In 2011 a British author, E. L. James, self-published an erotic romance novel entitled Fifty Shades of Grey. Salman Rushdie’s take on the book: “I’ve never read anything so badly written that got published. It made Twilight look like War and Peace.” Maureen Dowd of the New York Times described the book as being written “like a Brontë devoid of talent.”

The reading public didn’t listen. The book topped the best seller list around the world, was translated into 52 languages and set a record in the United Kingdom as the fastest selling paperback of all time. The first book was followed by publication of the second and third volumes, Fifty Shades Darker and Fifty Shades Freed. By 2017, the trilogy had sold over 150 million copies worldwide. The books are notable for their explicitly erotic scenes including bondage and domination/submission. Predictably, Hollywood produced film adaptations which were thoroughly panned but were box office successes.

In a world where Kim Kardashian has 200 million Instagram followers and where sex always sells, it should be no surprise that the books and movies were smash hits.

But how many shades of grey are there? I suspect that there are far less than 50 but, nevertheless, we live in a grey world although we often pretend that is black and white.

The color grey is produced by mixing equal amounts of black and white paint. Anyone who listens to the daily news will not be surprised by the coverage given to the shootings of black people by white people, often police officers. In many cases, there is no reasonable defense to these killings.

The most prominent was the death of George Floyd which really ignited the Black Lives Matter movement which had been simmering for a number of years. A generation ago, the lyrics of a popular song said “that the revolution would not be televised.” In the George Floyd case, it was televised and the “television” consisted of a nine minute video recorded on numerous cell phones. The jury outcome was not a surprise although it appears that the verdict may be overturned because one juror did not answer his questionnaire truthfully. I don’t expect further proceedings to result in a different outcome and ex-police officer, Derek Chauvin, is likely to spend many years in prison.

While the Floyd trial was in progress, another Black man, Daunte Wright, was killed by a white police officer, Kim Potter, who said that she thought she was using her Taser and not her gun. Many found that hard to believe as the Taser has a grip completely unlike the police pistol and is drawn from an officer’s left side as opposed to the pistol on the right. However, she is heard just after the shooting expressing anguish that she had used her pistol. Clear or unclear or, maybe, a shade of gray.

On the day the Floyd verdict was delivered, there was another killing by a white officer of a Black female teenager in Columbus, Ohio.  Ma’Khia Bryant was shot as she was about to knife another girl whom she had pinned against car. For anyone who has seen the video, the evidence is clear that her shooting saved another teenager from being stabbed and possibly becoming a murder victim as shown in the picture below.

But what is interesting about all three cases is the reaction reported by the media. In the Bryant case, United States Senators Cory Booker and Raphael Warnock said that the shooting demonstrated the “need for police reform.” Valerie Jarrett, the Senior Adviser to President Obama, tweeted that a teenager had been shot multiple times to break up a “knife fight” and she demanded accountability. Apparently, in her view of the world, a knife fight is no big thing. Ms. Jarrett should get off her Twitter perch and ask the girl about to be stabbed her thoughts on the seriousness of this particular knife fight.

There is more than sufficient anecdotal evidence that black people can be more roughly treated by police. However, that does not mean that, in most cases, the treatment is either rough or inappropriate.

George Floyd was being arrested for passing a counterfeit bill. The call was appropriate; the response not.

Daunte Wright was pulled over for expired tags when it was discovered that he had an outstanding warrant. The stop proper; the outcome not, but likely an accident rather than intentional.

In Ma’Khia Bryant’s case, the call and response were proper.

Unfortunately, all three cases are lumped together by activists who are more interested in pursuing an agenda than seeking individual justice.

The case of Daunte Wright is an object lesson.

For Daunte’s adherents, the case for murder is clear. He was “driving while black” and stopped for expired tags and it was discovered that he had an air freshener on his rearview mirror which happens to be a violation under Minnesota law. He was on the phone to his mother when he was shot. According to the Rev. Al Sharpton: “you can die for having expired tags….It wouldn’t happen in any other community.”

The opposite view: It wasn’t the air freshener; it was the discovery that Wright was wanted on an outstanding warrant for fleeing police with an illegal firearm and for skipping bail on an armed robbery charge. Wright was outside the car about to be handcuffed but broke free back to the car when Officer Potter shouted “I’ll tase you” and then “Taser, Taser, Taser” but discharged her gun.

Former officer Kim Potter has been charged with second degree manslaughter which carries a maximum prison sentence of 10 years. That is not enough for the activists; they demand more serious murder charges and the demands became so personal and threatening that the prosecutor removed himself from the case which now rests with the Minnesota Attorney General’s Office which also prosecuted the George Floyd case.

I, for one, believe Kim Potter is telling the truth. That does not mean that she should not be charged with negligent manslaughter but it does mean that this was not an intentional murder. Unlike the activists, I think this is a perfect example of the way things happen in a “grey” world and that those who say “here we go again” are not seeking real justice but are pushing a false narrative. As Alfred Lord Tennyson said: “A lie that is half-truth is the darkest of all lies.” This is particularly true when it stirs racial animosities.

One of the more unfortunate aspect of these cases is the television presence of the Reverend Al Sharpton who is the master of the “half-truth.” He has considerable rhetorical abilities and a true gift for hogging the klieg lights when the cameras are rolling. His “half-truth” in the Daunte Wright case is that a black man was murdered because of expired plates and an air freshener. Sharpton has come a long way from the 1980s when he engaged in outright fabrications and he has honed his ability to mislead with “half-truths” rather than complete lies which spectacularly backfired on him 40 years ago.

For those who are not familiar with his history, it began in the 1980s with the case of Tawanna Brawley. Brawley maintained that she had been abducted and sexually violated by six white men, one of whom was a police officer. She was found with fecal matter on her and racial epithets written on her body in charcoal. Her case became a national story due to the efforts of the Reverend Sharpton and a few others. Initially, there was widespread sympathy for Brawley but the tide turned when, after an extensive grand jury investigation, it was determined that the story had been made up and was not true. Sharpton (and three others including Brawley) were ordered to pay significant damages for defamation.

I am sure it has not been lost on Sharpton that, with the many millions of dollars being paid to the Floyd and Wright families, they might be called upon to make contributions to his national efforts. God knows that he needs money. According to the New York Times, he was in default of federal and state taxes a few years ago to the tune of $4.5 million.

This false narrative is not limited to Sharpton. Indeed, every white Minnesota politician including the Governor and a United States Senator are in Twitter lockstep in suggesting that this is a case of “here we go again” where a black man is killed by a white police officer. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz tweeted that this was “… another life of a Black man taken by law enforcement.” Minnesota United States Senator Tina Smith tweeted the exact same message.

The prize for the most inane tweet goes to Minnesota Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan who declared “Minnesota is a place where it is not safe to be Black.” Presumably, all Minnesota black men should move to Iowa where things will be “hunky-dory.”

Nowhere is there an appreciation of the nuances of this particular case or any recognition of what plainly is a tragic accident. The national media has fallen in line in promulgating this false narrative.

Much remains to be done to continue to ameliorate America’s original sin of slavery and much that followed. Nevertheless, we will only get there by telling the “truth” about events in this “grey” world and by calling out “half-truths.”

The truth probably is that, if Daunte Wright were white, he would have suffered the same fate. Anyone who is resisting arrest and attempting to flee with an outstanding warrant for doing the same thing before would have been “tased” as well and the same accident would have occurred.

We do a profound disservice to our fellow black citizens in continuing to assert that they are sitting ducks for police officers and that white citizens don’t care.

The Statue of Liberty in New York harbor was first conceived around 1870 by two Frenchmen ‒ Édouard René Lefèbvre de Laboulaye, the President of the French Anti-Slavery Society, and the sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi. France provided the Statue and the United States was responsible for the pedestal. The Statue was ultimately dedicated in 1886 with a multi-day celebration presided over by President Grover Cleveland. The Statue is modeled on the Roman goddess Libertas who is the patroness of liberty and it sought to celebrate the abolition of slavery. Lady Liberty is stepping out of chains at her feet.

