RichardHowe.com – Voices from Lowell & Beyond

Seen & Heard: Vol. 22

Magazine: “The Venture-Capital Populist: How David Sacks and the new tech right went full MAGA and captured Washington” by George Packer in The Atlantic, June 2026 – Because of extreme cold, the 2025 presidential inauguration was held inside the U.S. Capital. The smaller venue limited how many could attend in person. I found it notable that photos of the ceremony showed the front row occupied not by members of the Cabinet but by leaders of the nation’s tech companies: Facebook, Amazon, Google, and X. I saved that photo as an emblem of the marriage of high tech and a government regime with fascist aspirations. Two decades ago, tech founders seemed grounded in the left side of the political spectrum. What changed? This article, by George Packer, who is best known for his deep explorations of U.S. foreign policy, national politics, and the socio-economic divisions shaping modern America, profiles David Sacks, a native of South Africa who made his initial fortune alongside Elon Musk with PayPal, who was appointed White House AI and Crypto Czar in the second Trump administration. This quote gives a sense of this article. It refers to Sacks’ position that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was entirely Ukraine’s fault. According to Packer, “It’s worth asking how someone so committed to facts and logic could end up spouting such nonsense. If Sacks made investment decisions on this basis, he would go bankrupt. An obvious explanation is that a successful businessman might not know much about history and politics. But an intellectual deficiency can be compounded by a moral one.” That moral deficiency is the willingness of Sacks and the other Tech Bros to embrace what Packer calls the most corrupt administration in American history to grow their already enormous wealth. Whatever room they enter, these guys not only believe they are the smartest one in it, but that everyone else should be unquestionably grateful to them for their brilliance. When ordinary people began turning hostile towards tech for all the harm social media has wrought, and all the anticipated and magnified harm that AI will bring (as used by these people), the tech bros fled to a corrupt, anti-populist regime that permitted tech to maximize its own wealth at the expense of everyone else, as long as the regime got its cut of the profits. 

Newspaper: “Pope’s Encyclical Calls for Putting Humanity at the Heart of Technological Change” by Ruth Graham and Elizabeth Dias, New York Times, May 27. 2026. Pope Leo XIV, a native of Chicago and the first American Pope, has criticized governments over immigration crackdowns and war. Now he has spoken out on artificial intelligence and technology in general by issuing his first encyclical, called Magnifica Humanitas. I downloaded it but haven’t read it yet – it’s quite long – but have followed the mainstream news coverage of it. He warns that technology should not be allowed to take away the dignity of ordinary human beings, and says humane labor practices and just wages remain essential. While this pronouncement is focused on the impact of AI, it is also a critique of the modern economy where more and more of the world’s wealth is concentrated in the hands of a small group of people. Government, which once leveled the playing field between corporate owners and individual workers, has become a tool of the wealthy and the expense of the many. 

Newspaper: “Jill Lepore adds a Pulitzer to her laurels, but she’s nowhere near ready to rest” by Kate Tuttle, Boston Globe, May 23, 2026. When Jill Lepore’s first book – The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity was published in 1998, I was in the midst of a late in life masters in history program at Salem State and was in a course on colonial America. I scooped up this book and wrote a paper on King Philip’s War (which had a profound impact on the subsequent history of Lowell). However, when her next book came out, I bought it, read it, and thought it was just OK (I can’t even recall the title). Since then, Lepore has been omnipresent in American history and culture, as a prolific author, a staff writer for The New Yorker and as a full professor at Harvard. Earlier this month, she also won the Pulitzer Prize for history with her latest book, We The People: A History of the U.S. Constitution. A week ago when I was at lala books on Market Street with a gift certificate I had received I spotted We The People on the New Nonfiction table, took that as an omen, and bought the book. Every Pulitzer Prize winning history or biography that I’ve read has been a good book and I expect this to be that. And in the age of Trump and the corrupt Supreme Court, knowing the history of the Constitution is valuable information to have. This article quotes Lepore: “I’m really fascinated by the relationship between the past and the present . . . The way we tell stories is how we anchor ourselves in time. That’s what I’m interested in.” She also said that one of the reasons we’re in our current predicament is that it is so difficult to amend the US Constitution. In contrast, the Massachusetts Constitution which predated the US version, has been amended more than 100 times which is not a lot for state constitutions. But the US Constitution was last amended in 1971. Lepore says to be functional, a constitution must be “durable and changeable.” Because the US procedure for amend is so difficult and rare, it is decisions of the Supreme Court that amend the Constitution by its decisions. Since not everyone agrees with those decisions, there is a sense that unelected judges are encroaching on the people’s government. I have a big stack of books to be read before this one, but whenever I do get to it, I’ll be sure to review it here.

