James P. Freeman: Mass. in '15: A state of hope and (fiscal) peril
It is right there
Betwixt and between
The orchard bare
And the orchard green
— Robert Frost from “Peril of Hope”
With an eerie prescience, the Jan. 9, 2015, front page of The Boston Globe captured perfectly the mixture of fear and anticipation associated with the hope a new year brings. Two headlines above the fold – “Boston picked to bid for Olympics” and “Baker promises firm fixes, sensitive touch” – would set the tone for 2015 in Greater Boston.
Boston 2024 Partnership, the consortium of business and political interests (so-called “thought leaders”) to bring the 2024 summer Olympic games to The Hub, underestimated Bostonians’ capacity for common sense and overestimated Bostonians’ tolerance for large municipal projects. (Didn’t anyone remind planners of the Big Dig experience?) Residents rightly feared costs would be socialized and any profits would be privatized by special interests. The bid was rescinded in July.
Charlie Baker was sworn in as Massachusetts’ 72nd governor within hours of the Olympic announcement. No politician campaigned on the Olympics but it consumed precious time and energy from more mundane and serious matters, such as the opioid emergency, which rages on unabated (1,256 people – likely more this year – fatally overdosed in Massachusetts in 2014). Alarmingly, more people die in Massachusetts from overdoses than from car crashes.
Boston broke the record for snowiest winter on record, with 108.6 inches. But the MBTA was broken long before 2015 from decades of incompetent government oversight. With melting irony, man could not make the trains run during the blizzards but a train actually ran without a man this December in Braintree, due to “operator error.” Baker must restore the entire system to ensure a second term.
The New England Patriots earned their fourth Super Bowl championship in February, amidst the faux-scandal of Deflategate (which is now being taught as a class at University of New Hampshire). A federal judge determined that the NFL went too far in suspending quarterback Tom Brady. In May, some suggested that Salem State University went too far in paying him $170,000 for a one hour “lecture.” But don’t tell that to the local media, which cover the team by way of sports jingoism, not journalism.
It took a jury in April nearly 26 minutes just to read the “guilty” verdict on all 30 counts against unrepentant terrorist Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, in the Boston Marathon bombing trial.
Irish rockers U2, who lived through the terror of “The Troubles,” charmed the town with four sold-out concerts this summer, as “#BostonStrong” was featured prominently on a massive vidi-wall during their encores.
Pedro Martinez was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame and David Ortiz announced this post season he would retire in 2016. Their recognition and retirement mark the perilous end of an era of Boston baseball dominance. Perhaps no other players were better catalysts of hope for a despondent Red Sox Nation before 2004.
Two films about Boston’s ugly underbelly proved to be, in many respects, largely for Boston; another cathartic exercise in order to exorcise criminality. “Spotlight” chronicled the unspeakable and unimaginable clergy sex abuse cover up, and “Black Mass” showcased Whitey Bulger. Each affirmed that evil can reside both in men of the cloth and the cleaver.
After nearly a century, Cambridge-based Converse unveiled the long-awaited Chuck Taylor II sneakers.
After 20 years since the first charter school was opened in Massachusetts, with some municipalities having reached their quotas, many want a reset, a Charter 2.0.
Atty. Gen. Maura Healey, prodigal progressive, concluded that more regulation (of course) would be best for Boston-based fantasy sports league website DraftKings (and FanDuel). But former Gov. Deval Patrick, promiscuous progressive, discovered free enterprise by joining the investment firm Bain Capital.
In November, the financial news Web site 247wallst.com ranked Massachusetts as the best place to live among the 50 states. General Electric thinks so, as it imagines what a world headquarters might look like in Boston as it contemplates relocation from Connecticut for lower taxes and closer proximity to the area’s innovation ecosystem.
This autumn, the Oxford Dictionaries determined that its word of the year was, in fact, not a word, but a pictograph. The “Face with Tears of Joy” emoji according to Oxford lexicographers, “best reflected the ethos, mood and preoccupation of 2015.”
In retrospect, then, Frost got it partially right. Time — and 2015 — might best be defined as an alloy of peril and hope.
James P. Freeman is a New England-based writer and a former Cape Cod Times columnist. This comes via the courtesy of The New Boston Post.
For some of his previous columns, read:
- See more at: http://newbostonpost.com/2015/12/30/the-year-2015-and-the-peril-of-hope/#sthash.VrgyiQQu.dpuf
That green and fuzzy feeling
"Marsh Wake,'' by JOAN COLLINS, in the photo show "Shutters,'' at the South Shore Art Center, Cohasset, Mass., Jan. 8-Feb. 21.
