THE SUB-STANDARD DEDUCTION Are there any taxpayers out there who aren’t familiar with the concept of the “standard deduction?” I thought not. We all know about it. In recent years with various limits imposed on itemized deductions more and more of us have been using it. It’s convenient and besides that, Uncle Sam likes it and encourages us to use it. For him it makes it easier to process millions of tax returns, and for the filer it’s a guarantee that he or she will never have to worry about having the return audited. How could it be when all that is being claimed on the return is a fixed amount not requiring justification as opposed to a lot of itemized deductions supported by wild claims of overwhelming generosity to charities and shocking losses in the market and elsewhere? The concept of the “standard” is simple enough for anyone’s understanding. The Internal Revenue Service simply takes the whole multimillion volume of yearly returns received and derives from them a figure representing the average of all deductions made on all the returns. It derives four averages actually, one for the aged and/or handicapped, one for single people, one for married ones filing jointly and one for heads of households. One class of people above all is affected by this system. They are the overwhelming majority of singles who don’t qualify as heads of households. Numerically the only class matching them are the married-filing-jointlys, but since millions of them are householders deducting their mortgage interest and real estate taxes, the standard deduction holds no interest for them. In fact I don’t know if they are in the mix from which the deduction is extracted by the IRS. It hardly matters anyway. The numbers crunched may be skewed too high by the inclusion of relatively high earners, but what I’m interested in here is the average that emerges from the calculations and the peculiar situations that follow, particularly in my own state of New York. With all the background sketched out let’s look at a case in point. This is a single woman, a middle-bracket earner, childless, renting an apartment in New York City, with a full-time job as an employee, not an independent contractor. No deductions, in other words. Sounds like a natural for the standard deduction, wouldn’t you say? Well, no. Not in New York anyway. Why not? New York is the reason. New York politicians are the most ravenous to be found anywhere outside of a communist country, where the government lays claim to all the earnings of the citizens. So something happens in NY that is unknown anywhere else. The standard deduction, $5,350 for singles this year, is exactly equal to the sum of the state and city income tax withheld from this average worker. (That’s withholding; the actual tax is $37 higher). No wonder the late Senator Moynihan said that it’s like falling off a cliff to go from New York taxes to those of any other state. Shocking, isn’t it? The exact amount that the federal government says is the average amount that could be claimed as a deduction by average taxpayers is only the beginning of deductions for the New Yorker. Those who take the standard deduction are debarred from going any further, but the New Yorker is not. He already has a deduction equal to the standard and he can go on from there. Uncle Sam’s nightmare now begins. An untamed taxpayer has been turned loose to rove in the fields of his imagination plucking up rare samples of deductions found growing wild in the underbrush. IRS can only handle this by examining returns, but it can’t hope to examine more than 2% of them. The rest are home free, like the TV herds escaping the crocodiles when crossing a river. It’s an ill wind, etc. The downtrodden New Yorker ground to dust by the native scavengers, finds their impositions to be useful as claims against those of the national government. Years ago the IRS tried to revoke the federal deductibility of state and local taxes, but didn’t succeed. No state has yet defended its taxes as offsets against federal ones, but it might happen yet. Particularly in New York. I hope I’ve made a discovery here that may be useful to other taxpayers. If they’re not in the habit of comparing their returns using the itemized method against the standard deduction method, they could miss out on the windfall. How did New York taxes climb up so high? I’d like to know myself. In these pages I’ve dealt with some of the causes from time to time. There was for instance the $11,000,000 ripoff of the Roslyn school district by the superintendent and his accomplices, the gold-plating of the Long Island firehouses with hundreds of thousands of dollars laid out for luxury buildings, supersonic equipment, junkets for the staff and even fancy dress outfits for the officers to enable them to make a good appearance in society. Recently we’ve had the case of the Great Neck water supply board, which paid its assistant superintendent $140,000 a year while paying the super, who happened to be his father, $192,000 per year. The most up-to-date ripoff report we’ve had concerns a lawyer working for five school districts here while retaining partnership in the law firm which provided his services and got paid separately. Mr. Reich, the attorney, also got paid separately from the districts for a total of $97,000 in 2006. He earned it, because each district carried him as a full-time employee, not a consultant, enabling him (a) to perform the miraculous total of 1,271 days work in 2006; and (b) to be rewarded with a lifetime pension of $62,000 yearly when he “retired” at the end of ‘06. Clearly he deserved a reward for working all those hours. But why wasn’t a shrine also erected to honor his achievements? Any man who can work 181 weeks in a 52-week year deserves an equestrian monument at least. All this has been only a brief sketch of how New York politicians operate to milk the treasury of assets in the name of public service. Obviously I’ve only skimmed the surface. Oh, I forgot to say that the way Uncle Sam can get the standard deduction back on its feet in New York is to increase it here to a level that is higher than what we can deduct beginning with our state and local taxes. That will be higher than the rest of the country. They can’t start their deductions with the kind of taxes we start ours with. We must have our own standard deduction or else every New Yorker will start to itemize and, believe me, Sam will never be able to cope with that.

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WAR IS SWELL?

My last week’s column seemed to dwell on the blessings of war for stimulating an economy that had gone dead before World War II woke it up and put it to work again. Well I was there and I saw it happen. One winter the City was able to assemble an army of unemployed men with snow shovels to clear our locals streets after a heavy fall. The next winter there were no such men. They were all doing war work, the lucky ones in private industry, the others in government work -- of the kind that’s done with a rifle and bayonet.

So the unemployment crisis was solved. People who hadn’t been working at any job were now working at one or even two or more, to meet the demand for labor. I heard first hand about the subway workers in sedentary jobs who now were getting overtime as “pushers.” These were the men who stood at the edge of the platforms and filled the cars by packing them with passengers who needed an extra shove to get them through the doors into the jammed interiors. It called for deaf ears and a thick skin to cope with the objections of the first comers squeezed by the newcomers. The overcrowding was a result of the business hyperactivity caused by the war and the inadequacy of repair and maintenance of the subways also caused by the war, which created shortages of everything needed to keep them running.

It was all in a good cause, or so we were told. We heard it from the radio, read it in the papers, saw it in the movies. Being young, though, my own little concerns tended to overshadow the daily catastrophes and disasters that were racking the world. But the big things stood out, Pearl Harbor, the Bulge, Hiroshima later on. When things were at a stalemate, one’s attention wavered. And if things were going too well, that meant that there might be a letdown in the effort people were putting into their war work, and that would never do. Or so the government thought anyway, so that news of the biggest victory of the war, the battle of Midway, was suppressed after one announcement for fear that the country might conclude that the war was over and it was time to go back to normal life. When a chronology of the war was printed on V-J day, Midway didn’t appear in it. I had read about it once in the old New York Sun, and saw it no more until peace broke out.

I think the war hardship that most of us youth felt the most was the cigarette shortage. I should probably extend that to take in the whole male population and a good part of the female one. Still, the adults had more money to spend on the happy habit and we didn’t. The adults got their Chesterfields and Camels, while we only did so by luck and most of the time had to settle for stuff called Kings and Queens, allegedly manufactured in a garage in Brooklyn, or for off-brand items named Parliament, Herbert Tareyton, Virginia Rounds, Viceroy, Pall Mall, or such. When some of these actually became popular postwar, we couldn’t believe it. We had thought of them of them as the horrors of war.

Income taxes were one wartime hardship that didn’t impinge on us much. At the same time we knew that there were a lot of grownups that were making a lot of money from the war and were glad to have our envy gratified by news of the confiscatory income taxes they were paying. The salary of Louis B. Mayer of MGM was something like a national monument. It was the highest in the country every year, but on the other hand it was taxed at 91%. The next biggest earner in Hollywood was Bob Hope. He also was in thrall to the IRS, or so we thought. We had never heard of the oil depletion allowance which enabled investors to retain their earnings from oil wells. Louis B. Mayer and Bob Hope owned a lot of oil wells. Mayer also had a hobby of raising racehorses which produced tax losses which greatly reduced his taxable income. Hope’s little hobby was real estate. Through these two chaps and others like them, the term “tax shelter” entered into the national dictionary. They were men of vision, men of foresight. They hewed out a path to the future that has been followed by millions who came after them. They have no monument except in the hearts of those who have done this, but that is permanent.