However, the original idea behind the Statue was lost because of Emma Lazarus as well as the immigrants who entered the United States by way of New York harbor. In 1883 Lazarus, who was fiercely pro-immigrant, wrote a sonnet entitled “The New Colossus” for the purpose of raising funds for construction of the Statue’s pedestal. Her poem compared the New Colossus (Lady Liberty) to the ancient male Colossus of Rhodes. The poem was unmentioned at the dedication ceremony in 1886 and its words would not be placed on the Statue of Liberty until 1903. Still, it came to symbolize the meaning of the Statue.

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

The net effect: The Statue, conceived as the triumph of freedom over slavery, instead became a symbol of welcome to the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

Without immigrants there would be no present day America. Massive waves of immigrants came from 1850 to 1920. The Irish started in the late 1840s as a result of the potato famine. They were unwelcome with employment ads reading “Irish Need Not Apply.” But they kept coming and their sheer numbers transformed the cities where they landed. By 1880, they had elected an Irish American as Mayor of New York with Boston to follow in 1884. Immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe followed the Irish.  None were turned away or had to prove a skill; only the sick were quarantined. 

Many of us are descendants of immigrants who arrived in the great waves from 1850 to 1920. However, immigration continues to bring people here. Most first generation immigrants are now hiding in plain sight, generally in blue collar jobs. This became crystal clear as the result of a horrible workplace shooting in a town not far from Baltimore. 

A few weeks ago, a Judge sentenced Radee Prince to five life sentences for murdering three people and the attempted murder of two others. Prince worked at a company called Advanced Granite Solutions which is located in Edgewood, Maryland, and is approximately 30 miles north of Baltimore on I-95. Advanced, a small company, specializes in granite and stone applications and is the local place to go for your new granite kitchen countertop.

On October 18, 2017, Prince went to work, opened fire, killing three coworkers and seriously injuring two others.  The names of the murdered and seriously injured:

But now the “huddled masses” are not sailing into New York but, rather, crossing the Rio Grande River, the mountains and deserts of Arizona and New Mexico.  It is clear that the end of Trump and the beginning of Biden became a signal to those “yearning to breathe free.” And behind all of this are the “coyotes” who demand exorbitant sums to get people to the Promised Land. The “coyotes” are the vermin of this world who prey on the poor, the uneducated and the desperate and care nothing if their charges don’t make it as long as they have been paid.

Most people end up where they started. Usually, a person’s natural desire is to stay “home” with their families and loved ones. But what happens when “home” has become intolerable whether because of the absence of economic opportunity or lawlessness. That seems to be the case with respect to most people trying to enter the southern border. In story after story, those who are coming are coming because they are fleeing grinding poverty or gangs which are trying to recruit their children and which make their neighborhoods unsafe.

Last week there was a newspaper story about a Honduran father and his seven-year-old daughter attempting to cross the Rio Grande into Texas. The only contact they had in the United States was a relative in South Carolina. They were caught and sent back.

Then, he sent his daughter by herself and she made it only because of the kindness of a fellow immigrant who found her crying and alone short of the border. As an unaccompanied child, it is virtually certain that she will be allowed to stay.

I try to put myself in her father’s mind. The two had walked through Honduras, then through Guatemala and the length of Mexico to reach Texas. Now they’re stuck. But her father knows that she will be protected if she can reach the United States. He probably thinks “I will follow and find her.” But, down deep, he must also think “even if I don’t make it, it is better for her to make it and be alone than to be with me in Honduras.”

So what is the answer? Many immigrants who are here “legally” are not in favor of “illegal” immigrants and insist that they should have to go through the same bureaucratic, expensive and time-consuming process that they did. This notion may well account for Trump’s surprising level of support from Hispanic Americans in the 2020 election.

As long as Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and Mexico remain inhospitable to their people, the immigrants will come and the coyotes will prosper. United States’ immigration policy should first try to stabilize the situation in these countries. That, of course, is easier said than done. In the meantime, we have to develop a coherent policy for dealing with the “illegals.” Here are a few ideas:

1. Our present policy unreasonably limits “legal” immigrants with the result that there are too many “illegal” immigrants. One solution is to increase “legal” immigrants by encouraging family based immigration. In this way, an immigrant would have a family member to assist in his or her integration into the country. Trump railed against this, saying that he wanted “skilled” people to immigrate not the unskilled.  When my great grandfather immigrated, I don’t think he had any “skill” but he had a lot of moxie.  It takes a whole lot of moxie to leave the land of your birth, travel over 3,000 miles to a place you have never seen and where you do not know the prevailing language. His son, my grandfather, inherited the moxie but only got through the third grade.  Things seemed to have worked out pretty well from there.
2. New rules for granting asylum that recognize fear for personal safety from groups like gangs. Right now you can probably get asylum if the neighborhood gangs came after you because you were gay or because of your religious affiliation. However, your next-door neighbor who is dealing with the same gangs, would not qualify if they could not assert fear based on sexual orientation or religion.
3. Funds to help other countries remedy the problems at “home” and to help Mexico to secure its southern border.
4. Trump’s policy of making immigrants remain in Mexico until their asylum cases were decided would not have been so wrong if Mexico were safe but it is not. People escaping gang violence in Guatemala found the same in Mexico. What if funds were found to assist Mexico in providing safe waiting zones?

Some will say “where will the money come from?” If we want the money, we will find the money.  It now appears that there is no shortage of dollars flowing out of the Federal spigot.  Here is one recent example.

The recent $1.9 trillion COVID package passed by President Biden and the Democrats contained $86 billion for a “bailout” of Multi-Employer Pension Trusts. These Trusts were not victims of the pandemic; they had been consistently under funded by employers and workers alike for any number of years. No problem: let’s have the taxpayers properly fund them even though the affected parties had not done so and without even requiring that these Trusts clean up their acts going forward. This was an outright grant of money not a loan. This one item was approximately 5% of the recent legislation. You pretty much know that there is something wrong with a proposal when the Washington Post, New York Times and the Wall Street Journal all question it. These are the broadsheets for the Democratic and Republican parties and rarely agree on anything.

Ronald Reagan, quoting John Winthrop, referred to America as a “shining city on a hill.”  Later, he said:  “And if there had to be city walls, the walls have doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and heart to get there.”

It is fashionable in certain enlightened quarters to dismiss Reagan’s optimistic view of America and to decry its numerous sins: systemic racism, income inequality, gun violence, foreign misadventures and the like. Indeed, these same people scoff at the idea of American exceptionalism described by the “city on a hill” metaphor.

In the end, I believe that immigrants are a positive good for the country. Almost without exception, they are extremely hard-working, grateful and bring an energy to succeed which they pass on to their children. Those of us who were born here often do not realize how special, warts and all, this place is.  

If you don’t think America is a “shining city on a hill,” just ask an immigrant.

Woke is an old word which has now taken on a new life. It was first used in the 1940s by black Americans but became increasingly popular as a result of the Black Lives Matter movement after the deaths of Michael Brown and George Floyd. BLM activists use the word to alert people to keep watch for police brutality. In other words, “wake up” to the systemic racism which continues as a result of America’s inability to expiate its original sin of slavery.

As often is the case, “woke” was appropriated from the black community by the white community to state its own grievances. And “woke” ‒ once loosed ‒ is not easily cabined. “Woke” is now a more generic slang word associated with “progressive” causes such as LGBTQ+ rights, feminism, environmentalism and, as will be seen in a few paragraphs below, the audacity of a non-ethnic person in giving advice on how to prepare ethnic recipes (yes, you read that right).

Without question, the most “woke” governmental body in the United States is the San Francisco School Board. A previous blog on this site introduced readers to this group. The School Board just passed a Resolution to rename 44 schools with Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Roosevelt and even current U.S. Senator Feinstein getting the boot.

