Chris Powell: Block housing development and your property taxes may rise
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Blame for rising property taxes in Connecticut may be shared more broadly than most people think. It's not just the fault of elected officials who yield to the demands of special interests, particularly the demands of government- employee unions for higher wages and benefits.
Property taxes are determined in large part by property values, and the great inflation created by the spectacular overspending and over-borrowing by the Trump and Biden administrations and Congress have increased the nominal value of nearly everything, including residential property.
Then there is the flood of illegal immigration. The millions of illegal immigrants admitted in recent years must live somewhere, and the federal government and state government are often subsidizing their housing, causing scarcity. Without so many illegal immigrants and government subsidies for their housing, demand would be reduced, more properties would be vacant, and residential rents, prices and property values would fall.
There is still another cause of housing scarcity and rising property values and taxes: state and municipal policy that restricts supply, such as exclusive zoning and what is called farmland preservation, a politically correct mechanism for preventing housing development. People tend not to associate these policies with rising property taxes, which homeowners pay directly and tenants pay indirectly through their rent.
But maybe the association will be noticed after more periodic municipality-wide property revaluations, such as the ones that New London and Norwich recently underwent.
According to The Day of New London, residential-property values in the little city just rose by an average of 60 percent, and many people are shocked by the corresponding increase in their property taxes, since commercial- property values didn't rise that much if at all.
With employment booming at submarine manufacturer Electric Boat in neighboring Groton, New London and nearby towns especially need more housing. But since the housing shortage, rising property values, and rising property taxes are statewide and national phenomena, any town could facilitate a building boom and still not knock housing values down much.
At least people should take their rising property-tax bills as a reminder not to complain so much about new housing. Obstructing new housing means scarcity, and scarcity means that housing prices will be bid up, taking housing taxes with them.
LEAVE IDAHO ALONE: Abortion rights are more secure in Connecticut than they are in many other states.
Having long ago incorporated into its own law the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Wade, Connecticut leaves abortion unrestricted prior to fetal viability, and even then few seem to be guarding against the abortion of viable fetuses. Connecticut also allows abortions for minors without parental consent, enabling child molesters to erase the evidence of their crimes.
Still, the abortion policies of other states have Connecticut Atty. Gen. William Tong in a frenzy. Lately Tong has been fulminating about Idaho's restrictive abortion law and has even had filed a brief in an Idaho case in federal court, though the case has no bearing on Connecticut.
Speaking of Idaho's law the other day, the attorney general said: "This threat and severe state abortion bans are not going away. We're going to have to keep fighting these fights in every court in every state where patients' lives and reproductive freedom are at risk."
But why? Reversing Roe two years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court didn't restrict abortion anywhere. It just returned abortion policy to the states, restoring some federalism.
Who is Connecticut's attorney general to seek to override democracy in Idaho? Presumably if enough of the women of Idaho wanted their state's abortion law to be like Connecticut's, they could mobilize to achieve it. Apparently many if, not most, women in Idaho want abortion tightly restricted.
No one has to live in Idaho or Connecticut.
And where does the attorney general find the authority to intervene in cases having no bearing on Connecticut? State law confines the attorney general's office to legal matters "in which the state is a party or is interested." Abortion law in Idaho is not a state interest in Connecticut, just a partisan political one.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
‘Fragile places’
“Distant Lands” (cold wax, oil stick, graphite, ink, on Bristol board), by Natick, Mass.-based artist Deborah Marum Pressman, in the group show “Forces of Nature,’’ at the Ava Gallery, Lebanon, N.H., through Aug. 24.
She says:
‘‘My relationship with the land is with the fragile places . . . their beauty and vulnerability are undeniable.’’
Invasive plants move fast
Japanese knotweed is strangling native plants in southern New England.
— Photo by harum.koh
A barberry shoot
— Photo by MPF
Text excerpted from an ecoRI News article by Frank Carini
“An international team of scientists recently discovered that nonnative species are expanding their ranges up to 1,000 times faster than native ones, in large part due to human help…. {New England has seen a massive invasion of non-native plants, such as barberry, in recent decades.}
“Barberry was brought to the United States from Japan and eastern Asia in the late 1800s…. {T}he prickly shrub easily spreads into woodlands, pastures, and meadows, where, like many invasives imported from faraway lands, it strangles native species.