Newspaper: “Cambodia’s Leader Suddenly Pardons Top Opposition Politician” by Sue Narin and Sui-Lee Wee, New York Times, May 27, 2026 – Because Lowell has the second largest population of Cambodian-Americans in the United States, and because the politics of Cambodia today have repercussions for the politics in Lowell, anytime I see a news story about Cambodia, I pay attention. This one reports that Hun Sen, the longtime leader of Cambodia, “pardoned” Kem Sokha, one of the leaders of the opposition party who has been under house arrest for years. Sokha is a founder of the Cambodia National Rescue Party which was the main opposition to Hun Sen and his followers. Although Sokha’s supporters must be pleased with his release, they are also realistic that this is not a move towards reform but an attempt to lessen Western scrutiny of the country and its regressive political practices. I believe the Cambodian-Americans in Lowell fall on both sides of this divide and that the intensity of that divide seeps into local politics here. 

Newspaper: “A eulogy for Schlitz, the cheap beer that made me a beer lover” by Kevin Slane, Boston Globe, May 24, 2026. Like many, my introduction to beer occurred when I went away to college (which was during the short window during which the drinking age was 18). My preferred brand was Miller, or sometimes Michelob but that was more expensive. Because I went to school in Rhode Island, there was plenty of Narragansett to be had. Schlitz was in the refrigerator case of the local liquor store but no one ever seemed to buy it. “The beer that made Milwaukee famous didn’t have much of a following in the late 1970s. This story’s author went to school in Wisconsin in 2008 which is where he first tried Schlitz. He says he enjoyed it. The brand, now owned by Pabst, is being discontinued, hence the “eulogy” in the title. Interestingly, the author says in a cost cutting measure in the late 1970s, whoever owned Schlitz at the time revised the formula to use cheaper ingredients and the beer lost much of its popularity, although it switched back to the traditional better-tasting recipe by 2000. 

Newspaper: “Joe Sedelmaier, Auteur Behind ‘Where’s the Beef?’ Ad, Dies at 92” New York Times, May 21, 2026, by Richard Sandomir. I’d never heard of Joe Sedelmaier but this story caught my eye because the ‘Where’s the Beef” commercials were big in popular culture in the early 1980s. It was so big that in the 1984 Democratic Presidential Primary, former Vice President Wallter Mondale used it to skewer Gary Hart whose campaign was surging on the strength of his promise of “new ideas” that were never defined or described.

“La Caverne du Pont Neuf” by JR, Plato and Daft Punk

Pont Neuf, overall view

La Caverne du Pont Neuf  by JR, Plato and Daft Punk

By Louise Peloquin

More than 40 years after Christo and Jeanne-Claude literally wrapped up le Pont Neuf, JR is in the process of transforming it into what he calls “the world’s biggest immersive artwork.” (1)

From Saturday June 6th to Sunday June 28th, the Caverne du Pont Neuf will open to the public, day and night, free of charge. Passers-by will be able to cross the bridge, meander beneath it along the river banks, admire it while cruising on a bateau-mouche. It will even be visible from the Eiffel Tower.

This work is a colossal technical challenge which gathered 800 engineers, workers and production teams to provide European-made equipment for the construction of a “monumental ephemeral sculpture” 323.70 feet long, 65.62 feet wide and from 39.37 to 59.06 feet high.

The Caverne is made of inflatable material printed to resemble stone. JR wants to highlight Paris’s architectural origins and to “give Paris history a friendly wink.”

La Caverne du Pont Neuf will transform each of the bridge’s arches into a cave entrance in reference to Plato’s famous allegory. The artist wants to use this myth to make people reflect upon society and upon themselves.

