Whitcomb: Anxious Armed America; How Brazil Escaped; Balcony Solar Redux

Sunday, February 22, 2026

(Only a week more of this particularly leaden February!)

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The stormy March is come at last, With wind, and cloud, and changing skies, I hear the rushing of the blast, That through the snowy valley flies.

Ah, passing few are they who speak, Wild stormy month! in praise of thee; Yet, though thy winds are loud and bleak, Thou art a welcome month to me.

For thou, to northern lands, again The glad and glorious sun dost bring, And thou hast joined the gentle train And wear’st the gentle name of Spring.

And, in thy reign of blast and storm, Smiles many a long, bright, sunny day, When the changed winds are soft and warm, And heaven puts on the blue of May.

Then sing aloud the gushing rills And the full springs, from frost set free, That, brightly leaping down the hills, Are just set out to meet the sea.

The year’s departing beauty hides Of wintry storms the sullen threat; But in thy sternest frown abides A look of kindly promise yet.

Thou bring’st the hope of those calm skies, And that soft time of sunny showers, When the wide bloom, on earth that lies, Seems of a brighter world than ours.

-- “March,’’ by William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878), American poet, editor and journalist. He grew up in The Berkshires, known for cold and snowy winters.

“Every thought is, strictly speaking, an afterthought.’’

-- Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), German-American historian and political philosopher

“Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled …. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.’’

-- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), American writer and naturalist

“Ridicule often checks what is absurd, and fully as often smothers that which is noble.’’

-- Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832), Scottish novelist and poet

xxx

However much individual states might try to curb gun violence, they must deal with the fact that it’s very easy for someone to buy guns, including ones designed for war, in Red States. Thus it apparently was with the mass shooter Cláudio Manuel Neves Valente. In December, he shot to death two students and injured nine at Brown University; shot to death an MIT physicist, and then himself. And then last week, Robert (or Roberta – he/she was trans) Dorgan shot to death two people; hurt three others, and then killed himself/herself, at a skating rink in Pawtucket, on Feb. 16.

Dorgan got one of his guns in West Warwick and another apparently in Florida; Valente apparently got his weapons in Florida.

While the death toll from mass shootings is much higher in gun-soaked Red States than in the Northeast, it’s very convenient to stock up in Red States and travel to wreak havoc elsewhere. Indeed, in some states, such as Florida, it’s about as easy to buy a gun as to buy a cup of coffee.

Is this the sort of thing the Founding Fathers had in mind when they cited the need for “a well-regulated militia’’ as the reason for the Second Amendment?

Are there more potentially dangerous disturbed people in the U.S. than in other Western countries (if we’re actually a Western country). Apparently yes, in part because of our relative lack of social cohesion, related high levels of anomie and inadequate psychiatric services in our broader, very fragmented private, public (federal, state) health “system”.

We had serious mental illness (exported from Scotland?) in part of my family, but some of its worst effects were buffered by having a bit of money for treatment and stretches of a kind of gentle incarceration for the sick person, which gave us nonmentally ill relatives some breaks. We were luckier than many people facing such a challenge, but not so lucky that many somewhat effective psychotropic drugs weren’t yet available.

How Brazil Did It, for Now

Brazil, like the United States, has in recent years faced the peril of becoming a right-wing dictatorship. The South American giant’s history includes stretches of such tyranny. Most recently, the “populist’’ former President Jair Bolsonaro was well on his way to creating the same sort of nasty and kleptocratic regime that Trump has been building here. The Vox article below explains how Brazil has fended off the threat, at least for now.

Things are darker in the United States, to no small degree because of our two-party system. Most of the members of one of the parties, the Republicans, in Congress and on the Supreme Court, through a combination of fear of their sociopathic Fuhrer and fact-lite ideology, do little or nothing to protect democracy. History will judge them harshly.

History will also judge harshly members of the general public who don’t push back, especially this year, when Trump and his cult are working to steal the mid-term elections, in some places by physical force at the polls.

We should be alert for other examples of nations fending off or recovering from tyranny.

** Less Money for Texas**

Anything New Englanders can do to achieve more regional energy independence would be most appreciated! As I have written, one such way is to promote use of those small “plug-in’’ solar-energy devices in rapidly growing use elsewhere, notably on European balconies. The units range from 200 to 1,200 watts.