“{R}esearchers found that even seemingly sedentary nonnative plants are moving at three times the speed of their native counterparts in a race where, because of the rapid pace of climate change and its effect on habitat, speed matters.’’
Here’s the whole article.
Inquiring into immigration
“What a New Day’’ (oil on canvas) by Taiwanese-American artist Chris Chou, in the group show “Roots of Passage: Artists Examine Immigration,’’ at Atlantic Works Gallery, East Boston, through Aug. 17.
— Image courtesy of Atlantic Works Gallery.
The gallery says the show is an opportunity for artists to investigate immigration from various viewpoints
“With East Boston’s rich tradition of welcoming immigrants, and now with immigration such a burning issue in the news today, the gallery felt compelled to not only examine, but to celebrate the issue," according to Atlantic Works Gallery founding member Eric Hess.
East Boston Immigration Station circa 1922.
Llewellyn King: How the move to a MAGA-style Britain flopped
Areas of the world that were part of the British Empire, with current British Overseas Territories underlined in red.
— Photo by RedStorm1368
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
“Make America Great Again.” Those words have been gently haunting me not because of their political-loading, but because they have been reminding me of something, like the snatches of a tune or a poem which isn’t fully remembered, but which drifts into your consciousness from time to time.
Then it came to me: It wasn’t the words, but the meaning; or, more precisely, the reasoning behind the meaning.
I grew up among the last embers of the British Empire, in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). I am often asked what it was like there.
All I can tell you is that it was like growing up in Britain, maybe in one of the nicer places in the Home Counties (those adjacent to London), but with some very African aspects and, of course, with the Africans themselves, whose land it was until Cecil John Rhodes and his British South Africa Company decided that it should be British; part of a dream that Britain would rule from Cape Town to Cairo.
Evelyn Waugh, the British author, said of Southern Rhodesia in 1937 that the settlers had a “morbid lack of curiosity” about the indigenous people. Although it was less heinous than it sounds, there was a lot of truth to that. They were there and now we were there; and it was how it was with two very different peoples on the same piece of land.
But by the 1950s, change was in the air. Britain came out of World War II less interested in its empire than it had ever been. In 1947, under the Labor government of Clement Attlee, which came to power after the wartime government of Winston Churchill, it relinquished control of the Indian subcontinent — now comprising India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.
It was set to gradually withdraw from the rest of the world. The empire was to be renamed the Commonwealth and was to be a club of former possessions, often more semantically connected than united in other ways.
But the end of the empire wasn’t universally accepted, and it wasn’t accepted in the African colonies that had attracted British settlers, always referred to not as “whites” but as “Europeans.”
I can remember the mutterings and a widespread belief that the greatness that had put “Great” into the name Great Britain would return. The world map would remain with Britain's incredible holdings in Asia and Africa, colored for all time in red. People said things like the “British lion will awake, just you see.”
It was a hope that there would be a return to what were regarded as the glory days of the empire when Britain led the world militarily, politically, culturally, scientifically, and with what was deeply believed to be British exceptionalism.
That feeling, while nearly universal among colonials, wasn’t shared by the citizens back home in Britain. They differed from those in the colonies in that they were sick of war and were delighted by the social services which the Labor government had introduced, like universal healthcare, and weren’t rescinded by the second Churchill administration, which took power in 1951.
The empire was on its last legs and the declaration by Churchill in 1942, “I did not become the king’s first minister to preside over the dissolution of the British Empire,” was long forgotten. But not in the colonies and certainly not where I was. Our fathers had served in the war and were super-patriotic.
While in Britain they were experimenting with socialism and the trade unions were amassing power, and migration from the West indies had begun changing attitudes, in the colonies, belief flourished in what might now be called a movement to make Britain great again.
