Whitcomb: Loud Spring on Campus; Fish Fun in Newport; Sorry in Suburbia

Sunday, April 28, 2024

Robert Whitcomb, Columnist

Robert Whitcomb, Columnist

Tonight a shimmer of gold lies mantled o’er
Smooth lovely Ocean. Through the lustrous gloom
A savor steals from linden trees in bloom
And gardens ranged at many a palace door.
Proud walls rise here, and, where the moonbeams pour
Their pale enchantment down the dim coast-line,
Terrace and lawn, trim hedge and flowering vine,
Crown with fair culture all the sounding shore.
How sweet, to such a place, on such a night,
From halls with beauty and festival a-glare,
To come distract and, stretched on the cool turf,
Yield to some fond, improbable delight,
While the moon, reddening, sinks, and all the air
Sighs with the muffled tumult of the surf!

-- “On the Cliffs, Newport,’’ by Alan Seeger (1888-1916), American poet killed while fighting with the French Foreign Legion on the Western Front in World War I. He’s best known for his poem “I Have a Rendezvous With Death,’’ a favorite of John F. Kennedy. Here it is, a peculiar kind of spring poem:

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(Some may have a more, er, nuanced view of Newport. Thames Street on a Saturday night in the summer….?)

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“The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be.’’

-- Paul Valery 1871-1945), French poet and essayist

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“I live in rural New Hampshire, and we are, frankly, short on people who are black, gay, Jewish, and Hispanic. In fact, we're short on people. My town {Sharon} has a population of 301.’’

-- P.J. O’Rourke (1947-2022), American journalist and satirist

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This is the time of spring when gardeners gamble that they haven’t put out plants before the last freeze; those long-term forecasts aren’t that accurate. The smell of freshly cut grass now, if not the scent of lawnmower gasoline, evokes the end of the school year.

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Brown's Rabbi Josh Bolton calls the encampment "anti-Israel" PHOTO: Anthony Sionni for GoLocal

Spring Demonstration Season

The weeks before university/college commencements are prime time for campus demonstrations of the sort that anti-Vietnam War demonstrations in the late ’60s and early ‘70s made famous. Warm weather, grass to lie on and pitch tents, etc. But things can get out of hand, with buildings taken over and impatient police brought in to haul away students, whom some of the cops consider spoiled brats.

The police should be called in when demonstrators physically block others from going about their business and/or shout so much and so long as to seriously hinder an institution’s ability to function. Private institutions have the right to have outsiders removed; it’s a little trickier with public ones.

There will always be outside troublemakers, politically or otherwise motivated, drawn to campus controversies. It’s one of the innumerable things that makes running a university so difficult.

It would take years for some universities to recover from the disruptions of the ‘60s and early ‘70s. Columbia University, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, was still picking up the social and economic pieces after the 1968 demonstrations when I attended graduate school there, in 1971-72. And now Columbia is under siege again.

I wonder how many of the pro-Palestinian demonstrators at some elite U.S. universities know much about the history of Hamas, Gaza’s fascist Islamic theocratic regime, which seeks to take over what is now Israel and the West Bank while controlling Gaza.

Naturally, the students are mortified by the terrible suffering wrought by the Israel invasion of Gaza to attack Hamas after the group massacred 1,200 Israelis, and kidnapped others, last Oct. 7. But I doubt that many of the protestors would relish living under Hamas or even under the more moderate (if corrupt) Palestinian Authority that’s supposed to be sort of in charge of the West Bank.

Meanwhile, consider the role of Israeli settlers stealing Palestinians’ land on the West Bank, sometimes violently and in cooperation with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, in intensifying the hate and violence there.

Hit this link:

Grandstanding by members of Congress about the campus demonstrations, such as House Speaker Mike Johnson’s theatrical visit to Columbia last Wednesday to denounce its leadership for allegedly being too soft on antisemitism and demand that its president be fired, doesn’t help. And reminder: Columbia is a private institution.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul put it well:

“It seems to me there’s a lot more responsibilities and crises to be dealt with in Washington. I’d encourage the speaker to go back and perhaps take up the migrant bill, the bill to deal with closing the borders, so we can deal with the real crisis that New York has.” (Congressional Republicans killed a bill, crafted by members of both parties, to tighten border security because they didn’t want Biden to get credit for it in the November election.)

