September 14, 2017--Arboreal Chic

I'm so glad we no longer have a house in East Hampton.

In case I was having any doubts about moving on when this formally bucolic place became a bastion of conspicuous consumption among big-bonus outer-borough Wall Streeters, a story in last week's New York Times cured me.

"How Does the Hamptons Garden Grow? With a Lot of Paid Help" is about vegetable gardening Hamptons' style.

The Times reports that compared to more familiar small scale, do-it-yourself vegetable gardens--

On the gilded acres of Long Island's East End, a different set of skill set often applies: hiring a landscape architect to design the garden, a gardener and crew to plant and pamper the beds, and sometimes even a chef to figure out what to do with the bushels of fresh produce. All that's left is to pick the vegetables--though employees frequently do that too.

Of course the "different set of skills" begins with the ability to write a big check.

Alec Gunn, a landscape gardener whose made-to-order gardens typically go for as much as $100,000 has something interesting to say about what is going on out there--

"What's driving the gardening bug [pun intended?] among the affluent, [professional] gardeners say, is their clients' focus on "self-care"--a curious phrase for a pursuit that requires so much help. . . [He adds], that the impulse includes a "moral component."  

"There's so much wealth, he said, "It's, 'Let's take something I've been fortunate to have [money] and put it back into the environment. I want to do something to reduce what I'm taking.'"

Rona and I knew it was time to begin to think about bailing out after participating in a garden tour for the benefit of the local Animal Rescue Fund. Among the gardens we visited was Martha Stewart's. She had recently bought a huge "cottage" by the ocean. 

We were stunned particularly by her mature rose garden. It was at least a half acre and included perhaps 50 varieties of roses. Talking with one of her gardeners we learned that it had been planted the week before.

"Just a week ago?" I nearly screamed at him. He just smiled as if to say, "If you have the money . . ."

A week or two later we were wandering around one of our favorite garden stores, Marders in Bridgehampton. They were well known for their stock of specimen trees. We stopped to look closely at one--a huge conifer. Not to buy it, it was listed at $5,000, but to admire its majesty.

We knew one of the owners and he walked over to say hello.  I said, "This is some tree."

He said, "If you promise not to tell anyone I have a story about it." We promised not to, though I am breaking that vow now. He told us that two, three years earlier Paul Simon, who had an estate on the beach in Montauk, wanted rows of them planted on both sides of the quarter-mile drive to his "cottage."

"We told him they wouldn't thrive there because they would be so close to the ocean that there would be too much salt in the air for trees of this kind. He insisted, and we said OK, but that we wouldn't guarantee them. He agreed and, though we shouldn't have, we agreed to plant them."

"What happened?" Rona asked.

"Within a year they were all dead."

"How much did they . . . ?"

"Hundreds of thousands," he confided in us. 

This was more than 15 years ago when hundreds of thousands was real money.

The Times article concluded--

The initial excitement of a vegetable garden fades for some clients. They lose interest, after they are planted. . . . It's the same thing with the chickens. They say, 'I have to have chickens, so I can tell my friends,' but they end up giving the eggs to the help.

Let me end with something on the same subject from my new-favorite book, Kevin Phillips' Wealth and Democracy--

The Hamptons, where roadside vegetable stands sell Osaka purple mustard and Romanian wax peppers, developed a particular case of arboreal chic. Crimson king maples and golden honey locusts costing tens of thousands of dollars apiece became status symbols along with weeping copper beeches, according to one Baedeker. They had to look like they had been there since the first settlers:

Size, rarity, and the difficulty of transportation add to the cachet of some trees, but in the end it comes down to expense. Some trees now gracing Hamptons estates have been driven down from the Pacific Northwest in refrigerated tractor-trailers, and some have been planted with the aid of military-size Sikorsky helicopters to obviate the necessity of rutting the lawns with wheeled tracks. 

Amagansett Farmers Market

September 4, 2017--Wealth & Democracy

In a 2002 book of this title by Kevin Phillips (my favorite conservative writer), with the subtitle: A Political History of the American Rich, speaking about wealth formation over the course of American history, turning to the early 1980s, Phillips talks about how the technology sector began to contribute to a surge in the American economy--

Technology was gathering force in the eighties, dropping hints of greater things to come. Sector firms were among the stock market high-fliers of 1979-82: Tandy, Teledyne, Wang Labs, Prime Computer, Datapoint, Rolm, MCI, and many more.  

