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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.

Wednesday, June 22, 2016

The "Watch List," More of Jo, Ghosts of the G.O.P. and our Fireworks Short Story



                                               


Watching the Watch List - A Big Job


If we are to try to prevent weapons from falling into the hands of potential terrorists, and if we are to otherwise be able to keep an eye on such individuals, we must recognize the enormity of such tasks.


As reported by the McClatchy News Service, the government’s “watch list,” formally called the Terrorist Screening Database, combines several sources, and it’s much bigger than the formal no-fly list, about which we all have heard much.

About 1.1 million names, representing about 400,000 individuals, were included on what’s formally called the "Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment" as of December 2013 according to the National Counterterrorism Center.  Of these, about 25,000 were U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents.  This "TIDE" database encompasses those suspected of involvement in international terrorism.  And periodically, as was the case with the Orlando terrorist, names are removed from that list, apparently to make it somewhat less unmanageable!  Click here to read the entire article.  

 
 Street in Muslim neighborhood in an American city

It occurs to me that to keep tabs on 400,000 individuals (and we are NOT even talking about a 24/7 operation), it would take about 80,000 law enforcement personnel, each one working a 40 hour week and having the responsibility of checking on five individuals.  At present, there are only about 14,000 special agents and another 22,000 professional staff working for the FBI. And they have other things to do as well.  That is a recipe for terrorists slipping through the cracks.  It’s a big job.  If it is to be done properly, we must be willing to pay the price for it, both in dollars and in a sacrifice of some individual freedoms.   
Jack Lippman
                                            


More Jo Stafford ... and Blood Pressure Reduction


A few weeks ago, the blog featured a piece about Jo Stafford.  Well, almost every day, I manage to listen to a song or two by her on the CDs I purchased … and my doctor tells me that for some unexplained reason, my blood pressure is down about ten points.  I am trying to see if I can get my Medicare Part D to reimburse me for the three CDs I bought.  Meanwhile, here’s another sample of Jo’s golden voice, this time from later in her career, 1956.  Listen to her version of “The Nearness of You.” Click Right Here!

JL
 
                                           


Where Will the Ghosts of the G.O.P. Go?


Many postings ago, I predicted the demise of the Republican Party.  I thought, however, that it would take 20 or 30 years to occur because of the pace of demographic changes in the population.  These included the increased number of voters who might be classified as Latino, Afro-American … or within any other group other than the traditional white, middle class cohort, leery of big government and change of any kind who historically have voted Republican.  I figured it would take a generation or so for this last-mentioned type of voter to be hopelessly outnumbered.

 
What Donald Trump might look like as the returns come in on Election Night


Well, it looks like an “accelerant” in the form of the Republican Party’s presumptive 2016 Presidential candidate has been poured into the mix and the Party is in its death throes right now. Even though many Republican officeholders, party leaders and traditional G.O.P. voters are unhappy about this and flailing about, all going in different directions, Trump will be their candidate!  The defeat to which he will lead the G.O.P. will destroy it, at least in the form in which we have known that Party since its founding in the 1850’s. This is a rare moment in American history.  We are able to watch the death, breath by breath, of a political party.  Its final passing will occur after the 2016 Presidential Election, soon after which its remains will be interred. 

 

But from out of that grave will come floating the Grand Old Party’s ghosts.  Like such spirits in gothic novels, they will be doomed to roam in lonely misery until they find new homes where they will be welcome.   That will take a while, so since these ghosts will be with us for some time, let’s identify them.






Among them are the ghosts of those traditional G.O.P. voters who believe that we should have as little Federal Government involvement in our lives as possible, with as much of what the Federal Government now does handed back to the States, which they feel was the intention of the Constitution’s writers.  With this will come a need for less Federal taxation and regulation.  Belief in a strict interpretation of the Constitution and a withdrawal of the Federal Government from “social” agendas is part of these ghosts’ agenda.  Among them you will find businesses and wealthy people, both of which groups quickly snap to attention (and open their wallets) at the mention of lower taxes, and those who believe in an aggressive military posture at the price of tending to domestic needs.  Let’s call this group “the real Conservatives.“



A second group of ghosts believes pretty much the same, and has usually goes along with the “real Conservatives,” but has felt betrayed by them, for their goals are rarely accomplished.  They are impatient and now prefer, it appears, to strike out on their own.   Some of these ghosts believe that there is a “socialist” agenda behind much of what the government does, intent on taking away individual rights and sometimes it believes that government is, by nature, inefficient and corrupt and is ready to “drown it in a bathtub” and would really prefer a “libertarian” approach which it often confuses with “benevolent anarchy.”  These ghosts spend their leisure time reading the novels of Ayn Rand or the economic treatises of Frederick Hayek who preached that we are on the road to serfdom.   We can call these ghosts “the Libertarians.”


