The First 100 Days of Donald tRump
While
words should always be looked at within the context in which they are spoken or
written, they still have meanings of their own. The following quote from a letter by John
Adams, written fourteen years after he left the Presidency, was in response to
comments in a book on government written by Virginian John Taylor that included
criticism of some of Adams’ ideas. But
taken by itself, it is very challenging statement.
“Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes,
exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not
commit suicide. It is in vain to say that democracy is less vain, less proud,
less selfish, less ambitious, or less avaricious than aristocracy or monarchy.
It is not true, in fact, and nowhere appears in history. Those passions are the
same in all men, under all forms of simple government, and when unchecked,
produce the same effects of fraud, violence, and cruelty.”
Looking at these words within
the context of Adams’ remarks, they argue that all forms of government are
susceptible to becoming evil, and that is true of democracy as well as of
other more narrowly based forms of government.
But the words history remembers are “There never was a democracy yet that did not commit
suicide.”
With that in mind, and
remembering that the President of the United States is elected by a
“democratic” process, here is a magnificent article by the Editor of the New Yorker magazine, discussing the
first one hundred days of the Trump administration. I cannot urge you too strenuously to click on these words and read the article … and I hope you will forward it to your
friends, relatives and perhaps a few enemies as well.
If clicking on the "link" doesn’t work for you, the article can be found at
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/05/01/a-hundred-days-of-trump
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/05/01/a-hundred-days-of-trump
Jack Lippman
(Illustrated: Numbers 45 and 2 of our Presidents)
Western Civilization Challenged
Back in the days when some of us were in college, we were exposed to a mandatory freshman course entitled Western Civilization. Well, those days are past, and we live in a global world where it is our job to accept that Western Civilization's values are not necessarily the values of the rest of the world, that which was not part of "western civilization." Two weeks ago, David Brooks discussed this in his New York Times column. Were it not for the vitally important article from the New Yorker linked to above, this piece would be this posting's lead story ... so click right here to read it.
JL
JL
Money to Buy the Marlins
JL
On Kias and Hyundais
Now
that the Kaesong Industrial Complex in North Korea, where pathetically paid
North Korean workers are exploited by their government and the South Korean
companies, 200 of them, which employed over 50,000 North Koreans there, is
closed and is likely to remain closed due to the growing tension between the
two Koreas, I have re-visited the matter of Americans buying from South Korean
companies involved in the zone. Chief
among them is the Hyundai conglomerate which actually manages this closed
industrial complex within North Korea and had continued to have relationships
with that country. Because the "zone" is closed,
I suppose the chief reason for not purchasing Hyundai’s automobiles (Hyundai
and Kia) is now no longer an issue. But
we still should be looking to purchase cars made in the U.S.A., providing jobs
for American workers.
JL
JL
Jack Lippman
Chrissy Frost was dreaming. She was in an upscale steakhouse in Boca
Raton, enjoying a succulent filet mignon cooked exactly the way she liked them
done, black on the outside with a strip of red in the middle. At least that was the way she had liked her
steaks before her doctors told her to avoid red meat. Although she was almost completely recovered
from her stroke six years ago, and was earning a good living performing on the
stages of Palm Beach County’s many retirement communities, she still had to
watch her cholesterol and beef was no longer part of her diet. But it was an enjoyable dream anyway.
She barely noticed the tiny brownish specks
she was spitting out when she brushed her teeth and flossed the next
morning. But the following day, after
having another “filet mignon” dream, Chrissy was again flossing out bits of
steak when she brushed her teeth. Very
puzzling. Particularly since she had eaten
mostly salads, chicken and egg white veggie omelets over the past week or
so.
And when she went to Dr. Lopez for her
regular exam the next week, he shook his finger at her.
“Chrissy, your lipids are up. Have you been eating anything to increase
your cholesterol? Looks to me like you
have.”
“Swear to God, Doctor, I haven’t had a
piece of beef in a couple of years.
Fish, chicken and rarely, a piece of veal maybe. No red meat at all.”
The doctor scratched his head.
“But, let me tell you,” Chrissy
continued, “Something funny has been happening lately. I’ve been dreaming of
eating a delicious filet mignon in a fancy restaurant and when I brush my teeth
in the morning, when I floss, it seems like I had really eaten a piece of steak
during the night. I think I’m flossing
out bits of meat.”
