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Jack is a graduate of Rutgers University where he majored in history. His career in the life and health insurance industry involved medical risk selection and brokerage management. Retired in Florida for over two decades after many years in NJ and NY, he occasionally writes, paints, plays poker, participates in play readings and is catching up on Shakespeare, Melville and Joyce, etc.

Thursday, January 5, 2012

Iowa Caucus and a Scary (?) Short Story


During the past seven days, 114 viewers looked in on Jack’s Potpourri.  The breakdown by country of these viewers included 60 from the United States, 29 from Russia, 15 from Germany, 3 from Japan, 2 from Canada and one each from China, Denmark, France, Latvia and Vietnam.  Don’t ask me why we are getting so many foreign hits.  They usually result from someone doing a Google Search and finding something having to do with their search on this site.   

Today’s postings feature a short piece which appeared on www.politicaldrek.com yesterday and a 2004 short story I have dug out of my archives.  Let me know if you enjoy it.
                                                        
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January 4, 2012:  A Day After Iowa - By the narrowest of margins, Mitt Romney edged out Rick Santorum in the Iowa Republican caucus, with Ron Paul rounding out the top three finishers.  The problem for the likely Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, is that over 70% of Republican voters, in poll after poll, prefer someone else, someone more conservative, someone less likely to compromise “conservative” values.  Thus far, this 70% has been divided among several candidates.  One, Michelle Bachmann, dropped out today.  Expect Rick Perry to follow by the end of the month as well as Jon Huntsman.  This will leave those Republicans who just don’t like Romney with the choice, when the pollster calls, of either Ron Paul, Rick Santorum or Newt Gingrich.  

A thinking Republican conservative, and there are some, knows that Paul, Gingrich and possibly Santorum are unelectable in a general election.  Paul’s ideology is anathema to most Americans and Newt Gingrich doesn’t have their trust.  Eventually, Gingrich will drop out.  Paul will not, however, and it is not inconceivable that he will run a third party libertarian campaign.  Santorum’s ideological fixation on family values and his extreme anti-abortion posture hurt him, but his ideas are not written in stone as are Paul’s.  

The first primary, or national poll, where Mitt Romney must run against only one other candidate would prove whether more than 30% of the G.O.P will support him.  Unfortunately we may not get that opportunity, even after Perry and Gingrich throw in the towel, leaving only Romney, Santorum and Paul in the race, because the latter two are in it for the long haul.   

Comparing them in a three-way contest, via polls or primaries, however, it is likely that Paul will get his solid 25% approval by Republicans and Romney his 30%, leaving the rest of the conservatives supporting Rick Santorum with 45%.  If, despite these numbers, the convention still gives the nomination to Mitt Romney as the only electable candidate, this will still leave 70% of the G,O.P. unhappy, susceptible to a third party run by Ron Paul or perhaps just staying home on Election Day.

The Republicans can solve this problem in one of three ways.  First, Mitt Romney can suddenly become more conservative.  This will not help him in the general election but it will bolster his support in his own party.  This won’t happen.  A more likely alternative would be for Romney to choose a solidly conservative Vice-Presidential candidate such as Santorum or even Michelle Bachmann to keep the conservatives from straying.  A third possibility would be a new candidate coming up at the last minute.  I doubt this will happen since the likes of Chris Christie or Mike Bloomberg lack adequate conservative credentials.  I predict the G.O.P. will nominate Romney who will select Santorum as his running mate.  Remember this.  You read it here on January 4.

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                                                                  Two
When Russ turned the corner, making a right off of McKinley Avenue onto Oak Street, he blinked his eyes for a second.  Had he made the wrong turn?  The third house on the left was where his house should have been, but it wasn’t there.  The neighbors’ houses all were there alright, but where his house should have been was a fenced-in brick structure.  He pulled up in front of it and looked at the sign on the fence. “Keep Out – City Water District Pumping Station Number Four – Built 1999,” it read.   Reaching for his cell phone, he punched in his wife’s number several times, but each effort was cut off by a metallic voice saying, “the number you dialed in not available at this time.”  Putting the phone down, he slowly drove off, circling the block a few times.  Everything was as it was when he had gone to work that morning; all the trees and houses looked the same, but his house was gone. 

Deciding to drive back to the center of town to his haberdashery shop, he thought he might sit down and think it out.  It probably was a dream which he was in the midst of, or some kind of hallucination.  There had to be an explanation.                               
                                          
                                         

                                         
When Russ got to the store, or more correctly to where the store he had left twenty minutes earlier should have been, it wasn’t there.  Between the Children’s Shoe Emporium and the Chiropractic office, where Russ’ Dapper Dan Shop had stood for the past twenty years, was a Starbucks Coffee shop.   It hadn’t been there a half an hour ago.