Unfortunately, such solar is not yet widely legalized or standardized in Rhode Island, though there’s been legislation this year to do so, which would involve adjusting to utility codes and local regulations. Rhode Island does have a streamlined permitting process for larger, mounted systems for roofs and yards. Small-scale solar is in a legal gray area in Massachusetts, too.

Stop sending so much of our energy dollars to Pennsylvania and points southwest for polluting and Earth-cooking fossil-fuel companies. Let’s cut our electricity costs and reduce the stress on the regional grid – especially in cold waves and heat waves. Oh yes, and revive nuclear energy.

The Brief Joys of Illness

Like many people, I’ve been somewhat ill lately with a long cold this leaden winter that has clipped my wings and kept me more at home than usual.

That reminds me of being sick as a kid, mostly lolling around in a flannel bathrobe. The lethargy could be pleasant for a day or two, and it was agreeable to avoid school while waiting for a fever to go away. There was also the soft pleasure of taking codeine-laced cough syrup, which is more discouraged these days for fear of opiate addiction. I’m surprised that the Sackler family, of OxyContin infamy, didn’t get into the cough-syrup biz.

Mainstay treatments for sick children in our house and many others included ginger ale (good for settling stomachs) and beef and chicken bouillon. But I never felt any better after a cup of bouillon. When I think of it now, I see someone on the deck of a transatlantic steamer with a blanket over her lap being served the steaming stuff by a uniformed waiter.

There was one long-term threat from my staying sick at home: Higher chances of developing lung cancer from my mother’s smoking.

With no vaccines back in the ‘50’s for such then very common childhood illnesses as measles, chicken pox, German measles and mumps, there were many more opportunities then than now to be sick at home. Our distinguished HHS secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (doctor of voodoo science) is bringing back those opportunities as he works to restrict vaccine availability

But then, as he said the other day:

“I'm not scared of a germ. I used to snort cocaine off of toilet seats.’’

But It Was Fun

Watching the new movie Blue Moon, almost all of which is set in the Manhattan theater district restaurant/watering hole Sardi’s, reminded me of being taken there a couple of times by two Business Week editors in 1972; I was doing a project at the magazine. (I wrote a brief comment on this here in 2020. I reviewed my notes from ’72, and this is a revised version.)

What I recall most vividly was my lunchmates’ alcohol consumption – they’d split a bottle of wine and have a cocktail. There was far less opprobrium in those days to mid-day drinking, and you could write off 100 percent of business meals, including the booze. Things could get quite silly. There wasn’t much “business” transacted. I suppose it was unhealthy, but we had fun back then.

Some people have an amazing tolerance for alcohol. After our lunches, the senior of the two editors would run a meeting of two dozen journalists, some calling from abroad. He directed the meeting smoothly, made assignments, and occasionally did quick mathematical calculations in his head, as he puffed on his pipe. But my other lunchmate went back to his office to nap. He retired later that year.

Here's a rendition of the beautiful song “Blue Moon,’’ with music by Richard Rodgers and lyrics by Lorenz Hart (1895-1943), who the movie is about. He basically drank himself to death:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/dOSR2lPB5qs

** Factory Farm Empire**

*The Spinach King: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty *is John Seabrook Jr.’s history (with memoir thrown in) of what became a huge frozen-vegetable company in New Jersey. The enterprise was created by Mr. Seabrook’s ruthless and ingenious grandfather, union-busting C.F. Seabrook. His heir-apparent was generally expected to be his son John (but called Jack), the author’s increasingly social-status-obsessed and financially sleazy father, but that didn’t work out. Ultimately, corruption, a generational succession war, and general craziness destroyed the company, though much of the family stayed rich. This is story of rags to riches to riches, seasoned with betrayals, revenge, and secrets.

There are some lessons here to learn, or relearn, about growing and destroying a business, and family dynamics, both warm and creative and pathological. And the book well describes how Seabrook help lead the industrialization of American agriculture in the 20th Century.

Ah, capitalism! Companies swell, shrink and die, and are sometimes reborn looking quite different. Entire economic sectors do the same things.

The book, set in South Jersey, shows how much that region used to recall the Deep South’s plantation culture.

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

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