The Resolution which passed by a vote of 6-1 on January 27, 2021 provided that the names were being changed because they were historical figures responsible for “…the subjugation and enslavement of human beings; or who oppressed women, inhibiting societal progress; or whose actions led to genocide; or who otherwise significantly diminished the opportunities of those among us to the right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness…”

It is, at best, ironic that the School Board said its actions promoted “the opportunities among us to the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Those words are from the Declaration of Independence which was penned by Thomas Jefferson whose name is now being stricken from one of the schools. You really can’t make this stuff up.

The politicians in San Francisco are so “woke” that no one, including the Mayor, objects to the renaming. Meanwhile, the public schools in San Francisco, both the renamed ones and the others, remain closed with no apparent plan to reopen anytime soon.  As Mark Twain said:  “First God made idiots.  That was for practice.  Then He made School Boards.”

The rap on Lincoln, according to teacher Jeremiah Jeffries, is that he was chosen based on “his treatment of First Nations peoples.”

The Cherokee Nation, after dithering for almost 5 decades (explained over the years as having “no official position”) just “woke up” and requested that Jeep change the name of the Grand Cherokee. The Cherokees may do better copying the Seminole Tribe.

Florida State University retains the name Seminoles, complete with the head dress costumed brave who rides a horse and throws a ceremonial spear into the turf prior to football games. The Seminole Tribe was happy to let this tradition continue, proving once again that money is a great leveler.  Suffice it to say that the Seminoles would have driven an extraordinarily hard bargain for Manhattan.

All of which brings us to one of the most bizarre instances of “woke” from the world of food. Hamantaschens are triangular cookies eaten during the Jewish Festival of Purim (celebrated a few weeks ago). In 2015, Bon Appétit published an article by food writer Dawn Perry on how to make a really tasty hamantaschen. Recently, Abigail Koffler was researching hamantaschen fillings and came upon Perry’s article. She was not pleased and turned to Twitter (where else) to state “that traditional foods need to be updated by someone from that tradition.” Dawn Perry’s sin: she is a Gentile.

Bon Appétit is a part of the Condé Nast mass media empire. Its brands include Architectural Digest, The New Yorker, Vogue, Vanity Fair, GQ and attract over 72 million consumers in print, 394 million in digital and 454 million across social platforms.

The title of this post copies the title of Bret Stephen’s must read Opinion column in the New York Times of February 23, 2021. Within hours of the Koffler tweet Condé Nast responded as recounted in the Stephen’s piece:

“The original version of this article included language that was insensitive toward Jewish food traditions and does not align with our brand’s standards,” the editor wrote. “As part of our Archive Repair Project, we have edited the headline, dek, and content to better convey the history of Purim and the goals of this particular recipe. We apologize for the previous version’s flippant tone and stereotypical characterizations of Jewish culture.”

…What Bon Appétit blithely calls its “Archive Repair Project” is, according to The Associated Press, an effort to scour “55 years’ worth of recipes from a variety of Condé Nast magazines in search of objectionable titles, ingredient lists and stories told through a white American lens.”

There’s no way to be certain about this but I wager that Dawn Perry’s hamantaschens are tastier than Abigail Koffler’s and that she would be better company. But one thing is surely certain: Condé Nast’s groveling over the Perry article is appalling.

Winston Churchill once said “a nation that forgets its past has no future.” Whatever their now declared sins, Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln are our past and the reasons we have a present and a future. Without Washington, the Revolutionary War would not have been won; without Jefferson there would be no Declaration of Independence nor the Louisiana Purchase; without Lincoln there would be no United States; without Theodore Roosevelt there would be no National Park System and without Franklin Roosevelt there would be no Social Security program or regulation of Wall Street.

Is there anything good about the current “woke” sensibility? With respect to the business of “names” it is clear that certain names should be ditched and others should be elevated. A rough sampling:

1. Fort Bragg in North Carolina and Fort Hood in Texas are huge military bases. Both are named after Confederate generals. We should never give honor to those who fought against the United States. A law school classmate has suggested that the business of renaming strikes him as “empathy on the cheap.” That may be, but I remain convinced that federal military institutions should not honor Confederate rebels.
2. Whatever happened to the elevation of women?  Susan B. Anthony’s face appears on a one dollar coin which is rarely used. Surely more can be done to honor women who were held back for so long but who have been so important to the success of the country. Identifying those women and finding appropriate ways to honor them would be a good “woke” project.  One woman to be considered is Lois Wilson who was the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous Family Groups.  Her more famous husband Bill was co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous.  These groups have proven to be the most effective self-help programs ever devised. 
3. What about Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman?  Douglass has a number a public schools named after him and truly more can be done but Tubman has pretty much been slighted. That was so until the Obama Administration decided to place Harriet on the $10 bill in lieu of Alexander Hamilton. That bonehead suggestion was altered only because of the success of the Broadway show “Hamilton.” Now Harriet is being proposed for the $20 bill in lieu of Andrew Jackson. As between Hamilton, who is probably one of the least famous but one of the most important Founding Fathers and Jackson, there is no choice. Put Harriet on the $20 or let her share it with Jackson.

The principal problem with most of the current “woke” movement is that it scours the past for mistakes instead of trying to claim the future. It is the future where inclusion is important and past mistakes can be remedied. 

However, there is one thing I do know for sure:  a cookie whisperer should not be the subject of derision.

Shame, today thy name is Condé Nast.

P.S.  A college roommate recently exposed me to a singer named Eva Cassidy. Twenty-five years ago (January 1996) Eva and a fellow bandmate secured enough money to make a record while they performed a live set at a small but famous music venue in Washington D.C. known as Blues Alley.

Eva would be dead before that year was out. The record from that session has sold over 10 million copies, mostly as a result of word of mouth.

The following is a documentary about Eva, her band and that record. Her marvelous voice is on full display.  Live at Blues Alley

The last three weeks have provided much inspiration for blog subjects.  The question of whether President Trump should be impeached because he incited the mob that invaded the Capitol is one worthy subject (he should be) but covered by many commentators.

For those of you who are appreciative of Twitter suspending Trump’s account, you may want to rethink your position if the social media account of Alexei Navalny is suspended.  Navalny, who just survived a Putin poisoning, uses social media which is the only way he can effectively speak to fellow Russian dissidents.

Finally, who thought it was a good idea to turn Washington D.C. into a war zone for the Biden inauguration just because a number of wingnuts were making threatening comments on the Internet, none of which came to be even remotely true.  There will be those who say that the reason they did not become true was because of the show of force.  In my view, 5% of the show of force would have accomplished the same thing and everything else was overkill.

While all of the above would have been fit subjects, one reader told me it was time for a “light” subject which I took to mean something silly that did not offend anyone (I am waiting for a reader to now say “if you are not going to write about anything important, why should I read it?”)

The pandemic has given us a good subject which are the “jokes” which have been shared as we are all sheltering in place and living on our computers.  Every day, for the last nine months or so, I have received jokes, clever images and the like from friends and acquaintances.  Most are mildly entertaining but some deserve more attention.

For example, as President Trump left the White House, I received the following one which was not great but faintly amusing.

The joke received at Thanksgiving was memorable. 

A man goes to a pet shop and buys a talking parrot. He takes the parrot home and tries to teach the parrot how to say a few things, but instead, the parrot just swears at him. After a few hours of trying to teach the bird, the man finally says, “If you don’t stop swearing, I’m going to put you in the freezer as punishment.” The parrot continues, so finally the man puts the bird in the freezer. About an hour later, the parrot asks the man to please open the door. As the man takes the shivering bird out of the freezer, it says, “I promise to never swear again. Just tell me what that turkey did!”

At Christmas there was Edna.

There was a man who worked for the Post Office whose job was to process all the mail that had illegible addresses.

One day, a letter came addressed in a shaky handwriting to God with no actual address.

He thought he should open it to see what it was about.

The letter read:

Dear God,

I am an 83 year old widow, living on a very small pension.

Yesterday someone stole my purse. It had $100 in it, which was all the money I had until my next pension payment.

Next Sunday is Christmas, and I had invited two of my friends over for dinner.

