Face of New England

 

"Blue Granite" (mixed media on paper),'' by LUANNE W. WITKOWSKI,  in her Exhibit "IV", at Kingston Gallery, Boston, through Feb. 2.

Blighted and bright college days

BY ROBERT WHITCOMB

(comment via rwhitcomb51@gmail.com)

A few weeks ago, I was chatting with a Dartmouth College classmate about stuff that happened when we were students in 1966-70. I mentioned someone we knew in common and recalled that he was in a certain fraternity.

 The guy I was talking with, Denis O’Neil, a screenwriter who recently published a part-memoir, part-novel of that period titled “Whiplash: How the Vietnam War Rolled a Hand Grenade into the Animal House,” politely corrected me; in fact, this person was in another fraternity.

Time has fragmented and mingled stories in my memory and those of others from that era, now almost half a century ago. One could argue that it was a tumultuous era, and thus it’s easy to get things scrambled, but most times are tumultuous and transitional. Mr. O’Neil makes much of the stress caused by the fear of being drafted and sent to Southeast Asia, but as bad as that was, it was much worse for young men in World War II. Whatever. We’re all the centers of our own universes, and we create narratives to explain ourselves to ourselves and others and to place ourselves in history.

Certainly, the huge size of the Baby Boomer generation, and technological and social changes of its young times, were dramatic, though I would argue that except for improvements in the rights of racial minorities and women, the transformations caused by the Internet (which increasingly looks as if it has made things worse for most people) have been much bigger than “Sixties” changes.

Still, it’s true that in that period one had the distinct sense of living in a discrete and vivid era, which actually began about 1966 and ended about ’73. People who lived in the “Roaring Twenties” — 1924 to the Great Crash of October 1929 — told me in “The Sixties” that they had had a similar sense back in the Coolidge administration. Youth is intense, and so the memories the now-autumnal people of “The Sixties” are intense, if sometimes erroneous.

From Mr. O’Neil’s book, which centers on fun, romance (not always fun) and anxiety, you might think that 80 percent of a male undergraduate’s time was spent drunk, seeking young women to have sex with and trying to get out of the draft. In fact, even for non-nerds who disliked what we then called “booking” — has the World Wide Web come up with its own equivalent phrase? — most of the time was spent going to class, studying and sleeping, not “raging” (the word for partying). After all, a lot of students wanted to get into good graduate schools and then fancy jobs. A lot did, and went on to become perhaps the greediest generation in U.S. history.

Mr. O’Neil was wise to have constructed his book at least in part as a novel, letting his imagination and telescoping of events provide a better story for the movies, a business he knows very well. If they do make a film of his story, I’d be interested to see how much of it gives a sense of the more humdrum aspects of college life for middle-to-upper-class late adolescents back then.

Probably not much.  The famous and often hilarious (and even witty) Dartmouth pranks memorialized in “Animal House” (and Mr. O’Neil describes some corkers, including  a great train robbery of sorts) and the stuff described above offer rich material for a film.

Still, while L.P. Hartley’s line “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there” is much quoted  people don’t do things as differently as they now might like to think  they did 45 years ago.

***

I was working last week in Harrisburg, Pa., the capital of the Keystone State. While that recently bankrupt city has seen better days — for many decades, it was a thriving center of trade and manufacturing and is bounded by rich farmland — many of its old residential and commercial buildings are beautiful, and you get a sense that people in the region very much want the little city to come back.

Greater Harrisburg has more brick and stone houses than you see in New England, where most houses are of wood, but there’s the same sense of an almost European-style settlement pattern, with a tight city center and the countryside close by. More and more people there complain about commuting and some of the gentrification in parts of Harrisburg suggests that a lot of its aging population is getting tired of driving. Indeed, demographics may gradually undo, over the next decade, much of the social and economic damage done by developer-driven sprawl zoning.

And there’s still a lot of boosterism in Harrisburg: The small local airport is proudly called Harrisburg International Airport, with flights to Toronto providing the “international” angle. Perhaps poor little Rhode Island could use a little of what some might slur as Babbitry to help talk itself out of its inferiority complex.

Robert Whitcomb (rwhitcomb51@gmail.com) is a Providence-based editor and writer.