These marshes, on the edge of which I grew up, were so lovely and yet so smelly.
Emily Schwartz Greco: Congress's strange energy bill
As lawmakers scurried to keep the government open and head home for the holidays, they wrapped spending and tax deals into a costly measure that highlighted our nation’s mismatched energy policies.
Specifically, this monster bill extended and restored tax incentives for wind and solar power while lifting a ban on crude-oil exports that began during Jimmy Carter’s presidency.
On the one hand, the private sector can keep generating a growing share of the nation’s electricity from renewable, free, and non-polluting resources. On the other hand, some oil that might have stayed in the ground just became more likely to be extracted and burned.
But the deal’s contradictory compromises won’t cancel each other out. Ultimately, the Republican-led Congress — which largely pledges its allegiance to Big Oil — wasted no time in helping the United States adhere to its commitments under the global accord sealed in Paris.
As more homeowners, drivers, industries, and utilities draw their power from the sun and the wind, catastrophic climate change will become less likely. And the long-term climate benefits of boosting wind and solar power for five more years will outweigh the potential climate pollution from allowing crude exports, Council on Foreign Relations energy expert Michael Levi predicts.
Currently, oil prices are so depressed due to a global glut that there’s little demand elsewhere for U.S. crude. If oil markets bounce back, the long-term climate consequences of this largely symbolic victory for Big Oil will probably be small.
Stretching renewable-energy credits out for another five years, however, will deliver major relief to the wind industry. The Production Tax Credit, its primary source of federal support, had been in limbo for most of the past two years.
Then there’s the solar energy Investment Tax Credit. Without the new tax deal, it would have expired at the end of 2016. Now it’s assured through 2022.
Wait. Many Republican lawmakers scoff at the notion of climate action and are trying to sabotage President Obama’s Clean Power Plan. Why would they buttress renewable energy right after the Paris deal?
There are plenty of reasons.
Take job creation. The solar industry alone already employs 200,000 workers and anticipates bringing another 140,000 on board because of the tax credit’s extension. It also goes out of its way to hire veterans and plans on hiring 50,000 of them by 2020.
“These jobs are stable, well-paying, and cannot be exported overseas,” observed Solar Energy Industries Association CEO and President Rhone Resch.
There’s also the shockingly good results of government support for these industries through the tax code, which in recent years has coincided with technological breakthroughs that are now slashing costs for turbines and solar panels.
Over the first three quarters of 2015, wind and solar energy constituted more than 60 percent of the nation’s new energy capacity. The United States is undergoing a renewable-energy boom that’s leaving coal and nuclear power in the dust and overshadowing what until recently appeared to be unstoppable growth for natural gas-fired power stations.
Then, there’s vigorous public support for wind and solar energy, which is nearly as strong among Republicans as Democrats.
While letting solar tax credits lapse wouldn’t have short-circuited that part of the renewable boom outright, Rhone’s solar trade group predicted that it would have slowed things down, including the pace of job and investment growth.
Likewise, the wind industry — despite boasting about $20 billion worth of wind farms now under construction — feared falling off an “economic cliff” had Congress failed to restore the Production Tax Credit for multiple years.
Now the forecast for renewable energy looks sunny and bright, thanks to this green and dirty gift from Congress.
Emily Schwartz Greco is the managing editor of OtherWords, a non-profit editorial service run by the Institute for Policy Studies.
Soon enough
"Sunny Path'' (oil on panel), by PAUL GEORGE, at Alpers Fine Art, Andover, Mass.
Providence should go the Detroit route
With such pathologies as continuing massive "injury'' fraud by Providence firefighters and some other city workers and other "inefficiencies,'' I think more than ever that Providence should go the Detroit route into bankruptcy and restart municipal operations with a clean slate.
-- Robert Whitcomb
Thanks for the memory of great old songs
The end of the year tends to put one in a reflective mood, as does this witty and bittersweet song. The level of literacy of many songs written in the '30s was a mile higher than about 99 percent of the songs cranked out now.
Charles Pinning: I intended nothing bad that Christmas season
I go, and it is done. The bell invites me.
Hear it not, Duncan, for it is a knell
That summons thee to heaven or to hell.
