas recently warned, local public schools in his state alone would lose $1.2 billion annually, with another $703 million in school funding lost from the state level.
Our top big-boxers are flourishing: Home Depot profits last year jumped nearly 14 percent to $8 billion. And Home Depot CEO Craig Menear took home $11.5 million.
So on what grounds should the big-box boys be taxed less? Retail CEOs, Education Week reports, are having their lawyers make the astonishingly audacious argument that “the massive stores they operate ought to be appraised as if they were vacant.”
This ridiculous “dark store theory” has been winning lawsuits in Michigan, Indiana and Wisconsin, and school districts in the Midwest have already lost millions of dollars in revenue. In some cases, court rulings have actually forced local governments to reimburse big-box retailers for the higher property taxes they’ve already paid.
The new attack on local public-school funding isn’t just coming from brick-and-mortar retailers. Amazon, the online retail king, is taking new steps to avoid taxes, too.
Amazon now collects sales taxes on the goods consumers buy online in states that impose them.But Amazon is only collecting taxes on about half the goods that people who click onto Amazon itself buy. The half of sales that go through the third-party vendors that the Amazon site spotlights go untaxed.d.
The State of South Carolina is demanding that Amazon end this tax avoidance. Amazon is disputing the South Carolina claim, and the case is going to the courts. All the big online retailers will be watching closely. A South Carolina victory could mean higher tax revenue nationwide from big online retailers.
All these big-time retailers can afford to pay higher taxes. Our biggest retail empires, after all, have already made their emperors into some of the world’s richest people. The chief executive of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, now holds the third-largest individual fortune in the world.
Panhandling Oklahoma teacher Teresa Danks says she’s “tired of not having enough funding for our classrooms but being expected to always make it happen.”
The super rich who run retail in America could ease that fatigue. They could start paying their taxes.
Sam Pizzigati, an Institute for Policy Studies associate fellow, co-edits inequality.org.
'Out-of-body transformation'
Work by Anne Lilly, in her joint show "Stillness,'' with Phyllis Berman, at Room 83 Spring, Watertown, Mass., Sept. 9-Oct. 28.
The gallery says: "Kinetic sculptor Anne Lilly uses carefully engineered motion to shift and manipulate our perceptions of time, space and energy. Her steel sculptures move you. Sit across from someone with the tall mirrors ... moving slowly back and forth between you, and experience an out-of-body transformation as you morph into the other person and back into yourself. Anne’s work crosses the line between art and science.''
Put parking garages underwater?
From Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary,'' in GoLocal24.com
Building underwater parking garages might be a partial answer to the parking problems of coastal cities, such as Boston and Providence. An Aug. 22 Boston Globe story, “Could underwater garages solve Boston’s parking shortage?’’ noted that underwater parking garages “have been built, or are in the midst of being built, in at least three cities: Amsterdam, Copenhagen, and Geneva.’’
The Globe went on: “In a city like Boston, where the most parking-starved areas are surrounded by water, the payoff could be significant: helping to reduce the pollution and traffic caused by drivers circling the block hunting for spots, making parking more affordable, and freeing up more street-level space for other uses.’’
Much of tight little downtown Providence is virtually at sea level and would seem a good candidate for such garages. It might seem an eccentric idea, but so did moving the rivers and Route 195 when those huge projects were first proposed.
'Into the apparitions of the sky'
"I saw the spiders marching through the air,
Swimming from tree to tree that mildewed day
In latter August when the hay
Came creaking to the barn. But where
The wind is westerly,
Where gnarled November makes the spiders fly
Into the apparitions of the sky,
They purpose nothing but their ease and die''
-- From"Mr. Edwards and the Spider,'' by Robert Lowell
Don Pesci: Connecticut's confused moralists
Lincoln quoting Jefferson: “I tremble for my country when I remember that God is just!'’
During his political career, which spans four decades, Connecticut U.S. Sen. Dick Blumenthal has been storming moral mounts and shaking his fists at the gods. At some point, the gods of Western morality may respond.
Blumenthal’s reaction to American Nazis in Charlottesville was commendable and necessary; in any denunciation of Nazism, there must be no ambiguity – no moral confusion. There are indeed degrees of evil in the world. The bank robber who murders a teller commits a greater evil than the bank robber who simply robs a bank.