David Warsh: WWI, the elites and the 2008 crash

  By DAVID WARSH

BOSTON

A century after the outbreak of World War I, in 1914, and the memory of the wholly unexpected series of horrors to which it led, many commentators are feeling a little gloomy. Ordinarily I am persuaded by whatever sensible, knowledgeable, well-connected Martin Wolf has to say.

So I was surprised last week to find the chief economics columnist for the Financial Times arguing that our future is once again threatened by ignorant elites, just as it was in the years after 1914.  This time, he wrote, the best and the brightest have been mismanaging the peace rather than bungling a war and its aftermath.

Wolf’s bill of particulars: First, the economic, financial, intellectual and political elites mostly misunderstood the consequences of headlong financial liberalization. Lulled by fantasies of self-stabilizing financial markets, they not only permitted but encouraged a huge and, for the financial sector, profitable bet on the expansion of debt. The policy making elite failed to appreciate the incentives at work and, above all, the risks of a systemic breakdown.

When it came, the fruits of that breakdown were disastrous on several dimensions: economies collapsed; unemployment jumped; and public debt exploded.

The policymaking elite was discredited by its failure to prevent disaster. The financial elite was discredited by needing to be rescued. The political elite was discredited by willingness to finance the rescue. The intellectual elite – the economists – was discredited by its failure to anticipate a crisis or agree on what to do after it had struck.

The rescue was necessary. But the belief that the powerful sacrificed taxpayers to the interests of the guilty is correct.

It seems to me that the history of the last 40 years is susceptible to a very different interpretation:

That the Cold War, which began with the partition of Europe after 1945 and the Communist Revolution in China in 1949, entered its last phase with the five-day meeting of the ruling committees of the Chinese Communist Party in December 1978, little more than two years after the death of Mao Zedong;

That the financial liberalization in the West, in the U.S. in particular, began just in time, in the Seventies, to facilitate the entry of China into the global market system, starting in 1979;

That markets in the Eighties in general coped very well with a vast expansion of world trade; and that the immediate aftermath of the Cold War saw remarkably little loss of life, except in the Balkans;

That experts in the Nineties navigated a series of crises in Mexico, in Asia, in Brazil and Argentina, preserving the international financial system and maintaining global growth;

That when the 25-year  boom ended, in 2008, with the threat of a systemic breakdown of terrifying proportions, thanks to a global banking system that had evolved in ways that were little understood, central bankers correctly diagnosed the panic and  Congress passed its test, appropriating funds necessary to preserve the banking system.

At least in the U.S., the necessary rescue probably cost the taxpayer little or nothing. The loans have been repaid. The severe losses – homes, jobs, earnings, careers, the fisc – stemmed from the deep recession, which otherwise could have been much worse. (The continuing crisis in the Eurozone is another matter. So is the Middle East.) True, by hampering the Fed’s ability to act, the Dodd-Frank Act probably makes it harder, not easier, to deal with the next crisis. But there is still time to deal with that.

I’d like to think that Wolf was simply writing for his audience, which consists almost entirely of those elites whom he castigates. There’s nothing wrong with leaning against the preferences of your readers.  He cited weakening bonds of citizenship amid growing inequality and the constitutional disorder of the Eurozone as further evidence that elites are losing touch..

It seems to me more reasonable to fear that the rise of China and India to superpower status may cause increasing friction with their neighbors and with the West. The experience of World War I suggests that there may be something about coming into the club that wants a war.  That was the case with Prussia’s becoming Germany, and Russia’s designs on the Ottoman Empire in the run-up to August, 1914. This time the problem of climate change may be enough to keep the lid on.

Some pretty serious trials lie ahead.

David Warsh, an economic historian and long-time financial journalist, is principal of www.economicprincipals.com.

Blighted and bright college days

BY ROBERT WHITCOMB

(comment via rwhitcomb51@gmail.com)

A few weeks ago, I was chatting with a Dartmouth College classmate about stuff that happened when we were students in 1966-70. I mentioned someone we knew in common and recalled that he was in a certain fraternity.