More active than the first two groups is a third set of ghosts.  Not content just to philosophize as do the first two groups, they are constantly looking to find someone to blame for the problems the nation faces. Usually that “someone” is identified as “those people” who receive some sort of government subsidy in order to get by, immigrants or the offspring of immigrants, academic people, “do-gooders,” and those who take what they feel is a proper course of action but which these ghosts see as only being “politically correct,” dirty words to them. They also blame scientists, unions and “mainstream” media which they seem to think was engaged in sort of conspiracy to kill the G.O.P.  This group of ghosts is characterized by never offering any solutions to any problems.  They see their role to be that of placing blame, and little more.  Lacking a real home at present, they haunt the frequencies of talk radio.  This is group of ghosts we can call “the Blamers.“

The fourth and final group of ghosts comprises those who are fed up with everything they see happening in this country and are willing to be active in bringing about change or preventing change (depending on the issue involved), regardless of how it is accomplished.  They are willing to do away with freedoms and resort to violence if pushed to it.  They are more than just talk, however, since they are the ghosts of owners of guns (including assault weapons to use in the coming domestic Armageddon in which some of them believe), KKK types and right-wing militia activists.  In life, these ghosts were outwardly religious, but far from religious in their actual beliefs. While staying friendly with the Blamers,  these ghosts believe that both the Conservatives and the Libertarians, despite their agendas, are fools.  And there you have the final ghost group, “the Dangerous Ones.”

Now that the Republican Party is practically dead, where do these ghosts go?  What is to be their happy “haunting” ground now that the Democrats are destined to control the Presidency, the Senate and the Supreme Court for the next twenty years or so?  (The remnants of the Republican Party will still control the House of Representatives for a few more years due to gerrymandering of districts dictated by Republican State governments, but even this will soon wear off.)  

I feel that within the next decade, two political parties will emerge to cater to these four groups of Republican ghosts.  One will be on the far right and consist of the Blamers and the Dangerous Ones.  The other will be a “right centrist” party and appeal to the Conservatives and the Libertarians. 

Eventually, these two parties will merge, each recognizing that they cannot go it alone against the Democrats.  Sadly, the new merged party will be comprised of different groups whose only purpose would be to defeat the Democrats but have no real united agenda of their own on which all of their members agree, somewhat like the dying Republican Party of today.  United in nothing but hatred, these people will never learn.

Look for this “merging” process on the right to start to happen no sooner than the year 2030!  Why so long? Remember that after the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, the strength of the Republican Party was such that it took almost a quarter of a century until a Democratic President was again elected! That is the kind of enduring purgatory into which the ghosts of today’s Republican Party will shortly be entering. 

This new party will succeed in electing candidates for national office only if and only when the Democrats become sufficiently corrupt, lazy or misdirected to disturb their center-left coalition.   If this “new” party ever does succeed, however, it will certainly fall apart after a couple of decades, at most, as did the Whig Party (ca. 1830 – 1850).  That party was based on a broad spectrum of often violently conflicting ideologies, with their only point of agreement being that they hated Democrats, specifically Andrew Jackson and his followers.   
 
Andrew Jackson    
Objects of their opponents' hatred in 1832 and in 2016, Jackson and Cllinton.  Tp succeed, ideology must involve more than hatred.

Some people never will learn.   We can refer to such people and their ghosts as Republicans, or as I did in a recent posting, members of the “Hypocritical Party” or “Hippos," or even members of the B.I.G. (Bigotry, Ignorance and Gullibility) Party, another recent re-naming which appeared in this blog.  In this vein, Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts referred to them as the Repugnant Party.  Take your choice.  
JL
                                         

  



Agricultural Usage

And here's a short story of mine from the "archives."
 
“In the good old summertime,” cousin Mike, “we have lots of fun down here in Florida ... barbecues, beer drinking, swimming at the beach, and fireworks right in the backyard too, ‘specially for the Fourth of July. Betcha don’t have all that kind of good stuff up north in New York, right?”

