Trump Will be the Republican Nominee, the Blue Tail Fly, a Challenge to America in Decline and Stamping out Volunteerism

                                               
With Trump as Nominee, Some Republicans Will Face Hard Decisions

Insofar as the Republican Presidential nomination goes, it is now a done deal.  I was wrong.  I never really believed the G.O.P. “establishment” was so weak that they would permit a totally inexperienced person to be their Presidential nominee, but that is what is going to happen.  The “establishment” is no more.  (I do think there still is a small chance of an G.O.P. “establishment” line appearing on ballots in some states so that local and Congressional candidates can avoid running on the same line as their “sure-to-lose” Presidential nominee.)  The G.O.P. Establishment has been replaced by a shallow populism, dissatisfied with government, but with nothing more than slogans to replace what they object to.

This is despite Donald Trump's espousal of Islamophobia, anti-immigrant rhetoric, and confused and inconsistent remarks regarding foreign affairs, trade, health care, the KKK and anything else he talks about when he is not busy insulting his competition.  The populism which has replaced the G.O.P. establishment just doesn't care.  And those legitimate Republicans, like Jeff Sessions (who belongs in the pre-Civil War South) and Chris Christie,  who have endorsed him are only doing so to share in the support of that populism.

As sad as it might seem, this "populism" reflects the same gullibility which led dissatisfied voters in other countries to elect the likes of Juan Peron, Benito Mussolini and most frighteningly, Adolf Hitler in the past.  I am not comparing Trump to these evil dictators;  what I am comparing is the sentiment which fueled their popularity. They are behaving in this manner because for years, the Republican Party Establishment has cultivated this gullibility by getting millions of Americans to vote for things which were not in their interest.  And now, it has come back to bite their hand!  

Donald Trump, although he may be qualified to RUN for the Presidency (or any other office), is no more qualified to BE the President than he is to fix the transmission on your car, remove a painful molar from your mouth, fix your overflowing toilet or do any other thing requiring skill and experience in a particular field.  And that’s what being President calls for, and the G.O.P. knows it.  It is not something to learn “on the job.”  Purportedly a successful businessman (which is not the same as being a successful deal maker), I cannot recall any of the major corporations in this country ever running to offer this successful “businessman” the post of CEO.  That’s because making a lot of money buying, selling, managing and investing in real estate, and being a “hit” on television, and writing books about it, does not prepare one to be the CEO of a major corporation, let alone the government of the United States.  Anyone who believes that it does should have their head examined.  The only major "businessman" who has endorsed Trump is Carl Ichan, whose forte is investing and making money as a wheeler-dealer in the same style as Donald Trump.

And on the other side of the fence, Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic nominee, despite her long association with government which apparently is a minus in this year’s election, where ignorance of issues is apparently seen as a virtue by many.  Attacks on her integrity regarding her involvement with the Benghazi tragedy or with her separate Email server will continue because her foes feel that that is only way they can attempt to counter her superiority over their candidate in terms of skill and experience.

All of which raises an interesting question.  On Election Day in November, will thinking Republicans who still might recognize the need for skill and experience in the White House be able to vote for the G.O.P. nominee?  Will they stay home?  Or will they, recognizing the need for someone who knows what they are doing (even someone with whose programs they disagree) rather than someone who just knows how to mouth slogans and insult opponents, quietly vote for Hillary Clinton? 

Who will the “low-energy” Jeb Bush vote for?  The man who insulted him?  And what about the other Republicans with skill and experience on whom the party turned its back?  Will Ted Cruz, for whom many have no love nor respect, end up voting for the man who has called him a liar innumerable times?  And if Marco Rubio's criticism of Trump is honest, how could he vote for him?  


Can you see any of this trio voting for the oaf who viciously insulted them?  They will never mention it, but I suspect all three prefer Hillary to Donald.


Who will Republicans vote for once they recognize the folly of having let Donald Trump win their nomination?  Will they do what is better for America or will they waste their vote on the candidate of a party they no longer believe in and which not longer believes in them?  (I don't include candidates like Governor Kasich or Dr. Carson in this category since both have not really argued with nor have been insulted by Donald Trump, conceivably because they might be in the running to be his running mate.)   And what about the conservative journalists with whom I usually disagree?  I wonder for whom George Will, Mona Charon amd  David Brooks will vote.