If the exterior aspect of the work astounds passers-by, the interior will equally impress.

“I have imagined entering the Caverne as an experience where fullness and emptiness live in equilibrium. It will be a symbolic crossing, a step towards the unknown, a journey within oneself, a unique sensorial experience where augmented reality allows interaction and gives the visitor the impression of traveling and seeing beyond the Caverne. The technology creates an immersive, emotional and participative experience turning everyone into a co-author of the artwork” explains JR. (2)

A specific soundtrack will be an integral part of the Caverne adventure and, for that, JR turned to former Daft Punk member Thomas Bangalter who will “sculpt sound matter from electroacoustic elements whose reach will materialize the monolithic and mystical aspect of the Caverne.”

    With his Caverne du Pont Neuf, JR not only aims at transforming an old Paris monument but he also wants visitors to renew their perspective on the world around them.

After closing on June 28th, the Caverne will be dismounted. Several options are being studied for disposal of the 20669.29 yards of Caverne fabric. It could be used for future exhibitions, for new inflated structures or simply recycled. In any case, JD intends to give his artwork a second life.

La Caverne opens to the public on June 6th. These shots offer a sneak peek at a most unusual, and free, June 2026 “must-see” for Paris tourists and residents alike. (3)

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1. Completed in 1607, le Pont Neuf over the Seine is Paris’s oldest bridge. It is the first structure in the city to be entirely built with Lutetian limestone, the famous material used for many Parisian buildings and monuments.

Born in Paris in 1983, JR is a creator, photographer and director who began his career with graffiti and defines himself as an “urban artist.”

2) Augmented reality – technology which overlays digital content onto the real world enhancing the user’s perception of it.

3) Photos – Louise Peloquin

JR, the “Caverne” artist

Pont Neuf, partially covered

Pont Neuf, closeup

Lowell Politics: May 31, 2026

Tuesday’s Lowell City Council meeting was devoted almost exclusively to the council’s review of the proposed FY27 city budget. The council opted to review the budget department-by-department and worked diligently for three hours until the mandatory meeting stop time of 10 pm arrived. A vote to keep going failed and the budget hearing was continued to next Tuesday, June 2, 2026, at 6 pm.

In last week’s newsletter I wrote that an early motion by Councilor Dan Rourke during the May 19 meeting to “table” a transfer of money into the fire department overtime account signaled difficulties with the fire department budget. This week, Rourke made an early motion to take that transfer “off the table” which passed unanimously as did the substantive vote on the transfer, signaling that the impasse had been overcome, if only temporarily.

While these two votes dealt with overtime spending which in turn is driven by absenteeism, the primary cause of the current friction was City Manager Tom Golden’s plan to lay off six firefighters as part of citywide layoffs of personnel to achieve a balanced budget for the coming fiscal year.

Sometime since last week’s meeting, Golden and the president of the firefighter’s union had a one-on-one meeting and reached an accommodation that avoids any firefighter layoffs in exchange for an ambiguous promise by the union to, according to Golden, “work with their members to explore opportunities to financially assist the city and to try to lower overtime costs.”

The president of the firefighter’s union then spoke. While he complemented the city manager for meeting again after the recent impasse and for finding a way to avoid fire department layoffs, he also made it clear that issues remained. He emphasized the need to maintain 203 firefighters in the city.

An article in Thursday’s Lowell Sun clarified why the union so firmly defended that number. “City Council restores 6 firefighter positions to Lowell budget” by Melanie Gilbert covered the council’s Tuesday evening ratification of the city manager’s revised fire department budget that dispensed with the six layoffs. The Sun story then added an important detail: Last week, the fire union sued the city over the proposed layoffs and obtained a preliminary injunction from a Superior Court judge that ordered the city to “fund minimum-staffing requirements for the Lowell Fire Department as agreed upon in Article XV, Section 5 and 6 of the collective bargaining agreement between the City and the Union for fiscal year 2027.”

Earlier Tuesday evening, some councilors had alluded to a court order, but it was unclear to me what they were talking about until the Sun article appeared. Not having seen the contract nor the complaint filed with the court to initiate the lawsuit, it’s hard to comment on the merits of either.