Dr. Lopez looked at her kind of funny,
peered into her mouth and set up another appointment for more blood work two
weeks later.
“Funny things happen all the time,
Chrissy. Let’s see what it looks like in
two weeks. Meanwhile, stop dreaming so
much.”
During those two weeks, Chrissy ate
like a vegan, but whenever she had the “filet mignon” dream, there still were
particles of steak between her teeth when she flossed the next morning.
And when she went back to the doctor,
the results were no better. The
cholesterol was still up, the LDLs were climbing and the HDLs were
dropping. She explained her diet over
the past few weeks and then surprised Dr. Lopez by taking out a little pill box
which contained a few strands of red meat.
“This is what I flossed out this
morning. Take a look at it.”
“Looks like steak to me,” he said,
holding them in a tweezer up close to his eyes.
“Chrissy, we have a problem and it’s
beyond me. I am referring you to a
specialist whom I hope can help you.
Here’s his name and address. I’ll
call him this afternoon and his office will call you. We’ll get to the bottom of this. Don’t worry.”
“What’s this guy? A cholesterol
specialist? I certainly don’t want to
have another stroke.”
“No, Chrissy, he’s a psychiatrist.”
“You think I’m crazy?”
“No way, but physical manifestations
of what you’re dreaming about are a little beyond me. You have bits of the meal you dreamt of stuck
in your teeth. Not a job for an
internist, Chrissy, but this guy many have some answers. Give him a chance.”
* * *
The sign on the glass door in the
shabby professional building read “Tobias Fink, D.M.A.” Chrissy went into the waiting room, signed in
and waited for the nurse behind a glass window, or whatever she was, to
call her. Otherwise the room was
empty. Glancing around she saw some of
the diplomas displayed, apparently to reassure patients of the credibility of
Dr. Fink. One was from the University of
the Guianas, announcing his having received his Doctor of Medical Arts degree
there in 1983 with honors and another testified to his having completed his
residency in Psychiatry at the Cayman Islands Mental Health Center three years
later. Very reassuring, she thought.
Once ushered into Dr. Fink’s office,
she was confronted by a barefooted chubby man in his fifties wearing a colorful
Hawaiian shirt and denim cargo shorts.
He was smoking a pipe.
“Good morning, Miss Frost. Dr. Lopez called me and told me a little
about your story. Would you mind
repeating it for me. But first, would
you like a drink?”
With that, Dr. Fink opened a small
refrigerator next to his desk and took out a can of Diet Dr. Pepper, popping it
open and inserting a straw.
“No thanks, Doctor,” Chrissy
replied. “But before I start talking to
you, I’d like to find out if I really want to be here talking to you. You must admit, you don’t look like any
doctor I’ve ever seen. Tell me why I
should be even talking to you.”
“Miss Frost, all of my patients
usually say about the same thing as you’ve just said when they first meet me,
but believe me, I am legitimate. Or
almost, anyway. You see, my medical and
psychiatric credentials aren’t accepted anywhere in the United States, but here
in Florida, I am able to practice because of a loophole in their licensing
laws. Actually, this place is officially
licensed as a barber shop and somewhere along the line, I will snip off a half
inch or so of your hair … and that makes everything else I do okay with the
State. You know, barbers are known to
talk a lot with the person in their chair, and that’s what I do in my practice,
so it works for me. Of course, I can’t
take insurance payments but that doesn’t matter much since my charges are very
low. I was left a lot, a real lot, of
money a few years back, so I don’t depend on this practice, or barber shop, to
support myself. Okay?”
“Hmm,” Chrissy intoned. “How come Dr. Lopez referred me to you if
you’re not really a doctor?
“Good question. Because Henry respects what I do, as do most
of the physicians in South Florida. They
all know of me, and when they come across the kind of case I handle, they don’t
hesitate to refer patients to me, even with my phony credentials, because I get
results!”
Crissy was beginning to believe, at
least a little, in this guy. He slouched
in his chair, popping a bit of his gut out between the buttons on his
shirt. She almost wanted to laugh.