Without that money, I have nothing to buy food with, have no family to turn to, and you are my only hope…

Can you please help me?

Sincerely, Edna

The postal worker was touched.

He showed the letter to all the other workers. Each one dug into his or her wallet and came up with a few dollars.

By the time he made the rounds, he had collected $96, which they put into an envelope and sent to the woman.

Christmas came and went.

A few days later, another letter came from the same old lady to God.

All the workers gathered around while the letter was opened.

It read:

Dear God,

How can I ever thank you enough for what you did for me?

Because of your gift of love, I was able to fix a glorious dinner for my friends.

We had a very nice day and I told my friends of your wonderful gift.

By the way, there was $4 missing.

I think it might have been those bastards at the post office.

Sincerely, Edna

However, by far the one of the funniest (and surely the longest) jokes was the following:

One day a man decided to retire.

He booked himself on a Caribbean cruise and proceeded to have the time of his life, that is, until the ship sank.

He soon found himself on an island with no other people, no supplies, nothing, only bananas and coconuts.

After about four months, he is lying on the beach one day when the most gorgeous woman he has ever seen rows up to the shore.

In disbelief, he asks, “Where did you come from? How did you get here?”

She replies, “I rowed over from the other side of the island where I landed when my cruise ship sank.”

“Amazing,” he notes. “You were really lucky to have a row boat wash up with you.”

“Oh, this thing?” explains the woman. ”I made the boat out of some raw material I found on the island. The oars were whittled from gum tree branches. I wove the bottom from palm tree branches, and the sides and stern came from an Eucalyptus tree.”

“But, where did you get the tools?”

“Oh, that was no problem,” replied the woman. ” On the south side of the island, a very unusual stratum of alluvial rock is exposed I found that if I fired it to a certain temperature in my kiln, it melted into ductile iron and I used that to make tools and used the tools to make the hardware.”

The guy is stunned.

“Let’s row over to my place,” she says “and I’ll give you a tour.” So, after a short time of rowing, she soon docks the boat at a small wharf. As the man looks to shore, he nearly falls off the boat.

Before him is a long stone walk leading to a cabin and tree house.

While the woman ties up the rowboat with an expertly woven hemp rope, the man can only stare ahead, dumb struck.

As they walk into the house, she says casually, “It’s not much, but I call it home. Please sit down.”

“Would you like a drink?”

“No! No thank you,” the man blurts out, still dazed. “I can’t take another drop of coconut juice.”

“Oh, it’s not coconut juice,” winks the woman. “I have a still. How would you like a Tropical Spritz?”

Trying to hide his continued amazement, the man accepts, and they sit down on her couch to talk. After they exchange their individual survival stories, the woman announces,

“I’m going to slip into something more comfortable. Would you like to take a shower and shave? There’s a razor in the bathroom cabinet upstairs.

No longer questioning anything, the man goes upstairs into the bathroom. There, in the cabinet is a razor made from a piece of tortoise bone. Two shells honed to a hollow ground edge are fastened on to its end inside a swivel mechanism.

“This woman is amazing,” he muses. “What’s next?”

When he returns, she greets him wearing nothing but some small flowers on tiny vines, each strategically positioned, she smelled faintly of gardenias. She then beckons for him to sit down next to her.

“Tell me,” she begins suggestively, slithering closer to him, “We’ve both been out here for many months. You must have been lonely. When was the last time you played around? She stares into his eyes.

He can’t believe what he’s hearing. “You mean…” he swallows excitedly as tears start to form in his eyes,

“You’ve built a Golf Course?

One just received proves the Shakespearian line that “brevity is the soul of wit.”

There was a man and woman living separately in a retirement community who became friends as they both had dogs which they would walk every day. Most of the time, they would sit on the bench and talk while the dogs played. One day the man asked the woman what she thought about moving in together. He said they both would be paying half of their current expenses. It turned out that both of them were financially secure and their children were grown and well taken care of. She then asked the man: “What about sex”; he replied: “Infrequently”; she thought for a minute and then said: “Is that one word or two?”

Clearly corny jokes still abound such as “A penguin walks into a bar.”

Bartender:  “My goodness, I now think I’ve seen everything:  A penguin walking into my bar.  What can I do for you?”

Penguin:  “Thank you for that welcome.  I am looking for my brother.” 

Bartender:  “Happy to help.  What does he look like?”

And in the time you have taken to read this, there is a fair chance that another one has landed in your inbox.

P.S. In the early days of television one of the most popular shows was “I Love Lucy” featuring the celebrated comedian Lucille Ball and her TV (and real life) husband Desi Arnaz who played a Cuban American band leader. In almost every episode Desi would become exasperated with Lucy’s antics and say, in fractured English, “Luceee, you has a lot of ‘ess plane ing’ to do.”

Listen to this video and will someone please “ess plane” to me how this is possible.

In August of 1998 Ruthless Records released an album titled “Straight Outta Compton” which was written and recorded by N.W.A. (Niggaz Wit Attitudes).  The group included Ice Cube (birth name of O’Shea Jackson) and Dr. Dre (birth name of Andre Young).  N.W.A. is widely credited with popularizing the gangsta rap genre of hip-hop music.

The lyrics of the title song are jarring to many, glamorizing gun violence and misogyny and include the following:

The B-side of Straight Outta Compton included a song title “Fuck The Police” which prompted the FBI to send a letter complaining about the inflammatory nature of the song. That letter boosted album sales which eventually reached triple platinum status.

I grew up in the 1950s in Washington DC which was, at that time, not a cosmopolitan city but rather a small southern town. Like all southern towns, it was very segregated. My mother, on hearing the term “nigger,” was adamant that the term never be used in our house or by us. The correct term, she said, was Negro. In later years, Negro became black which became African-American which became black again and which has now become, according to the style mavens at the New York Times, capital B Black (A current “woke” suggestion I am refusing to follow; I’m not sure whether the term brown referring to Hispanic people is now a capital B Brown but I’m pretty sure Asian people will not be referred to as Yellows nor Native Americans as Reds).

Within the last few weeks, Netflix released a movie known as “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” which was produced by Denzel Washington and starred Viola Davis and the now departed Chadwick Boseman. Davis played Ma and Boseman played Levee, a member of Ma’s band. Set in 1927 at a recording session where all the performers are black, Ma and Levee are at odds and Levee is at odds with the other 4 band members. Levee and the band members regularly banter back and forth using the word “nigger” along the lines of “you are one dumb nigger.”

All of which brings us to Mimi Groves (New York Times Dec. 26, 2020, “A Racial Slur, A Viral Video and A Reckoning”). Last school year, Mimi was the captain of the cheerleading squad at her high school in Leesburg, Virginia. She dreamed of attending the University of Tennessee as its cheerleading team was the reigning national champion. By May, she learned that she had been accepted and placed on the cheerleading team. Her mom threw a celebratory party complete with a cake and decorations in orange which is the Tennessee school color. 

But then Mimi’s world was turned upside down. There surfaced on social media a three second video made a number of years before when she was 15 and had just received her learners permit . In a private Snapchat to a friend, Mimi looked at the camera and said “I can drive, nigger!” In a matter of a few weeks, Tennessee caved to the Social Media frenzy, removed her from the cheerleading team and convinced her to withdraw her application for admission. She now attends a local community college.

It turns out that one of Mimi’s classmates, Jimmy Galligan, had posted the video. Indeed, he had the video for some time but waited to post it until it would have the maximum effect on Mimi. Once she had been accepted at Tennessee, he decided that it was the time.

Galligan has a white father and a black mother. He had complained to high school officials about the use of derogatory racial and ethnic slurs at his high school but to no avail. At the same time, he admitted that at social gatherings on his mother’s side of the family, the forbidden word was used. However, when his father joined in on one occasion, Galligan had taken his father aside and told him he could not use that word.

Now 19, Mimi Groves says that she did not understand “the severity of the word… because I was so young…” It was “in all the songs we listened to, and I’m not using that as an excuse.”