 The guy I was talking with, Denis O’Neil, a screenwriter who recently published a part-memoir, part-novel of that period titled “Whiplash: How the Vietnam War Rolled a Hand Grenade into the Animal House,” politely corrected me; in fact, this person was in another fraternity.

Time has fragmented and mingled stories in my memory and those of others from that era, now almost half a century ago. One could argue that it was a tumultuous era, and thus it’s easy to get things scrambled, but most times are tumultuous and transitional. Mr. O’Neil makes much of the stress caused by the fear of being drafted and sent to Southeast Asia, but as bad as that was, it was much worse for young men in World War II. Whatever. We’re all the centers of our own universes, and we create narratives to explain ourselves to ourselves and others and to place ourselves in history.

Certainly, the huge size of the Baby Boomer generation, and technological and social changes of its young times, were dramatic, though I would argue that except for improvements in the rights of racial minorities and women, the transformations caused by the Internet (which increasingly looks as if it has made things worse for most people) have been much bigger than “Sixties” changes.

Still, it’s true that in that period one had the distinct sense of living in a discrete and vivid era, which actually began about 1966 and ended about ’73. People who lived in the “Roaring Twenties” — 1924 to the Great Crash of October 1929 — told me in “The Sixties” that they had had a similar sense back in the Coolidge administration. Youth is intense, and so the memories the now-autumnal people of “The Sixties” are intense, if sometimes erroneous.

From Mr. O’Neil’s book, which centers on fun, romance (not always fun) and anxiety, you might think that 80 percent of a male undergraduate’s time was spent drunk, seeking young women to have sex with and trying to get out of the draft. In fact, even for non-nerds who disliked what we then called “booking” — has the World Wide Web come up with its own equivalent phrase? — most of the time was spent going to class, studying and sleeping, not “raging” (the word for partying). After all, a lot of students wanted to get into good graduate schools and then fancy jobs. A lot did, and went on to become perhaps the greediest generation in U.S. history.

Mr. O’Neil was wise to have constructed his book at least in part as a novel, letting his imagination and telescoping of events provide a better story for the movies, a business he knows very well. If they do make a film of his story, I’d be interested to see how much of it gives a sense of the more humdrum aspects of college life for middle-to-upper-class late adolescents back then.

Probably not much.  The famous and often hilarious (and even witty) Dartmouth pranks memorialized in "Animal House'' (and Mr. O'Neil describes some corkers, including  a great train robbery of sorts) and the stuff described above offer rich material for a film.

Still, while L.P. Hartley’s line “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there” is much quoted  people don’t do things as differently as they now might like to think  they did 45 years ago.

***

I was working last week in Harrisburg, Pa., the capital of the Keystone State. While that recently bankrupt city has seen better days — for many decades, it was a thriving center of trade and manufacturing and is bounded by rich farmland — many of its old residential and commercial buildings are beautiful, and you get a sense that people in the region very much want the little city to come back.

Greater Harrisburg has more brick and stone houses than you see in New England, where most houses are of wood, but there’s the same sense of an almost European-style settlement pattern, with a tight city center and the countryside close by. More and more people there complain about commuting and some of the gentrification in parts of Harrisburg suggests that a lot of its aging population is getting tired of driving. Indeed, demographics may gradually undo, over the next decade, much of the social and economic damage done by developer-driven sprawl zoning.

And there’s still a lot of boosterism in Harrisburg: The small local airport is proudly called Harrisburg International Airport, with flights to Toronto providing the “international” angle. Perhaps poor little Rhode Island could use a little of what some might slur as Babbitry to help talk itself out of its inferiority complex.

Robert Whitcomb (rwhitcomb51@gmail.com) is a Providence-based editor and writer.    

The dangers of afternoon naps

 

"Seance II,'' by HYMAN BLOOM,'' at the University of New Hampshire Museum of Art.

Stick together till spring

 

"Both'' (oil on panel), by ELLEN GRANTER at Peter Alpers Fine Art, Andover, Mass.

'Pretty white gloves'

  By PAUL STEVEN STONE

CAMBRIDGE

He sits on a folded-over cardboard box, slightly off-balance and without any visible sign of support other than the granite wall of the bank behind him and the few coins in the paper cup he shakes at each passerby.