In London in 1954, it got an organization, the League of Empire Loyalists, which was more warmly embraced in the dwindling empire than it was in Britain. It was founded by an extreme conservative, Arthur K. Chesterton, who had had fascist sympathies before the war.
In Britain, the league attracted some extreme right-wing Conservative members of parliament but little public support. Where I was, it was quite simply the organization that was going to Make Britain Great Again.
It fizzled after a Conservative prime minister, Harold MacMillan, put an end to dreaming of the past. He said in a speech in South Africa that “winds of change” were blowing through Africa, though most settlers still believed in the return of empire.
It took the war of independence in Rhodesia to bring home MacMillan’s message. We weren’t going to Make Britain Great Again.
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com, and he based in Rhode Island.
whchronicle.com
Coastal confrontation
From Boston-based artist Jessica Straus’s show “Stemming the Tide,’’ at the Brattleboro (Vt.) Museum, through Oct. 19
The museum says:
“A segmented map stretching across the gallery floor and rising to the ceiling is the central feature of Jessica Straus’s immersive installation. Its scale dwarfs us. The distinctive New England shoreline is recognizable. This is the Gulf of Maine, with waters descending from Ktqmkuk, now called Newfoundland, to Patuxet, the crook of land stretching out to the sea that we know as Cape Cod.
“Paired with the map is a series of photographs, partially occluded by hand-knotted fishing nets. In each image, a piece of the map floats atop lapping ocean waters, sometimes with the artist and other times adrift. The mesmerizing images allow us to contemplate the seen and unseen currents of the ocean.
“Deftly carved fish—cod—are scattered across the map. They are painted a ghostly white. In 1602, when Bartholomew Gosnold sailed into the southern terminus of the Gulf of Maine, its waters teemed with giant cod. That iconic fish is no longer abundant or giant.
“Woven together, the elements in “Stemming the Tide’’ provide a multifaceted and open-ended viewing experience.’’
Zachary Albert: How the Heritage Foundation pushes right-wing policies
As the 2024 presidential election heats up, some people are hearing about the Heritage Foundation for the first time. The conservative think tank has a new, ambitious and controversial policy plan, Project 2025, which calls for an overhaul of American public policy and government.
Project 2025 lays out many standard conservative ideas – like prioritizing energy production over environmental and climate-change concerns, and rejecting the idea of abortion as health care – along with some much more extreme ones, like criminalizing pornography. And it proposes to eliminate or restructure countless government agencies in line with conservative ideology.
While think tanks sometimes have the reputation of being stuffy academic institutions detached from day-to-day politics, Heritage is far different. By design, Heritage was founded to not only develop conservative policy ideas but also to advance them through direct political advocacy.
All think tanks are classified as 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organizations, which are prohibited from engaging in elections and can take part in only a small amount of political lobbying. But some, like Heritage, also form affiliated 501(c)(4) organizations that allow them to participate in campaigns and lobby extensively. Heritage is one of the sponsors of the Republican National Convention, which wrapped up in Milwaukee on July 18.
In research for my forthcoming book, Partisan Policy Networks, I’ve found that a growing share of think tanks are explicitly ideological, aligned with a single political party, and engaged in direct policy advocacy.
Still, Heritage stands out from all of the groups I investigated. It is much more conservative and more closely aligned with former President Donald Trump’s style of Republicanism. Heritage is also more aggressive in its advocacy for conservative ideas, pairing campaign spending with lobbying and large-scale grassroots mobilization.
Americans should expect to hear a lot more about its ideas, like those outlined in Project 2025, if Trump is reelected in November 2024.
Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, speaks with members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus during a Capitol Hill news conference in September 2023. Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images
A new type of think tank
Two Republican congressional staffers, Ed Feulner and Paul Weyrich, formed Heritage in 1973 as an explicit rebuke to existing think tanks that they thought were either too liberal or too meek in advancing conservative ideas.
Feulner and Weyrich were particularly incensed about how a preeminent conservative think tank at the time, the American Enterprise Institute, or AEI, timed its release of a policy report in 1971 on whether to approve government funding for supersonic transport airplanes, which can fly faster than the speed of sound. AEI published its recommendations several days after Congress voted on the issue, because it “didn’t want to try to affect the outcome of the vote.”