As for Jimmy Galligan, he is pleased by what he has done. According to the NYT story: “I’m going to remind myself, you started something,” he said with satisfaction. “You taught someone a lesson.”

So what lessons do we learn from all this?  I think that there are a number including the following:

1. Jimmy Galligan’s time would have been better spent educating his black relatives as he did his white father about the use of the word.  Indeed, he could have changed the world for the better by reaching out to Mimi as he did to his father rather than lying in wait for a “gotcha” moment that changed nothing except Mimi’s life.
2. My mother was right and the nursery rhyme is wrong. There are certain words that should never be spoken because these words are extremely hurtful.  Free speech allows us to say the word but respect for social cohesion tells us not to exercise that right.
3. Social Media is inherently cruel and unreliable as it takes the frenzy of an ignorant mob and multiplies it endlessly through the internet.  In order to quell the Social Media mob, the University of Tennessee sacrificed a young girl who, at 15, had been hopelessly adolescent but not knowingly malicious.
4. This last Sunday (January 3^rd) Chris Rock, in an interview with Gayle King, when asked if he still gets angry about bullying he faced as a child, replied as follows:  “I do, but I forgive… [because] it made me who I am.  I’m also, like, people get better, and people change.  So, I mean, right now we’re going through this thing where we’re punishing people for thinking and feeling and saying things 20, 30 years ago.  You know how easy it would be for me in one of my specials to, like, name a name or show a picture and go, this person called me a nigger (bleeped on TV) in 4^th grade and ruin someone’s life? I’m gonna assume all my bullies are better people [now] I’m gonna hope to, pray to God, and I’m gonna hope that what they did to me shames them on some level, and that they teach their kids better.”
5. Alexander Pope wrote that “to err is human; to forgive, divine.”  Jimmy Galligan should listen to Tyler Perry:  “It’s not an easy journey, to get to a place where you forgive people.  But it is such a powerful place, because it frees you.”

PostScript

I had originally intended to make this blog about music which is so common during the Holiday Season.  I quickly decided to abandon that notion because I am not musically literate.  However, I did find a number of music videos which I liked for different reasons.

For Christian believers there is Jordon Smith’s rendition of “Mary Did You Know” which is a perfect song for the Christmas season. 

Leonard Cohen wrote the song “Hallelujah.”  The most downloaded version of this song is by Jeff Buckley.  While the lyrics have biblical roots, the song itself is not particularly religious and because Leonard Cohen is Leonard Cohen, this is his rendition of Hallelujah. 

Finally, for those who want to believe that “the last will be first,” and that small miracles are possible, look at Susan Boyle’s audition on Britain’s Got Talent.

On the eve of the election, all the polls agreed:  Joe Biden would win the popular vote by 10 to 11 points.  The pollsters assured everyone that the mistakes of 2016 had been corrected and that these polls were indeed correct.  It appeared that the “blue wave” was coming and that the Democrats would pick up House seats, and had a more than decent chance of a Senate majority.  Perhaps more importantly, a number of state legislatures would be “flipped” which would give Democrats the opportunity to draw favorable Congressional Districts once the Census was completed.

And then the votes were counted.  Joe Biden got 51% of the popular vote and Donald Trump received 49% (it may end up 52-48).  Biden squeaked out wins in Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin, Georgia and Pennsylvania to win the Electoral College.  One legislature (New Hampshire) did “flip” but it flipped from Democratic leadership to Republican.

So what happened?  It turns out that Trump’s prediction was more accurate than the pollsters.  He said he would win and, even though he didn’t, he was a lot closer than any poll, all of which predicted an historic and resounding defeat, an outcome I desired.

I am a “never Trumper.”  When he came down the escalator, I told my wife that he was the Devil and, by that, I sincerely meant the “real” Devil.  But having said that, one has to recognize his appeal.  For all of those left behind by neoliberal Davos-inspired economic policies, he appeared to have answers.  His bellicose attitude toward China was long overdue.

If he was not Trump and the Swedes were not the Swedes, a Nobel Peace Prize might have been merited.  Imagine if President Obama had arranged for three Muslim countries (United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and the Sudan) to recognize Israel’s right to exist and begin economic relations.  If that had occurred, Obama’s Nobel Peace prize would have been earned.  But, of course, Obama would not have worked that deal because it went against the accepted international paradigm calling for a 2 state solution with the Palestinians in agreement before anything could happen.

Trump ignored and broke all the accepted rules.  He unilaterally favored Israel, effectively ignored the Palestinians, cozied up to the murderous Saudi Crown Prince, moved the United States Embassy to Jerusalem, recognized Israel’s dominion over the Golan Heights and still managed to bring three Muslim states into Israel’s fold joining Egypt and Jordan.

A Jewish-American supporter of Israel, watching this all unfold, might well have voted for Trump.  One of my wife’s dearest childhood friends absolutely detests Trump but voted for him because, living in Arizona, she saw the effects of illegal immigration.  Another Arizonan, a 60 year old Mexican immigrant, also voted for Trump on the basis that the newer immigrants should have to obey the rules that he followed.  Trump substantially improved the percentage of Hispanic and African-American voters over what he garnered in 2016.

So the pollsters’ heralded “blue wave” did not occur.  It appears that the Republicans are likely to retain control of the Senate.  They picked up 12 seats in the House of Representatives and gained control of one State House.

If the polls were wrong in 2016, they were twice as bad this time around.  The most colorful assessment came in a Twitter posting by Sean Trende, senior election analyst for RealClearPolitics.com:  “The polls were a stinking pile of hot garbage and there’s really no two ways about it.”  In Wisconsin, the polls had Biden’s average lead at 6.7 percentage points.  The Washington Post and ABC poll gave Biden a Wisconsin lead of 17 percentage points.  He carried Wisconsin by less than a point.

So where to from here?  One common refrain is that we are too fractured to move forward and that Mitch McConnell will thwart Biden at every turn.  That is sheer nonsense.  It is clear, however, that a Biden administration (and the Democratic Party leadership) need to take into account that the country is most uncomfortable with a lurch to the left.  Biden understands this instinctively; many of the knuckleheads in the Democratic Leadership, not so much.

This is what I think President Biden and the Democratic Party need to do.

First, Biden will make an immediate splash on Day 1 by doing what he has promised: reentering the Paris Climate Treaty and reinstating the DACA Program for children brought to the United States illegally.

Second, Biden’s initial legislative agenda should be modest but it does not have to be inconsequential.  Infrastructure improvement (trains, planes and automobiles) will find bipartisan support and is sorely needed.  It may well be that there is bipartisan support for creating a citizenship path for those DACA adults brought here as children.

Third, Medicare for All should be off the table.  Biden already agrees and pledges a “public option” for those (and only those) who want it.  In a generation or two, we may have a Medicare for All system but not now.  The Democratic Party needs to resist the so-called “progressives” who, as Peggy Noonan has written, punch above their weight and scare many more people than they energize.

Fourth, the Green New Deal preached by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) should be off the table.  Again, Biden is on the right track as his “greening” is grounded in economic reality.  As energy companies like Chevron, BP and Exxon know, the future is green energy and Joe Biden understands that future well-paying jobs are green as well.  Moreover, American (not Chinese) manufacturers can produce the turbines, batteries and solar panels needed.  General Motors and Ford will welcome increased federal support for electric vehicles as will their associated unions which have always supported Biden. 

Fifth, resist all attempts to go leftward.  73 million people voted for Trump with his appeals to law and order and warnings about socialism.  For every Hispanic that the AOCs of the world brought to the electoral party, there were at least an equal number of Cuban, Venezuelan and Nicaraguan Americans who said and voted “Hell No!”

In many ways, it may be better that the “blue wave” was a ripple.  My deceased friend, Mike Busch, was the Speaker of the Maryland House of Delegates and also the best politician I ever met.  He always maintained that America was a center, slightly right, country from a political point of view.  He was a liberal Democrat but he understood that the majority may not agree with him so that the Democrats had to occupy the “middle” in order to remain viable.  The “middle” is where most people are and where they are comfortable. 