-- from Macbeth
Twas the week of Christmas and it was off to the library to return books and pick out something new. It was cold and blowing snow, but God-forbid that ma mere would let a library book become overdue.
Hustling our barrel buttons and wool into the station wagon, we rumbled toward Bellevue Avenue, parking in the shopping center lot in front of Cherry and Webb, trudging around the corner to the library with our books.
The Newport Public Library was at that time in an Italianate mansion, whimsical and stern at the same time, at the top of a hill overlooking the harbor. Today it’s a senior center and the new library is a brutish thing, squatting at the bottom of the hill.
We entered glittering and while my mother returned the books, I climbed up the central staircase to get closer to the enormous red bell that was suspended from the ceiling.
It was huge and pleated, one of those paper bells that comes flat and accordions out. Only this was industrial strength, probably four feet high and ten feet around, a giant Christmas hoop skirt of a bell, hanging on fishing line from a gold hook.
Why, if I leaned a little forward over the railing, I could…and I did. I lifted the loop off the hook and freed the bell, watching it float silently straight down, where it landed on top of the librarian sitting at the front desk in the middle of the foyer.
“Waaaaaaaaaaaaaah!!!!” Her unbridled shriek rang though the building, sending me melting into the first available room of books, grabbing a volume entitled Diseases of the Horse, and plunking myself down at a long table.
Soon, I heard my mother’s voice calling me. But I was studying so hard that when she came into the room I could hardly look up.
“I think we had better go now,” she said.
Book in hand, I stood up.
“Leave it,” she said.
She led me downstairs where a group of people surrounded the librarian who lay crumpled on floor as if shot. We didn’t pause but put on our hats and swept out the door.
We said nothing rolling slowly down Bellevue Avenue and turning onto Kay Street. My mother began rocking back and forth and suddenly burst out laughing.
“Oh, Dear God! Dear God!...Get a stick of gum out my purse, please, sweetie.”
She placed the back of one hand in a red driving glove up against her mouth and began shaking with uncontrollable laughter. She stopped for a moment and then suddenly started up again.
“Dear God…Dear God…,” she repeated and then the laughing began again.
Before we got out of the car, Mom got serious and said, “Never tell anybody about this. Do you hear me? Promise me that. Do you promise?”
“I promise,” I said, gripping the door handle.
“You’re a good boy,” said my mother, and then we exited the vehicle.
I got my bicycle under the tree that Christmas, glistening and perfect, just as I’d imagined. And nothing was ever mentioned about the librarian upon whom the bell fell. If I heard something about someone’s untimely death, I blocked it out. Newport was a small town back then, and the librarian could have been anyone; a former classmate of my mother’s at Rogers High…the sister of the man who owned the dry cleaners…anyone.
I’ve at times been tempted to delve into old records, newspaper obituaries, but haven’t.
Once a swan suddenly swooped down upon me when I fell water skiing at dusk on a mountain lake, and I sensed what the bell must have felt like to her, the amorphous presence, the shock. I’ve entered dark rooms and felt a specter….
I used to remember the incident and feel badly every Christmas, especially at the sight of a red pleated bell. But now, with the passage of more years, I realize that sometimes bad things can be for the best. Who knows? It is my annual Christmas present to myself, that wish that I did something good. God knows I intended nothing bad. I was only a boy, curious to see what it would be like, the bell floating.
Charles Pinning is a Providence-based novelist.
Quilting up a storm in Gloucester
From an exhibition of quilts by members of the Rose Baker Senior Center in Gloucester, Mass., at the Cape Ann Museum there.
Above, left to right: "Portuguese Hill." Quilt, mixed media. Linen backing made possible through grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Gift of the Art Program at Gloucester's Rose Baker Senior Center, 2015. [Acc. #2015.033.09]; "West Gloucester." Quilt, mixed media. Linen backing made possible through grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Gift of the Art Program at Gloucester's Rose Baker Senior Center, 2015. [Acc. #2015.033.08]; "Magnolia." Quilt, mixed media. Linen backing made possible through grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Gift of the Art Program at Gloucester's Rose Baker Senior Center, 2015. [Acc. #2015.033.03]
Chris Powell: How it can be a wonderful life
Frank Capra's 1946 film, It's a Wonderful Life, to be broadcast tonight at 8 by NBC television, is loved most for its personal message of discovery at Christmas: that its hero's life has been, unbeknownst to him, crucial to his family, friends, community and even his country.