Heritage turns this philosophy on its head. Rather than producing policy research for its own sake, Heritage conducts research, as one employee told me in 2018, “to build a case, to make the argument for policy change.”
For example, Heritage’s affiliated 501(c)(4) advocacy organization, Heritage Action for America, and Sentinel Action Fund, a Super PAC set up by Heritage Action in 2022, spend money to influence elections and lobby elected officials on issues as diverse as taxation, abortion, immigration and the environment.
For this reason, some scholars and politicos call Heritage and other similar groups “do tanks” rather than “think tanks.”
Because Sentinel Action Fund is a Super PAC, it can raise and spend unlimited amounts of money to influence elections so long as they do not coordinate with candidate campaigns. Sentinel Action Fund then spent more than US$13 million on voter outreach and advertising in the 2022 midterm elections. The fund’s self-described aim was to ensure GOP majorities in the House and Senate by aiding “key conservative fighters” in “tough general elections.” Sentinel Action Fund Vice President of Communications Carson Steelman said that in 2024, “the Sentinel Action Fund is totally legally separate from Heritage Action.”
Former Vice President Dick Cheney addresses the Heritage Foundation in April 2007 in Chicago. Jeff Haynes/AFP via Getty Images
People, not just money
But it’s the people, even more than money, that make Heritage influential, my research shows.
Heritage has directly worked to place former and current employees in congressional offices and the executive branch. More than 70 former and current Heritage staffers began working for the Trump administration by 2017 – and four current Heritage staffers were members of Trump’s cabinet in 2021.
Heritage also says that it has more than 2 million local, volunteer activists and roughly 20,000 “Sentinel activists” who receive information from Heritage and take part in organized campaigns to push for conservative policies. My interviews show that activists who partner with Heritage take part in strategy calls, contact elected representatives with coordinated messages and amplify the organization’s messaging on social media.
In one example from 2021, Heritage Foundation developed a report on election fraud and voter integrity. Heritage Action for America, meanwhile, coordinated volunteers to deliver this report to Georgia legislators, had staffers meet with these legislators to advise them on passing new voting restrictions, and paid for television advertising urging citizens to support such laws.
Heritage, Trump and Project 2025
All these efforts add up to a great deal of influence within the Republican Party. Heritage has played a key role in pushing Republicans toward more conservative policies since its creation.
When Ronald Reagan took office as president in 1981, for example, the Heritage Foundation had a ready-made conservative agenda for the new administration. By the end of his first term, Reagan executed more than 60% of the think tank’s policy recommendations.
When Trump took office in 2017, Heritage was again ready with friendly staffers and a handy policy agenda, called the Blueprint for Reorganization. By the end of Trump’s first year in office, Heritage boasted that he “had embraced 64 percent of our 321 recommendations,” among them key conservative priorities like tax reform, regulatory rollback and increased defense spending.
Project 2025 is similar to these other sets of recommendations for Republican politicians and presidential candidates. It outlines an agenda for a new president to adopt and a team of experts to help them.
But Project 2025 has taken on a different bent compared with earlier blueprints. Kevin Roberts, the president of Heritage, has described the group’s role as “institutionalizing Trumpism.”
This is probably why Project 2025, and Heritage, have received such an unusually large amount of attention in recent months. The fact that a wonky, 900-page policy memo has been the focus of countless news articles and hundreds of Biden campaign tweets, especially before the 2024 election, is a telling indication of its expected influence.
For its part, the Trump campaign has maintained distance from the project, as Trump himself has implausibly claimed that he knows nothing about it.
He is likely keeping his distance from Project 2025 because parts of the agenda are far too extreme for all but the most die-hard conservative activists. But even if Trump isn’t campaigning on these policies, Americans should expect Heritage ideas to matter greatly in a second Trump administration. The Heritage Foundation is built for this goal.
Zachary Albert is an assistant professor of politics at Brandeis University, in Waltham
Zachary Albert does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond his academic appointment.