The long night of Trump is over.  One should not be surprised by his lack of civility once his defeat became clear.  Always the petulant narcissist, he will continue to peddle the fantasy that the election was stolen from him.  Unfortunately, many of his supporters will believe him.  However, the overwhelming majority of Americans understand that he is promulgating “fake news”.

Welcome back to normal.

There she sat, surrounded by warring political armies.  Behind her were six of her seven children and her siblings.  Serene, unflappable and respectful through 4 days of hearings, she was clearly the smartest person in the room.

According to one side, she would be a deciding vote to declare the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) unconstitutional, to overturn the abortion holding in Roe v. Wade and to decide the presidential election in the favor of her sponsor, President Donald Trump.  The Senate Minority Leader, Charles Schumer of New York, called it “… the least legitimate nomination to the Supreme Court in our nation’s history.”

One of the most interesting comments came from Greta Thunberg, the teenage climate change activist, who was Time’s Person of the Year in 2019.  She called Barrett a “flat earther” apparently in the belief that the Supreme Court has the ability to decide the pros and cons of global warming.

To the Republican side, she was impeccably credentialed, respectful of precedent and judicial restraint and, because of that, was not to be feared.

When asked about her positions on issues that would come before the Court, she invoked the “Ginsburg rule” articulated by Ruth Bader Ginsburg in her own 1993 confirmation hearing:  “No hints, no previews no forecasts.”  The “Ginsburg rule” has been cited repeatedly by other nominees who did not care to preview their positions on controversial issues.

The Darth Vader in the hearing (besides Trump) was the ghost of the deceased Justice Antonin Scalia for whom Barrett had been a clerk after law school.  Scalia had been a proponent of an “originalist” theory of interpreting the Constitution which, in a nutshell, means that the words of the document are to take precedence over what we would now like them to mean.  Barrett agrees with Scalia on this.  Scalia was approved without a dissenting vote when he was confirmed in 1987. 

Commentators have taken to the opinion pages of the New York Times and the Atlantic (to name just two) to decry the “originalist” theory of constitutional interpretation, most saying that the world has changed since 1798 and, accordingly, the original document is not relevant to many current problems before the Court.  

Of course, the Constitution also has changed materially since 1798 with the adoption of 27 amendments including the 1791 Bill of Rights (Amendments 1-10 granting free speech, religious liberty, due process of law to name just a few), the Civil War Amendments (Amendments 13-15) granting former slaves rights previously denied and Amendment 19 giving women the right to vote. 

The critics of the “originalist” theory rarely point out that the amendments have materially changed the original document.  For example, the Civil War amendments granted newly freed slaves the right of citizens whereas the original document had only counted them as 3/5 of a person for the sole purpose of enhancing the electoral power of slave states.  

The most important was the 14^th Amendment which guaranteed not only the freed slaves but every citizen the rights of due process and equal protection against state attempts to limit these rights.  The 14^th Amendment has turned out to be the greatest restraint on state government and state laws and, as such, completely turned the 1789 Constitution on its head as that document and the 1791 Bill of Rights restrained only the federal government not the states.  Indeed, all powers not enumerated to the Federal government were to reside with the states (Amendment 10).  The 14^th Amendment gave citizens constitutional rights against the states.  

In 1954 the Court decided Brown v. Board of Education which held that state racial segregations of public schools violated the equal protection clause of the 14^th Amendment.  In relatively quick succession the Court applied almost all of the individual Bill of Rights (Amendments 1-10) to the states.

Suffice it to say such restraint on state power would have been unthinkable to the Founding Fathers and would have produced numerous hissy fits.

Critics of Scalia and Barrett seem to freeze them like an insect in amber into the year 1789 when the Constitution was ratified.  But the Constitution has grown organically and in response to numerous challenges.  To accuse them of being stuck in 1789 is both silly and wrong.   “Originalists” first concentrate on the word of a document whether it be the word of the 1789 document or the words of the amendments to the document.  That seems to be an entirely appropriate way to proceed.

The Democrats obviously decided that the Barrett hearing was an opportunity to make points for the upcoming election.  Unable to stop the Republican steamrolling of her nomination, they went “all in” by suggesting that she would be a vote to declare Obamacare unconstitutional in a case now on the Supreme Court docket.  

So, on the first day, every Democratic senator displayed a picture of a constituent with a “pre-existing condition” who would be adversely affected if Obamacare was struck down.  On the day of the committee vote, the Democrats boycotted the vote but placed a picture of the affected constituent at their seat.  Apparently, the “focus groups” had agreed that healthcare and “pre-existing conditions” were electoral gold.  

The only television visual more powerful than the constituents with pre-existing conditions was probably Barrett holding up her “notes” during the hearing – a blank piece of paper.

So is Barrett likely to declare Barack Obama’s signature legislative accomplishment unconstitutional, particularly since it has been in the crosshairs of Trump since Day One?  The first casualty in political warfare is usually the truth.  The Democrats’ concentration on Obamacare was good politics but the case before the Supreme Court is unlikely to result in Obamacare being declared unconstitutional.  The reason is the legal doctrine of “severability” which means that a judge will always attempt to uphold the rest of a statute even if a portion of the statute is unconstitutional.  Chief Justice Roberts has already “saved” Obamacare once and the then offending provision (financial penalty for not purchasing insurance) is no longer operative.  I think the doctrine of “severability” will result in a decision in favor of Obamacare that may be as great as 9-0 but, maybe more likely, 7-2 with Barrett in the majority.  Wouldn’t it be fitting if Chief Justice Roberts assigned Barrett to write that majority opinion?

A friend asked me what I thought about Judge Barrett. I replied that I hoped for the following: “That Barrett be confirmed and that Trump be ousted in an historic landslide.”

One down; one to go.

Do your part.

Her name was Valerie Obenstine and she was the owner of a “Gentlemen’s Club” known as “Bottoms Up”.  She was a tall woman, remarkably well endowed and, though her 20s were well behind her, she was very attractive at 45.  She never carried a purse but instead tucked her driver’s license, lipstick, cash and children’s pictures in her ample cleavage.

In her 20s, when she herself was an exotic dancer, she could have been the lady in the Raymond Chandler novel, Farewell My Lovely: “It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window”.

They say that there are certain inflection points in everybody’s life and meeting Valerie was one of mine.

I first met her on March 16, 1980 at a party after the Baltimore St. Patrick’s Day Parade. St. Patrick’s Day was a High Holyday in our house due to my Irish wife and the Parade was a must attend.  In 1980, I marched dressed as Uncle Sam with two daughters dressed in their bright green Irish dancing outfits and our 5 year old son dressed as a leprechaun.  After the Parade, there was a party at the Parade Chairman’s home which Valerie attended.  Valerie’s son was a classmate of the Chair’s son at a selective and expensive Catholic high school.  Valerie knew there would be politicians galore at that party and she needed politicians.

At this juncture, I was a budding lobbyist in the Maryland General Assembly and Valerie also was seeking a lobbyist.  Her need for a lobbyist and politicians was because of a Bill pending in the General Assembly.  On St. Patrick’s Day, it had already passed the Maryland Senate and was well on its way to passage in the House of Delegates.  It was supported by the Mayor of Baltimore, the legendary William Donald Schaefer, who would later become Governor of Maryland. 

The Bill allowed certain clubs to remain open until 4 AM as opposed to the normal closing time of 2 AM.  The 18 favored clubs were on “The Block,” a 3 street strip in Baltimore’s central city which was adjacent to City Hall and Police Headquarters. The Bill was explained as an inducement to tourism which was pretty laughable given the seedy nature of “The Block”.

Valerie’s problem with the Bill was simple. “Bottoms Up” was not included and she wanted “in” or everybody “out”.

If Valerie was open and gregarious, her husband, Frank Siciliano, was the polar opposite.  At least 3 inches shorter than Valerie and reed thin, Frank spoke in whispers and rarely showed emotion.  As it would turn out, Frank had a lot of fire in his belly, but it would be a few years before that appeared.