Such general encouragement may seem more needed than ever these days; indeed, this may be, sadly, the cause of the film's popularity. But It's a Wonderful Life may be more important still for its overlooked lesson in democratic economics, a lesson arising from the struggle for survival of a combination credit union and savings bank, the Bailey Building & Loan in the Everytown of Bedford Falls.
The Building & Loan's founder and chief executive, Peter Bailey, has died and its board of directors is deciding the institution's future. The richest man in town, Potter, a misanthropic banker, ruthless landlord and board member, played by Lionel Barrymore, proposes dissolving the Building & Loan, and his callousness angers Bailey's elder son, George, played earnestly by Jimmy Stewart, who has been working as assistant to his father.
POTTER: Peter Bailey was not a businessman. That's what killed him. Oh, I don't mean any disrespect to him, God rest his soul. He was a man of high ideals -- so-called. But ideals without common sense can ruin this town. Now you take this loan here, to Ernie Bishop. You know, the fellow who sits around all day on his ... brains, in his taxi. I happen to know the bank turned down this loan. But he comes here, and we're building him a house worth $5,000. Why?
GEORGE BAILEY: Well, I handled that, Mr. Potter. You have all the papers there -- his salary, insurance. I can personally vouch for his character.
POTTER: A friend of yours.
BAILEY: Yes, sir.
POTTER: You see, if you shoot pool with some employee, you can come and borrow money. What does that get us? A discontented, lazy rabble instead of a thrifty working class. And all because a few starry-eyed dreamers like Peter Bailey stir them up and fill their heads with a lot of impossible ideas. Now I say. ...
BAILEY: Now hold on, Mr. Potter. Just a minute. Now you're right when you say my father was no businessman -- I know that. Why he ever started this cheap, penny-ante building-and-loan I'll never know. But neither you nor anyone else can say anything against his character, because his whole life was. ... Why, in the 25 years since he and Uncle Billy started this thing, he never thought of himself. Isn't that right, Uncle Billy? He didn't save enough money to send Harry to school, let alone me, but he did help a few people get out of your slums, Mr. Potter. Now, what's wrong with that? Why, you're all businessmen here. Doesn't it make them better citizens? Doesn't it make them better customers? You said that ... what did you say a minute ago? "They have to wait and save their money before they even think of a decent home." Wait? Wait for what? Until their children grow up and leave them? Until they're so old and broken-down that they. ... Do you know how long it takes a working man to save $5,000? Just remember this, Mr. Potter: that this "rabble" you're talking about, they do most of the working and paying and living and dying in this community. Well, is it too much to have them work and pay and live and die in a couple of decent rooms and a bath? Anyway, my father didn't think so. ...
At the board's insistence, George Bailey takes over in his father's place to keep the Building & Loan going, and soon he forestalls a run on it, part of a general financial panic, by putting up the money he has saved for his honeymoon and by preaching to a mob of frightened depositors about how they should not withdraw their money but instead have faith in the institution, because their money isn't kept in cash in the safe but rather is invested in the houses, the mortgages, the very lives of their neighbors.
Of course, this is Capra's metaphor for politics and the world: that there is progress when everyone is given a chance, a little capital and credit, when people play by the rules, look out for each other, and don't take too much more than they need, and that selfishness is the ruin of everything.
Something like this -- more or less a policy of helping to make middle-class everyone who aspired to it and would indeed play by the rules, a policy of democratizing capital and credit -- made the United States the most prosperous country and the most successful in elevating the human condition.
But for a few decades now the price of obtaining and maintaining those "two decent rooms and a bath" and the middle-class life to go with it has risen as real wages have fallen for most, largely under the pressure of government's unrelenting taxes in the name of services that have not really been rendered, a welfare system that has subsidized what somehow is not permitted to be called the antisocial behavior it is, and a plutocracy that has gained control of both major political parties.
There seem to be more people who, if too confused or demoralized to be dangerous, are still closer to being a "rabble" than the country saw even during the Great Depression.
Even at its best now Christmas is seldom more than an itinerant charity that, necessary as it may seem, tends to suppress the great political question of the day after Christmas, the question of how things can be organized to ensure that everyone has a good chance to earn his way in decency. But the great joy of Christmas is that the answer has been given, that we are not lost, that the country has been shown the way and can recover it -- that society can work for all, that it really can be a wonderful life if enough selfless people make it a political one.
Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.