Big taxes were an innovation of the war years, but big bands just didn’t fit in anymore. The draft wiped them out. There were still instrumentals for us to listen to, “Cherokee”, “Sleepy Lagoon”, “Sugar Blues”, but they had all been made before the war. The bands that survived during the war had to make do with whatever talent was available after the draft and produced very few hits. They turned to singers instead. Sinatra took over. The Army said he had a punctured eardrum and returned him to the women of America. Crosby was in full voice and so were Dick Haymes, Perry Como, Peggy Lee and others, who replaced the bands and leaders as the focus for the fans, putting a premature end to the big band era, which has never come back, though I’m still waiting.

War heroes. From the beginning the battling nations worked to put a human face on the war by spotlighting individuals whom it was hoped the public would take to its heart. The star system worked for Hollywood, it would work for Uncle Sam as well. The trouble was that the First World War had left the public with a skeptical attitude toward propaganda. People were likely to look for hidden meanings behind the breathless announcements of glorious achievements. Early in the war the British beat the drums for a flier named Paddy Finucane, the scourge of the Luftwaffe. It didn’t work. Obviously the Brits were trying to win over the Irish-Americans who resisted American entry into the war. Even when Finucane was killed in action, the suspicion persisted. You can’t please some people.

The glorification of John Basilone, a Marine who distinguished himself on Guadalcanal in 1942, was met with the same attitude. Now Uncle Sam was trying to reconcile the Italian-Americans to a war in which we were unfortunately fighting…Italy. Don’t try to get around us with your Italian hero was the response. This was regrettable because John Basilone was a genuine hero, a career soldier who had the rank of gunnery sergeant. Like Finucane he proved his legitimacy through death in combat on Iwo Jima.

Oh yes, the Bronx had a hero too. He was Lieutenant Charlie Shea of the 88th Infantry Division, winner of the Congressional Medal of Honor. Of his heroism there can be no question.






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SNATCHING TARA FR0M SCARLETT O'HARA Last week in this space I described an attempted coup d’etat mounted in my town by the Republicans on the town board who passed motions to reorganize the government so as to transfer the power to appoint officials from the Supervisor, a Democrat, to themselves. They were feeling chesty because they had regained their majority on the board in last year’s election, causing them to become drunk with power. So overheated in fact, that they decided to institute a new form of government not seen before in the United States. Most of us know that it is the job of the chief executive of any government from Washington on down to appoint people to jobs. Congress, or a local legislature, may have the right to confirm the appointees, but they don’t choose them. Our local powertrippers apparently decided that this was an outmoded way to do things and hiring should be done by the collective, not by its head. The fact that collectivism is an idea promoted, though not often practiced, by Communists, didn’t seem to bother them. Does that make these Republicans Communists? No, just a bunch of guys out to grab all the good jobs in sight for their friends in any way they can. (Not so different from commies after all). So they proceeded with their reorganization of town government, confident that they had a done deal and it was all over but the shouting. They only began to suspect that something might be wrong when they found that the town meeting where all the new arrangements were to be enacted into law was suspiciously well-attended. Instead of the usual handful of spectators, they found the hall was jammed with 300 noisy characters representing civic organizations which had never been notified of the proposed reorganization. No sooner had the meeting been called to order than they were on their feet demanding to know why the Republican plans had never been mentioned in the election six weeks before. From there things went downhill for the new majority. They had no explanation for their failure to confide their intentions to the voters. In Washington they could have pleaded national security but that wouldn’t work in a local election. It didn’t take them long to recognize that they had been caught with their pants down and the best thing they could do was to beat a retreat and abandon their plots. So the resolutions they’d prepared with care for automatic enactment by their bloc were “withdrawn” for “further consideration” and no more has been heard of them since. In case any reader is now wondering whether this conservative writer has now switched his loyalty from the Republican party to the other side, the answer is no, nothing’s changed. When Republicans start playing games and pulling tricks as if they were Demos, it’s time to change partners for a while and dance with someone else. When the time comes for reconciliation, we’ll be lovers again. It’s not the first time the Republicans have gone off the track. They did so in monumental style back in the days of the Tenure of Office Act, which I wrote about in my last entry here. The Republicans went on a rampage in those days. The eleven states of the Confederacy lay flat on the canvas after the Civil War and the GYP (Grand Young Party as it was then, although the other meaning of the initials also applied -- see the carpetbagger story below) prepared to jump up and down on the remains. That was the idea of the Radical Republicans as they were called, the extreme anti-South party controlling both houses of Congress, unhappy with Lincoln when they re-nominated him in 1864 and even more unhappy in 1865 when the war ended and he proposed peace “with malice towards none, with charity for all” which didn’t suit them a bit. His successor, Vice President Andrew Johnson, turned out to have the same ideas, which led to his attempted impeachment in 1867. Johnson beat the impeachment, but he couldn’t overcome the impeachers. They persisted in their plans to establish the “perpetual ascendancy” of the Republican Party as the rulers of the United States. This was to be done in two ways: by disenfranchising all former Confederate soldiers and officials in the seceding states and at the same time enfranchising all the freed slaves therein. Between the former slaves and the “loyal” whites there would be a permanent Republican majority established throughout the South, based on confiscation and redistribution of rebels' property These ambitious plans looked like being realized when finally the outcast states were permitted to re-enter the Union by adopting constitutions embodying these ideas, with the U.S. Army standing by to make sure everybody voted right. This meant that there now would be state governments again with power to levy taxes and to expend funds. But because of the new enfranchisement system the new legislatures were packed with “carpetbaggers”, new arrivals from the North who were known by their still unpacked luggage. Between them and the inexperienced and uneducated blacks elected with them a carnival was staged featuring blue-sky accounting and the mysterious disappearance of millions of dollars in state funds into the pockets of the legislators. This is the accepted account of the Reconstruction era as found in most history books, including the one I’ve consulted, “The Tragic Era” by Claude G. Bowers, published in 1929. Today it’s being challenged by New Left historians who care only about the fact that Reconstruction equalized blacks and whites in the South and everything else is irrelevant. The two viewpoints can’t be reconciled. Reconstruction got such a bad reputation from the activities of the new legislatures that there was a backlash against it even in the North, so that in 1876 the Republicans only got the Democrats to concede the questionable election of Rutherford B. Hayes to the presidency by promising the removal of federal troops from the South, which was done the next year. After that the backlash continued in the South for eighty years of segregation and discrimination against the blacks. Maybe if Congress, like the local legislature which inspired this essay, hadn’t been so anxious to tear up the Constitution and supplant the executive in the performance of its functions, all this would never have happened. Shoemaker, stick to your last.