A decade earlier the stock market's "Nifty-Fifty" had also had a high-technology vanguard: Polaroid, Xerox, Electronic Data Systems. Breakdowns of manufacturing spending during the 1979-83 slump and turnaround showed high-tech industries alone performing in a steady upturn.

Not only did various bubbles subsequently burst, but how many of these former high-fliers are still around? Those that are, like Xerox, are greatly diminished.

Lesson--

Proceed very carefully.

November 29, 2016--This Is Depressing

In response to one of my blogs, Dr. S, a good friend who is also the best audiologist on the east coast, issued this warning. All in capital letters--

CAUTION:  THIS IS DEPRESSING. DO NOT READ ALONE OR WHILE STANDING ON A TALL BUILDING.

He went on to tell me about his ongoing frustrations with the outcome of the election. How we should not spend too much time beating ourselves up about not doing enough to forestall the outcome or struggle too hard to "understand" Trump voters. We have fallen into times where things are seen in extremes of black and white and right and wrong. He advocated calling Trump supporters out for being racist, sexist, and even worse.

I responded--

We do live on the 14th floor and have a terrace with a low railing so, heeding your warning (thank you) I read this in a room without a window or exterior door. The same place we go to when there's a tornado warning.    

I do get your point.  

It likely is a dangerous time even if Trump is a closet moderate and will find ways to wiggle out of some of his most outrageous positions. Dangerous in my mind since he is wicking out the worst in some people. 

I leave his "some people" for him to deal with. (Speak about reaping the whirlwind.) But I also have been trying to urge the rest of us to recognize that even people who voted for Trump also represent just "some people." 

I can't think of what to say to those who are as you describe them. They are out there and probably not up for grabs. I mean politically. 

So I've chosen to try to find a few ways to be optimistic and to spend most of my time trying not to get crazy while chiding the people with whom I affiliate--mainly progressives--to get up off the mat (or pot), stop feeling powerless and defeated, and get back in the game. But this time being sure to keep it up, not just do some marching for a few days and some annual check writing and then revert to the too frequent--talking, writing, fulminating.  

There's a war going on for the soul of America and too many on our side are not, I feel, behaving accordingly. Including, in my view, taking the full measure of who's on the other side. I see them as a bit more diverse than I am hearing many of my friends describe.  

To me what makes them dangerous is not that they are identifiable alt-right people (many obviously are) but people with genuine frustrations that deserve attention. People who, for example, have been lied to and manipulated by both parties, are working 2-3 jobs and still falling behind, whose kids have $50K or more in college loan debt, and who fear their children will not have good lives or a chance to live the American Dream. 

So I've been reading Kevin Phillips again (mainly American Theocracy) and the new Thomas Frank book (Listen, Liberal). For me they've figured out a lot of what's been gathering the past 30-40 years. And can serve to help explain what we might do to take back our America. 

I'm getting beat up by some friends for my efforts to urge them and myself to get more sustainably activated, but activated with as deep and nuanced an understanding about what happened as possible, to take note of the antecedents in recent and earlier American history, and also to take a hard, critical look at ourselves since I feel it essential right now not just to understand the Trump people. We need to look within. No more jerking ourselves around thinking that because we have the right views that that's enough.  

Clearly it isn't.  

We lost in very disturbing ways (look at all the swing states Trump won--Pennsylvania to me is most disturbing), look at how shallow the Dem's political bench is, look at the PC responses (see what's going on with the American flag at highly-selective Hampshire college as just one recent example), try to hear the pleas behind some of the right-wing bombast.  

Most important, I have been trying to say, it's essential to be honest about what one believes and how, among other things, one may have been a passive beneficiary of some of the right's regressive policies. How, I confess, I have benefited by the Bush tax cuts and am thereby contributing to the inequality I say I abhor. 

I've been trying to do that and am not entirely happy with what I have been discovering about myself. Another example--I find myself more Islamophobic than I'm comfortable admitting. Sadly, I could go on.

But now I'm ranting when I should be thinking about what to do with still-left-over turkey. 

Hang in there. It could get worse. Likely will. So we need to do some struggling. Including among ourselves. Maybe, starting there. 

Cozy up with a six-pack and watch some football. 

Beyond that, keep off rooftop balconies.

His response--

On occasion, especially during moments of weakness, I have found it easier to see things in black and white.  Two beers, a good night sleep, and I am again seeing the gray.   

I was really feeling like it was the end of the world, between the anti-Semitic picks and now the Secretary of Education . . .  

I realize now it’s going to be OK, eventually.  The New Yorker article, “Obama Reckons With a Trump Presidency” by David Remnick also helped.  Liked, “I think nothing is the end of the world until the end of the world.”  