Art from a very bloody business
“Scrimshaw Utensils, Pie Crimpers and Jagging Wheels” (19th century) (whale bone), at the New Bedford Whaling Museum.
— Photo by Beth Neville
Japanese narrative screen showing a whale hunt off Wakayama.
Trying to create 'multimodal paradise' along Emerald Necklace
What part it would look like
Excerpted from The Boston Guardian
(New England Diary’s editor, Robert Whitcomb, is chairman of The Boston Guardian)
State planners have finalized plans to revitalize Boston’s Bowker Overpass, the Fenway’s eastern gate, repairing crumbling road infrastructure and turning a dangerous pedestrian intersection into a multimodal paradise.
The Massachusetts Department of Transportation (MassDOT) gave the public its most complete picture yet on July 11. The public forum saw general support from residents and civic groups eager to see the broader Charlesgate project move toward fully opening that part of the Emerald Necklace.
Today, the 60-year old Bowker overpass is a knot of asphalt roads, connecting Boylston Street to Commonwealth Avenue over the I-90. Officials showed pictures of crumbling concrete and exposed rebar rusting away in the elements…..
The new layout will offer distinct paths for bikes, cars and pedestrians all the way to Commonwealth Avenue from either direction, with bikes and pedestrians sharing some parts.
The offramps will also be redesigned, with one new road to Charlesgate west replacing the ramps on either side to Commonwealth Avenue.
Michael Schmalz: What is Catholic Integralism, and how does Vance fit into it?
Fenwick Hall at Holy Cross, named after Benedict Joseph Fenwick, is the college's flagship building.
WORCESTER, Mass.
Since his nomination as the Republican candidate for vice president, focus has intensified on JD Vance’s religious beliefs and how they connect to his politics.
Vance is a convert to Catholicism and seems to have the same policy positions that many American Catholic conservatives hold: opposition to abortion, support for the traditional family, skepticism regarding liberal immigration policies and efforts to combat climate change, and advocacy of economic tariffs.
Some news reports have also referenced Vance’s apparent association with Catholic Integralism, although Vance himself has not addressed the issue publicly.
So, now might be a good time to ask: What is Catholic Integralism?
The basic position of Catholic Integralism is that there are two areas of human life: the spiritual and the temporal, or worldly. Catholic Integralists argue that the spiritual and temporal should be integrated – with the spiritual being the dominant partner. This means that religious values, specifically Christian ones, should guide government policies.
Catholic Integralists disagree about how to achieve this integration between the spiritual and temporal. Some argue that Christians, particularly Catholics, should have advisory roles in government and lead by example. Other Catholic Integralists want a more comprehensive approach to organizing society along Christian principles.
Catholic Integralists share an opposition to liberalism. Generally, liberalism is understood as a political philosophy that supports limits on the government’s authority and backs constitutional protections for the rights of individuals and minorities. But Catholic Integralists argue that liberalism is incapable of establishing deep forms of human community because it values individualism and liberty above all things.
The irony, from the Catholic Integralist perspective, is that liberalism is not really that liberal. Instead, liberalism demands – and enforces – adherence to a certain set of values, like tolerance and pluralism, that prevents creating a social order in which human beings can realize a larger, God-given meaning for their lives.
Catholic critiques
There are strong criticisms of Catholic Integralism coming from both within the Catholic church and beyond.
The Vatican II document, “Dignitatis Humanae,” affirms that the state should protect religious liberty for all, not only Catholics. This is a position that some Catholic Integralists would find problematic.
Other critics have argued that Catholic Integralism is “unreasonable” and unworkable because society needs to rely on the cooperation of individuals who inevitably have different ideas and values.
Vance and Integralist views
When considering Vance’s current policy commitments, some certainly seem consistent with Catholic Integralist views. For example, Catholic Integralists might justify opposing immigration and migration because they believe that society needs to be more homogeneous in order to have a shared system of values.