I will say that the standard for obtaining a court injunction is steep. One requirement is that the judge find the plaintiff has a likelihood of success on the merits of the dispute. Also, for a judge to order a legislative body (the city council) to fund a particular department seems like an extreme measure given the concept of separation of powers between the legislative and judicial branches. For a judge to have ruled this way suggests it was a black and white issue of contract law. That in turn prompts the question, why did the city administration try to do this when the proposed firefighter layoffs, according to the motion judge at least, would be a clear violation of the union contract.

I think most councilors were more interested in getting this dispute behind them, so no one asked that question, at least not publicly. (And given council sentiments, it’s likely the layoffs would have been rescinded even without the court order.)

One question that was asked was how will the salaries of the six un-laid off firefighters be paid? Where did that additional money come from?

To make the math work, the city’s budget writers jumped on the slippery slope of boosting their projected revenue, specifically the amount of state aid the city is expected to receive.

How the state budget is finalized is a secretive backroom process controlled by a handful of legislative leaders. Here’s how I understand it to work: Early in the spring, the governor announces their budget recommendation for the fiscal year. Legislators pay no attention to that document. Instead, each branch of the legislature – the State Senate and the House of Representatives – issues their own budget proposals. Those two documents are the foundation of the final state budget. If both the House and the Senate agree on a line-item amount, then that amount is likely to carry over to the final state budget.

But what if the numbers differ? Then the disputed line item goes to a “conference committee” which I believe consists of the Senate president, the speaker of the House, the chairs of the two ways and means committee, and probably the Secretary of Administration and Finance. This committee meets in private and resolves the disputed line-items. Sometimes the House number prevails; sometimes the Senate number does; and other times there’s some compromise number. While the state fiscal year begins on July 1, 2026, the legislature rarely finalizes its budget by that date. In recent years, it has been finalized in mid-July, but it could be later.

Which brings us back to the Lowell city budget. The House budget had a lower amount for local aid than the Senate budget. Because Lowell prudently opts to be conservative in its revenue projections, the original city budget proposal used the lower House number. Now, to pay for the six firefighters whose layoffs were to be rescinded, the city simply swapped the lower House number with the higher Senate number, hoping that the higher number is the one that emerges from the conference committee. If it does not, then the city will have to make further cuts or dip into its reserve fund to make up the difference.

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Councilors asked many questions during the three-hour meeting, but only a few attempts were made to cut anything from the budget. As far as I could tell, only one – a reduction of $15,000 – was made.

A handful of councilors tried to identify nonessential items in the hope that sufficient savings could be found to reduce the number of employees who were laid off. While it’s understandable that councilors want to keep city employees from losing their jobs, I don’t recall any framing of proposed cuts to reduce the size of government and thereby lessen the tax burden on residents.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not a hypocrite who is happy to receive government services but then balks at paying for them. I appreciate all that government does for me and the community and I acknowledge those services must be paid for. But I am a realist when it comes to the cost of providing those services. The primary driver of the cost of local government has always been salaries. Employees should be paid a living wage and, to attract and retain top quality employees, the salaries paid should be competitive. However, to do that, the rate of increase of salaries and benefits will always exceed the amount of new revenue, so the only way to keep things in balance is to gradually shrink the size of the city workforce while simultaneously using technology and innovative management to increase the quantity and quality of services delivered to the public. At some point, that is unsustainable, but my sense is the city is nowhere near that point. In fact, it seems that the city remains on a trajectory to add positions, not cut them, notwithstanding the recent layoffs.

In any case, the council will resume its review of the budget on Tuesday night. I’ll report on what happens in next Sunday’s newsletter.

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This week in my Seen & Heard column, I reported on last Saturday’s “Lowell in World War II” walking tour which drew 30 people; commented on an America’s Bookclub interview of Candice Millard, a best selling American historian; I reported on the big Google I/O conference at which the company announced big changes to its search function; I reviewed the final episode of The Late Show with Steven Colbert; and noted the obituary of former Congressman Barney Frank.

