Matters of Opinion
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Can Cape Cod handle the love?
Posted: August 21st 2013 @8:31 PM -
Can you smell the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Plant?
Posted: August 21st 2013 @8:22 PM
On almost any given week there’s a demonstration protesting the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Plant. Or should I say, yet another demonstration protesting the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Plant? It’s not that I’ve got anything particularly exciting lined up as an alternative. There’s a Red Sox game but they’re already on the slide. And, the lawn to mow. It’s not that I don’t know how dangerous Pilgrim is. Over-capacity storage of nuclear waste. The same age and model as Fukushima. A sitting duck in the path of a hurricane with no escape route.
So why does an afternoon of weeding seem preferable to expressing my outrage about a real and present danger? Some call it disaster fatigue, so many things, the Marathon bombing, genocide in Syria, hit us everyday so that we can’t possibly focus. Psychologists posit that our brains constantly protect us from the dangers that surround us.” Or as T.S. Eliot put it, “humankind cannot bear too much reality.”The only thing I can come up with is that the dangers of Pilgrim aren’t real. That is, they’re not in my face. Pilgrim doesn’t look like a disaster waiting to happen, it looks like an old warehouse. It may be leaking lethal radiation but I can’t see it, I can’t smell it, or hear it; so it’s very simple to dismiss.
Which got me to thinking about propane, you know, the gas that fuels grills that really stinks. Except that it doesn’t.
Propane is actually an odorless but deadly gas to which a chemical is added to give it that noxious smell. The additive is called skunk gas, and it’s there so if you smell it you know something’s wrong and you have to act fast.
Without the skunk gas, propane is a lot like radiation, and the Pilgrim plant itself, inconspicuous and deadly. But maybe it shouldn’t be. I’m not in the law-making business, but it would seem to me that a nuclear power plant is at least as dangerous as a front-end loader, and OSHA requires them to make that horrible beeping noise when backing up. It’s called a “reverse signal alarm” and the more danger you’re in, the louder it gets. So why not power plants?
Obviously the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is not interested in closing them, so why can’t some other part of the government require them to smell, or sound, or look as dangerous as they are? What if the more dangerous Pilgrim became, say, the more radiation it was leaking, the more it had to emit a noxious smell.
Decaying carcasses and rotten eggs are the model for skunk gas but everyone has their own stink limits. For my own part I suggest the cheap perfume they spray on you in department stores. Liz Claiborne Curve Crush. Or Chloe Chloe. I’m already starting to gag. Tell me that if the air you breathe started to smell like Calvin Klein Eternity you would not put on your gas mask, pick up a picket sign, and get over the bridge to protest. Immediately.
And what if there was a sound tied to the amount of stored nuclear waste, a law that spent fuel rods had to emit a signal alarm, and the more spent fuel rods the louder it got. Last year researchers in England published a list of the ten sounds deemed most unpleasant to the human brain. Noises like an electric drill, a baby crying, finger nails on a black board, squealing bicycle brakes. I have no idea how OSHA came up with the back-up beep, but you get the picture.
For me it would be an endless loop of Paul McCartney singing Wonderful Christmas Time. I don’t know if that song has actually caused holiday suicides but I do know that if played loud enough and long enough it would get me to a protest rally.
What would illustrate a nuclear disaster? The black smoke that pours out of coal-fired power plants makes air pollution look very evident but what would visually represent the danger at Pilgrim? We’ve all seen the coverage of Fukushima. But the more we see it, the more we tune it out.
I was thinking about the bat signal that the Gotham City police Department beamed into the sky when they needed help from Batman? I think I’d replace it with that painting by Edvart Moonk, The Scream, and broadcast all across the Cape Cod sky. Because that’s just what we’ll be doing if, and when, finally Pilgrim blows.
I don’t know what would push your buttons. All I do know is that, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” Frederick Douglass said that a century and a half ago. He was talking about slavery, but it could just as well have been a potential meltdown at Pilgrim.
I’m Ira Wood…and that’s my opinion.
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Congratulations! (But do I have to go to the wedding?)
Posted: August 20th 2013 @7:40 PM
Last June the Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act, the truly hateful law that barred the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriages in states that permit them. Right now, thirteen states and the District of Columbia have legalized same-sex marriage, and states all over the country that still ban it are fielding a myriad of lawsuits that are suing to achieve equality. While we celebrate every victory we know that none of us are free while others are oppressed and we cannot rest until all lovers, gay and straight, are able to share equally in the rights of marriage. But that doesn’t mean I like weddings.