Does he realize it is 4 degrees above zero, or minus 25 degrees if you factor in the wind that blows through the city and his bones with little concern for statistics? Does he notice the thick cumulus lifeforms that escape from his mouth in shapes that shift and evanesce like the opportunities that once populated his life?

Can he even distinguish the usual numbing effect of the cheap alcohol from the cruel and indifferent caress of this biting alien chill?

Too many questions, he would tell you, if he cared to say anything. But his tongue sits in silence behind crusted chapped lips and chattering teeth while half-shut eyes follow pedestrians fleeing from the bitter cold and his outstretched cup.

His gaze falls upon the hand holding the cup as if it were some foreign element in his personal inventory. Surprised at first to find it uncovered and exposed, especially in weather this frigid, he now recalls that someone at the shelter had stolen his gloves and left in their place the only option he still has in much abundance.

Acquiescence.

Examining the hand, and the exposed fingers encircling the Seven-Eleven coffee cup, he smiles in amused perplexity, murmuring to himself, “White gloves.”

Lifting his hand for closer inspection, he adds, “Pretty white gloves.”

An image of his daughter . . . Elissa, he thinks her name was . Yes, Elissa!, he recalls. An image of Elissa rises up in his mind, from a photograph taken when she was ten and beautifully adorned in a new Easter outfit: black shoes, frilly lavender dress and hat and, yes, pretty white gloves. The photo once sat on a table in his living room, but he couldn’t tell you what happened to it, nor to the table or the living room, for that matter. They were just gone. Swept away in the same tide that pulled out all the moorings from his life, and everything else that had been tethered to them.

The last time he’d seen Elissa she was crying, though he no longer remembers why. Must have been something he’d done or said; that much he knows.

“Pretty white gloves,” he repeats, staring at his hand.

He recalls the white gloves from his Marine dress uniform. At most he wore them five times: at his graduation from officer’s training school, at an armed services ball in Trenton, New Jersey, and for three military funerals. There was never a need for dress gloves in Vietnam. They would have never stayed white anyway; not with all the blood that stained his hands.

Out of the corner of his eye he can see a policeman walking towards him and instinctively hides his cup, some vestige of half-remembered pride causing him to avert his gaze from the man’s eyes at the same time.

“We need to get you inside, buddy,” the officer says. “You’ll die of cold, you stay out here.”

Moments later, a second police officer, this one a woman, steps up to join them.

“That’s the Major,” she tells her colleague. To the seated figure she offers a smile.

“You coming with us, Major?”

“Go away,” he answers, looking up as he leans further against the cold granite wall. “Don’t need you. Don’t need no one.”

“Can’t leave you out here,” the first officer says. “We’ve got orders to bring you and everyone else in.”

“Leave me alone!” the seated man shouts, gesturing with his hands as if he could push them both away.

“Oh shit,” the female officer says under her billowing breath. To her partner she whispers, “His hands. Look at his hands.”

Quickly recognizing the waxy whiteness for what it is, the officer shrugs, “Guess we’re a little late.”

To the man on the sidewalk, he offers, “That’s frostbite, buddy.”

“No,” the seated man protests. He holds up both hands, numb and strange as they now feel and offers a knowing smile of explanation.

Just like the Marine officer he once was, just like the sweet innocent daughter he once knew, just like  the young man grown suddenly old on a frozen sidewalk, his hands are beautiful and special in a way these strangers will never understand.

“White gloves,”he insists proudly.

“Pretty white gloves.”

Paul Steven Stone is a Cambridge-based writer. His blog, from which this comes, is www.paulstonesthrow.com.

Don't send out for ice

"Breaching Iceberg: Greenland, August 8'' (photo), b y CAMILLE SEAMAN, in the show "Seeing Glacial Time: Climate Change in the Arctic, ''  through May 18 at the Tufts University Art Gallery, Medford, Mass.

Blank slate, for a minute

  A perfect New Year's Day morning  here in southern New England -- cold, calm and head-clearing, with cirrus clouds suggesting more storms to come.

Chris Powell: What have you got for this patient?