However, using the greater evil to excuse the lesser cannot be defended on moral grounds. The Antifa movement, like the American Nazi movement and the KKK, uses violence as a means of moral suasion. The Nazis and the members of the KKK who hijacked a protest over an attempt to remove a statute of Robert E. Lee from a park in Charlottesville should have been unreservedly condemned for who they are by all people whose moral sense is not impaired by political considerations.
These two groups have been with us a long time; we know them, and we should not pretend to forget or forgive the unrepented sins of their dark past. Both groups have bathed in blood up to their knees. The anti-black, anti-Semite, anti-Catholic KKK used to hang or terrorize its victims; these days, they are content to defame and rouse public opinion against them. German Nazis persecuted and murdered Jews; these days, American Nazis accuse Jews, who they falsely believe are animated by anti-patriotic globalist pretensions, of capitalist greed. The shadow of Buchenwald falls over all of this, and although David Duke is not Himmler – because there are differences in moral degrees of evil -- the seeds of the greater evil are sown in the ground of the lesser evil.
The Antifa movement – so called anti-fascists who have adopted the Stormtrooper tactics of Fascists -- should be roundly denounced for who they are by those who regularly storm moral mounts and shake their fists at the gods whenever television cameras are rolling. The Antifa movement has long been infiltrated by anarchists; in the anarchist dystopia, such senators as Blumenthal would be unnecessary excrescences.
Even for those who agree there is a moral order of greater and lesser evils, Blumenthal’s too ardent support of the more indefensible practices of Planned Parenthood is difficult to justify on moral grounds. Blumenthal's position on late term abortions, Orthodox Jews would say, is morally indefensible. Even a Reform Jew like Blumenthal may be uncomfortable with the killing of nearly born babies and the selling of their body parts to doctors, a process, some may think, that comes uncomfortably close to morally noxious Nazi practices?
The moral position on abortion – most especially partial birth abortion -- of 3rd District Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro also is confusing, which is why, she laments in her recent book, “The Least Among Us: Waging the Battle for the Vulnerable,” her bishop removed her as a trustee of her Catholic High School. Scandal in the Catholic Church is synonymous with sowing moral discord in the minds of Catholics. And Catholics who are public figures, so long as they remain in the faith, have a moral duty to maintain Catholic religious convictions in a morally confused universe. If they break with their Church on important matters of doctrine, a devil word in the modern period, they cannot maintain communion with the believing church, lay or clerical.
Of course, DeLauro has little use for bishops and little understanding of the historic opposition of her Church to the grave sin of abortion. She believes as a professing Catholic -- “My faith has always been important to me…” – that abortion has, within her Church, completely taken over “the conversation on faith in politics.” And she is inching toward a wholly indefensible moral position that important moral issues should be decided by the state, not bishops or rabbis.
DeLauro seems unaware that Catholic opposition to abortion and infanticide during Imperial Rome was the lever that freed women from a crushing paternalism in which the paterfamilias of a Roman family exercised complete dominion over the life and death of his unborn and born children. Abortion, infanticide and euthanasia, not uncommon in the Roman Empire, are becoming more common in the Western world as Christian perceptions are replaced by a morally neutral secularism, both in Europe and America.
The modern notion of human equality, unknown in the Roman Republic, descends from Biblical doctrine: “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus (Galatians 3:28).” And the highly romantic notion of the love of children also has its roots in Christian faith, “But Jesus said, suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 19:14).”
In Heaven, one hopes, abortion is frowned upon, as it is among bishops in DeLauro’s church. There, one hopes, Nazism, Klu-Kluxery, Antifa fascism and anarchism will not gain a foothold. Here below, the usual strife continues. Flawed moralists continue to belch fire from their secular pulpits. Medical practitioners, unbound by the Hippocratic oath – noxamvero et maleficium propulsabo: “I will utterly reject harm and mischief”— perform partial birth abortions, after which dismembered baby parts are auctioned off, while politicians, wrapping themselves in moral mantels, wink behind the curtain.
