Nobody Asked Me, But...
We consider cancellations and resignations in academia, the Progressive origin of our ever-growing bureaucracy, and recent events in Greenwich.
Annals of Greenwich
In 2019, when skyrocketing rents forced me out of Manhattan after 25 years, I landed in a 100-year-old house on a quiet, treelined street in Old Greenwich.
Almost immediately, I began to make a garden. I persuaded the landlord to bulldoze a couple of woebegone, weed-ridden strips of grass, and planted peas, beans, and old-fashioned flowers.
I was happy playing in the dirt with my new shovel and trowel, far from city concrete and noise. The birds sang a dawn chorus. The single sour note to my new bucolic life was a row of Norway maples that stood on my neighbor’s property behind my southern fence.
Now officially classified as an invasive plant and banned in Connecticut nurseries, Norway maples were once popular with tract developers because they grow very quickly. Their long, shallow, roots extended under the driveway into my newly dug garden beds and stole the nutrients I put into the soil. In spring, the trees let fly with hundreds of winged seeds called samara. In summer, their leaves blocked the sun from my plants. In fall, the leaves turned an ugly, depressing brown and had to be painstakingly raked out of the vegetable beds, too leathery to be of any use as compost.
In short, Norway maples utterly lack the charm of other maples. They are more like weeds—fast-growing, fragile, and annoying.
Worst of all, a misshapen limb hung directly over my driveway.
My neighbor, owner of the trees, said they had just appeared. They seem to have been descendants – volunteers, as we gardeners say – of street trees planted by the town decades early.
I asked my neighbor if she would be willing to take down the tree with the dangling limb. She agreed, then changed her mind the day the tree crew showed up. “I like to watch the squirrels,” she said.
Uh-huh. She cared more about squirrels than me. But that was Meredith; she lived for birds and animals. Now in her 70s, she had been in the house since she was eight years old, and her family had all passed away. She had designed her garden as a bird habitat, and for years she had run a bird and wildlife rescue operation.
I liked Meredith, but her refusal to cut down the Norway maple put a chill in our friendship.
One winter night, a big storm hit. I heard a loud noise. The side doorbell rang. From an upstairs window, I saw the limb I had complained about had splintered off and fallen across my deck.
The wicked old tree had rung my doorbell.
And there was Meredith in a waterproof jacket, dripping with rain, hacking at the branches blocking my door.
When the storm died away, I helped Meredith lug the 25-foot limb into my driveway. We spent the morning sawing it into pieces and dragging them to the street for town pickup.
Strangely, none of my dozens of plants had been damaged. I disapproved of Norway maples more than ever, but I was no longer angry. Perhaps a sense of vindication had displaced my venom.
Before winter was over, the landlord gave notice that he intended to tear down the old house to build a new one. When I had moved in, he had said I could stay there as long as I wanted. Against all odds, I found a new place even as many people in COVID-stricken Manhattan were desperately bidding to move to Greenwich.
That summer, a friend told me that my old home had been bulldozed. I stopped by to chat with Meredith.
The house was gone.
And so was the row of Norway maples.
My former landlord had done her a favor and cut them down.
Department of How Can Progressives Be So Damned Regressive
America Transformed: The Rise and Legacy of American Progressivism documents early progressives’ attempt to bring politics closer to the people. In the process, they created a sprawling fourth branch of government vested with legislative, executive, and judicial power—“what Madison considered the very definition of tyranny,’ writes City Journal.
Cultural Revolution Front
What could possibly go wrong with a push for “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion”?
Here follows a tale. The players:
Dorian S. Abbot, associate professor of geophysics at the University of Chicago
Robert van der Hilst, head of MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences
David Romp, director of the Atmospheric Sciences Center at University of California, Berkeley
The play began in August, when geophysicist Abbot and Stanford University game theorist Ivan Marinovic published an opinion piece in Newsweek, “The Diversity Problem on Campus,” in which they enumerated objections to DEI:
People are treated as members of a group rather than as individuals
Hiring requires telling an applicant "I will ignore your merits and qualifications and deny you admission because you belong to the wrong group”
Hiring, course content, and teaching methods are based on statistical group distributions compared with national averages
Any difference between distributions is ipso facto evidence of systemic injustice and discrimination by the university
DEI is illegal because it enforces inequality
The anti brigade took to the digital streets and banged pots and pans, and MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences canceled a scheduled public talk by Abbot. “We felt that with the current distractions we would not be in a position to hold an effective outreach event,” said Professor Robert van der Hilst, head of the department.
A second act to the grotesquerie came Monday, Oct. 18, when David Romp, director of the Atmospheric Sciences Center at University of California, Berkeley, resigned after being denied permission to host a talk by Abbot.
The University of Chicago is standing behind its professor.
Reading This Week:
Louis-Vincent Gave, Avoiding the Punch: Investing in Uncertain Times.
Philip Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (basis for the “Blade Runner” film)