The hearings on the Bill were right out of central casting. The proponents of the Bill could’ve been Don Corleone’s men from The Godfather, most dressed in three-quarter length leather coats. They showed respect to Valerie who, after all, was the female version of them. However, as to me in my suit and tie, their looks were chilling. They said to me:  “you are Luca Brasi and you will soon be swimming with the fishes”.

Perhaps I over-dramatized their glares but that was before the death threat and the rifle shot that would come a few weeks later.

The Bill was controversial in the Baltimore City House Delegation and only passed by a vote of 15 to 14 when the Speaker of the House, a Baltimore City Delegate, cast the 15th vote. This was the first and only time in the 1980 Session that the Speaker had attended a City Delegation meeting.

At that point, there were heavy odds favoring passage of the Bill because of a rule of legislative courtesy. The rule was this:  Local liquor bills affecting a single jurisdiction were the decision of that jurisdiction and all other jurisdictions would honor that decision when the bill was presented to the full House of Delegates. A second rule was: when the Speaker of the House wanted a bill, the Speaker’s wish was to be granted.

But then the unthinkable happened. The “Indians” rose up against the “Chiefs”.  It would not have been possible without the unrest in the Baltimore City Delegation as witnessed by the 15 to 14 vote. It turns out that the 14 began lobbying members of other Delegations to oppose the Bill and to ignore the legislative courtesy rule. 

One of the first casualties in political warfare is the truth.  While proponents argued that the Bill was necessary for tourism, opponents – particularly liberal female Delegates from Montgomery County ‒ argued that the Bill degraded women.  Sitting in the spectators’ gallery, Valerie and I signaled the 1980 equivalent of “You go girl!”

After an hour long debate, the Bill died at noon on Good Friday, April 4th by a vote of 55-52 with 34 not voting.  The “non-voters” apparently decided that a non-vote would both help the cause and not infuriate the Speaker and they were right.

After the vote, the House adjourned for lunch and many went to Harry Browne’s, a restaurant directly across the street from the State House.  Harry Browne’s had only been open for less than four months and its owner was 21-year-old Rusty Romo.  Soon, the place was packed including our table which was in the center of the room.

At that point, we were drinking celebratory toasts and not thinking too much about lunch.  Many of the delegates were offering congratulations and then the box arrived.  It was a box from the local florist located just doors away from Harry Browne’s.  Inside the box was a single red rose tied with a black velvet ribbon along with a pale pink but unsigned sympathy card.  My Italian friend sitting next to me gasped and said “this is the Mafia symbol of death.” Another person at the table asked me where my kids went to school and got up to call the state police to arrange for protection.

I was a little shaken but not as much as my tablemates.  I decided to go to the florist to find out who had sent the box.  As I turned out the door of Harry Browne’s on my way to the florist a shot rang out and I fell face first on the pavement only to later realize that a liquor delivery truck had backfired about 50 feet away.

The delivery of the box caused quite a stir in Harry Browne’s, so much so that a number of Delegates left, preferring to get lunch somewhere else. Word spread quickly and then a reporter arrived. The drama surrounding the Bill was well known and the delivery of the box was icing on the cake. The next day the Baltimore News American’s front page banner headline was “A Strange Defeat of The Block Bar Bill”.  The News American story noted that “Schwartz’s anonymously sent rose was the last act Friday in what became the strangest side show … [in] the state legislature this year”.

The News American story referred to the “fashionable” Harry Browne’s and that word was catnip to Rusty Romo.  40 years later, Harry Browne’s is indeed “fashionable” and probably the best white tablecloth restaurant in Annapolis; in 1980, not so much.

Rusty was so enamored of the story that he has a handsomely framed replica.  His mother had a different take after reading the story: “Rusty, what kind of people are you serving in the restaurant?”

The News American story certainly didn’t hurt my career.  It cemented my friendship with Rusty who, a few years later, named a luncheon sandwich after me.  The initial sandwich was something I had never eaten and I have had no input on the 5 or 6 iterations since then.

And what about Valerie?  I would last speak to her when she called my house and my, about-to-be, 10-year-old daughter sprang up to answer the phone during Easter dinner and returned to announce that “Daddy, Darling is on the phone”.  Valerie called everyone Darling, pronounced “Dahhling”.

While I did not speak with her after that, a few years later I learned of her death.  It seemed that husband Frank, infuriated with her and her boyfriend, had driven his car through the wall of a bar on the Eastern Shore of Maryland crushing them both.

I guess Rusty’s mom had been right after all.

I have a friend from law school who spent his entire professional life in Northern Virginia working as a lawyer for a federal agency.  Upon retirement, he and his wife became “reverse snowbirds” opting not to go south to the sun-kissed beaches of Florida but rather to move to Vermont.  Apparently, the lure of five grandchildren outweighed the warmth of one of God’s most popular waiting rooms.

I don’t know if my friend is a supporter of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.  In my immediate family, Bernie is either hailed as the second Messiah or as a whack-a-doodle.  But even those who do not “feel the Bern” know that even a blind squirrel can sometimes find a nut.  The “nut” in this case is Senator Sanders’ proposal to allow the U.S. Post Office to operate as a bank.  Since he is joined in this proposal by Congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), the proposal is a nonstarter in the current political environment.  But it is a good idea and one with historical precedent.

The current political kerfuffle over the Post Office has nothing to do with the bank idea but rather with President Trump’s appointment of a Postmaster General who has banned “overtime” in the interest of financial probity.  It will insure that mail delivery is slowed at a time when many people will be voting by mail.  This will allow the President to continue to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the upcoming November election. 

The President continues to insist that the Post Office is “under-charging” Amazon for parcel delivery (should raise prices 4x).  Perhaps if Amazon’s CEO, Jeff Bezos, knew what a great deal he had with the Post Office, he would abandon his plan to use Amazon’s fleet of trucks (60,000 with 100,000 more now on order) to deliver almost all its packages and end virtually any reliance on FedEx or the Post Office.  The real reason for the “under-charging” argument is that Bezos owns the Washington Post, a purveyor of “fake news,” including the Post’s running tally of the President’s lies or misstatements which now are well north of 20,000.

The Constitution gave the Federal government specific “enumerated powers” and reserved all other powers to the states.  The Federal government has grown like Topsy in the last hundred years so it does not appear to be a limited government at all.  One of the “enumerated powers” was to establish a postal system which was done with Benjamin Franklin as the first Postmaster General.  The United States Post Office is a very popular, if not the most popular, federal agency with 90% of Americans giving it very high marks in poll after a poll.

Now about that bank.  It is no secret that it cost a lot of money to be poor.  Take, for instance, payday lending.  There are more payday lenders in the United States than McDonald’s restaurants and this is true even though 12 states outlaw payday lending altogether.

Payday lending works this way.  Say someone needs $100 until their next two week paycheck.  The charge for this two week loan is $15 which is a simple interest rate of 15% but an annualized rate of over 400%.  If the borrower renews the $100 loan every 2 weeks for a year their cost would be $390 for that $100 loan.  According to the Pew Trust, the average borrower is on the hook for a $395 loan five times in the year and pays $530 in fees for that loan.

Payday lenders argue that their service is the only way for certain people to receive cash advances.  The payday lender will advance money almost immediately – without a credit check ‒ as long as there is proof of a paying job and access to the borrower’s bank account.

Payday lenders are correct that they fill a real need.  Most Americans have virtually no savings and live check to check.  Moreover, they argue that if payday lending is banned, their customers will find another way to get cash and that other way will not be regulated at all.

What payday lenders do not say is that payday lending is extraordinarily profitable.  This accounts for their overwhelming presence in every poor and working class neighborhood.

Now suppose the Post Office bank makes the same loan but at a simple interest rate of 5% which is an annualized rate of approximately 130%.  This is still usurious but the borrower will save over $200 a year.  And, if the borrower took the average loan of $395 five times in the year, their yearly savings would be $260.  Remember that the average credit card interest rate on an annualized basis is about 29%.  And, what if the Post Office bank charged not 160% but 36% as is the law in many states that allow payday lending but cap the APR at 36%?