Not a church going man, Abraham Lincoln, quoted from Thomas Jefferson, not a church going man, in his Columbus, Ohio, debate with Steven Douglas: “… there was once in this country a man by the name of Thomas Jefferson, supposed to be a Democrat -- a man whose principles and policy are not very prevalent amongst Democrats today, it is true; but that man did not take exactly this view of the insignificance of the element of slavery which our friend Judge Douglas does. In contemplation of this thing, we all know he was led to exclaim, 'I tremble for my country when I remember that God is just!' … He supposed there was a question of God's eternal justice wrapped up in the enslaving of any race of men, or any man, and that those who did so braved the arm of Jehovah -- that when a nation thus dared the Almighty every friend of that nation had cause to dread His wrath. Choose ye between Jefferson and Douglas as to what is the true view of this element among us.”
Lincoln’s audience applauded this sentiment of a frail man leaning for support upon the crutch of an eternal truth. How often, we should ask, do the political heirs of Lincoln and Jefferson tremble when they consider that God is just?
Don Pesci is a Vernon, Conn.-based essayist.
Endless challenge
"Red Cross Serving the Children of the World'' (oil on canvas, 1942), by Frederick Sands Brunner, at the National Museum of American Illustration, Newport. Image courtesy, American Illustrator's Gallery Archives.
William Morgan: R.I. celebrates the tacky
Rhode Island's newest specialty license plate is yet another instance of the state's inability to put forth a decorous image. No wonder that Rhode Island keeps faltering at trying to sell itself as a tourist destination and a place to do business.
Perhaps the parade in Bristol is America's oldest Fourth of July celebration. So what? (This silly plate reminds me of one of my favorite instances of pathetic local boosterism. As you enter Mitchell, Ind., a sign declares: "Welcome to Mitchell. Home of the Mitchell Bees. State Basketball Championship Runner-ups 1948''. Or to echo the 1969 Peggy Lee ballad, "Is That All There Is?'')
American independence is, however, something to celebrate. Despite ongoing unhappiness with Thomas Jefferson because was a slaveholder, the Declaration of Independence, of which he was the chief author, changed the world positively forever. Why not remember that document and the events it spawned as the zenith of the Enlightenment? Instead, Rhode Island commemorates a parade in only one of its 39 towns.
Could we have come up with a license plate that did not look like the cheapest sort of political bumper sticker, another "patriotic" pimping of Old Glory?
As a design, the plate is as silly as it is illegible. Why add the impossibly small drum with crossed flags (the simple graphic clarity of the Rhode Island Regiment's flag might have served as a template for the overall design)?
The waving field of stars and stripes is simply a distracting mess, while what are presumably fireworks explosions seems to have been borrowed from Maryland's equally dreadful War of 1812 commemorative plate. Never mind that a disastrous, unnecessary war that we lost (Fort McHenry did not fall, but Washington was burned) is the object of identifying motor vehicles boggles the mind. What’s next: a Vietnam War plate? (Its motto might be the legend I saw on a soldier's jacket in 1968: When I die I am going to heaven, because I have already been to hell: Vietnam.)
Official Rhode Island needs to stop trying so hard. With license plates, as with most aspects of our image, simple is best.
William Morgan is an architectural historian, based in Providence. He has written about license plate design for such publications as the Hartford Courant and Slate.
Lost in the goldenrod
Oak Grove Cemetery, in Falmouth, Mass., where Katherine Lee Bates is buried.
Beside the country road with truant grace
Wild carrot lifts its circles of white lace.
From vines whose interwoven branches drape
The old stone walls, come pungent scents of grape.
The sumach torches burn; the hardhack glows;
From off the pines a healing fragrance blows;
The pallid Indian pipe of ghostly kin
Listens in vain for stealthy moccasin.
In pensive mood a faded robin sings;
A butterfly with dusky, gold-flecked wings
Holds court for plumy dandelion seed
And thistledown, on throne of fireweed.
The road goes loitering on, till it hath missed
Its way in goldenrod, to keep a tryst,
Beyond the mosses and the ferns that veil
The last faint lines of its forgotten trail,
With Lonely Lake, so crystal clear that one
May see its bottom sparkling in the sun
With many-colored stones. The only stir
On its green banks is of the kingfisher
Dipping for prey, but oft, these haunted nights,
That mirror shivers into dazzling lights,
Cleft by a falling star, a messenger
From some bright battle lost, Excalibur.