I get the fact that a wedding enables the happy couple to be seen at their very best on the best day of their lives. I understand their desire to announce their commitment to a gathering of friends and loved ones but not why they would gleefully spend over half the median annual income of all U.S. households to do it. Why would they squander the equivalent of a down payment on a new house when afterwards they have to move back into a two-bedroom condo with a carpet that smells like cheese?
Some see weddings as a photographic opportunity. An occasion to create digital memories of the happy couple dancing in the traditional costumes, surrounded by children and classic melodies and applause, which they could frankly get much cheaper if they both took parts in the local junior theater production of The Sound of Music. But of course that’s it, isn’t it, the theatrical nature of the wedding, the ritual of introducing the couple, the toasts, the first dance, the cutting of the cake, which I have found are easy to avoid if you find the right excuse. For instance, they always serve shrimp at weddings and with a little research you can learn to fake anaphylaxic shock and spend a half hour in the lobby.
At my cousin’s wedding last summer I didn’t have to fake getting sick, I fainted. Prissy even as a child, the kind of kid who would rat you out in a pool if she saw bubbles coming out of your bathing suit, she insisted that all the bridesmaids make their own identical powder blue dresses, which assured they all looked like scrub nurses. The groomsmen were instructed to rent black tuxedos.
The ceremony was held under the stars, on the kind of hot humid night that you can watch mold climbing up your bathroom wall. It was a mixed marriage, a Jewish woman and a Lutheran man, and to please both sets of parents, a rabbi and a minister were hired to administer the vows. I was in a long line of suffering groomsmen, and simply keeled over, as the clergymen, competing to prove their devotion to god, enacted a kind of religious pissing contest and talked for an hour each.
I had to go to that one, not only because it was family but because half their friends had already bailed out. Now here’s a hint, if you’re going to plan a wedding, gay or straight, and ask people to spend money on clothes, transportation, and a present, don’t have it on a Sunday night, a move engineered to save the couple money but offering the best excuse to friends. When they scribble a little note on the response card that says, “So sorry, but I have a 7 AM meeting on Monday morning” what they really mean is, “I’m going to miss Dexter for this?”
t was, of course, the worst of all possible weddings, the destination wedding. Eight hundred dollars for airfare, a hundred-fifty for the tux, three-fifty for the hotel room, plus breakfast and lunch and drinks before the party, all so you can spend three hours at a table with their relatives from Oklahoma who think universal health care equals fascism. Originally they were going to have the wedding in Scotland because they thought it would be cool to be married in a castle. When they moved the ceremony to Disney World we were all relieved, until a storm cancelled the flight home and we stranded at the Orlando airport for eighteen hours.
I support everyone’s right to marry. I will take to the streets. I will write to your governor. I’ll boycott. I’ll march. I’ll contribute to your candidate. But please, don’t ask me to the wedding.
I’m Ira Wood…and that’s my opinion.
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Do you have cats? Or tomatoes?
Posted: August 20th 2013 @7:24 PM
Do you have cats? Or do you grow tomatoes? Although this might seem like a ridiculous dichotomy, I can assure you that it not only makes sense to me but is a choice I’ve been grappling with for weeks.
For as long as I’ve lived on Cape Cod, I’ve been proud of both. I’ve not only nurtured successive prides of Siamese, Burmese, Korats, Abyssinian, Maine Coon, and alley cats, I’ve grown Brandywines, Box Car Willies, Early Girls, Black Krims, Caspian Pinks, and an ever changing cast of heirloom tomatoes from around the world.
We freeze them, puree them, dry them, and bottle Bloody Mary mix. We can chutney, hot sauce, spaghetti sauce, salsa, ketchup, and soup. We eat tomatoes for breakfast, lunch, and dinner and give bushels to our friends. For years the cats were an integral part of the tomato operation. For just as we grew them from seed and tended the garden, the cats patrolled it, catching rabbits and voles and mice, proudly laying out their corpses on the back porch.
Sometime years ago, however, we began to hear packs of hungry coyotes in the marsh behind our house. Growing ever bolder, and hungrier, they began to circle the house with those plaintive yapping cries, my intrepid wife, wading into the moonlight in her nightgown, clanging two garbage can lids to frighten them off. One night, however, we called and called, but our favorite cat Max never returned. Needless to say no cats have been allowed out since…which meant free reign for the rodents.
We managed to keep up our tomato production with a simple strategy: we grew double the amount of tomato plants in order to compensate for those plants we lost.
And we managed to grow enough tomatoes through the year of the tomato blight and the summer that it rained everyday. We beat gray mold, leaf mold, and powdery mildew; blossom end rot, horn worm, and Antrhacnose. But this year, we’re on our knees…and the problem is chipmunks.