By CHRIS POWELL

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Hey, supporters of "Obamacare" -- the Affordable Care Act: Take a look at the case of the 10-year-old girl in Oxford, Conn., whose story was told the other day by the Waterbury Republican-American. Her small intestine has failed and she needs a transplant. She's ready for surgery at a hospital in Pittsburgh but her family's medical insurance won't cover the whole cost and the hospital won't undertake the surgery without proof of full funding.

So the girl's family and friends are holding little events in the community and soliciting neighbors as they try to raise the $65,000 needed. They're still about $35,000 short.

While it is denounced as sweeping and intrusive, "Obamacare" won't help the girl or thousands of others like her with remediable conditions whose families have been reduced to begging for their lives even as the government pours money down toilets from Afghanistan to the National Endowment for the Arts.

And hey, opponents of "Obamacare": What have you got for that girl and her family? The slogan used by opponents of "Obamacare" in Congress has been “repeal and replace,” but while they have held many votes to repeal, they have not yet offered any plan to replace.

People having to beg for their lives or those of loved ones when saving them is entirely possible -- what kind of society is this?

* * *

Recognizing the clamor about excessive sentences for nonviolent drug offenders, President Obama has commuted the sentences of eight federal prisoners who already had served at least 15 years for involvement with crack cocaine. Incredibly, six of them had been sentenced to life.

Three years ago federal law reduced crack cocaine sentences to the level of sentences for powder cocaine, but thousands of people remain in prison serving the harsher sentences even as there is no sign that the criminal-justice approach to drugs is anything but an economic stimulus program for employees of law enforcement and the illegal drug trade. The criminal-justice approach to drugs is also oppression of the poor, who disproportionately see the drug trade as economic opportunity and end up in prison for it.

At least Connecticut's Sentencing Commission is recommending reducing from 1,500 feet to 200 feet the circumference of the silly “drug-free” zones around schools. Since very few drug sales are to children, those zones don't protect kids; they only enable police to pile extra criminal charges on anyone caught doing drugs in cities.

Arguing for medicalizing the drug problem, LaResse Harvey of Hartford's Better Way Foundation told the commission that the best way to protect children from drugs is to help their parents overcome addiction. But in Connecticut most people in authority couldn't care less if half the young men of color are imprisoned over drugs as long as the other half can be hired to guard them.

* * *

South Windsor Conn.'s police department soon may lead the way toward greater accuracy and accountability in police work and criminal justice in Connecticut. Chief Matthew D. Reed says the department is studying whether to equip its officers with body cameras to record every word and movement in their work.

Like many police cruisers, the South Windsor department's are already equipped with dashboard cameras, but what they record is very limited.

Besides serving as a comprehensive record, video and audio from body cameras can protect people against police misconduct and protect officers against the false complaints commonly made against them by criminals and traffic scofflaws. If there's videotape, there will be far fewer false charges by officers and their targets alike and there will be much less time spent in court sorting out the credibility of witnesses.

Being videotaped, more people will be on their best behavior -- at least until the so-called victims' rights movement gets police videotape exempted from Connecticut's freedom-of-information law because disclosure might hurt somebody's feelings.



Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Conn.

Our artificial selves

 

Detail of "Swarm'' (hydrocal and wood), by STACY LATT SAVAGE,  at the Art Complex Museum, Duxbury, Mass.

Memories of green

 

"The Clark House " (oil on canvas) by RICHARD S. MERYMAN, in  private collection. This is shown through Monadnock Art / Friends of the Dublin Art Colony .

What a nice reminder of summer.

The Monadnock Region, in  southern New Hampshire, has long been a gathering spot for painters, writers and other artists. Just think of the McDowell Colony of creative types, in Peterbor0.

Cold December mountains

"Big Top'' (oil on canvas),  by MIRA CANTOR,   at the Kingston Gallery, Boston.

This is one of those times of years when you are again brought with up a start that you're one of the old folks, and that people 30 or 4o years younger have no knowledge, and usually little interest in finding out about, the historical events and personalities you're talking about.

Another year spirals out of control

 

Third person rural

  By ROBERT WHITCOMB

While driving through the Vermont hills a few weeks ago, I thought about two artists much associated with New England’s rural parts — Norman Rockwell and Robert Frost — and the relationship between their lucrative rural public personas and private lives. No surprise that there was quite a gap! For one thing, they were born outside New England — Frost in San Francisco and Rockwell in New York City — and grew up in cities. More importantly, their public images were, and are, at considerable variance from their personal lives.