‘Survey Team’ by Paul Marion

Eliot Church at South Common (Wikimedia photo)

Survey Team

With its spire ringed in scaffolding, the Eliot Church on the rim of the South Common in Lowell, Mass., looks like a church in Dresden, Germany, shown yesterday on the TV news, the spire there circled with staging from which workers guided a crane hoisting a new cross into place. Members of an Anglican church in Britain had commissioned a bronze cross in a goodwill gesture many years after the bombs. When I was young, my friend Mike Latour told me his father had been a prisoner-of-war underground with future author Kurt Vonnegut during the Dresden bombing by English and American fliers that burned large sections of the city in the winter of 1945. In Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-Five, he tells the story in off-beat form. With our gang of kids Mike had worn his dad’s green combat belt with a soldier canteen when we played army in our woodsy suburb just north of Lowell. I had my father’s tailored Eisenhower waist-jacket that hung loose at my shoulders. In his bedroom bureau, middle drawer, were souvenirs of World War II, including an edition of the Stars and Stripes military paper headlined: HITLER DEAD.

Ahead of me on the track on the floor of the Common this morning are Mr. Nguyen and Mr. Hong, both wearing faded camouflage baseball caps, which makes me wonder if they are veterans of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), South Vietnam, who have lately gathered with local American Vietnam War vets for Memorial Day ceremonies. Chanlina, a nursing assistant at the community health center, is a quarter-lap behind me, and gaining. When I passed her earlier, I read the back of her T-shirt, Survey Team, left over from the recent census. Everyone walks in the same direction, against the clock, face into the low sun until the turn at the pool. Now and then, someone crossed the soccer-lined infield diagonally, rushing to the train station just beyond the western edge of the park.

When I arrived at 6 a.m., Mr. Ya was stretching with four neighbors from South Street, friends who likely would have been strangers had he passed them in a park in Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City, where he was a newspaper editor during the war. He wears a brown fedora out of a Humphrey Bogart movie, tweed sport coat, gray pants, white shirt open at the collar, and blue canvas shoes. Before he starts walking around the asphalt oval, he pulls out of his coat pocket eight small stones, which he arranges in two rows of four on a bench near one of the oil-drum trash barrels. After each turn around the track, he stops to return one stone to his coat pocket.

He doesn’t keep up with his companions and sometimes waits until they catch up to him so he can chat again. With his cane, he can match their pace for more than an eighth of a mile. When I pass his group on the inside lane, saying “Hello,” Mr. Ya and friends nod, smile, and wish me a good morning before getting back to their own words. The peppy conversation reminds me of my grandparents and parents chewing over the day’s events in French. He probably knows French from the old country. Mr. Ya is about eighty and arrived in 1977 at the beginning of the resettlement period for thousands of refugees from Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. The Eliot Church atop the rise kept an open door for people arriving from the camps in Thailand and the Philippines. The sign out front today announces services in Swahili for the Kenyan community and also in Portuguese for Brazilian immigrants.

In the front hall of my family’s house across the street from the park, there’s a long panorama photograph. On April 19, 1919, George H. Russell, owner of the local Commercial Photo Shop, captured in his trendy format hundreds of people on the South Common, all along the north slope of Meetinghouse Hill, topped by the red-brick Eliot Church. It was Patriots’ Day, a state holiday since 1894. The church and houses on Summer Street made it into the picture. In reverse on a dark tree limb, Russell inscribed: Lowell’s Welcome to her 26D Boys.

Back from the trenches of Europe after defeating the Germans with allied help, the soldiers assembled. In the frame are nurses and nuns in white uniforms and habits, Knights of Columbus in regalia, French flags, kids in doughboy outfits, black-suited city leaders in bowler hats, women in Sunday coats, and officers wearing General Pershing cowboy-type campaign hats.

We run and rerun private History Channel tapes in our brains. I’m stepping through the afterimage of one George Russell composition this morning, just a moment in a parade of negatives. CNN’s Early Report from Afghanistan this morning told us about a soldier who shot a twelve-year-old boy who had run to be with his father after the soldier spotted the boy and ordered him to stand still. The soldier saw the boy as a threat. It took two hours for a helicopter to arrive and transport the kid to a field hospital, where an army doctor told reporters that he is recovering. The father said his wife returned to the rocky hillside where her firstborn son was wounded to beat the ground and wail.

Paul Marion (c) 2004, 2026