Jack Lippman
                                          

                                        

The Blue Tail Fly and Jimmy the Pig

The folk song “Blue Tail Fly” dates back to the 1840’s when it was sung by white performers in minstrel shows, mimicking Black slaves in the South where the song originated.  The lyrics, as popularized by Burl Ives during the 1940s-50s folk music revival, go something like this:

  Blue tail fly

When I was young, I used to wait
On the boss and give him his plate
And pass him the bottle when he got dry
And brush away the blue tail fly

(Chorus)
Jimmy, crack corn and I don't care
Jimmy, crack corn and I don't care
Jimmy, crack corn and I don't care
My master's gone away

And When he would ride in the afternoon
I'd follow after, with a hickory broom
The pony being rather shy
When bitten by blue tail fly
(Repeat chorus)

One day, he ride around the farm
The flies so numerous, they did swarm
One chanced to bite him on the thigh
The devil take the blue tail fly
(Repeat chorus)

The pony run, he jumped, he pitch
He threw my master in the ditch
He died and the jury wondered why
The verdict was the blue tail fly
(Repeat chorus)

They lay him under a 'simmon tree
His epitaph is there to see
"Beneath this stone, I'm forced to lie
Victim of the blue tail fly"
(Repeat chorus)

This was a very popular tune in the 1800s, in fact it is rumored that it was on the preliminary program when Abraham Lincoln spoke at Gettysburg. 

Clearly, it’s about a slave whose master died when thrown from a horse which reared up when bitten by a fly. One of the slave’s tasks had been to keep those flies away from the horse.  What has been a point of dispute is what the chorus means.  Who was Jimmy and what is “cracking corn” all about?  Some have theorized that it referred to corn whiskey which probably was the alcoholic beverage of choice among slaves, or that “Jimmy Crack Corn” was slang name given to slaves similar to “Jim Crow.”

Well, I have come up with another theory about why the singer is happy that his “master’s gone away.”  To do this, you first must buy into my assumption that “Jimmy” was the name applied singly to one particular pig, or collectively to all of the master’s pigs, and all Southern farms had pigs in those days.

(Now for those of you not familiar with animal husbandry, each year a farmer selects from the crop of piglets born to his sows a few choice males and females to use to breed the next generation of swine.  The rest will be fattened to be eaten or sold as pork.  All of these remaining pigs would first be castrated if male, or spayed if female, so that their meat would not be tinged with the offensive odor which leaving them to produce sexual hormones would cause. This practice continues even today in the hog farming business.  Recall how Senator Joni Ernst (Iowa – R) boasted during her 2014 campaign how she was skillful at castrating hogs.  Usually these “surgical” events are postponed until the piglets are old enough to be weaned away from their mother and provide food for themselves.)  

 
Aren't these piglets cute?  For gorier pictures, just Google "pig castration."

So where am I going with this?  Well, I have been doing some research into the life of Henry Clay, who lived during the first half of the 19^th century, and was one of the great legislators in American history.  Clay owned an estate near Lexington, Kentucky, where he, of course, raised pigs. In David and Jeanne Heidler’s monumental work “Henry Clay, the Essential American,” the process I just explained is touched upon as follows (page 357):  “He bred them in the first week of December in order to have piglets in April.  In the second week of May, when the pigs could crack corn, the boars were neutered and the sows spayed for meat in the fall.” 

The authors footnote this information as quoted in the papers of Henry Clay as originating in the December 1841 issue of “The Southern Planter.” Well, after a month of life, it looks like the piglets didn’t need their mother any longer and were ready for sexual neutering because they had reached the point where they were capable of chewing on corn kernels all by themselves.  They could now “crack corn” as the 1841 magazine article describes Henry Clay's hogs !

So getting back to the Blue Tail Fly, and all of those pigs we assume were named Jimmy, we now have a documented source from the same period when the song originated which describes what “cracking corn” really meant at that time in history in the American South.  One of the singer’s chores as a slave probably was to castrate his master’s pigs once they were able to feed all by themselves.  The pigs had reached that point ("Jimmy crack corn"!) but the slave, now that his master was dead, didn’t care any more about performing that messy job and that’s what he was so joyfully singing about.  "Jimmy crack corn and I don't care!"

Perhaps that is why the song may have been sung at Gettysburg.   Abraham Lincoln now knew that

       Lincoln at Gettysburg


slavery was dead and slaves no longer had to do their masters’ bidding.  (These conclusions are exclusively mine and originate on this blog, and may not make much sense to more creditable historians.)

JL

                                                  

Stamping Out Volunteerism?

Volunteerism has always been a wonderful trait here in America.  Neighbors and friends performing tasks without compensation for the public good has always been something meeting with almost universal approval.  But now, let me beg to differ.

I regularly attend a series of symphonic concerts at the Kravis Center in West Palm Beach, a concert hall seating about 2200.  The ushers and ticket takers there are all volunteers.  It appears that about at least 20 are on duty for each performance, and there is often more than one performance each day there.  There are other, smaller venues in the Kravis complex which require the services of ushers as well.