Norman Rockwell has been much in the news again lately because of the new book “American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell,” by Deborah Solomon. In it, she not only discusses Rockwell’s genius as an illustrator, but also a private life that was often quite tormented. (Like, I would guess, most lives.)

Ms. Solomon discusses Rockwell’s depression and anxiety. And she speculates (to the dismay of the artist’s family) that his life may have been complicated by homoerotic longings that may (or may not?) have expressed themselves in his many pictures of winsome, Tom Sawyer-like boys and handsome square-jawed men. He also had three troubled marriages and was a hypochondriac — and to the pleasure of his millions of fans, a workaholic.

Stockbridge, Mass., the Berkshires town whose scenes provided many of the ideas behind Rockwell’s famous illustrations, is also the site of the Austen Riggs Center, the mental hospital whose staff has treated many celebrities. Ms. Solomon says that Rockwell and his second wife, Mary Barstow, an alcoholic, moved there from Arlington, Vt., so that Mrs. Rockwell could be treated for depression. Rockwell himself used Austen Riggs’s services.

And yet the pictures that Norman Rockwell painted of the town are mostly upbeat — evoking a small-town communitarian paradise. “I paint life the way I want it to be,” he famously said.

Then there was the mating of modernist and 19th century poetry that is the great work of Robert Frost. Frost, like Rockwell, was a city boy whom the public came to primarily associate with rural New England themes, but innocent and Arcadian his poems are not. Many evoke a chilly or even malevolent universe. (My favorite is “Design.”) Far more Ethan Frome than Currier & Ives.

But as his fame spread in the English-speaking world (he first became well-known in England, where he lived in 1912-15), that he looked like Hollywood’s idea of a Yankee farmer, and his folksy genial manner (for public consumption, anyway) tended to overcome in the public mind the darkness of his poems. He could have been a character in a Rockwell painting. This was in part intentional: Being seen as a charming cracker-barrel philosopher/poet brought in the lecture and poet-in-residence fees. He became the most famous poet in America.

Thus we have the curious transformation of the deeply intellectual Frost (whose characters were mostly ordinary country people, whose speech patterns and emotions he was deeply familiar with) into an icon of popular culture.

Consider the revision in Norman Rockwell’s reputation from “merely” a “fine popular illustrator” to being seen as a kind of great artist, with aesthetic links to other masters going back to the Renaissance. It takes a long time for society to figure out what it really thinks of its artists and politicians.

***

Memoirs have been one of the comparatively strong parts of the book business in recent years. With aging Baby Boomers, expect a lot more. A few recent ones:

‘’Whiplash: When the Vietnam War Rolled a Hand Grenade Into the Animal House,” by Denis O’Neill, is a mildly fictionalized account of the 1969-1970 academic year at Dartmouth College. O’Neill is a journalist, screenwriter and musician. On Dec. 1, 1969, the Selective Service System held the first lottery since World War II for the draft, bringing great anxiety to some and relief to others, and “The Sixties,” as we know them, reached their crazy crescendo. (You could say that “The Sixties” as a cultural phenomenon didn’t really end until, say, 1972.)

Then there’s Rhode Island investment mogul Tom DePetrillo’s book about the downs (including personal bankrupty) but bigger ups of his career. He was one of 11 children and a school dropout before he made a fortune as an investor. The book provides chatty and colorful advice and observations on business, public policy, politics and life in general.

Finally there’s Ralph Barlow’s “Beneficent Church in Providence: A Church Engaged with an Emerging New World,” the Rev. Mr. Barlow’s memoir of running the church from 1964 to 1997, during which this downtown Congregational institution’s experience included many of the recent social upheavals of American society.

Robert Whitcomb (rwhitcomb4@cox.net), a biweekly contributor, is a Providence-based writer and editor. He blogs at newenglanddiary.com.

Preparing for a protest movement

"On the Edge'' (collage, wax and resin on panel), by JANE MAXWELL, at Lanoue Fine Art,  Boston.