Additionally, Vance has recently called to criminalize gender-affirming care for minors. In one sense, Vance is expressing the overall Catholic belief that sex and gender distinctions are willed by God – a point that Pope Francis has also made. But moving to enforce this religious belief by law might reflect a Catholic Integralist position that society must respect “natural law,” or the order of the universe as believed to be established by God.
Right now, Catholic Integralism is of interest to a distinct minority of Catholic academics and political conservatives in the the English-speaking world. But if Vance is elected vice president, it will be interesting to see what happens if he clarifies – or expands – his apparent Catholic Integralist connections.
Mathew Schmalz is a professor of religious studies at the College of the Holy Cross, in Worcester. He is a registered independent voter
‘Design of darkness’
I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth--
Assorted characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning right,
Like the ingredients of a witches' broth--
A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.
What had that flower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall?--
If design govern in a thing so small.
‘‘Design,’’ by Robert Frost (1874-1963)
Chris Powell: Municipalities should be posting their most interesting records
— Photo by Michal Klajban
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Greenwich First Selectman Fred Camillo is sore at people who, he says, make lots of requests for access to town records under Connecticut’s freedom-of-information law. “Some people are abusing the system,” Camillo says, and requesting town records "has been weaponized and we’re getting harassed."
So his administration has begun posting on Greenwich’s internet site the names of all FOI requesters and the subjects of their requests.
This is perfectly legal. No one who requests access to a public record can very well object if his own request is a public record too. But Camillo’s new practice seems meant to retaliate against and embarrass requesters. It’s mistaken and almost surely will fail.
For anyone who is making FOI requests mainly to annoy town officials isn’t likely to be embarrassed in the least by publicity. To the contrary, such people probably will welcome publicity and figure that their renown will help intimidate town officials and employees in the future.
Besides, Connecticut’s FOI law now authorizes government officials to petition the Freedom of Information Commission for relief from a “vexatious requester,” a person whose requests for records are so numerous and redundant as to constitute abuse. While they are few, there are such people and the commission has taken action against some, exempting the government agency being harassed from having to respond to the requester.
So if First Selectman Camillo really thinks that any FOI requester is "abusing the system," he should identify the abuser in a complaint to the FOI Commission, whereupon the commission may call a hearing that may be as much an inconvenience to the requester as the requester’s requests are to town officials.
There’s no harm in posting FOI requests on a town’s Internet site as Greenwich is doing, but there’s not much public service in it either. Indeed, if a municipality or state agency is going to put more effort into posting records on its Internet site, many records would be of far more public interest than FOI requests.
For example, municipalities could post their payrolls as state government does. Some municipal government salaries are extraordinary but overlooked. Excessive overtime for police officers and others is often a scandal.
Municipal employee job evaluations and disciplinary records should be posted too. Those records are where some big scandals are hidden.
While teacher evaluations, alone among all government employee evaluations, long have been exempted from disclosure under state FOI law -- a testament to the influence of teacher unions and the subservience of state legislators to the worst of special interests -- nothing prevents municipalities from disclosing teacher evaluations voluntarily just as municipalities are required to disclose the evaluations of other employees.
With local journalism weakening, these days most municipal governments have little serious news coverage and few if any reporters inspect disciplinary records regularly.
Posting more records about government’s own performance would show the public far more about who is really "abusing the system." Any annoyance to government officials from this greater transparency might be offset by accountability and better management.
SLICING AWAY AT DEMOCRACY: Many people who achieve public office quickly come to realize the truth of the old saying, "To govern is to choose." French President Charles de Gaulle clarified that governing is always "to choose among disadvantages." Of course choosing can be a drag.
So some non-profit social-service groups want Connecticut to impose a special tax on telecommunications services whose revenue would be dedicated to social-service groups.
But why should cell phone or Internet users particularly pay for social services? There’s no causal relationship between telecommunications and social-service needs. It’s just that the social-service groups don’t want to have to compete for state government money as everybody else has to. With a dedicated tax their money would be guaranteed.
If choosing is restricted this way, over time the practice would slice away at democracy and insulate many rcipients of government money. Connecticut has done enough of that already.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
UBEW's diverse workforce
“We Are Power,” by Meredith Stern, in the show “Listen!”, at the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, through Jan. 5.