I haven’t seen a squirrel or a skunk or a snake or a turtle all year, but the chipmunks sit on woodpiles and taunt me, rubbing their little paws together and twitching their noses.
They’ve turned our yard into a miniature golf course and dig up tulip bulbs an hour after we plant them. They empty the bird feeders and leave caches of seeds in the potted plants.
I can live with all that but not what they do to the tomatoes, nibbling on the just-ripened, lowest hanging fruit, and then, instead of just finishing one damned tomato, they move on to the next one, and the next, until there are five perfect tomatoes with a chipmunk bite taken out of each.
I have tried picking fruit before it’s ripe, but they beat me to it every time. I’ve scattered mothballs, pepper oil, human hair clippings, and ammonia. I’ve sprayed them with a garden hose. I’ve rigged up a five-gallon pail of water with a ramp laced with sunflower seeds and didn’t catch one. I’ve baited rap traps with peanut butter and caught nothing but ants.
Many people on the internet advise shooting them with a twenty-two caliber long rifle. Living as close as I do to my neighbors, this is an option that strikes me as an excellent way to end up doing hard time in Walpole.
Another popular remedy is coyote urine. There are certainly coyotes out there, but I have never figured out how to induce them to urinate in my garden.
Those who have figured out how to bottle it have also figured out how to sell it and are more per ounce than your favorite premium vodka.
The recommended methods of dispersal for coyote urine vary from spray applicators to perforated plastic containers to saturated panty hose, strung every two feet around the tomato plants. Since I have chosen the last method my once bucolic garden now resembles a hand laundry and smells like the Grandstand men’s room at Fenway Park.
I am certainly hoping this will rid us of chipmunks. The choice between the safety of cats and fresh garden tomatoes is unfair. I love my cats…unfortunately, you can’t put them on a hamburger with a thick slice of Vedalia onion.
I’m Ira Wood…and that’s my opinion.
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Schadenfreude is an all too human emotion
Posted: August 20th 2013 @7:07 PM
One morning this week I opened the newspaper to an article reporting that the chief of cardiac surgery at Cape Cod Hospital was pursued and arrested after allegedly running over a state police trooper’s foot while fleeing police at Logan Airport in Boston. And to tell you the truth, I was kind of ashamed of my reaction. According to the press release, the doctor was sitting in his Mercedes-Benz E350 in the passenger pickup area of Terminal C, when a trooper asked him to move his car and wait in the cell phone lot. In this day and age of airport security, this would seem a reasonable request, wouldn’t you agree, at least if you’re not the Duchess of Cambridge giving birth to the future King of England in the back seat. But the doctor didn’t think it was reasonable, not for the chief of cardiac surgery. He waved the trooper off, became angry, yelled and swore, got out of his car to berate the Trooper—again, all this is gleaned from the article—and after the trooper told him to stay in his car and that he was going to be arrested, drove off and ran over the trooper’s foot as he fled. So were my first thoughts with the State Trooper, who was taken to Massachusetts General Hospital with injuries to his foot? Not at all. Was I bemoaning yet another potentially dangerous police chase? That would have been prudent, but I guess I’ve experienced too much road rage from self-declared Lords of the Universe and I was happy the guy was arrested him, charged him with assault and battery with a dangerous weapon, disorderly conduct, assault and battery on a police officer and other motor vehicle violations.
This is an emotion called Schadenfreude, which means taking pleasure in the misfortunes of others. It’s a complicated emotion because it does not simply involve enjoying the pain of others, but the kind of pleasure we derive from watching their fall from grace, particularly when that person is in a powerful or enviable position. Did you shed any tears for Lance Armstrong, John Edwards, or Martha Stewart? No more than I shed for the Chief of Cardiac surgery, I bet.
It doesn’t make you a bad person. In fact researchers believe that the higher a person has risen, the farther we delight in seeing them fall. It makes us feel better about ourselves by comparison. It not only confirms the fact that the rich and famous are only human but that there is justice in the world.
But there’s another kind of Schadenfreude that comes from a sense of relief, and this one is especially hard to own up to. I feel it every August on Cape Cod during hurricane season, when the tropical storms begin to form over the Caribbean and exuberant forecasters tracking their progress like bicyclists in the Tour de France, detailing wind speed and direction and its every twist and turn as it makes its way toward us, stalling over Puerto Rico, making landfall in the Great Banks. We monitor the preparations and evacuations of the poor devils south of us and the massive destruction in the storm’s wake, counting the days until it reaches us, wondering if we’ll have to cancel events planned nine moths ago and silently praying all the while that it will veer left or right, weaken over cool water in the best case scenario, or head out to sea, but whatever it does and wherever it goes, miss us.