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POWER GRAB ON LONG ISLAND Politics is funny. Things that happen on the high levels of government show up again happening on the lower levels. Yesterday it was a case of getting rid of an Attorney General who had developed political halitosis and had to be replaced, today it’s a town board doing the same thing with a bunch of administrative assistants, sewer inspectors, building managers, etc., for the same kind of reasons that cost the A. G. his job. Like him, they were getting in the way and they had to go. This re-staging of a drama lately played out in Washington on a national stage is now taking place in Brookhaven, Long Island, the township where I reside. It’s small-town politics, but Brookhaven isn’t a small town actually. The population is half a million. The politicians consider it worth fighting over and they fight. In elections last November the Republicans regained control of the town board, winning a one-member majority. The Democratic Supervisor won re-election also, thereby becoming a hunted man in the eyes of the board. They immediately voted for a re-organization of the town government which would place the offices of the town assessor, tax receiver, personnel chief, planning director, parks commissioner and purchasing director under the board instead of the Supervisor. This would reduce the supervisor to the condition of a castaway on a desert island, which is exactly what the board intended. Out here politics ain’t beanbag, as the saying goes. But then, when was it ever? The legislature cutting the legs out from under the executive has happened before. The most famous case was in 1867. President Andrew Johnson, Lincoln’s successor, was engaged in extreme combat with Congress over postwar reconstruction of the South. Congress wanted tough measures; Johnson didn’t. His opponents had a friend in his Cabinet, Secretary of War Stanton, a holdover from Lincoln’s administration. Johnson wanted him out, but Congress passed a Tenure of Office Act that stripped him of his power to fire Cabinet officers. Johnson fired Stanton anyway Congress struck back by voting Johnson’s impeachment. His trial went on from March to May of 1868 and was decided in his favor by one vote, cast by Senator Edmund Ross of Kansas. John F. Kennedy memorialized this in his book Profiles in Courage. Oh yes, the Tenure of Office Act was later declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. They thought the intention of the Constitution was to give the president authority over his appointees and not to turn it over to several hundred members of Congress. Clearly the Brookhaven Town Council doesn’t agree. They want to make the town employees responsible to seven bosses, the council members, rather than to one, the supervisor. Nothing like variety, is there? Even when a government does have unity of command, i.e., one person in charge, things can degenerate to a point where nobody’s in charge and anarchy reigns. In England in 1780 for instance, “economical reform” was the catchword of the parliamentarians fed up with King George III’s expansion of the so-called civil list, his royal slush fund for the maintenance of his establishment and everything appertaining thereto. This last took in a large number of the members of Parliament, whom George had put on his payroll in return for their votes. This way he had been able to continue the American war through one disaster after another, simply by defeating any anti-war measures introduced in Parliament. The opposition was mounting, though, and after the surrender at Yorktown in 1781 it became irresistible. Reform was demanded: George must account for the money he used for bribery and for the other out-of-control expenses as well. The royal setup was a rat’s nest of pensions, sinecures, overlapping jurisdictions, no-show jobs, secret accounts, hired stand-ins, empty offices, graft, malingering and general chaos. Besides being King, George had other titles as well, duke of this, earl of that, each one entitled to an income but also saddled with expenses for estates rarely even visited. On all his properties there was at least a skeleton staff living well at the King’s expense. Unfortunately for him, they couldn’t vote in Parliament, but they did enjoy good appetites and never missed a meal. In his major residences there were bigger staffs, sometimes including servants to wait upon the servants, and always they were furnished with long tables and big kitchens for the convenience of hearty eaters putting away three meals a day. All this grew up over the centuries English royalty existed, often creating new offices to be filled by the high nobility as a way of binding them to the king, even though the nobles eventually tired of the positions and farmed them out to substitutes, who split their fees with their employers. Among these offices were two called the great wardrobe and the removing wardrobe, which had no functions but did provide incomes for “dependent” members of Parliament. That wasn’t all. There was a jewel office serving the same purpose, a Board of Works which built nothing, a Mint no longer in use, an artillery office abandoned but still staffed, and on and on. It was all about political patronage, a subject as familiar in the eighteenth century as it is now. “Boondoggles” was not a word in use then, but they existed all the same. This kind of thing still goes on. Working at a school polling place one election day I was shown a storeroom by the custodian which was stuffed literally to the ceiling with new desks and chairs never used. This was how the school made sure it used up its full budget each year so as to get the same allotment the next year. This shows how things can go to pot when too many cooks are in the kitchen and too many departments under one roof or one government. They provide a good illustration of chaos theory. If Brookhaven plunges ahead with its plan to share out authority over operations to a legislative junta instead of an executive, they will go the same way. Can they be stopped? I’ll report on that in my next dispatch from the front.

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WHAT'S NEW, DEMOCRAT? New faces of 2008, that is. Well, they’re new all right. One is a black man, one is a woman, one is a preacher, one is an actor, one is a flier, one is a doctor, one is a business person and all are gainfully employed. The other contenders are all lawyers, something which is also true of some of those whose better-known occupations I’ve just listed. Twenty-six of the forty-two presidents we’ve had up to now were lawyers. would you believe? No wonder we’ve got the world’s fattest law books, stuffed to bursting with statutes, ordinances, codes, enactments, provisions, decisions, amendments and God knows what. The only times when we’ve gotten a break from all this lawmaking were the times when we elected soldiers (five), writers (twice), a tailor (once), a farmer (once), teachers (twice), an actor (once), an engineer (once), and some others. We need more diversity, clearly. As yet we’ve haven’t had a professional athlete, an acrobat, a scientist, a professor, a movie director, a dance instructor, an inventor, an astronaut, a beautician, a detective, and, oh, many and many other occupations. In a big country like this we should be reaching out more to groups that have been overlooked when it comes to the filling of offices and the guidance of government. Lawyers aren’t the only people who are capable of this. In fact a large number of lawyers should be excluded from the field because their professional habits make them unfit to hold a public trust. Anyone who remembers the O.J. Simpson trial knows this. Some of the top lawyers in America were involved and all they succeeded in doing was to convince the country that they were unworthy of belief whenever they opened their mouths. The diversity of this year’s candidates may indicate a trend in the direction I’ve been talking about. Entertainers and athletes are two classes who have been showing more and more interest in running for office. Chuck Norris is both of these and Governor Huckabee had him standing next to him when he made his Iowa victory speech Tuesday. He had been a big help in the race. This is reminiscent of how Ronald Reagan got his start in politics working for Barry Goldwater in 1964. There have been a couple of doctors in the Senate in the last few years, and some in the House. I think Senator Bunning of Kentucky will shoot for the White House one of these years. Just about every long-service Senator gives it a try sooner or later. They’re often ignored, but then none have been in the baseball Hall of Fame like Bunning. From the media, Lou Dobbs of CNN is supposed to be warming up for a run. Who knows, even a cop might come out of nowhere sometime. In the 90’s there were two men in the House whom I knew well from working with them in the police department. Lightning didn’t strike and turn them into presidential candidates but once you’re in Congress you never know. I’ve now been through thirteen presidents and maybe thirteen hundred candidates and I can’t say that I’ve ever seen one that made a difference in my life. But that’s only a way of saying I didn’t notice the difference when they were making it. I know darn well that Harry Truman drafted me into his army, but after all I expected it sooner or later. Somebody before him did the things that made it inevitable that I should be conscripted. I suspect it was Franklin D. Roosevelt, who took us into World War II, to which the Korean War was the inevitable sequel which provoked the confrontation between me and Truman. What confrontation? Well he wanted me to go and I didn’t want to and that’s what I mean. The draft board saw it his way and not mine and the confrontation was over. But I made it close. Did all this start with Roosevelt? Not necessarily. It could have been Woodrow Wilson, who took us into World War I, which led us to WWII. Then there was Teddy Roosevelt, who hounded Wilson to get us into it. He himself had become president by promoting intervention in the Hispano-Cuban war which became the Spanish-American one. There’s three presidents besides Truman who may very well have been responsible for my army career. I guess they do make a difference in our lives. All the same I don’t see why it’s necessary for them to use up the best part of two years running for the job and debating and berating and orating all over the networks without let or hindrance for all that time. It didn’t use to be that way. All the contention was confined to the election year itself. In the spring there were some primaries and a lot of state party conventions where the states’ delegations to the national party convention in the summer were chosen. Some of these delegations were pledged to one presidential candidate, some were split among the candidates and some were unpledged. Some of the pledged ones were committed to favorite sons, i. e., local heroes who served as placeholders until the delegation chose its actual candidate. In this way the stage was set for horsetrading when the convention finally got going. The convention didn’t resemble in any way the meetings that will be held this year for the purpose of anointing the candidates already chosen in the primaries. There’s no more action and no more suspense as there was when every delegation was up for grabs and every organization went in swinging to put its candidate over the top no matter what had to be done in the way of persuading delegates to betray their trusts or to live up to them or what promises had to be made to win the game. In 1924 a hundred and twenty-four ballots had to be taken to choose the Democratic nominee and in 1976 things had not changed that much, but afterwards they did, as the number of primaries increased and became decisive in choosing the candidate. Things are tamer now, not that the primaries aren’t hard fought, but that the old conventions were more dramatic, with thousands of participants gathered under one roof in blazing summer weather, liquor flowing freely and rhetoric likewise, all to the tune of bands playing and the chairman’s gavel pounding when some impassioned orator had to be cut off in the full flow of his eloquence. It was disorderly as hell, but more entertaining. Today there’s none of that inside the hall because the outcome of the voting is known in advance, but there still will be noisemaking by demonstrators outside trying to get inside. But since they’re more of a nuisance than anything else and since the people inside are no fun anymore, there’ll be nothing to see on TV and in fact there may very well be no TV. The conventions just don’t pull the ratings anymore.

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A SHOT RANG OUT

This is New Year’s Day, a time for reviewing the immediate past and determining what lessons it teaches and the best way of not repeating it in the year ahead. I haven’t quite done that, but I have done some collating of the records I use writing this blog and will be telling you something about them here. This is the first time I’ve tried organizing them, as opposed to diving into them at random in the hope of finding something I can use for this space.

The organizing isn’t finished yet by a long shot, but at least I’ve pinpointed some of the differences between the various categories of documents coming into my hands during my time as a police captain in Queens, N.Y. Most of them are reports that I wrote but there are also copies of other people’s work which came to me as an addressee. I decided I was entitled to a copy of every one of these and threw them in my ragbag without classifying them. By starting to do that now I’m finding that they have a lot to tell us about the sociology of our time and place and about the conclusions we should draw from it.