“Listen, young lady … “
“Cut it out, Doctor,” Chrissy
interrupted. “I’m older than you are, so
stop with the young lady bit.”
“Okay,” he said, “But let me tell you
about some the cases I’ve handled and maybe you’ll want to give me a chance to
help you.”
Chrissy nodded her assent.
“This guy, I’ll change his name, came
to me a year or so ago with these bloody spots on his hand and on his lower
torso. ‘Rufus,’ I asked him, ‘where did
you get these things?’ ‘Doc,’ he replies
to me, ‘I got them in a dream. I was
dreaming I was Jesus Christ being crucified and when I woke up, these marks
were on me from the dream of the crucifixion.’
Well, I checked him out and he wasn’t much of a religious guy, went to
church once every couple of years maybe and didn’t even know the Biblical
details of what he was dreaming. Had him
sleep over in my office one night, right on that chaise over there, and I
watched him toss and turn. He was
dreaming alright, and in the morning, damn it, he had those spots right where
he told me he was getting them.”
Intrigued, Crissy asked what happened
with Rufus. Dr. Fink continued.
“I got this friend in the Bishop’s
office in West Palm. Now I’m not a
Catholic, but we grew up together. I
tell him this story … and he writes it up and gives it to the Bishop. Two months later a bunch of priests show up
in my office with Rufus and ask me to sign some papers. I guess the schools I went to for my degrees,
which aren’t worth much in this country, are fully accredited by the
Vatican. They tell me that once he dies,
they’ll put Rufus up for what they call beatification, which is a step toward
sainthood if they can verify any miracles or cures connected with him. They’re taking their time because he really must
die first before this thing gets moving.
So far, he hasn’t. I told them I go
to the track and the casinos with him occasionally, and damn it, he always wins,
never loses, it’s unbelievable. Big
bucks, really big bucks … but he gives it all to charity. They smiled when I told them that. One of them whispered to me that he suspects
that Rufus may actually be Jesus. Keep
that under your hat, he says to me. So you see, I do deal with cases like
yours, Miss Frost.”
“Wow,” Chrissy said as Dr. Fink
cracked open another Dr. Pepper. “Do you
have any other interesting patients, ones more like me?”
“Sure … There was Melissa. That wasn’t her real name. Always wanted to be in show business, TV, the
movies. But she had no talent and was
what I would call homely. In her dreams,
she was in the movies, not a star mind you, but a significant bit part
player. It was always the same movie,
the one that won a lot of awards last year, you know, ‘La La Land,” and she
always played the same part. Well, I
downloaded the video and she pointed out to me where she was in the movie in
her dreams, and to my amazement, when I paused the video exactly there, damn
it, it actually looked like it was Melissa playing that role! Or at least someone whom she resembled very
closely. I zoomed in and the actress in
the movie had the same mole on her neck as Melissa, sitting right where you are
now, had. Of course, some other actress
played that role in the film, so I contacted the people who made the film, so I
might really compare what she looked like with Melissa in person. They told me they couldn’t help me since the
actress had died in an automobile accident shortly after the film was made, but
they would send me a photograph. I have
it right here in her file, and as far as I can see, it’s a photograph of
Melissa. She claims she remembers from
her dreams when they took it after one of the shoots in Hollywood and even
identifies some of the other actors in the background.
“What happened to Melissa,” Chrissy
asked.
“Nothing much. I told her never to go to the movies anymore
and to cut out watching them on her TV screen too. She also cancelled her Netflix subscription. I know she got married last year and I think
she just had a baby. She’ll be fine so
long as she stays away from movies. But
as far as I am concerned, professionally, I do believe that there was some
cosmic merger of her dreams and the making of that movie which resulted in the
real actress getting killed and Melissa, from her dreams, retrospectively
taking over the role. These things do
happen.”
“Another one. This guy, call him George, always was
dreaming that he was cheating on his wife with another woman in a hotel room
somewhere. The hotel catches fire and
the fire department calls up to them on a bullhorn to jump out of the window
and they’ll catch them in a net. The two
of them do that, stark naked, and who do you think is one of the firemen
holding the net? The guy’s wife! And this is where this dream always
ends. Normal stuff so far, George is
dreaming that he’ll get caught. Classic
guilt. Now his wife, I was given to
understand, was a stay-at-home type wife, baking cookies, sending the kids off
to school and all of that usual good stuff.