The big dripper

 

"Jack the Dripper,'' by JOE FIG (courtesy of the artist and the Tierney Gardarin Gallery, New York), at the Bruce Museum, in Greenwich, Conn., in the current "Artists' Studios: Small-Scale Views'' show.

The "Jack'' here is, of course, famed abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock, whose violent alcoholism would have been denounced by the quiet and dignified alcoholics living in the famous rich precincts  of Greenwich.

Oil/gas moguls try to quash solar power

 

From Brookhaven National Laboratory

Now the Koch brothers are coming after my solar panels.

I had solar panels installed on the roof of our Washington, D.C., home this year. My household took advantage of a generous tax incentive from the District government and a creative leasing deal offered by the solar panel seller.

Our electric bills fell by at least a third. When people make this choice, the regional electric company grows less pressured to spend money to expand generating capacity and the installation business creates good local jobs. Customers who use solar energy also reduce carbon emissions.

What’s not to love?

According to the  American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative network better known as ALEC, our solar panels make us “free riders.” What?

Yes, according to ALEC, an organization that specializes in getting the right-wing agenda written into state laws, people like me who invest in energy-efficiency and shrinking our carbon footprints ought to be penalized.

Why does ALEC want us punished? Since it’s bankrolled by, among others, the billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, it’s hard not to surmise that they’re worried about a threat to fossil fuels businesses. Koch Industries’ operations include refneries, oil and natural-gas pipelines and petrochemicals

That’s no conspiracy theory. Recently the British newspaper The Guardian wrote about the assault on solar panels as part of a broader exposé on ALEC.

John Eick, the legislative analyst for ALEC’s energy, environment and agriculture program, confirmed to The Guardian that the organization would support making solar panel users pay extra for the electricity they generate. That’s already about to happen in Arizona, where homeowners who use solar panels will pay an average of about $5 extra a month for the privilege, starting in January.

The sola- power industry called the new rule a victory only because power companies in the state were demanding assessments of as much as $100 a month — more than high enough to deter families from considering switching to solar.

Making solar energy cost-prohibitive for homeowners and businesses is part of a larger ALEC objective, affirmed at its recent annual meeting, to continue its effort to eliminate state renewable energy mandates.

According to meeting minutes, ALEC has already succeeded in getting legislation introduced in 15 states to “reform, freeze, or repeal their state’s renewable mandate.” ALEC lobbyists are pushing policies through states that will speed up climate change and increase pollution. They’re threatening the renewable energy industry, which is already creating new jobs and saving money for homeowners and businesses.

Without the current policy paralysis in Washington and a lack of bold, creative thinking about how to build a new, green economy at the national level, they wouldn’t be making so much headway.

My organization, Institute for America’s Future — together with the Center for American Progress and the BlueGreen Alliance — recently published a report that shows what’s at stake with ALEC’s destructive agenda.

Our “green industrial revolution” report recommends tying together a series of regional solutions that take advantage of the unique assets of each part of the country, such as the abundance of sun in the West and the wind off the Atlantic coast, into a cohesive whole.

These regional strategies would be supported by smart federal policies, such as establishing a price for carbon emissions and a national clean energy standard, creating certainty and stability in the alternative energy tax credit market, and providing strong support for advanced energy manufacturing.

This is the way to unleash the kind of innovation and job creation our economy — and our rapidly warming planet — desperately needs.

My solar panels are the envy of my block and I wish more of my neighbors will be able to make the same choice I did. But they won’t if fossil-fuel dinosaurs like the Koch brothers and right-wing organizations like the American Legislative Exchange Council keep casting their dark clouds on efforts to build a clean energy future.

It’s time for them to step aside and let the sun shine in.

Isaiah J. Poole is the editor of OurFuture.org, the Web site of the Campaign for America’s Future. OurFuture.org. This was distributed via OtherWors.org.

Anything to get to America

 

"The Steerage,'' photo by ALFRED STEIGLITZ, in the show "Photography at the Fitchburg Art Museum,'' through next summer.

Boston at dusk

  Painting by SAM VOKEY, at the Guild of Boston Artists.

The quintessence of Boston Common in the winter -- beautiful, in its way, but also forbidding.