I won’t be writing that kind of thing here, but the material for it is available from this dog-eared file. It runs the gamut -- murder, robbery, assault, suicide, accident, fire, flood, domestic violence, acts of God, disappearances, pursuits, captures, escapes, it’s all in the files. Up to now I’ve mined all this for material to use in this blog and I’ll continue that, but there will be an overview in due time, that is, when I feel the time is ripe and some “inconvenient truths“ can be revealed. Pending that, here’s one of the stories I’ve just uncovered which offers an insight into the life of a drug dealer who enjoyed great success until he overindulged in his own merchandise and ‘blew his cover‘, as they say.

His name was Maximo Vasquez and he lived in Jackson Heights, a location that appeals to dealers like Park Avenue appeals to stockbrokers. Anything goes in Jackson Heights, but Maximo overstepped himself one midnight and fired a shot through the floor of his apartment into the one below. This caused its tenant to decide that enough was enough and he called the cops. When they came he displayed a high-caliber bullet lodged in his floor right under the hole in his ceiling through which it had been fired. They went upstairs.

Maximo, apparently in a state of confusion, admitted them even though he had neglected to hide the scales and bags of milk sugar he’d been using to package his merchandise. They told Max and his girl friend they were under arrest and went searching for his gun. They didn’t find this but they did find $6,500 in cash which they confiscated for evidence. Somehow Max had hidden the gun, but his neighbor was able to help with this problem by pointing out Max’s car, a late-model Jaguar. He told them Max had put a bag into the trunk just before his target practice. The bag was removed and found to contain no less than three fully loaded pistols, plus more bags of a “white powdery substance believed to be heroin.“ An empire had come crashing down.

I should probably have been the one to make this report, but since I was never notified of the arrest, I couldn’t. Instead of calling me, a sergeant went ahead on his own and did a decent job of reporting. I wasn’t required to analyze his work since I only got it for information, not for action, but I would have done some things differently if I had made the report. The disappearance of the gun required more explanation, for instance. A search was made, but wasn’t spelled out in enough detail. By rights the rod should have been on the ground under the apartment windows, and when it wasn’t that should have been stated explicitly. The rest of the search should also have been described in more detail. Guns don’t just fly away leaving no trace behind.

No description of the three loaded guns was given. Were they name brands or just Saturday night specials of no particular provenance? It makes a difference. There’s nothing wrong with putting your best foot forward when informing headquarters of your achievements. The guns might have fitted the description of those used in unsolved crimes. And although examination by the Ballistics Squad was a foregone conclusion in this case, it would have been just as well to include it in the list of agencies notified.

Also the condition of the guns should have been reported. Had any of them been recently fired? That should have been ruled out because the informant had reported that they had been thrown into the car trunk before the shot into his flat, but it was possible he might have been confused and that possibility should have been checked out.

Finally, although the report states that Max and friend were charged with possession of a controlled substance, it makes no mention of a charge of unlawful discharge of a firearm or possession of unlicensed handguns. It’s all right to say that these charges can be assumed, but it’s not all right to assume it to the point of leaving them out of the report altogether. It’s also not all right to tell us no more about Max than his name and nothing else and to omit mention of any attempts to question him and of his response thereto.

All the same, it wasn’t too bad a production by a sergeant making probably his first attempt at wrapping up the details of an incident in a neat package to be delivered with the morning mail. Psychological portraits of suspects aren’t normally part of this, but it would have been interesting to see Maximo’s. I personally see him as a sufferer from Joe Pesce syndrome as seen in the movie “Goodfellas.” In it Joe demonstrates a propensity for spraying his surroundings with gunshots when excited. Liquor is the catalyst for this in Joe’s case, but I suspect heroin was in Max’s. Or maybe “Scarface” was his inspiration. Al Pacino was a successful Latino dealer who contacted a drug habit and started settling arguments with a machine gun. Did this strike a chord with Max? Will we ever know? Does it matter?

Tony Blair joins the Catholic Church. Like everyone else I’m glad to see him come on board. One thing I worry a little bit about, though. Does this give him precedence over me? I mean, I’ve been a Catholic all my life, and he’s only just arrived. Somehow, though, I get the feeling that if we were both waiting to see the Pope, he’d go in first.

Mustn’t let it bother me. After all, the Bible says there is more rejoicing in heaven for one finding the one lost sheep than for the ninety-nine who never strayed. Also the last shall be first and the first shall be last.

\I didn’t just swot up those quotes from a handy copy of the Bible I happen to have lying around, but from my memory of hearing them once every year as the good book got read in weekly installments to the congregation.

It’s a remarkable piece of news whatever way you look at it. There hasn’t been anything as spectacular since 1845. That was when John Henry Newman, the leading priest in the Church of England, came over, many years later becoming Cardinal Newman. This was the religious sensation of the century. It was the first crack in the wall of the edifice that Henry VIII and his successors had erected to replace the Roman church. They had turned the population from Catholics into Pope-haters, showing what propaganda and pressure can do even with such a “bulldog breed’ as the British claim to be.

However, according to one historian, the English Church had become...comfortable. The clergy, enabled to marry by Henry’s reformation, naturally got to thinking more about their families than their flocks and less about salvation than remuneration. This re-opened people’s minds to the advantages of a priesthood who wanted to be spiritual fathers only and who, in short, were more inclined to enthusiasm than careerism. Newman thought this way and he found many followers to join him. This came to be called the Oxford Movement from their association with Oxford University.

The activists mostly moved into the Catholic Church, but even those who didn’t worked to Romanize the English church, causing it to become in part Anglo-Catholic, with ceremonies, vestments and practices similar to the old Catholic ones suppressed by the Reformers. The great difference made by the Movement was in the way it familiarized Anglicans in all the English-speaking countries with the idea of conversion as an option for them whereas before it had been almost unthinkable no matter what doubts they had about the established church. It would be hard to find any conversions before Newman’s.  Without a doubt now that a Prime Minister has joined there will be Catholics on the alert for candidates from the Royal Family.

If this sound like I’m cheerleading, well what about it. I think consolidation of Christians is a perfectly good idea, to erase the distinctions and divisions among them as much as possible. That doesn’t mean that I think all Christian religions will merge into one. But any movement toward unity is a good one in my opinion. It wouldn’t hurt a bit for the same thing to happen among the Moslems. I’m tired of reading, every time a bomb goes off, that the “outrage” has been condemned by “moderate” Moslems. They seem to exist only for the purpose of cushioning the blows from the immoderate ones. Until such time as the Moslems speak with one, civilized, voice, no one can be expected to trust them or believe in the
elusive “moderates.”

When I see the attention the pope gets and the crowds that surround him, it’s a lesson in the usefulness of unity and, well, hierarchy, in preserving great organizations like the church. In 1870 the Catholic Church was at another low ebb comparable to the one it experienced during the French Revolution seventy years before. This time it had been stripped of its last remaining territorial possession, Rome, by the new Italian Republic and was reduced to its present territory of the Vatican and its surroundings. No matter, the first Vatican Council went ahead as scheduled.

Not only did it go ahead, it went haywire, in the opinion of progressive people all over the western world. It actually pronounced a new and shocking doctrine, the infallibility of the Pope when giving out the law on faith and morals. How medieval can you get? Even some of the attendants at the Council held out against it and many of those who were for it thought it wasn’t the best time to issue it. But it went through anyway with the following results: (a) The most dissident people left the church and formed their own, thereby promoting unity as against discord; (b) The question of authority in the church was settled for good and; © The prestige of the Papacy was strengthened in the eyes of the world. It was all win-win.

The church is about authority, which a man like Blair understands if anyone does. Converts are often accused of being wimps who want a pope to tell them what to think and what to do, but that’s not it. What they want is a church telling all its people what to believe, which happens to be what the converts believe and which they want to see the church enforce. They often come from backgrounds where there is no belief of any kind and no one thinks there should be any.

This is an essay, not a speech, so it’s all right for me to end with a joke instead of opening with it, as is customary. It’s a story George Jessel used to tell on the Ed Sullivan show in the last century. It was about an Irish girl who fell in love with a Jewish boy, but whose family demanded that he become a Catholic before he could be allowed to marry her (no snickering, please). So Joe agreed to be instructed in the faith. The family kept tabs on his progress by quizzing the daughter. “Oh, he’s learning about Christ and the Holy Family and he loves it.” The following week, “He’s been hearing about the Pope and the College of Cardinals and Rome and all and he’s absolutely fascinated. ” Things are going so well that the mother is shocked when she makes another inquiry sometime later on and the girl bursts into tears. “What’s the matter, dear?” says the mother, “Is something wrong?” “Oh Mother, now he wants to be a priest!”