She had majored in Italian Renaissance Art in college and was a really
bright woman. So one day, right out of
the blue, she tells George that she has decided to become a volunteer fire
department aide. It would be a change
for her, she claimed. Smiling, she said
it was perfectly safe, he shouldn’t worry, the closest she would get to a fire
would be to help those holding the net when someone was forced to jump out of a
window in a burning building, and even that would be a rare occasion because they didn't use nets much any longer. At this
point, George turned white. He went to
the doctor the next morning and that is how I got involved.
“You mean,” Chrissy said, “that his
wife in real life was about to enter his dream world, and she was totally
unaware of what she would encounter there.”
“She wouldn’t encounter it there,”
Chrissy, “George was the one doing the dreaming. He would.” But her presence in the dream
would be as a real person, and under deep hypnosis, she might even remember
being there in his dream, but we won’t go there. Maybe it was just a coincidence, but it
served to turn him into a faithful husband, as I had advised him to be, and which
he has been ever since. Now do you think
I’m capable of dealing with a bit of filet mignon stuck between your teeth?”
Chrissy replied “Yes, Doctor.”
After Chrissy repeated the full story
of her dreams and the dental residue that remained afterwards, Dr. Fink smiled.
“You’re an easy one, Miss Frost. We can wrap this up right now in one sitting,
and my fee will be just $29.99. And I’ll
include a second consultation with that free!
That’s something I learned from watching TV … and of course, there’s no
charge for shipping and handling. Ha,
Ha. Okay?”
Crissy nodded, adding, “And you can
call me Chrissy, Dr. Fink.”
His remedy was a simple one. “Chrissy,” he said. “Set your mind to controlling your dream as
soon as it starts. When the waiter
brings the filet mignon, scream at him saying something like ‘I don’t want
that, take it away, no meat for me.’
You get the idea. And if he
persists, pick up the damn steak and throw it at him! You must be the one who controls your dream,
not that little bit of your brain that really wants the filet mignon. Got it?”
Crissy smiled, wrote a check and went
home. That night she had the same dream,
but this time she tried to confront the waiter.
“Take than goddamn steak away! I
don’t want it.” Despite her entreaties,
he placed the piece of meat on a plate before her. The aroma was almost overpowering, but she
hung on. It was slow-motion in the
dream, but it was really happening. With her left hand, she stabbed her fork
into the steak and slowly, ever so slowly raised it off the plate. Transferring
it to her right hand, she drew her arm back as if she were a quarterback
throwing a pass. As her arm moved
forward, the steak flew off the fork and sailed across the room, hitting the
waiter squarely in the eye. And then the
dream ended.
The next morning, her sister-in-law
came into her bedroom as she was getting up.
“Is everything alright, Chrissy?”
I heard you screaming during the night, something about taking a steak
away. I looked in but you were sound
asleep.
“Wait a sec, Stella,” Crissy said as
she ran into the bathroom.
“No meat between my teeth! Great!
That cockamamie doctor cured me!” Chrissy
was delirious with joy as she waved a strip of clean dental floss! Let’s go shopping!”
Later that afternoon, walking through
the Town Center mall in Boca, Chrissy thought she recognized one of the waiters
from what used to be her favorite steak house strolling toward her. He had a black eye.
Turning to Chrissy, he said, “Pardon
me, M’am, I think I recognize you. Were
you dining in New York Prime last night about eight?”
“No,” Crissy replied.
“I could have sworn you were there and
you threw a steak at me. See my
eye. Don’t you remember, we had to call
the cops to escort you out of the place.”
“You must have been dreaming. I haven’t been in that place for months. But I hope that eye heals up fast.”
“Yeah, I do too. If it didn’t hurt so much, I would swear it
was all a dream”
(At her next visit to Dr. Lopez, Chrissy's cholesterol levels all were within normal limits.)
HOW TO BE ALERTED TO FUTURE BLOG POSTINGS.
(At her next visit to Dr. Lopez, Chrissy's cholesterol levels all were within normal limits.)
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