Every developed country provides for postal banks.  The United States had postal banking from 1911 to 1966.  While originally proposed for the under banked areas of the South and West, it turned out that the principal customers were recent immigrants in urban areas who had confidence in the government but no confidence in banks.  If immigrants did not trust the banks, it is also clear that the banks didn’t trust the immigrants or see them as reliable customers.  Fast forward to 1947 when deposits in postal banks reached $3.4 billion with 4 million customers banking at the post office.  For a concise history of the United States postal bank, see Slate article.

A rebirth of postal banks will, no doubt, be fought by the banking industry and your average payday lender.  There should be a little sympathy for the banks which abandoned poor areas starting in the 1970s leaving them to payday lenders and check cashing services.  But it would be a boon to those poor people who are now captive to payday lenders.

Critics will also complain that the Post Office is losing billions of dollars and should not be entrusted with a new responsibility such as a bank.  It is true that the Post Office has lost money for years, revenue dropping as a result of the sharp decline in first class mail brought on by the use of email.  However, on the expense side, every time the Post Office tries to save money (mail five days a week rather than six; closing inefficient post offices), Congress passes a law to forbid it.  

However, the Post Office’s real burden results from a congressional law in 2006, which required the Post Office to set aside billions of dollars for retirees’ future health care costs.  This is required of no other Federal agency.  One of my college classmates, who is a Professor of Business at Notre Dame, has written an explanation for this which can be found at Notre Dame News.

Of course, there will be the argument that a government agency should not be allowed to compete with “private enterprise” and that this is a step to “socialism.”

The Bernie/AOC proposal would be a postal bank on steroids.  One doesn’t have to go that far and it seems better to stay small and focused.  Suppose, for instance, the new postal banks offer basic checking accounts, savings accounts, loans up to $500 and continue to sell other financial instruments like money orders. 

Will this solve the growing wealth inequity between the rich and the poor?  No, but it might be a small solution.  Like the immigrants, the poor would have an outlet to deposit their savings and to take out a small loans necessary to pay the rent or buy groceries.

All in all, I am “feeling the Bern” on the subject of postal banks.  If that makes me a socialist, so be it.

In the Roman Catholic Latin Mass there is a prayer that occurs just before communion known as the Agnus Dei (Lamb of God).  In Latin it is “Agnus Dei qui tolis peccata mundi, miserere nobis.” This prayer is repeated three times with a slightly different ending in the third iteration. The English translation is: “Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, have mercy on us.”

In Catholic belief, the Lamb of God is Christ who “takes away” (tolis) the “sins of the world” (peccata mundi) by His suffering and death, thus reuniting man to God.

And, boy, are the sins of the world ever present each and every day.   Until COVID-19 struck, we would hear about other events including:

• The intentional killing of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians in Syria leading to millions of refugees;
• the “reeducation” camps for 1 million Muslims in China;
• the sexual abuse of children by priests, scoutmasters and teachers;
• daily murders, rape, robberies and the like in our own communities.

In the Tulsa massacre of 1921, 40 square blocks of the Black neighborhood known as Greenwood were burned to the ground by white vigilantes. But, perhaps, the worst emblem of that event was the blind, double amputee black man who sold pencils on the street and who was chained to the back of a convertible and dragged down the street until he died.

In a few hours, Greenwood was gone and, so too, were 1,000 homes, five hotels, a hospital, a dozen churches and 31 restaurants.  The National Guard was called in to secure peace but, instead of rounding up the white vigilantes, the Guard placed black men defending their homes in detention.

In my parents’ generation, 6 million Jews, Gypsies and other “intolerables” were gassed to death and 5 million Ukrainians and Kazakhs were starved to death by Stalin and his henchmen because the Ukrainian harvest fell dramatically short of the quota set by the first Soviet “5 year plan”.

How to explain such evil? The major religions (Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism and Buddhism) are in accord on one great teaching:  human beings are immortal. Their spirits come from an eternal or divine world and may eventually return there. All these religions hold that the way people have conducted themselves on earth will greatly influence their souls’ destinies upon death. 

For Christianity, evil is a problem to be overcome in the material world. The classic explanation is by Saint Augustine in The City of God.  In sum, there is a City of God and a City of Man.  For those who live a righteous life in the City of Man, there will be a reward in the City of God.

Archaeologists tell us that even Neanderthals buried their dead with tools, food and weapons presumably to assist in the next life.

To a great degree we are now living in a “post religious” world or even an anti-religious world.  The “post religious” world may best be summed up by the lyrics of the John Lennon song, “Imagine”.

(Verse 1)

Imagine there’s no heaven

It’s easy if you try

No hell below us

Above us, only sky

Imagine all the people

Living for today

(Verse 2)

Imagine there’s no countries

it isn’t hard to do

Nothing to kill or die for

And no religion too

(Verse 3)

Imagine no possessions

I wonder if you can

No need for greed or hunger

A brotherhood of man

Imagine all the people

Sharing all the world

There are many who believe in Lennon’s lyrics. For obvious reasons, this was not the soundtrack for the movie Hotel Rwanda which recounted the genocidal massacre where Hutus slaughtered between 500,000 to 1,000,000 million Tutsis in Rwanda in 3 months in 1994.

Whatever one thinks about religion, it is clear that the major religions have been a unifying and civilizing force in urging proper behavior and respect for others.

However, religious belief is not self-evident and cannot be proven. The prominent commentator David Brooks has recently said that religious belief is a difficult thing and that one would be lucky to wake up 3 days out of 10 having “faith.”  The notion of a next or eternal life requires a leap of faith, one which our ancestors have usually made whether they were Neanderthals, Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus or Buddhists.

But what if you’re not willing to make that leap of faith? Perhaps you do not believe in God and think he or she is a construct created by man and that worshipping him or her is as silly as the mythical indigenous tribe which worshiped a Coke bottle which had fallen from the sky.

The only nontheistic system which has taken hold and currently holds sway is communism. It explicitly disavows a belief in God and in the eternal world and, instead, proposes to organize the material world in such a way that, in effect, it can create heaven on earth. The only problem is that the overseers of that system have repeatedly committed “peccata mundi.” whether that be a gulag in Siberia or a cleansing “cultural revolution” in China. Mass detentions and mass murders have regularly been ordered, all in the name of preserving the purity of the “revolution” and the dominance of the State.

Then, of course, there is the single individual who just doesn’t believe in God or an eternal life. He or she tries to do their best to live appropriately as that is defined in their particular time.

Gratefully, there is much more in our world than its “sins.” There are also wonderful things like love, generosity, empathy, decency, compassion, courage, honesty, selflessness, heroism, wisdom and all the creations of the human mind in art, literature and music.

A number of years ago, sitting in the Istanbul airport after spending 5 days in Jerusalem, I asked my friend why he was a believing Catholic. His reply was simple: Catholicism had been given to him by his parents and they hadn’t steered him wrong on anything else. At the time, I thought that was an odd response, one that could’ve been given by a good Jewish son, a good Muslim son, a good Hindu son, a good Buddhist son or, for that matter, the good son of an atheist.

However, upon reflection, I believe that there is great insight in that response in that it acknowledges the wisdom conveyed by all previous generations. It doesn’t settle the question of religious belief but it certainly frames it properly.

In wartime, they say that there are no atheists in foxholes. The same is true for most older people who are keenly aware of their approaching expiration date. Death is not only the great leveler but it pretty much demands that you sit up and take notice. In some cases, an older person’s newly found religion may be the equivalent of the sailor who sets an anchor to windward in the event of an unlikely but possible storm.

My meditation ends here. This is what I believe (at least today) and this seems to be a distillation of all that has been passed on to us by preceding generations. Human beings have an eternal or divine spark or soul and this demands that we behave appropriately and avoid “peccata mundi.” We will be rewarded for this. This is the accumulated wisdom handed on to Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu and Buddhist children by their parents.

As my friend said, his parents hadn’t steered him wrong on anything else.