I’ll keep talking and sending checks to the ACLU and Southern Poverty Law Center.

At Hampshire College

November 14, 2016--Election Postmortem

I called an old friend late last week to commiserate about the results of the election.

It was three days after the fact and she was still morose. "I'm too old to move to Canada or Europe. Friends in England called to invite me to stay with them for at least Trump's first six months. They said his first hundred days would be over by then and it would be possible to see how bad things were going to be. They said if by then he overturned most of Obama's major accomplishments, I could apply for asylum in England. But then of course there would be Brexit to deal with."

"Really?"

"Really. I'm thinking about it."

"Do you think things are that bad?"

"Potentially. Did you see who's on Trump's short list of possible cabinet members?"

"There's a lot of speculation but . . ."

"Forget 'but.' How does Sarah Palin as secretary of the interior sound? Say goodbye to our forests. Remember 'drill, baby, drill?' Or how does John Bolton for secretary of state sound? I think his favorite quote is John McCain's 'bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran.' McCain was probably making a joke but for John Bolton it could sum up his foreign policy agenda."

"Sounds like a nightmare."

"And worst of all, as a lifelong feminist, I hate what Trump and his even-worse vice president, Mike Pence, say they want to do about women's rights. Say goodbye to Roe v. Wade. That alone is making me sick and depressed."

"I hear you," I said, then, "Therefore this may not be the best time for what I want to say but . . ."

"Say it. There's nothing you could say to make me feel worse."

"I'm not sure about that. But you know on my blog I've been writing critically about progressives who I feel did things to unintentionally help elect Trump."

"Too many didn't turn out to vote."

"That's part of it and related to my critique. For me a big part of the problem was that too many liberals lost touch with what was smoldering in that part of America they don't know because they live in isolated urban coastal enclaves, live comfortably, and look down on people who have different lives and value different things. Also, we have lost touch with people who are finally fed up with the false promises that have been made to them for decades by both Democrats and Republicans. In many ways Trump was like a third-party candidate."

"So far I don't disagree with you. We've grown very complacent."

"Worse, in that complacency and out of feelings of superiority, we've lost the activist spirit. I was looking again at Kevin Phillips' Emerging Republican Majority written way back in 1969 after Nixon in '68 won all but one of the southern states. He lays it all out there and conservatives have been using it successfully as a kind of playbook since then about how to take control of governments at all levels from the local to the state and now the federal. All three branches."

"I remember that. Isn't he now disenchanted with the right wing he helped empower?"

"He is, but it's a little late. Among other things he wrote about how the so-called silent majority should begin the process of dominating all levels of the government by running for school boards and then work their way up the political food chain. They've done this successfully so that now they control 33 of 50 governorships and most state legislatures."

"Fair points," my friend said.

"But here's the even harder part--I know you really well and how you live and what activates you. So let me ask you a tough question."

"Fire away."

"You're very passionate about preserving the reproductive rights of women from being able to get contraception to . . ."

"And Mike Pence," she snarled,"wants to block that."

"Totally terrible," I said, "But people who agree with him about that and who are also obviously anti-abortion, have for decades set up picket lines at abortion clinics, harassing women who are seeking to terminate pregnancies. I've visited and worked in almost all the states and pretty much everywhere I've seen those nasty pickets. But, you know one thing I haven't seen?" I paused but my friend remained silent, "I've never, not once seen a picket line of pro-choice people there to help women enter the clinics." More silence.

"This to me is a terrible and condemning reality. And I'm including myself. I never was out there trying to offer support for those brave but harassed women. And while I'm on a roll, have you ever . . . ?"

"Never," my friend whispered, "I should have but now I'm old. Too old for that".

I let the silence remain uninterrupted between us.

"You could be right," she finally said.

"I think I am," I said, "And if I am, by our inactivity--maybe excluding some check writing to Planned Parenthood--we left this political opening to the more motivated people who are trying to take away rights that we believe are protected by the Constitution."

"My biggest worry is the Supreme Court."

"We should be worried. But here's my bottom line--Progressives are very good at marshaling facts and articulating opinions, but not so good as fessing up to how we've become complacent, waiting for government to take care of and protect us, much less getting mobilized and activated in support of the things we value. And until we do, what happened last Tuesday should not be a surprise. Also, though it may be hard to acknowledge, as I said, through our inactivity we helped bring about the debacle. And worst of all," I concluded, "too many of us secretly agreed with Hillary that Trump's people are deplorable."

Before I finished I heard the sound of my friend hanging up.