Some leading GOP/QAnoners seem to want violence on campuses so they’ll have something more to blame “woke leftists” for, whoever actually caused the trouble.

(But yes, we’re grateful that the speaker finally pushed through urgent help for Ukraine. That could be a history-changing move.)

Some pols like to threaten universities they dislike with a loss of federal grants. But especially at such major research institutions as Columbia, many of those grants go to such things as medical research and national defense applications.

If only Israeli intelligence had located the key leaders behind the Oct. 7 attack and taken them out, in Gaza, Qatar or elsewhere, instead of launching a full-scale invasion of one of the most densely populated places on earth, where Hamas fighters have sheltered among the civilian population, intentionally maximizing the death toll. It recalls how much better it would have been if we’d been able to kill Saddam Hussein and his entourage in 2003 rather than launching a full-scale invasion of Iraq, which had disastrous long-term effects that we’re still living with.

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Providence College PHOTO: PC

There’s considerable tension these days at Providence College, a Catholic institution, over the feeling of LGBTQ students and employees that PC’s administration doesn’t adequately respect them (or agree with them?).

The central problem, of course, is that Catholic theology doesn’t mesh well with the desires, actions and beliefs of these students and staff. One wonders, then, why they’re at PC, given the many other institutions they could attend. And after all, PC, let alone the Roman Catholic Church, has no obligation to change its views.

I taught at the college for several years and always found it was run in a kindly way. That was before most people had heard of “LGBTQ”. I’m waiting for a few more letters to be added in our identity-obsessed times.

Shows Behind the Glass

The new Save The Bay Hamilton Family Aquarium, in Newport, is an exciting education and entertainment venue, and well on its way to becoming one of The City by the Sea’s prime attractions. That’s especially because it’s focused on marine and fresh-water creatures native to our region (with a few interlopers that rode up on the Gulf Stream). The aquarium is especially welcoming toward young people; there were lots of kids there last Monday when I visited and they were having a great time, as were their teachers and parents. (The small octopus, said to be smart, seemed to be a star.)

The place will be very busy this summer, especially on rainy days, and so you might have to make reservations sometimes.

Aquarium staff told me that they think the facility, though along the water, is safe from flooding. I remembered that Hurricane Carol, on Aug. 31, 1954, shut down the aquarium along the harbor in Woods Hole for years.

Congrats and thanks to everybody who helped make this little miracle happen. (Much of the Hamilton family fortune is from its stake, via the Dorrance family, in the Campbell Soup fortune.)

Hit this link:

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Superman Building (Industrial National) IMAGE: PPL

Surprise, surprise?

It seems that finishing the rehabbing of the Industrial Trust Building, in downtown Providence, will probably need more public funding. Such public-private projects usually require considerably more money than advertised at the start of the project, even when inflation and interest rates are low. See, for example, the ballooning cost of Tidewater Landing stadium, in Pawtucket. And once construction starts, public agencies are trapped, even if irritated taxpayers think that spending more money on fiscally dubious projects is throwing good money after bad. Abandoned half-completed projects are demoralizing and embarrassing.

Back in 2022, when the current agreement on the building with High Rock Development was announced, the cost of rehabbing the Art Deco skyscraper for housing was projected to be $223 million, with about $65 million from federal, state and city sources. Now, who knows?

Replace Them With Wood

Most of New England is woodland, especially, of course, Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont. Well-managed forests can be an economic boon, especially given the renewability of wood as a building material. (Let’s hope that a hurricane doesn’t blow down a lot of it, which is what happened in 1938.)

I thought of this after reading Abigail Brone’s article on the New England News Collaborative website about the use of “mass timber,’’ which involves installing wood panels in place of concrete and steel, whose manufacturing emits a great deal of carbon dioxide. The wood panels are shipped to building sites from fabrication centers elsewhere. Installing wood cuts labor costs compared to handling concrete and steel. This, among other things, could encourage a speedup in much-needed housing construction over the next few years.

Ms. Brone notes that the cost of mass timber in New England is substantially raised by having to be shipped from the South and Canada. But why not harvest a lot of New England wood for the purpose – especially from Maine, which is almost 90 percent forested?

