The Cabinet

Zounds! Horace Popinjay here with the first edition of The Cabinet, a dispatch which shall be put forth each sennight hence!

You may guess from my demeanor that I’m writing from the past. No! This dispatch comes from the future — the year 2121, in fact, when Providence is an Underwater City, and we all have to put on our Copper Diving Suits to go to the Alga Encrusted Ruins of The Providence Place Mall!*

“Egad!” you’re saying to yourself. “I thought our noisome troubles would cease now that we’ve shed that pestilent year, 2020.”

No. Why did you think that? Things will get way worse. But of course the future, unlike the past, is mutable! Heed my dispatches in this periodical, and we can avoid this watery end.

Take Senator DiPalma’s commission to investigate Rhode Island’s energy infrastructure. Not a single activist or environmental expert among the 20-member commission, which includes luminaries from Enbridge Gas and National Grid.

Tommyrot! But let’s give the State House their due: Trying to balance preserving the conditions for life on earth with keeping the energy companies happy is a sticky wicket. At least the new Transportation and Climate Initiative will reduce public transit carbon emission. Unfortunately, the bigger transit priority seems to be making sure rich people don’t have to look at the folks who ride it. Isn’t that the real agenda
behind this codswallop multihub bus plan?

Don’t worry Mr. Paolino, the skyscrapers may be underwater here in 2121, but our moneyed class lives in capacious dirigibles, miles above the hoipolloi down in the briny deep. You’ll love it!

*RIP to the many who drowned in defiant opposition to the Governor’s 2120 Copper Diving Suit Mandate