Nor do we stop watching TV if it does miss us. And here’s the shameful part, at least for me. We watch with an even keener interest as it rips the roofs from buildings and floods neighborhoods and destroys beachfront vacation homes. We don’t want to see people suffer. We don’t want to see houses tossed like salads and canoes floating down highways but we’re glued to the screen because we know that could have been us and that knowledge is a psychological dividend. Terrible as we might feel for feeling it, we’re doing better than someone else, and that someone else could have been us, and that makes us feel good.
Schadenfreude is a pretty basic, if not an admirable, human emotion. Scientists have traced it to activity in the basal ganglia, a motor region of the brain. So don’t feel too bad about it. Sometimes we eat the bear and sometimes the bear eats us. Unlike our friend the Chief of Cardiac Surgery, most of us don’t imagine that we’re too special to have to suffer the everyday hardships of the world. If we’re aware of our Schadenfreude it might even be good thing and make us feel a little guilty for our good luck. And that guilt is probably what makes us try to help the people we feel superior to.
I’m Ira Wood…and that’s my opinion.
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Do I have to censor my ipod in Provincetown?
Posted: August 20th 2013 @6:54 PM
I’ve waited awhile to write about the Provincetown Banner article headlined, ‘Witness says chief flew into rage at local restaurant?’ because it was troubling and I wanted to figure out exactly why I was troubled.
When we read a newspaper article we know we don’t always get the facts as they happened. Most of us are too sophisticated for that. We realize there are many sides to an issue, especially when witnesses are involved; we know that even the reporter is not absent a point of view. But it’s impossible not to come away from any article without a perception. And absolutely true to the facts or not, the perception of reading about a police chief at a bar, in a rage—or simply livid; the word used in a supportive letter to the editor the following week—over a song, is not good.
Nor is that troubling perception confined to Provincetown, in spite of the letters defending the Chief and his own dictum “end of story.” There’s at least one town on the Cape that people refer to as a speed trap and another whose police are commonly thought of as rude. Will this keep people from visiting those towns? During a summer heat wave? I doubt it. But how about a Sunday drive in autumn? Or a weekday splurge on lunch with drinks during cabin fever season? I know I have a choice where I spend my money and I don’t do it in a place where I feel uncomfortable. Would I, as a visitor, care one bit if a DPW worker or a town accountant was known to be short-tempered and fly off the handle? Of course, not. But cops are a different story. Cops can ruin anyone’s day, especially a visitor’s, and anyone reading the story of a police chief (I’m quoting here) “flying into a drunken vulgarity-laced, tyrannical rage” and “threatening the bar tender” has got to come away with a perception.
To be sure, there have been many letters defending the Chief. But every person who reads the June 6 article will surely ask questions according to his or her own concerns. Some might wonder why the Town Administrator, who was finally sparked to conduct an inquiry, initially took offense with those who merely expressed concern, referring to them, again as quoted, as “certain members of the community who continue to attempt to degrade our professional police officers.”
Others might wonder why a professional police officer, knowing that bars and alcohol are kindle for accusation and rumor, would even subject himself to potential trouble.
My own concerns were personal. I’m a writer, an artist, and I have to ask, Could my own, or anyone’s work, instigate that much anger? From a chief of police? In a town with a reputation for art and freedom and intellectual tolerance?
Again, according to the article, the source of the police chief’s “tantrum” was a protest song by a gangsta rap group, incidentally listed on Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. It’s not a pretty song. It uses the language of the neighborhood. (And yes, many minorities use the insults of the majority amongst themselves to express an ironic camaraderie.) There’s a reason the rapper Chuck D called hip hop the Black CNN.
Like angry protest songs before it, classics such as Masters of War and Strange Fruit it’s metaphorical and over the top, a bleak message with the intent to educate, inspire, and motivate change. It’s a most unfortunate irony that a police officer hearing a song protesting the violence of police officers is alleged to have reacted violently.
According to the article the bartender wrote a letter apologizing for playing the song on his i-pod and this is the most troubling part…do I have to censor my i-pod in Provincetown?
It has about 2000 songs and I immediately erased I Shot the Sheriff and just to be safe, Officer Krupke. You have to wonder what other works of art should be banned so as not to offend the police. Would the local theater company, for instance, have to think twice before putting on the drama A Steady Rain? It starred Hugh Jackman and Daniel Craig on Broadway and at the time had the highest weekly gross in Broadway history, but the subject matter is two bad cops. What about movies? The Departed. LA Confidential. Training Day. Same subject, same risk.