Here’s her story:

A University of Maine report says:

“The Maine Mass Timber Commercialization Center (MMTCC) brings together industrial partners, trade organizations, construction firms, architects, and other stakeholders in the region to revitalize and diversify Maine’s forest-based economy by bringing innovative mass timber manufacturing to the State of Maine. The emergence of this new innovation-based industry cluster will result in positive economic impacts to both local and regional economies, particularly in Maine’s rural communities.”

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VW plant in the South voting to unionize IMAGE: VW

Unions in the South

“The driving force in American politics in the decades after the American Revolution was the rise of an arrogant, ruthless, parasitic oligarchy in the South, built on a foundation of Christian religion and a vision of permanent, God-ordained economic inequality.’’

-- Historian S.C. Gwynne in The New York Times Book Review

One of the reasons that wages are so low and poverty so high in the South is the paucity of unions in the region, which traditionally ruthless businesspeople aligned with politicians have always fought to keep out, sometimes even with violence.

Low wages and benefits have long drawn big foreign and domestic manufacturers to the old Slave States. In recent decades, vehicle makers have been a major part of this migration.

But that might be changing as workers more clearly understand how much better they could do if they had a union to represent them.

Employees at a Volkswagen factory in Chattanooga, Tenn., have voted to join the United Auto Workers.

And it wasn’t close: Joining the union was approved by a vote of 2,628 to 985.

This has energized union organizers at the Mercedes Benz plant in Tuscaloosa, County, Ala., as they head toward a unionization vote there in May. If they win, the floodgates may open, and it will be interesting to see how this might change politics in Dixie.

When You Deal With the Devil

How foolish it can be to try to do deals with Russia, indeed to believe anything it promises. See tiny Moldova’s painful experience since it left the Soviet Union.

Czar Putin will try to kill his way into forcing Ukraine into negotiations in which the latter would be coerced into giving Russia lots of the land he seized in his invasions, which he started in 2014, followed by his all-out invasion in 2022. Like any megalomaniac, after taking a breather, he’d then use those gains as a springboard for further land grabs.

Hit this link:

I wonder if the Ukrainians’ attacking Russian oil and gas facilities is a great idea. It tends to raise prices, which some Americans will blame on Biden, perhaps enough to bring Putin suck-up/Ukraine enemy Trump back into power.

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It’s amusing to hear TikTok users, and those who profit from its use, are asserting that banning the app in the U.S. (as a national security threat) would violate the Constitution’s protection of free speech. There’s no protection of free speech in China, whose ByteDance company owns TikTok and ultimately reports to the dictatorship known as the Chinese Communist Party.

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Disillusioned: Five Families and the Unraveling of America’s Suburbs, by Benjamin Herold

Sorry in Suburbia

Disillusioned: Five Families and the Unraveling of America’s Suburbs, by Benjamin Herold, looks at the decline of the American Dream, suburbia sector, as huge government incentives, especially in subsidized mortgages and in highway construction, white flight and the desire for more space led to boom and later bust over decades in suburbs around America as the bills came in and sociological reality bit. He looks at cases around America, one of them the town outside Pittsburgh where he grew up.

The book, with six families, if you include Mr. Herold’s own, as the central characters, says a lot about the country’s current mood and politics, since most Americans live in suburbs. Too many Americans continue to swim in wishful thinking about where they live or hope to live.

I saw the early years of suburbia taking over the U.S., with my hometown going from semi-rural (including farms) to a bedroom suburb of Boston. But that there was so much rock that had to be blasted to allow new construction slowed housing development.

Robert Whitcomb is a veteran editor and writer. Among his jobs, he has served as the finance editor of the International Herald Tribune, in Paris; as a vice president and the editorial-page editor of The Providence Journal; as an editor and writer in New York for The Wall Street Journal, and as a writer for the Boston Herald Traveler (RIP). He has written newspaper and magazine essays and news stories for many years on a very wide range of topics for numerous publications, has edited several books and movie scripts and is the co-author of among other things, Cape Wind.

Whitcomb: Loud Spring on Campus; Fish Fun in Newport; Sorry in Suburbia

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Whitcomb: Loud Spring on Campus; Fish Fun in Newport; Sorry in Suburbia

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