Judeo-Christian Christmas songs
I've always thought that it's charming, and says something about the ecumenical nature of America, that the partial or full authors of three of the most famous popular Christmas songs -- "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer'' (lyrics by Robert May), "White Christmas'' (words and music by Irving Berlin) and "The Christmas Song'' -- ("Chestnuts roasting,'', etc.) (music and some of the lyrics by Mel Torme) -- were of Jewish background.
On "White Christmas,'' it's too bad that so many singers leave out the opening of the song, as they do with many, perhaps most, such songs from the Great American Songbook.
Anyway, the intro to one of the most popular songs in world history is:
The sun is shining, the grass is green,
The orange and palm trees sway.
There's never been such a day
in Beverly Hills, L.A.
But it's December the twenty-fourth,—
And I am longing to be up North—
It may be hard for young people to understand why the song evoked such emotion among members of the so-called "Greatest Generation'' until they understand that it was written early in World War II and thus evoked a powerful longing for family and home.
My father, a Navy combat veteran and not a bad amateur musician, hated the tune, denouncing it as being musically tedious and, of course, maudlin. But the song drew tears of sweet melancholy from many of his friends, especially after a few drinks.
David Warsh: "System of 1896'' and GOP hopes for decades of power
SOMERVILLE, MASS.
So impatient am I with the Trump phenomenon that I spent a good part of the week reading The Triumph of William McKinley: Why the Election of 1896 Still Matters, by Karl Rove (Simon & Schuster, 2015).
I read all the way to the end to discover the answer that Rove gives — not every word of a fairly long book, mind you, but enough to get a feeling for the argument. It was an interesting time. Rove tells a good story. He had plenty of help from the published works of a quartet of academic historians – “the Modern McKinley Men,” he calls them – and from own his extensive staff.
McKinley (1843-1901), the 26th president of the United States, rose to prominence as a young hero of the Civil War, later governor of Ohio. He is more widely remembered as the man whose assassination by an angry anarchist catapulted Theodore Roosevelt, his 42-year-old vice president, into the White House.
Yet McKinley had won two presidential elections, the first of them towards the end of a bitter depression that began in 1893. He reconfigured the political map of the day, creating Republican majorities in the Northeast, the Upper Midwest and California – just the opposite of the present day. In defeating William Jennings Bryan, he created what scholarly historians have called the “system of 1896,” which, they say, lasted until 1932. After 1896, Rove writes,
The Republican Party was no longer a shrinking and beleaguered political organization composed of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants in the North and Southern blacks being systematically stripped of their right to vote. Instead, it was a frothy, diverse coalition of owners and workers, longtime Americans and new citizens, lifetime Republicans and fresh converts drawn together by common beliefs and allegiances.
Rove, of course, is himself a practicing political operative, the consultant widely credited with producing the 2000 candidacy of George W. Bush. He served as the administration’s senior political adviser and deputy chief of staff until resigning, in August 2007. In 2010 he organized American Crossroads, a political-action committee to raise money for the 2012 elections. In 2013, he organized the Conservative Victory Project, with a view to supporting “electable” conservative candidates.
As befits an expert fundraiser, Rove ends the books with what amounts to a literary PowerPoint presentation: eight reasons for McKinley’s first victory. He conducted a campaign based on big issues, sound money and protection for infant industries. He attacked his opponent, turning a strength (free silver!) into a weakness (inflationist!). He sought to broaden the Republican base, appealing with considerable success to Catholics, labor unions and immigrants, formerly excluded groups. He put more states in play than had previously been the case. He campaigned as an outsider against traditional GOP bosses in New York and Pennsylvania. He successfully portrayed himself as an agent of change. He adopted the language of national reconciliation, in sharp distinction to Bryan. Finally, he raised plenty of money and brought his advisers into his campaign – Mark Hanna in particular. And he did all this from the comfort of his own home in Canton, Ohio –- receiving one delegation of would-be constituents after another, including a body of former Confederate soldiers, in his “Front-Porch” campaign.
In other words, says Rove, McKinley was the first modern president. If all this still seems a little remote in time, here is a video of Rove himself zestfully describing what he sees as the parallels. He writes, “McKinley’s campaign matters more than a century later because it provides lessons either party could use today to end an era of a 50-50 nation and gain the edge for a durable period.”
The really interesting part is this search for a durable edge, it seems to me, and not because I am especially interested in history. Like Rove, I am concerned mainly with the present day. Also like Rove, I believe that the US electorate is prone to subtle long-term mood swings.