— Image courtesy of RISD Museum.
The show has 30 historical and contemporary works on paper from the museum that curators found "urgent and powerful, directly addressing the issues [they] face while offering hope for the future.’’ The show also features reflections and poems written by the curators.
Green is good, air travel is terrible
1928 poster
Terminal lobby at Rhode Island’s Green Airport
— Photo by Antony-22
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
“Once I get you up there, where the air is rarefied
We'll just glide, starry-eyed
Once I get you up there, I'll be holding you so near
You may hear all angels cheer because we're together.’’
-- From the 1958 song “Come Fly With Me,’’ with music by Jimmy Van Heusen (1913-1990) and lyrics by Sammy Cahn (1913-1993). Song was pre-airline deregulation!
Kudos to the folks at Rhode Island T.F. Green International Airport, which keeps getting honored, for being ranked by Travel + Leisure magazine as second-best airport in America (after Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport (“Minnesota nice’’? Sometimes.).
Green gets high marks for being, for an airport, low-key and (relatively) low stress, in part because it’s so easy to navigate. God knows that many, probably most, medium and large airports have become stress centers, serving up a mix of anxiety, anger, boredom, confusion.
Airports have become so unpleasant because of the law of unintended consequences. The Airline Deregulation Act of 1978 removed federal control over fares, routes and encouraged entry of new airlines (most of which have since disappeared). That brought “the masses” into a sector whose customers had previously been mostly businesspeople and the affluent. And the nation’s population has increased from about 225 million in 1979 to about 340 million now – a hell of a lot more potential airline passengers.
Deregulation led to the fearsome hub-and-spoke system, based on using a few major airports as central connecting points, which increased passenger loads, intensified airport and air traffic congestion and eliminated many convenient nonstop flights. And if one airline dominates a hub, the lack of competition has often led to higher fares. Not exactly what the deregulators had in mind.
Another bad thing that came out of airline deregulation was that it led to the closing of airports serving small cities.
On top of that, there’s the mystery, to me, of so many Americans’ masochistic and lemming-like tendency to want to travel at the same times, which leads many people to spend as much as half the time or more on a trip amidst the hordes at airports and highways rather than at their sought destinations.
Anyway, at least the planes (even Boeing’s!) are safer these days. Think of that as you wait in lines for hours as your flights keep getting cancelled because of, say, a thunderstorm in Chicago.
One nice thing about airports, however awful they can be: They still have newsstands, which used to be everywhere but have rapidly gone away in other public places, especially since COVID erupted.
Llewellyn King: Looking back, with a sigh, at when there was more respect everywhere
Sign at Arlington National Cemetery.
Sign in São João da Barra, Brazil, saying "respect if you want to be respected".
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
I can’t explain all the social and political maelstrom I have seen down through the years. But I have known times when crime was far less than it is today and political disputation, in all its forms, wasn’t a cause of violence in the population.
Here are some fragments of the changes I have seen in different places. I parade these fragments from my life because of the sense of doom, the sense that violence could break out between the political extremes in the United States; that, in effect, we haven’t seen the end of the violence of Jan. 6, 2021.
When I was a teenager in the 1950s in the Central African Federation, a long-forgotten grouping of three British colonies in central Africa — (Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe; Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia; and Nyasaland, now Malawi), the prime minister, Sir Roy Welensky, lived two miles up the road from my parents and every school day, he would pull over his big black car, a Humber Super Snipe, and give me a lift to school.
He had no chauffeur, no security, and no sense that it was needed. Those were times when society was placid — not just placid, but very placid.
When I left school at 16 and became a reporter, the prime minister would drive me into Salisbury (now Harare), the capital, which was very useful. Often he would pick up other car-less people, without regard to color, and drive them as far as the unguarded government buildings which housed his office.
There was simply no violence.
I hitch-hiked all over the federation and down to Johannesburg in the neighboring Republic of South Africa. No thought of personal safety ever crossed my mind.