 

 

 

A WINNER NEVER QUITS, A QUITTER NEVER WINS Rather late in life I’ve been morphing into a movie fan by watching Russell Crowe films. Two of them have appeared together on TV lately. One is “A Beautiful Mind” and the other is “The Cinderella Man.” “Mind” is about John Nash, a mathematician who loses his to schizophrenia, but recovers it in time to win the Nobel Prize. The other movie is about Jimmy Braddock, the1930’s fighter who lost fights but recovered well enough to win the heavyweight championship in 1935. You can’t go wrong with upbeat movies and these two pictures belong with “It’s a Wonderful Life” and “Gone With the Wind” in that category. We like to see a lead character win over adversity and here it happens. The two Crowe movies are more convincing than their prototypes about this because, unlike them, they’re not fiction, but fact. I can confirm this because although I only just learned about Nash from the film, I have known the Braddock story all my life. When he lost to Joe Louis in 1937 I knew about it. The movie ends two years before this when he beat Max Baer for the heavyweight championship. I said it was upbeat. Jim didn’t do badly after that during his two years as champ, He spent most of the time ducking a match with Max Schmeling, the leading contender. This was a matter of calculation on the part of Braddock and his manager Joe Gould. Schmeling may have deserved the shot, but the glamour boy of the heavyweight division was Joe Louis, and a fight with him would produce much more money than one with Max. In spite of the efforts of Adolf Hitler and his propaganda minister Dr. Goebbels to force the Yankee chiselers to give Germany a chance at the title, Braddock and Gould held out and finally got the bout with Louis, which Braddock lost. It wasn’t a total loss, though, because the loser and his manager wound up with a cut of all the future earnings of Joe Louis, which had been their price for agreeing to the fight. Jim Braddock went back to private life after that and lived prosperously ever after. The movie emphasizes his Irish extraction, but I don’t remember that that was dwelt on a great deal at the time. Possibly it was his name, not ostentatiously Irish, or his New Jersey background which made his breeding a little suspect as compared to someone coming from an Irish hotbed like Boston or New York. He may have worn a shamrock on his boxing trunks, but I don’t remember it. He didn’t sport one in the movie either, but then Max Baer’s Star of David also wasn’t shown. The reason could have been that Max wasn’t actually Jewish at all. He just chose to go with the flow. Crowe makes the transition from the part of number cruncher in “Mind” to counterpuncher in “Cinderella” with the ease of a switch hitter. His New Jersey accent as Braddock seems more authentic than his Southern one as Nash, but he never goes Australian on us and shows no trace of Steve Irwin. He doesn’t seem to train as hard as Stallone did in “Rocky”, but his fight scenes are more realistic. Maybe he could be the next Rocky himself in Rocky IX or XIV or whatever installment is due. If we can have large numbers of James Bonds, why not a few more Rockys as well? As usual, I got along without taking in more than half of the dialogue. My hearing isn’t as keen as it was when the only sounds I missed were the ones only dogs could hear, and I also tend to keep the sound down when viewing, but in spite of this, the main blame for my incomprehension has to go to the actors who have gotten so natural with their speech that a lot of the time I don’t know what they’re talking about. Old-time actors tried to be natural too, but somehow they still made every word heard and understood. There was one man, Roland Young, whose lips never seemed to move so that everything he said was mumbled, not spoken, but it was still crystal clear. Brando changed all that. He mumbled for real. He didn’t care if anyone understood him or not. People found this so unusual and interesting that he got himself a huge following and soon other actors were slurring their words for all they were worth in their zeal to keep up with the Master. Things have never been the same since. So we’ve got realism. Realism, not reality. The two ideas get confused with each other, often deliberately. This because “realists” want to convince people they’re presenting actuality, life as it really is with the bark off, that is, with the seamy side fully exposed, which boils down to a full helping of sexual exhibitionism. Not only does this qualify a producer or director as an unflinching witness to reality, it qualifies him as a pretty good hustler who knows how to draw a crowd. Sex sells, in other words. As a realist who shows life as it is, you unfortunately have to include lots of it because reality demands it. The money is irrelevant. Revealing the truth is what counts and it must be done no matter who is “offended” That’s the argument. I don’t buy it. “Realism” is supposed to differ from “romance” in that it exposes the underside of human life as well as the presentable side and therefore claims the right to describe illicit behavior fully and employ obscenity to do it. The so-called “romantic“ view of life doesn’t do this. It distorts the picture, giving us an overage of happy talk and a minimum of truth. This is to say that those who take an optimistic view of things select the incidents they use to prove their case. But so do the “realists”, except they choose to emphasize negative ones. They have the right to do this, of course, but I deny that this gives them the right to describe debauchery and depravity in their full ugliness, with the associated language. I reserve this right to people engaged in presenting “reality” not “realism”, to scientists and educators and others whose business is to deal with fact without embellishments of any kind. “Realists” don’t do this. They take a profit from promoting a version of fact that oversteps the limits that society has created to save itself from brutalization and vulgarization stimulated by the circulation of such images. Today we see their results in sports stadiums full of yahoos screaming obscenities at the teams on the field and assaulting any women trapped in the crowd. I want censorship, you say? Yeah, why not? We had it most of my life and it hurt no one.

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PLANES, TRAINS AND AUTOMOBILES I’m not a tree-hugger because I’ve never felt that way about a tree. Something lacking in me maybe, but there it is. It’s just never been my thing. Not that they aren’t attractive of course, but I really think you have to be another tree to fully appreciate it. You can’t make up for it with imagination, at least not with mine. So although I have the deepest respect and admiration for trees and also bushes, I have never been able to see myself as part of their family. All the same I’m an environmentalist in my way. One of the ways is my distaste for automobiles. I have owned plenty of them and driven thousands of miles in them and expect to keep on doing so, but I’ve still always looked at them as an expensive luxury that we should treat as such, not as an indispensable means of getting to and from work every day. There are plenty of other ways to use them, most of which I’ve been involved with myself, but commutation has always seemed to me a wasteful use. All those people, one to a car, grinding it out every day on a jammed highway, can they be happy? Well of course not, but then why don’t they complain? They do, certainly, but hardly ever against their real grievance, the need to travel this way at all, but only against the incidentals, like congestion and obstruction and dangerous drivers. Car travel every day is something they’ve accepted, which has to be endured like bad weather, another thing everyone talks about, but nobody does anything about. What about public transportation? Why don’t we have more of it? Why don’t people demand it more? Wouldn’t it save everyone a lot of money and save the environment from a huge amount of pollution? Are people so attached to their cars that they’re not interested in traveling any other way, no matter how high the price of gas goes? The key question above is the last one. People like their cars all right -- they were the last things they gave up in the Depression -- but I don’t think they’re obsessed with them. They certainly aren’t that much superior to trains as a way of travel, they break down as often as any railroad and they encounter long-lasting delays more often than trains do. So what’s the problem? I think it’s security. Cars have it, trains don’t. Not to the same extent anyway. Today’s headline in my paper is about a young woman in Union Square in New York who was pushed onto to the subway tracks by another young woman standing behind her. Two strangers jumped down to the tracks and pulled her up before an arriving train got to her. Her assailant got caught leaving the scene. She was black like the victim, but they were strangers to each other. So this isn’t a hate crime or an interracial one, but it still has a racial element in it. The subways are where the races meet and mingle like they do nowhere else. They have no choice about it either. There is no escape. Pass through a turnstile and you enter the Valley of Fear. The source of the fear is what the police call “roving bands”, which is actually a euphemism for “packs of blacks.” Black high school kids finding themselves in a tightly knit group well able to take over a subway car are liable to try doing just that. In fact, two groups in the same car may compete with each other to do it. Today this will usually result in shooting. Whether whites or blacks are the victims of this kind of action, its roots will usually be the same. Start with group dynamism, add in learned hostility and you have all the ingredients you need for chaos underground. It’s proven out everyday. This means one thing. Talking about the elimination of automobile pollution, expense, delay, stress, etc., gets us nowhere if we don’t come up with a reasonable alternative to car use. Public transportation as I’ve described it above isn’t a reasonable alternative. Before it can be we have to solve the problem of security. The automobile stranglehold didn’t come about by accident. Millions of people had enough bad experiences on trains and buses that they gave them up in favor of their cars. Before we add another train to our schedule, instead of recruiting the necessary engineers, conductors, trainmen, ticket agents and others, let’s sign up the cops we’ll need to protect it. Let’s add the cameras, sensors, and alarms we need to guarantee safety. When we’ve done this we can begin to talk about building ridership. We cannot build it, though, under today’s criminal justice system. We need a new system, a Transportation Code that won’t just put teeth into the laws, but fangs. The first provision should be to ban all bail for transit criminals. The idea that bail is only to guarantee their re-appearance in court isn’t in the Constitution. It’s only a lawyer’s invention to facilitate crime. A criminal working mass transit is a specialist who can be trusted to repeat himself. The passengers aren’t there only for their convenience. They have subjected themselves to an imprisonment that is also for the public good and the preservation of the environment. To allow criminals to prey on them is to penalize them for their public spirit. Another improvement over present law would be a requirement that accused persons must take the stand and testify in their defense. Or they can take the Fifth Amendment and refuse to testify. They can attempt to exonerate themselves or they can admit that their testimony will implicate them. In either case the jury can form a judgment about them. They do it now even though forbidden to do so when there’s no testimony. Again we’re not looking at the Constitution but a lawyers’ trick to encourage criminals and expand their pool of customers. Looking at the headlines in the papers everyday has proved to me that I can’t discuss questions of transportation without touching on legal ones as well. Next time I go in that direction I will bring up the question of the relationship of juries to the proper operation of a modern transportation system. Don’t worry, I mean all juries, not just hanging juries.