Speculation about long political cycles—periodic electoral “realignments” of political parties, students of politics call them – had great vogue in the 1960s and ’70s, when Rove and I were young. Professors of political science described them, notably V.O. Key, Walter Dean Burnham, E.E. Schattschneider and James L Sundquist. Historians Arthur Schlesinger, senior and junior, popularized the idea. Recently, , of Yale University, has critically examined to good effect the idea of generation-long spans, first in a landmark article for Annual Review of Political Science, and in a subsequent book, Electoral Realignments: A Critique of An American Genre (Yale, 2004). He is certainly right when he says that contingency, strategy and valence all play a part. “Politics cannot be about waiting,” he writes, “for realignments or anything else.” Here is Mayhew’s review of Rove’s book.
And yet the narrative itch persists – before, during and after. The idea that the election of 1896, McKinley vs. Bryan, brought into existence an electoral “system” that dominated U.S. politics until 1932, has been neglected, I think, somewhat obscured by the eight-year presidency of Woodrow Wilson, which eventuated only after the Republican Roosevelt staged his third-party “Bull Moose” run in 1912. Even the Federal Reserve System was largely a Republican creation, under the leadership of Sen. Nelson Aldrich (R-R.I.). I am no historian, but I am inclined to believe Wesleyan University’s Schattschneider, who wrote: “The most substantial achievement of the Democratic Party from 1896 to 1932 was that it kept itself alive as the only party to which the country could turn if it ever decided to overthrow the Republican Party.”
Taken together, along with an account of the influence of congressional Republicans during the Wilson administration, the presidencies of McKinley, Roosevelt, Taft, Harding, Coolidge and Herbert Hoover constitute it seems to me, as coherent a period of governance as the two that followed. The realignment that followed the election of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 lasted until 1976, at least if you buy the argument that Richard Nixon was the last “liberal” president. The realignment that began with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, or, if you prefer, Jimmy Carter in 1976, lasted at least until 2008.
That’s where Rove comes in. He thinks that the Republican Party can gain a second wind – another 30 years or so of hegemony, if only it finds a candidate who can adopt McKinley’s tactics. This, in turn, is where Rove hopes Jeb Bush will serve. Sure enough Bush last week finally began to make his move, preparing to challenge Trump for the political fraud that he is. I still expect the contest for the nomination will come down to Bush vs. someone else – Ted Cruz, or Marco Rubio or even Chris Christie. It’s even conceivable that Bush could still beat Hillary Clinton in the general election, if all the stars were to align.
Would that outcome be the beginning of a second long skein of Republican victories? I doubt it. Rather than cycles, why not call it a zig-zag pattern? – somewhat irregular but durable shifts in majority voter preferences, every couple of generations or so? My hunch is that, for now, the GOP has had its turn. Even an unlikely Bush victory would point away from the policies enunciated in the primary campaign. National security aside, the big issues of the next twenty years in presidential politics – inequality, citizenship, climate change – have barely begun to show up.
David Warsh is a proprietor of economicprincipals.com and a longtime financial journalist and economic historian.
Visitors welcome to Selma
"Saturday, March 21 {1965}. Afternoon. Taken on my arrival in Selma {Ala.}, at the Brown Chapel area," by JAMES H. BARKER, in the show "Through the Lens of History: Selma & Civil Rights,'' Grand Circle Gallery, Boston, through January.
Through January, 2016
Yuletide editing
Going through the Christmas card mailing list at this time of year concentrates the mind on the difference between mere acquaintances and real friends. The editing function gets stronger with age -- you realize that you won't have time to keep up with all these semi-friends -- but the deletion by death and disability of your friends is of course an even stronger force.
The holiday season casualty list.
--- Robert Whitcomb
Don Pesci: Murderer Putin evokes Trump's admiration
VERNON, Conn.
Progressives, who sometimes have great difficulty making proper distinctions between populism and progressivism, may want to take a gander at populism Trump style, which appears to be a toxic combination of demagoguery laced with ineffable stupidity.
Here is the sad tale according to Charles Cooke of National Review:
“US presidential hopeful Donald Trump has said it is a 'great honor' to receive a compliment from Russian President Vladimir Putin. The property tycoon hailed Mr. Putin as a man 'highly respected within his own country and beyond.' It comes after Mr. Putin said Mr. Trump was a 'very colorful, talented person' during his annual news conference...