It would be very unsafe and unwise to attempt that nowadays. That peacefulness went forever with the Zimbabwe war of independence, which started within a decade.
In 1960, I was in London and covering the legendary East End, an immigrant and working-class area. Peace reigned. I walked through the roughest dockside at midnight and later with no sense of fear or concern for my bodily safety. The only memory I have of being interrupted was by prostitutes, inquiring whether I needed company.
At that time, one could walk up to the prime minister’s residence at No. 10 Downing Street without being stopped. A single, unarmed policeman was all there was for security.
Now, you can’t get near No. 10. Political violence and just malicious violence is everywhere. Street crime, muggings and knife attacks are common all over London.
I was in New York during the Northeast Blackout of 1965. I had to walk across the 59th Street Bridge into Queens to make sure that the gas was turned off in a printing plant, which belonged to a partner of mine in a publishing venture. There was no looting, no threat of violence. Indeed, there was a party atmosphere and statistics show that many children were conceived during it.
By contrast, there was extensive looting and crime during the city’s major blackouts in 1977 and 2003. An ugly social indifference to each other had come into play.
I was in Rio de Janeiro in 1967 and, after having partied late into the night, I walked the backstreets of the city without fear. The last time I was in Rio in the 1990s, security personnel would prevent you from leaving your hotel after dark and caution you not to walk alone during the day.
When riots broke out in Washington and elsewhere in 1968, following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., there was massive rioting, but the anger was against property. I walked around the city during the riot, particularly on 14th Street, its epicenter. Several rioters, loaded with looted goods, suggested where it might be best for me to walk or stand to avoid being knocked over by the surging crowds.
There was still a kind of social peace, a respect of one individual for another.
Fast forward to the invasion of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. There was no such respect, either for people or the building and what it stands for, just mob anger.
About the U.S. Capitol: Back in 1968, it was easily approached and entered. You could take a taxi all the way to the entrance under the archway, either on the Senate side or the House side, and you could just walk in.
I offer these fragments from my own experience and pose the question which I can’t answer: How did we get to the state of social and criminal rage that is a reality across the globe?
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com and he’s based in Rhode Island.
Lobbying with leaves
“Green Manifesto: transformation through leaves” (video still), by Daniel Otero Torres, in his show “Sonidos del Crepúsculo (Twilight Sounds)’’, at the Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, N.H., through Oct. 6.
— Image courtesy of Currier Museum of Art.
The museum says the show honors the "unsung heroes of environmental protection" and highlights "rural and peripheral communities, power structures, and collective participation." This show includes Otero Torres's drawings on aluminum and steel structures that act as "totemic monuments" to environmental activists. This show also contains the artist's first video work.
And you thought that they had all moved to Nova Scotia
At a restaurant in Seekonk, Mass. Kitsch is one of Western Civilization’s greatest triumphs.
— Photo by Carolyn Morgan
‘Weather clerk's factory’
The Mark Twain House and Museum in Hartford.
“I reverently believe that the Maker who made us all makes everything in New England but the weather. I don't know who makes that, but I think it must be raw apprentices in the weather clerk's factory who experiment and learn how, in New England, for board and clothes, and then are promoted to make weather for countries that require a good article, and will take their custom elsewhere if they don't get it.’’
— Mark Twain (1835-1910), long-time resident of Hartford, Conn., who also loved his late-in-life sojourns in Dublin, N.H., where he rented a house in 1905-1906.
Mark Twain on the porch of his rented house in Dublin, N.H. He told people that Dublin had become his favorite place in the world.
Avoid us then
Daisies and other flowers in Vermont.
“Go ahead: say what you’re thinking. The garden
is not the real world. Machines
are the real world. Say frankly what any fool
could read in your face: it makes sense
to avoid us….’’
— From “Daisies,’’ by Nobel Prize-winning New England-based poet Louise Gluck (1943-2023). Here’s the whole poem.
Working on her personality
“Portrait of a Young Girl” (oil on canvas), by Judith Rothschild (1921-1993), at Moss Gallery, Portland, Maine.
— Courtesy of the Estate of Judith Rothschild