“I guess not,” Mike replied.  “In fact, fireworks are illegal in New York, except for the big displays like Macy’s and what some towns do in the parks.  You know, handling fireworks is dangerous.  You can blow a finger off.  I read about some kid doing that in the papers every year.”

“I know, I know.  They’re illegal the same way here in Florida too!  But anyone can get them from places like the Fireworks Queen over on 441.  All ya gotta do is sign a form saying they’re for agricultural use.  You know, stuff like for scaring the birds away from crops.”

“Is that how you got the stuff you told me you shot off for the Fourth of July?”

“Yesiree!  I just signed the form and came home with a carload of rockets, pinwheels, shootin’ stars and whatever.  You should have been here to see it.  It was great!”

A ringing of the doorbell interrupted the conversation. Miltie got up to answer it and came back into the living room a minute or so later with a piece of paper in his hand and a confused look on his face.

“Mike, there was a guy at the door says he’s a volunteer from the County Fireworks Watch Bureau.  He had that damn piece of paper that I signed over at the Fireworks Queen when I bought the stuff I just told you about.  Wanted to know where my farm was.  I gotta fill out this form telling him where or I’m subject to a $2000 fine or thirty days in jail.  Told me to mail it back to him by next Thursday or he’ll be back with a Sheriff’s Deputy to take me in.  Do you know any farmers around here?

“Miltie, we don’t have this kind of crap up in New York and I don’t know any farmers in New York, let alone down here in Florida, but I have an idea.  Let me get on your computer and maybe I can come up with something.”

Twenty minutes later, after doing some Google searching, Mike smiled.

“Miltie, look what I just came up with on the internet.”  Both of them leaned over looking at the laptop’s screen, where they read the following: “Fertile Swamp Farm – 300 acres of farmland growing vegetables all year round.  You can experience the pleasures of being a ‘gentleman farmer’ by renting a few acres of our land for a month or by the year.  Call us at 1-800-555-7226 for info.”

“I get the idea, Mike.  We can rent a little bit of this guy’s farm, and maybe he’ll backdate the papers, and we can say that’s where we used the fireworks.   You are a genius!  I’m going to call him right now.”

The next day Mike and Miltie drove out State Road 80, way past Belle Glade and Clewiston at the bottom of Lake Okeechobee into the heart of Hendry County.  Finally they saw a sign reading “Fertile Swamp Farm – Next Left – 500 Yards.”

  Following the directions, they turned into a one way dirt road with two well-worn tire ruts leading to a ramshackle farmhouse next to which there was a gravel parking area in which about a dozen cars and pick-ups were parked.  A teen age boy waved them into a spot and pointed to the farmhouse door.  Once inside, they found themselves among a bunch of people who from their attire, obviously didn’t have anything to do with farming.  A bald middle-aged man, seated at a table, greeted them and checked off Miltie’s name from a list before him.

“Glad you could make it.  Let me explain the deal to you,” he said.

“Hold on a minute, we really don’t want to become ‘gentlemen farmers.’ We just schlepped out here because we figured we could rent some farmland from you for a while.  All we want to do is make our use of fireworks for agricultural purposes legal.”

“I know, I know,” said the man.  “Look around you.  Why do you think all these other guys are here?  Can’t grow anything but weeds in this frigging swamp anyway.  It’s all polluted mud.   But I manage to squeeze out a living off of guys like you.  The going rate is $100 an acre a month, minimum two acres for three months, discounted to $500 if you pay in cash, which is the only way I do business anyway.  Okay?  Make up your mind.  There’s a line behind you.  And before you ask, sure, I’ll backdate the deal. It’s quarter the price of the fine they’ll hit you with.  Sign right here.”

Miltie signed and forked over $500 to the farmer.  They got into their car and quickly fell in behind the line of vehicles crawling back down the rutted road leading to State Road 80.  Once the cars cleared the dirt road and were back on the highway, three or four cars which had been impatiently waiting there made the turn onto the dirt road leading up to the farmhouse. Business was good at Fertile Swamp Farm that day!

Meanwhile, the bald headed farmer was talking on the phone to his brother.

“Bennie, I know the fireworks stores are slowing down now that the Fourth is over, but you gotta keep pushing them.  Tell them we’ll up it to $25 for each one of those Agricultural Usage forms they copy and give to you.  And wait until you see the neat uniform shirt I got for you to use.  It comes with a “smokie” hat so you’ll almost look like a state trooper when you knock on their doors.”

Jack Lippman

                                                

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