Another day, another headline. This one (April 6) read: “R.I. group homes finance chief stole $220,602.”
Sigh.
How many such headlines have I read since we moved to Providence five years ago? It began with the unseating of liberal good-guy House Speaker Gordon Fox, and continued on with legislators and municipal officials, including the one about two-time felon Buddy Cianci winning nearly half the votes for mayor of Providence.
I should have expected something like this. An old friend had cautioned me, hearing that we were moving to Providence, that the state still reeked of corruption.
But, having lived in Brazil, Lebanon and Kenya, I figured I’d seen worse.
One Kenyan colleague explained that he loved to go clubbing with a government minister’s son who carried a big wad of cash — cash from his father, who’d been given the cash by people who’d wanted a favor. Or Lebanon, where if your father or your uncle didn’t own the company or run the ministry, you weren’t going to get that job.
With its “Don’t blame me: I voted for Cianci” bumper stickers, Providence reminded me of the story about an outsider who’d run against São Paulo’s incumbent mayor whose unofficial slogan ran, “Rouba, mais é o nosso” — He steals, but he’s ours.
Ah, Rhode Island.
Now don’t get me wrong. I really like the place with its lovely shorelines and villages. And Providence — with its colleges and universities, easy train rides to New York and Boston, interesting neighborhoods and, of course, good restaurants, music and theater — is a great place to live, potholes notwithstanding. And those cultural hallmarks that Rhode Island Monthly magazine heralds like coffee milk and Dell’s lemonade also notwithstanding.
But this lovely little state that Rhode Island Public Radio calls “quirky” has a political culture resembling none I’ve known in the eight other states I’ve lived in.
There’s something really askew, my good-government friends explain, about Rhode Island’s political culture. Everybody assumes everybody’s on the take or at least knows who’s on the take, but nobody does much about it. That endless effort to unveil more information about 38 Studios is a good case in point. And all it takes is a bit of digging into various pension funds to make you wonder just who got whom to do what, and how. Worse, lots of people don’t seem to care.
Am I wrong to see a connection between Rhode Island’s drivers and its politics?
I’ve truly never lived in a place where no one (this is an exaggeration, but not by much) comes to a complete stop at a stop sign.
And I certainly didn’t understand what happened when traffic cameras got set up in Providence school zones and people who were ticketed went ballistic, so — what else to do? — some of the fines were refunded and the public was warned that they would, after a few weeks to practice slowing down when the law said they should slow down in order to keep children safe, be fined. If, that is, they went more than 11 miles over the speed limit.
Truly, I like it here.
But I’m awfully glad that there seem to be quite a few people and organizations around here that don’t think that Rhode Island politics as usual is a particularly good idea.
Maybe if more of us decide that something can be done to make Rhode Island politics more transparent and to insist that Rhode Island’s politicians keep the service part of public service in mind, things can get better.
Maybe people will even begin to stop at stop signs.
It just can’t be that hard.
Nicholas Boke is a freelance writer and international educational consultant who lives in Providence.