  
Ticket-taker's pay is getting to see the show free

At Palm Beach International Airport, there is a Visitors Information Desk open during the day and manned by helpful volunteers.   Similarly, the Information Desks at most local hospitals are handled by volunteers; these are the folks who tell you what room the patient is in and hand you a visitor’s pass.

 

This nice unpaid lady tells you Uncle Fred is in room 304B and hands you a visitor's pass

Some local communities also have volunteer auxiliary police personnel, unpaid but trained to carry out such tasks as traffic meter enforcement or monitoring of disabled spaces in parking lots.

And what about those knowledgeable docents who lead visitors on tours of museums?  They are unpaid volunteers as well.

All of these folks deserve our congratulations for what they do.  But bear in mind that there still is a lot of unemployment in this country.  I wonder how many people would be hired on a full time basis to do all of these things if suddenly these tasks became salaried positions.  There would be a reduction in unemployment payments and possibly welfare benefits as well.  

Are volunteers keeping these folks on the Unemployment Benefit line?

So, has the time come to fight unemployment locally, and throughout the country, by waging a campaign to stamp out this scourge on our economy known as “volunteerism”?  Yes, doing so would make is costlier to run concert halls, airports, police forces, museums and hospitals.  Those costs would have to be passed on to those these facilities serve through higher prices, but look at the real jobs doing so would create!

JL

                                                

Dealing with a Declining America in the 21st Century

For the decade after the Second World War, the economy of the United States was the only show in town.  The industrial and agricultural resources of Europe and Asia had been decimated by the war.  But in the United States, jobs, money, security and opportunity ruled!  We were sitting pretty.

And then Europe and Asia, particularly Japan, recovered.  We helped them to do so to keep them in the world of free enterprise capitalism and out of the Soviet’s communist grasp.  And then they become our competitors.  Buoyed initially, but not permanently, by lower standards of living and lower wages, they slowly began sucking jobs, money and opportunity out of the American economy.  Later, China joined them in doing so, and our economy has been slowly slipping downward since then. Unions have almost disappeared along the way as has the optimistic approach Americans have always had about their future as well.  The following graph illustrates our Gross Domestic Product (monetary value of country's manufactured goods and services) over past years.  As the GDP has declined, unemployment has increased and the real income of those with jobs has declined, along with their benefits.

Unemployment, changes in the way health care is paid for, a decline in our educational standards, an infrastructure in needed of repair and a distrust of those in our economy whose business is the manipulation of money, rather than making things or providing services are all parts of this problem.  Some are angry because they see it as being caused by government itself and others are mad because they see it as existing because of the failure of government to deal with these specific aspects of the problem, which are all manifestations of the decline described above.

When politicians talk about making America great again, they are looking back to that glorious immediate post-war period.  Going back any further than that will bring them to harder times.  But we really cannot go back to what was just an artificial situation, caused by the destruction of the Japanese and European economies, and their temporary absence from the world scene.

Since then, our economy slid downward from a base in manufacturing to a base in “service industries.”  They too are now being eroded by advances in technology.  With more such technological growth on the horizon, with human labor being less expensive in less developed nations, with more robotics doing humans’ work, the make-up of our economic strength is changing almost daily, and again, not in an upward direction.  What will make America great today is not the same thing which made America great in the past.  We live in a world different from not only fifty years ago, but different from last month, last week and perhaps even yesterday.

To illustrate this, let me quote from a recent advertisement from a leading mutual fund company (Fidelity Investments) which promoted investment portfolio diversification by considering their "international" funds.  The ad pointed out that "100% of the time, over the past 30 years, the top-performing equity market has been outside of the U.S,  89% of global GDP comes from non-U.S. countries" and that "only 26% of the world's publicly traded companies are based in the U.S."

This points up the fact that America's economy is no longer so dominant as it was sixty years ago, and that, like it our not, we are part of a global economy.  An oil glut in the Middle East causes the stock market in the United States to tremble. Currency reform or debt issues in China or in Greece affect us.  All economies are now interrelated, disregarding borders and currency differences.  No longer can a tariff be imposed to keep out imports and protecting or creating jobs in one country without worldwide repercussions being felt.  And the balance between the economies of various nations is now maintained less by treaties and agreements than it is by instantaneous manipulations by computer programs which operate by themselves, once they are designed and put into operation by humans.

 
Untouched by human hands

There is a bright future ahead for mankind, in this country and in the rest of the world.   First, however, a way must be found to best utilize, organize and distribute the world’s resources to assure that future.  (I avoid using the words "wealth redistribution" but indisputably they lurk in the background of any discussion of this subject.)  That is the challenge for the remainder of the 21^st century.  Merely trying to “make America great again” does not supply any answers.  But there are answers out there and knowledge is the key to finding them.

JL
                                                

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