“Just a few hours ago, Trump confessed exactly that. He was not caught in a 'gotcha.' He was not misquoted. He was not led down the garden path by the ‘liberal or ‘mainstream’ or ‘pro-Obama’ media. Rather, he said, as plain as day, that he has ‘always felt fine about Putin’; he called him ‘strong’ and a ‘powerful leader’; and he suggested that he should be respected for his ‘popularity within his country.’ Nothing could pry him from this reverence. When it was pointed out to him that Putin is a man who ‘kills journalists, political opponents, and invades countries,’ Trump said flatly, ‘At least he’s a leader,’ which I can only imagine sounds an awful lot better in the original German. Then, for good measure, he took aim at the American system: ‘Unlike,’ he added, ‘what we have in this country.’”
It fell to Joe Scarborough of Morning Joe to point out to Mr. Trump that his amorata, President Vladimir Putin, formerly a KGB agent, the butcher of Ukraine and bosom pal of Bashar al-Assad, whose father was also a butcher of Syria, is “also a person that kills journalists, political opponents, and invades countries.”
Mr. Scarborough asked his guest, whether he thought “that would be a concern.”
Trump: “He’s running his country and at least he’s a leader. You know, unlike what we have in this country.”
Scarborough: “But again, he kills journalists that don’t agree with him.”
Trump: “Well, I think our country does plenty of killing also, Joe. There’s a lot of stupidity going on in the world right now, Joe. A lot of killing going on and a lot of stupidity and that’s the way it is.”
Mr. Trump is probably the only politician in the United States, though he has confessed he is new to the political game, who can survive an all-night rhetorical binge and emerge in the morning raring to meet the press. There is no mare’s nest of his own making from which he will not try, so far successfully, to extricate himself – for, see you, Mr. Trump is a populist, and populists who are popular receive from the media fewer yanks on the hangman’s noose than do, say, brothers of presidents running for president or articulate conservatives.
Mr. Trump likes Mr. Putin because the ex-KGB agent is popular in Russia; Mr. Trump, should he succeed to the presidency, hopes to be popular in Russia, though for different reasons of course; and, no, Mr. Trump was not suggesting that Mr. Putin was stupid, a sliver of the vast stupidity in the world, or even affected by the stupidity, a sort of mental flu, that appears to be making the rounds among Republican presidential aspirants, all of whom are much stupider and far less rich than Mr. Trump.
Mr. Trump’s sad suspicions about Republicans, not to mention the other dark corners of our stupid Republic, may be confirmed should he be nominated by the Republican convention as their bell-weather -- because Mr. Trump is not a Republican or a conservative. And he may have more in common with Mr. Putin than he or anyone else knows.
Don Pesci is a Vernon, Conn.-based political writer.
New England's chilly mountains
"You Don't Say'' (oil on panel), by JULIA PURINTON, at Alpers Fine Art, Andover, Mass.
Late but sometime before March
"Pond, through forest'' (oil on panel), by ROY PERKINSON, at Fountain Street Fine Art, Framingham.
The future of world shipping
The next guest speaker of the Providence Committee on Foreign Relations (thepcfr.org) comes Tuesday, Jan. 12, for when we have scheduled Eric Brenner, a high official of Hapag-Lloyd, the huge international shipping company, to talk about the effects of the widening of the Panama Canal and other changes in world shipping – including, presumably, the happy economic effects on the ports of Quonset, Providence, New Haven, Bridgeport, Boston and Portland.
Perhaps he’ll also talk about how a proposed North American-European trade community might boost the volume of shipping.
For Tuesday, Feb. 16, we have scheduled Greg Lindsay. Mr. Lindsay is an internationally known urbanist who speaks often about globalization, innovation and the future of cities. Here’s a sampling of his work:
He is a contributing writer for Fast Company, author of the forthcoming book Engineering Serendipity, and co-author of Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next. He is also a senior fellow of the New Cities Foundation — where he leads the Connected Mobility Initiative — a non-resident senior fellow of The Atlantic Council’s Strategic Foresight Initiative, a visiting scholar at New York University’s Rudin Center for Transportation Policy & Management, and a senior fellow of the World Policy Institute.
On Tuesday March 15, we’ll haveMorris Rossabi, one of the world’s greatest experts on Central Asia. He’s a professor at Columbia University
Among his many other honors and posts, he became chairman of the Arts and Culture Board of the Open Society Institute.