-- "In August,'' by Katherine Lee Bates, a native of Falmouth, Mass., who also wrote the lyrics for "America the Beautiful.''
Tim Faulkner: A confusing set of energy proposals for Somerset, Mass.
Via ecoRI News (ecori.org)
SOMERSET, Mass.
A massive new energy project is being proposed for the former coal-burning Brayton Point Power Station and the Montaup Power Plant, a long-shuttered coal facility along the west bank of the Taunton River. Both facilities are in Somerset.
During a muddled and at times rambling presentation on Aug. 23, a collection of energy developers outlined solar, biomass, fuel-cell and natural-gas projects with the potential to generate more than 2 gigawatts of electricity from the two locations. By contrast, recently closed Brayton Point had 1,611 megawatts of energy capacity.
The overall project, proposed by GSXI International Group, of Houston, is far from approved. The only agreement, so far, is a long-term contract to buy wood pellets from central Texas to fuel a biomass plant. The pellets would be shipped from Texas to Somerset via cargo ship. The town Economic Development Committee hosted the meeting as a public-information event.
The proposals presented conflicting data, but gave a rough outline of the scope of each project, which would be built in three phases. The biomass plant generated the most scrutiny, and about 20 protestors and several local environmental groups rallied outside the public library before the meeting.
Dubbed the Freedom Green Energy Biomass Project, the wood-fired plant is projected to generate between 400 and 1,000 megawatts by using the moth-balled coal boilers at Brayton Point. In a surprise twist, the power facility wouldn't burn the Texas wood pellets, but instead decompose the pellets and burn the emitted gases.
Skeptical residents wanted to know about pollution from emissions. Nilan Pillia, an engineer with GSXI, repeatedly promised that the energy process would generate no harmful pollutants. He couldn't cite any research, nor name a “syn-gas” facility that is already operating. Pillia could only say he’d worked on similar projects in Canada and Australia.
“There is no environmental risks. I can send you the reports,” Pillia said. “It is cleaner than natural gas, it is cleaner than coal.”
According to one of Pillia's charts, the biomass plant would also burn food scrap, animal waste and leaf and yard waste.
As the audience tried to grasp the unconventional power concept, the meeting shifted to a presentation on solar energy. Details were again sparse, but Seth Mansur, of Intelligen Energy of Worcester, described a 5-to-10-megawatt project comprised of solar carports and rooftop arrays combined with a residential discount program.
The presentation then pivoted to the hydrogen fuel-cell proposal. The audience expected to hear about hydroelectric power. However, Edgar Caballero, of Carter Energy Solutions, outlined a fuel-cell system that runs on hydrogen and raw sewage or seawater. The project would likely draw water from Mount Hope Bay, according to Caballero. Only carbon dioxide and drinkable water are the byproducts, he said. Although there are several companies developing full-cell energy, there are no industrial-scale power plants.
Caballero disputed the financial payout of residential solar power and touted the subsidy-free benefits of fuel cells. The costs to produce the energy from fuel cells is similar to the cost of generating power from natural gas, he said.
“It’s absolutely perfect, meaning zero emissions,” Caballero said, without addressing the amount of carbon dioxide emissions.
Caballaro explained that the competing hydrogen fuel cells are too expensive to turn a profit, but Carter is using a new, cost-effective 250-megawatt systems from German-based Langenburg Technologies.
In all, the combination of power projects promises 300 to 400 local jobs and $20 million in tax revenue. GSXI said it hopes to buy the Brayton Point site from Dynegy for $15 million. The projects would be built in three phases and cost $800 million.
After the meeting, Sylvia Broude, executive director of the Boston-based Toxics Action Center, said the presentation was shoddy and left her with more questions than answers.
"I continue to be very skeptical that they have a plan that could become a reality for Somerset," she said.
The Brayton Point Power Station operated for 54 years before ceasing operations on May 31. At the time, it was the largest and highest polluting power plant in New England.
The Montaup Power Plant closed Jan. 1, 2010. The 38-acre site has been considered for a number of industrial and commercial uses since its retirement.
Tim Faulkner writes for ecoRI News.