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FLOPHOUSES AND PENTHOUSES Why do I spend so much time thinking of Rudy Giuliani? Is that a sign he’s going to be President? Do I have the magic touch? Or is it just because I think maybe he should be president and all the other possibilities look as dull as old coins next to new ones? All of this, I suppose, plus the outbreak that I know must be coming -- when he gets tired of being accused of being a New York liberal, a breed he despises, and tells the world he’s been faking it all along. That he really doesn’t give a damn about gay rights, or abortion, or gun control, or sanctuary for illegal immigrants, or any other liberal lunacies, but in New York he had to conform or he would have been buried with a stake through his heart by the Red Brigade who control the city under the leadership of the New York Times. Even when he did conform, the media masters knew he didn’t mean it and they did their best to ruin him and get the ghettoes to riot against him. They were greasing the skids for his national career when 9/11 happened and changed everything. He still had to leave office because of term limits, but he now left on a high note instead of the low one the Times had planned for him. Unfortunately he still had to take with him the ideological baggage he’d had to carry for them in order to be able to do the job he knew he was born for -- saving New York City from its enemies both in the flophouses and the penthouses. If he admits his past hypocrisy and reverts to his natural conservative self, he’ll be denounced as a turncoat and an imposter, but underneath I think there’ll be a sneaking admiration for one who would not be cheated of his goal no matter how much dirt he had to swallow to reach it. That’s almost the definition of a tough guy and that’s what Rudy is running as -- a tough guy. George W. Bush is one too and he may emerge from all his troubles as a successful one after all. If so, he will have made determination popular and tergiversation and conciliation and palliation unfashionable. That would be just the atmosphere that would conduce to the election of Ol’ Rough’n Ready Rudy. It could happen. Give ’em hell, Rudy. Now what about the other pretenders to the throne? There’s one man I think should quit now. That’s Mitt Romney. He simply has no leadership ability. He can’t control his own family. The proof: he has five grown sons, he proposes to be a wartime president and he can’t get a single one of them to put on a uniform and serve the country. Leadership? No way. A leader would have corrected that long ago under threat of shutting his sons out of the White House if they didn’t contribute to his campaign by joining up. Franklin D. Roosevelt knew this. His four sons were all in service before Pearl Harbor. I wouldn’t want to be a Republican speaking for Romney as the party candidate next year. How do you respond to the catcalls? Bush gets them about his kids and they’re girls. What do you say? That it’s not like WWII, we don’t have a draft, it’s a volunteer army, so the Romney boys aren’t ducking an obligation, they have a right to their choice? Won’t that go over great? That their choice is not to serve their country? Mitt, it just won’t do. Another bone I’d pick with Mr. R. is his decision to conduct his required missionary work for the Mormons in France, of all places. France has been a Christian country since 496 A.D. when King Clovis took the plunge and got himself baptized along with his whole nation. France became known as the “Eldest Daughter of the Church.” The Mormons were first heard of in 1830. Granted that the Mormons are highly religious and the French aren’t so religious anymore, it still seems as though there is more of a need for Christianity to be propagated in countries such as, oh, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Arabia and others than in one that has been Christian for sixteen centuries. Moslem countries present a big challenge to Christian missionaries of course, but people like St. Francis Xavier and David Livingston didn’t let that discourage them and took the risks in stride. Of course they were prepared for martyrdom if it came and maybe Mr. Romney wasn’t, but then why go missioning at all if you’re not prepared to wear the martyr’s crown? In this essay I’m just passing on impressions I’ve been getting of the campaign so far. I still haven’t watched one of the debates in full because I don’t think they mean much at this stage. There’s an old belief that people don’t really concentrate on the presidential election until the World Series is over. This year the Series ran until October 28th, meaning that there were only eight days left before the election. And this was a four-game series, a sweep. If it had gone the full seven games people would have been going to the polls not even knowing who the candidates were. There’ll have to be some rescheduling here, either of the election or the series. That’s America, just one crisis after another. About my impressions of the other slate of candidates now that I’ve disposed of the Republicans, I really find my reactions being distorted by my taste for comic strips acquired at an early age and never completely lost. That’s why I can’t help thinking of one Democrat as “Hairless Joe” and of another, not yet a candidate, as “Fat Albert.” This is no way to think of distinguished statesmen, but habits are hard to break. I think the holy cause the Demos root for the most, out of so many, that is, universal health insurance, is the one that I’m most inclined to root against. Do they actually propose that we’re going to insure every habitual self-abuser in the land against the results of their debauchery? All the gluttons who live only to stuff themselves to bursting? All the alcoholics, who do it with booze? All the junkies? Once they get insurance they’ll swamp all the doctors with demands for quick fixes to enable them to go on poisoning themselves while escaping the consequences.  The intelligent people who live sensibly will be shut out, but they are the ones who will have to pay. The millions of morons for whom they will be paying will get all the benefit, that is, they will live a little longer maybe, but they won’t change their habits. The people who will make a change will be the taxpayers who will leave the country to escape this kind of enslavement.