We have asked him to focus on Mongolia, whose ability to become a real democracy stuck between the great expansionist police states of China and Russia, has long fascinated me.
In mid-April, celebrated author, TV documentary maker and former foreign correspondent Hedrick Smith will join us; he’ll talk about Russia, and the current state of America, too. We’ll nail down the exact date soon. Thanks to PCFR member Llewellyn King for suggesting this.
Tod Sedgwick, former U.S. ambassador to Slovakia, will join us in May 18 to talk about the future of Central Europe. He’s another friend of Mr. King.
On Tuesday, June 7, Michael Soussan, former UN whistleblower; acclaimed author; widely published journalist; NYU writing professor, and women's rights advocate, will speak. His satirical memoir about global corruption, Backstabbing for Beginners: My Crash Course In International Diplomacy (Nation Books / Perseus) is being adapted for a feature film, starring Ben Kingsley and Josh Hutcherson.
Mr. Soussan will speak about the subject of his next book TRUTH TO POWER: how great minds changed the world. A brief history of thought leadership.
We may also have an expert from Bhutan, mostly because that tiny country includes happiness in its measurement of national prosperity, andan official of the Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Project. All is not grim on the planet.
A reminder that general and specific information is available on thepcfr.org
Chris Powell: Protect decent procedure to protect our rights
The Kaaba, in Mecca, Islam's holiest site.
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Republican presidential aspirant Donald Trump says he wants to prohibit Muslims from entering the United States until the government "can figure out what isgoing on." But everybody knows what is going on and President Obama explained itwell enough earlier this month in a national address.
That is, a war is being waged within Islam by a totalitarian death cult. Inancient times there were wars within Judaism and in medieval times wars withinChristianity. In such wars God is perceived mainly as license for any atrocity. Islam's war continues today in part because that religion is so much youngerthan the others, but the world's interest in it is overwhelming, what withnearly a quarter of the world's population at least nominally Islamic, most ofthat population in the developing world.
The war for Islam has put the United States at the center of a world-historicalmoment.
If the country heeds Trump and demonizes all Muslims and if it tolerates theharassment and attacks against Muslims who are legally and inoffensively in thecountry, citizens, taxpayers, military service members -- attacks that havehappened even in Connecticut -- it will discredit modernity and vindicate thetotalitarian death cult. But if the United States claims Muslims as a fully legitimate part of ademocratic society under a secular government, the totalitarian death cult willbe repudiated and Muslims everywhere will be invited to choose against it.
No one may speak with more authority about this than Malala Yousafzai, thePakistani teenager who has taken a bullet in the war for Islam on account of heradvocacy of education for Muslim girls and equality for Muslim women and whoreceived the Nobel Peace Prize last year.
The more that people speak against Islam and all Muslims, Yousafzai said theother day, the more terrorists are created, and the more that all Muslims arecondemned for the actions of a few, the more will go into terrorism.
Indeed, exploiting fears politically rather than protecting the country againstterrorism, Trump and others are refusing to distinguish between good guys andbad guys and thereby are telling the good guys that there is no point in being good guys -- that they’ll be treated as bad guys anywayand that there will be no treating Muslims as individuals in the United States.
This is fascism, the betrayal of all American principle. But the fascist impulse isn't threatening only on the political right and withRepublicans. It is just as threatening on the political left and with Democrats. Stifling political disagreement, it now dominates college campuses from Amherstto Yale to Missouri to California, and even Connecticut Gov. Malloy has begun to dabblein it.
In the name of deterring terrorism, the governor would use the federalgovernment’s secret, grossly erroneous, and unappealable terrorism watch list toimpair the constitutional right of people in Connecticut to bear arms. Thegovernor’s objective is less to deter terrorism than it is part of the politicalleft’s objective to prohibit gun possession generally. If a couple of namessounding like terrorists could be found in the phone book, he'd use that.
The governor charges that people who object to his plan as a violation of dueprocess of law don't mind if terrorists get guns. That resembles what was saidduring the Red scares of the 1920s and 1950s: that if you defend the rights ofcommunists or people suspected of being communists, you're a commie yourself. But you're not.
For as Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote, thehistory of American freedom is the history of procedure. Decent procedure mustbe protected at all costs.
Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Conn.
Parrish's luminosity
"Frog Prince,'' by MAXFIELD PARRISH, at the show "The Power of Print,'' at the Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, N.H., through Jan. 10. Mr Parrish did much of his work in New England at the artists' colony in Cornish, N.H.