Getting out of his car, Russ cautiously walked along the sidewalk.  He looked into the shoe store and the Starbucks, but didn’t recognize any of the help there.  The Chiropractic office was closed.  Finally, he went into the Starbucks and quietly asked the girl behind the counter, “Miss, do you know of any men’s clothing store around here?”

                                

“No sir,” she replied.  “There’s a couple out at the mall but I don’t think there are any in town.”

A woman, seated at a table, looked up at him.  “Mister, she’s too young to remember, but there used to be one right here, about five years ago, right where this Starbucks is.”

“Thank you,” Russ said and walked back to his car.  This dream, he thought, had gone on long enough.  He had to do something.  He thought about going to the police but decided on the Emergency Room of the hospital instead. 

“Yes, sir,” the nurse at the Emergency Room addressed him.  “Can I help you”?  

He didn’t know quite how to explain what his problem was, but he blurted it out as best he could.

“Miss, I need to see a doctor.  I seem to be living in a dream or hallucinating, or something, but since I went to work this morning, my house has disappeared, my store has disappeared, and I seem to have lost five or six years of my life.”

“Have you been drinking or using drugs,”? the nurse asked.

“Neither,” he responded.  An idea struck him.  While he might be hallucinating, the nurse wasn’t.  “Here,” he said, taking his wallet out of his pocket.  Please call my wife. I couldn’t reach her on my cell phone, but maybe you can.”

The nurse examined the identification in the wallet, took his phone number and dialed it.   She turned away from him so he could not hear the conversation. When she got off of the phone, she turned to Russ, looking at him peculiarly, and said, “I spoke to your wife and she didn’t quite understand what I was talking about.  It seems you were sitting at the table at the very moment I called, eating dinner.  I asked to speak to you, and you got on the phone.  The voice sounded just like yours, incidentally, and you were a little annoyed about being disturbed, since you had just gotten home from a hard day at work.  Is this some kind of joke, or something”?

“No it isn’t, but where did whomever you spoke to say he worked,” Russ asked.

“At his store, Dapper Dan’s.  Incidentally, I know the store pretty well.  I bought my husband and my father their Father’s Day gifts there the other day.  It’s a nice store.” 

Russ held his head in his hands.  He was getting a headache.  Could it be that his body had split into two separate, but identical people, about five years ago, and one, the one eating dinner with his wife at that very moment, was continuing to lead a normal existence, but the other, himself, had been put into some sort of state of suspension, where he had remained until earlier that afternoon, when through some cosmic mistake, he had come back to a world where he did not belong, and would not belong, until his other self no longer existed.  That could be the only explanation.  This was the stuff, he thought, that science fiction was made of, but it was happening to him.  He couldn’t tell the nurse about it, of course. If he did, she would think he was crazy and he would never have the opportunity to replace his other self and resume a normal life.

His quickly-devised plan was to murder his other self, dispose of the body, and resume his rightful life with his wife and business.   How to do it, however, was another question, however, since he couldn’t get to the house or the store.  They existed, alright, but in a world of which he was no longer a component.  But the nurse, he thought, might be a bridge between both worlds, just as she had been over the telephone.

“Miss, I feel a lot better, so if you don’t mind, I’ll leave now.  But, could you do me one favor?  Ask the man you just spoke to on the phone to stop by the Emergency Room.  When he does, just give him these.  Russ took some photographs of his family from his wallet.  Tell them they were turned in to the Hospital’s “Lost and Found” desk.”

The nurse, eager to get rid of Russ, who appeared to be just another of the many screwballs who wander into Emergency Rooms, quickly assented.

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The next evening, Russ saw his other self striding up to the Emergency Room entrance.  He was crouching behind some thick hedges where he had positioned himself for the entire day with a loaded pistol in his hand.  A few minutes later, as his other self left, Russ aimed and squeezed the trigger.  The silencer on the gun muffled the shot.  He quickly dragged the body into the bushes and to his car.  He drove off and disposed of the body in a quarry where it probably never would be found.  He then drove home.  

This time, when Russ turned the corner, making a right off of McKinley Avenue onto Oak Street, his house was there, right where it was supposed to be, and his wife was on the porch waving at him.   She had no way of knowing that he was a murderer, or was he?

Jack Lippman

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