We’re all used to over-the-top art works producing outrage. Sometimes the work really does seem outrageous, like the recent story of the New York City MFA candidate prevented from debuting a project consisting of 68 vials of his own semen. But political art is the most outrageous of all because it poses the biggest threat: a challenge to those who hold the power.
I admit these are hypersensitive times. With the Federal Government riffling through our email and phone calls; with corporations pushing legislators to enact laws that punish whistleblowers who report corporate wrong-doing, many people are worried about losing the freedom to express ourselves. I just never thought it would happen in Provincetown.
I’m Ira Wood…and that’s my opinion.
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Should we tax people for being stupid?
Posted: August 20th 2013 @6:43 PM
An intriguing article in the New York Times broached the idea of something I’ve been thinking about for a long time, and that is, taxing people for being stupid.
Okay, the word stupid may be a bit impolite, although it’s a lot kinder than the one I scream at the 6 o’clock news when some nitwit decides to go hiking during snow storm and we have to pay the overtime of a hundred cops to look for him; or someone who insists on smoking during a walk in the woods and starts a fire that requires the departments of six towns to put it out. Just to be clear, The New York Times article did not talk about taxing stupid people, it talked about taxing external costs, which are the costs of a private transaction that society has to pay for. The concept has been around for a long time, but is gaining ground with economists and politicians on both sides of the aisle.
Air Pollution a prime example of an external cost. When we drive cars we put the products of combustion into the atmosphere. These added gases contribute to climate change and sickness, which costs society billions of dollars not included in the price at the pump.
The article began, in fact, as the author sat in a massive traffic jam outside and he wondered not only about the external cost of thousands of people breathing polluted air and losing valuable work time. He wondered if there would be fewer people on the road during rush hour if they had to pay extra to be there. There already is such a tax in London and Stockholm and Milan. It’s called a congestion tax, which charges a hefty fee for any vehicle entering the downtown during working hours.
The theory is that enjoying the comfort and convenience of your private car rather than public transportation is an encroachment on the health and safety of the rest of us, and a therefore a privilege you should have to pay for.
Needless to say the idea has not gained a lot of momentum in the United States. We do penalize tobacco smokers with a federal tax that pays for the health care coverage of poor children. And Californians did go to the polls last November to vote on a tax on sugary drinks that make kids fat. But the idea failed. And so would a tax to get over the bridges to Cape Cod on a hot summer weekend.
In recent months, however, there has been a lot of talk about a tax on gun ownership as a way to lessen the number of guns in people’s hands. It is estimated the health care costs from firearm deaths and injuries total about $40 billion/year. And some say that if we taxed gun buyers a hefty tax per purchase it might give some of them pause before they added another gun to their arsenal.
But what would you tax? Think about it. What’s costing you time and money? What do people do, out of laziness, out of arrogance, out of greed and selfishness that puts you at risk? Right now there is a massive flu epidemic and the worst outbreak of whooping cough in decades. The flu is contagious so is it too harsh to tax people who do not get vaccinated? You may say we can’t go that far.
Okay, how about people at the gym who sweat like Sumo wrestlers and don’t wipe down equipment when they finish? Why should you stay home from work because they can’t use a spray bottle? Shouldn’t they have to pay for your babysitter when you have to call in sick?
How much of our hard-earned money goes to paying for things any idiot wouldn’t do if they thought about it twice? Remember the mortgage meltdown that sank the economy? I don’t know who was to blame, greedy banks or stupid people who knew they couldn’t afford a huge new house or a home equity line of credit. But we ended up paying for it.
How about the massive waste of food in western society. Newsweek recently reported that half the world’s food, 2 billion tons is thrown away every year in the United States and Europe while the demands for water in food production has tripled in a time of drought. Should we tax people who don’t finish everything on their plate?
You can get really carried away with stuff if you think about. How about people who let their dogs run free to poop on the shellfish beds? Should there be a tax for dog owners to offset the price of enforcement? How about people who won’t shut up in movie theaters? Do they owe you the price of admission if you can’t hear what’s on the screen?
How much are we responsible for our individual effects on the world? I don’t know the answer to this but I do know thing. If they ever do decide to tax people for doing dumb things…I’m going to go broke.
I’m Ira Wood…and that’s my opinion.
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Matters of Opinion
Posted: August 7th 2013 @3:55 PMComing soon from the desk of Ira Wood