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THE WINTER WHATSIT Herewith a couple of quotations about winter to ease the pain of its arrival. First, Ogden Nash: “Winter comes but once a year/And when it does it brings the doctor good cheer.” Then a Nash predecessor, G. Chaucer: “The turtles vois is herd by douve sweete/The winter is goon, with all his reynes wete.” (Mark Twain said Chaucer was a good poet, but his spelling was poor.) One poet denounces winter’s arrival, the other salutes its departure. Neither of them likes it very much. Who does? Still there it is and it leaves its mark in the memory. Mine goes back to the time of the Little Ice Age. It lasted through my youth. The first thing I remember about it is the windowboxes. Everyone had them, not because there were no refrigerators, buy that there was plenty of frosty weather and you could save on electricity by securing a tin box with a sliding door to your windowsill to keep milk and butter in. Today it wouldn’t pay. Today we have sissy winters, not like the he-man types of those days. Another childhood memory is of the men lined up on Archer St., our shopping street, with long-handled shovels in their hands ready to go to work on clearing the snowdrifts left behind by the latest storm. It seemed an odd sight somehow, not being an everyday thing, but it might have made a deeper impression if I’d realized that these men were there because we were in the Depression and they needed a job of any kind, even shoveling snow for a nickel an hour or whatever they got. It took more than the Depression to discourage a kid with two feet of snow on the ground and a Flexible Flyer to conquer the slopes with. Those were the days of Henry Morgan’s famous weather prediction “Snow tonight, followed by little boys with sleds.” I don’t remember ever sleighing in a park as they do now. We used the streets and felt no need for a park, when the good hills were the public roads and traffic was so light that we only had to suspend operations occasionally to let it go by. By now you must be thinking that I’m all wrapped up in the good old days when I used to go gadding about with Grandma Moses in her one-horse open sleigh, but it’s not actually so. I kinda miss the old winters, it’s true, but like everyone else I miss myself more. Nothing to be done about that, though, so I’ll stop singing Bring Back Yesterday and stick to just trying to visualize it for the benefit of those who haven’t had the bracing experience of digging out a four-door sedan from a five-foot snowdrift on a one-way street. It was memorable, especially the way the wheels used to chew up the old rugs you tried to shove under them to give them some traction. The place where I prayed not to be buried was the entrance to my own driveway in Scarsdale. If I didn’t make it in I would be left with the back of the car extending out into the roadway obstructing it completely. But it could happen. The house was on a steep hill, Lee Road, which iced up considerably in a storm. We were on the lower end. meaning that you were sliding pretty fast by the time that you got to it from the top. Coming up from the bottom was impossible. You had to take your chance coming downhill braking hard and trying to turn in instead of sliding by. If you didn’t make it, you just had to start all over again. To get back up to the top of the hill for another try, you had to go south a block to a parallel street since your own ended at the bottom of the slope. The south street continued however, bottoming out and climbing again to another crest. The parallel being a main road and not so icy, you could get to the crest and turn around easily enough Then the job was to charge back down, getting enough momentum to get back to the original crest where Lee Road started downhill. Once you made this and were back at Lee, it was time for another slide downhill riding the brake and picking your spot to turn into your driveway on the right. Do this right and you were home again, inside your own driveway and not bogged down in the snow piled up by snowplows at the entrance. Anyone who liked roller coasters was bound to appreciate the whole thing, particularly the wild ride downhill then zooming up scrambling to get to the top of the hill where you would be in reach of your own goatpath home. Doing it in the dark with the tires grabbing the ice made you wish there could have been an audience. As I recall, the coldest day of the 20th Century came during the 1970’s and that must have been the one where our whole family got together to push our main car into the garage to keep it from freezing. While everyone else got in back and pushed I stayed in front with a claw hammer chopping away at the ice underfoot to advance the car a few inches at a time. I did not recite the poem about the snow, the snow, the beautiful snow filling the fields and the hills below. Well, all this seems like ancient history now. No blizzards anymore, no narrow paths on the roads to be followed until you got to your exit where you tried to generate enough momentum to get you through it to the streets, no rocking the car to get it out of the drift, no Yukon trailblazing to get to your igloo where you intended to remain for the rest of the month -- except for a spot of shoveling here and there, maybe with one of those snowblower things that looked like they might be fun. Just because you were too old for snowmen didn’t mean that you couldn’t get some laughs out of the freezing weather and the howling wind and the icy ground and blinding snow and everything else that went to make up the…winter wonderland. Later on we’ll conspire As we dream by the fire To spend the next season The Florida Keys in Away from the winter wonderland.

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MR. GREEN AND HIS SEWING MACHINE Every crime is unique of course, but it also has something in common with others. For instance, burglary. There is the impulse to break into other people’s houses which is a common bond between all burglars, but methods vary, as we see from the accounts here which I’ve collected from my Queens archive. And methods matter, too. When they’re wrong, they can lead to, well, extinction. The case that generated the most paperwork, three reports, an original, an interim one, and a follow-up, by me, turned out to be not a burglary at all, but derived its importance from the fact that the cop on the scene slipped on an icy sidewalk and had his gun go off in an unauthorized manner, requiring investigation. Officer McRann, it seems, was off-duty and canvassing his neighborhood for clothes for some Guatemalan earthquake victims when he saw a young black man loitering suspiciously in the area. McRann was well aware that burglars were targeting the neighborhood because he had personally arrested two while off-duty and been informed of many other incidents by local police and his neighbors. A stranger on the street with no occupation needed to be checked out. He decided to test the man’s local knowledge by pulling up to him in his car and asking the way to Jamaica Ave. The stranger didn’t answer but took to his heels instead. McRann pursued on foot with his gun pointed skyward for a warning shot, but had his fall instead. The accidental shot got the fugitive’s attention and that of his two friends, a man and a girl. It also brought out the residents, some of whom wanted the suspects shot out of hand. This expedited their removal to the station house. They were anxious to explain things. They were only there to deliver a new sewing machine to a Mr. Green, a resident. He was getting it for $150. Why so cheap? Well, Henry, the runaway, he delivered them and one day there was one left over and, well, he didn’t return it to the warehouse. It would just confuse things to have an extra machine getting in the way. Then Mr. Green came in and wanted to return the machine and get his $150 back. He was shocked -- shocked! -- to find such irregularity in his little off-the-books transaction. After this everyone was let go, even Henry, since it didn’t look like his company was going to prosecute him over its loss. The only one with a problem was McRann, the man who had, after all, fired a shot in the air that just had to be investigated. It was. In this affluent area of Queens known as Jamaica Estates, burglary was a constant threat.. In appearance it was a suburban settlement lodged inside the city limits. The borough president, Donald Manes lived there . I met him once in his house once over some complaint or other. We talked about the neighborhood’s attraction for the elite. He said “Where else can you go?” It was some time later that he committed suicide when he found out that he was likely to be arrested for “Official Misconduct.” Even with forty judges for neighbors he couldn’t face that. The neighborhood had class all right. One night thirty-two prints by Andy Warhol and other such people were stolen from one of the houses. The value was quoted as $18,750, but that was then and now is now. Burglary wasn’t always comic opera or even polite. It could get very serious at times. One case involved a retired cop who sentimentally kept 26 rifles and shotguns in his house. His son lived there with him among the guns. One night Robert Devine, 28 years old, the son, went to the drugstore from something or other and found the house alarm lit up when he got home. He ignored it because the audible alarm wasn’t ringing. He went in quietly, though, and then he heard a noise upstairs which wasn’t made by his father. He went down to the basement and got a pistol out of a safe there. When he got to the top floor he came under a “Psycho” knife attack by the intruder who missed him and took refuge in the bathroom. Devine fired four shots through the bathroom door. Not looking from another confrontation, he went next door to call 911. Before he and the answering cops could re-enter the house, two men on patrol brought in the suspect, picked up a short distance away. He had been shot in the right thigh and left calf. We finished up a big night for the NRA by checking out the father’s arsenal and finding that every one of the long guns had been properly registered with the city’s firearm control board. Old man Devine must have been a good cop, a guy who looked out for details. And burglars. The last case here, read in the light of a similar one agitating New York this morning, causes me to wonder if there isn’t something in drugs that imparts a sense of power to the point of convincing the user that objects bearing a resemblance to guns actually are guns and can be used to scatter the demons attempting to destroy him. Since the demons are generally cops, the harvest of all this is usually a set of headlines proclaiming that yet another unarmed man has been shot down in cold blood by individuals who simply haven’t responded properly to sensitivity training. This was the case with John Kopka, a “known drug addict and thief in the neighborhood” who broke noisily into a doctor’s office one night, causing a couple of residents on the floor to call 911. When the police arrived they saw Kopka stumbling around inside the office and ordered him to come out with his hands up. He did, but he came in a rush, in one hand clutching a metal object that looked like trouble. The cop didn’t press his luck, he fired once and suddenly it was all over. The object? A desk stapler. What did Kopka think it was? We’ll never know. The object in today’s incident? A hairbrush. We have gone from burglary as a non-event to burglary as a deadly one. I’ve only included one story of a householder coming home to find a burglary in progress there, and that had a happy ending, but there have been many others that didn’t end that way. Burglars always prefer empty premises to work in, but if they’re interrupted they’re usually ready to overcome the new arrival on the scene. Once you’ve seen the results of such a confrontation, you no longer think of burglary as a non-violent crime. All of a sudden it makes something like the Neighborhood Watch look good. If you don’t have one, start one. Also pray.

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MY FORBIDDEN PAST Today I’m continuing with my monumental project of reviewing my output of the last four years to see where I’ve been. the better to see where I should go in the future with Strike Me Pink in my efforts to inoculate the public with my views on life and, well, everything else, whatever that is. Reviewing my work is not made easy by my clever trick of using titles that mostly come from popular songs and fir in with my text quite well, but remain mysterious until one has gotten halfway through this and finally sees the relevance of the title to the contents. I’m sure this trick greatly impresses you readers or else I wouldn’t be doing it, but whether it does or not I’m not likely to change things because I’m hooked. Without a cute title added to titillate the reader everything is dust and ashes and the fun’s gone out of writing. Sorry about that. Critical types can console themselves with the knowledge that I suffer too because, as I’ve noted before, I can’t tell about the text from the title and have to pull out the paper and read it before I know anything. This is called being your own worst enemy. Enough of my sufferings. Some of the titles aren’t completely cryptic and you can actually look at them and get an idea of what the text is about. “Jailhouse Rock” from 2004 is one. It’s about plans to build a jail in Suffolk County, my home, and the monstrous costs that will be incurred in doing it. All the experts were predicting disaster for Steve Levy, the new Supervisor of the county, if he tried to go through with it. He has persisted, though, and today, which happens to be Election Day, he is on the ballot with the nomination of (a) the Republican Party, (b) the Democratic Party, © the Conservative Party, and (d) several other parties. He must be doing something right. One way is by looking like Eliot Spitzer, our governor, only better, but not resembling him in his approach to illegal immigration. Eliot wants to give driver licenses to the illegals. Steve wants to send them home. Hmm, Suffolk county’s verging on two million population. That many people might be capable of producing a governor, say in 2010. Another title that points at, rather than away from its accompanying text, is “A Bridge Too Far” from November ‘04. It memorialized Christmas Day fifty years before when I got into a fracas with three black drunkards while driving to work at my station house in Harlem. We were all stopped dead on the Macombs Dam Bridge when I tried to help them move their car out of the way by nudging it with mine, causing the three of them to charge me with the intent of throwing me off the bridge. I held them off with my gun, creating a panic as drivers attempted to get off the bridge, but things ended quickly enough when the skels saw the gun. Now their car could move and they piled into it and took off cursing at me. I mopped my brow, reholstered my gun and went my way. For the last few months I’ve thought of another bridge, this one in St. Louis, Mo. I wrote about it in October after I learned about it from the “American Justice” program on TV. It has stayed with me. Why was it sixteen years before I heard about it? Was it covered up? It has to be one of the most gruesome crimes committed in American history, yet if most people are like me before I happened to see the TV story, they’ve never heard of it. Never heard of what happened to two girls who went for a stroll on a St. Louis bridge one evening and were mobbed by a gang of thugs who beat them, robbed them, raped them and then threw them screaming off the bridge to their deaths in the river sixty feet below. If, as I suspect, there was a media coverup of this case, which would have aroused public indignation if it became known, there was at least one class of people in this country who knew all about its facts, but who felt no indignation at all and did everything they could to perpetuate the coverup rather than penetrate it. These were the conniving judges and lawyers who sided with the killers and succeeded in delaying the execution of their leader for a full thirteen years after his conviction. Their objective of course was to string out the appeals even longer until the Supreme Court would decide that twenty years’ wait for execution was “cruel and unusual punishment” and nullified his sentence. They almost made it, in fact the case went before the Supreme Court twice. When this case is remembered as I hope it will be, may its history of legal tricks and traps be remembered with it as a warning that American courts aren’t to be trusted. (To confirm this, three years after St. Louis we got the Simpson case which produced the worst exhibition of courtroom chaos yet seen in this country. Deliberate chaos of course.) Protesting all the while that I won’t write about politics because I don’t have any contacts any more, I still managed to write something I called “The Roaring Kennedys”, also something about former Comptroller Hevesi of New York, about the nominating conventions we enjoyed in the past, and of course about my pet punching bag, the late Justice William O. Douglas of the Supreme Court, the Court’s all-time champion groper, drinker, chiseler, liar, wife beater, grafter and redbird, whose staggering history was laid out in a book by an admirer (!) titled “Wild Bill.” Douglas wouldn’t have minded. He gloried in his shame. He displayed his contempt for us peasants and our narrow little minds when he told us he not only understood the Constitution better than those who wrote it, but was also able to find its real meaning in “emanations” from the “penumbra” of the statements it actually contained. This put him in a class with L. Ron Hubbard and other wizards able to read the coded messages of the bricks in the Great Pyramid. But by the end of his days he was completely gaga and his colleagues no longer took stock in his insights, no matter how inspired. Big Bill gave me enough material for a number of pieces and when I got through with him I found more up-to-date subjects in the faculties of the schools under the jurisdiction of the Roslyn school district, who managed to make off with $11,000,000 in diverted educational funds before being found out. Then there were the volunteer firemen…but probably the one I liked the best was the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, somehow planted on the shelves of my local library and emitting rays of malicious animal magnetism from its pages closely packed with lies, libels, distortions, inventions, slanders, invective, mudslinging and other poisons without number. Fun, though, if you admire cheek.

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IF P.O. FINDS GOD, WE'LL FIND OUR MAIL

Picking up where I left off last week, I had been describing the religious turf divisions of the 1930’s in New York as I remembered them. I got my information in those days from the newspapers, particularly the Easter Monday editions. The tabloids on that day all carried the same pictures on the front page, i.e., the Protestant and Catholic heavyweights of the city emerging from their churches to join the Easter Parade on Fifth Avenue. The Catholics made out best in that competition because they had the biggest church, St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The Protestants had a much smaller one, St. Thomas’s, north of St. Pat’s. The usual Catholic picked out by the photographers was Jim Farley, the Postmaster General, while District Attorney Tom Dewey represented the Protestants. Both were in full morning dress, with their wives in their Easter bonnets.

That set the tone of the day, which was a pretty classy one and which stayed that way until a swarm of cheap exhibitionists took over the Avenue and made it impossible for any normal people to use it without throwing up, finally putting an end to the Easter Parade. It didn’t put an end to the churches, though, which continued to operate. In my last piece I mentioned the three leaders who represented the major religions of New York in those days. They were Rabbi Wise, Bishop Manning and Cardinal Hayes, popularly known as the Big Three. It is not true, though, that they were ever called the Holy Trinity.

Manning is the Trinitarian whom I remember the least except as one of the people pulling hardest for the British in World War II and rooting for American entry into the war. In fact there was a cartoon of him officiating at the marriage of Uncle Sam and Britannia at the altar of the cathedral of St. John the Divine, his church. Not remembering any more than that, I refreshed my recollection of him through Google and found out more. Good stories too.

One was from 1922 and started on a high level, the divorce of the Duke of Marlborough from the Duchess in 1920.  She was an American, though that may not have been the cause of the divorce. Two years later she decided to remarry, this time to a Frenchman. He must have been a stickler about religion, though, because she resorted to the Vatican to get an annulment of her marriage to the Duke. Unless she got it she couldn’t marry a Catholic because the Duke was still her husband in the eyes of the church.

In what seemed to some people a true miracle, she got her annulment by claiming her parents coerced her into her first marriage. This kind of thing has since become known as a “Catholic divorce” and is fairly common among the wealthy classes. It’s considered too good for the common people though, and isn’t much seen amongst them.

Manning wasn’t about to take this lying down. The marriage had been performed in his diocese with another bishop and a priest on the altar and was still good in his eyes. How come, he wanted to know, this coercion claim was never made in the divorce proceedings and is only being trotted out now? Is that because the duchess’s mother is now dead and can’t refute the story?

Manning went on in a long letter to his congregation to question the coercion story further, saying that he had talked to people present at the marriage, who informed him that the bride hadn’t been reluctant at all, but “quite the contrary.” Why did she stay married for thirty-one years, with two children, if she’d been forced into it? He asked if the acceptance of this “pretext” didn’t put every marriage in the country at risk if any “woman in middle life” who wants to get out of her marriage can make it without any evidence to support it. It would be interesting to know how Her Grace, the Duchess took this zinger. It must have wobbled her at least.

Manning left no doubt that he suspected dirty work at the Vatican and believed a lot of Catholics would agree with him. He also waved the flag, asking what right did a court in a foreign country have to cast imputations on a good American marriage?

If all this wasn’t enough to prove that the Bishop was a tough man in a fight, the Bertrand Russell controversy in the Thirties did a lot to confirm it. Russell lived to be 98, dying in 1970 after spending the Sixties mostly in denouncing the United States for the Vietnam War. In 1940, though, he was a philosopher, a militant atheist, and a member of the family whose head was the Duke of Bedford in England. Manning, however, wasn’t any more impressed by this than he had been by the Duchess’s title. So when Russell was offered a post as a professor at the City College of New York, the Bishop again went into opposition, this time in company with most of the clergy of New York. Their opposition was so strong that even the leftist politicians like Mayor LaGuardia had to give in eventually and the invitation was revoked. The public didn’t mind; there were quite enough atheists at City College as it was.

The outstanding recollection I have of this episode is the testimony of one man who told the City Council of New York that he had visited Russell’s school for children in England. A young girl answered the door. She was naked. “Good God!” said the man. “There is no God” said the girl, and closed the door.

All this comes from a dissertation on the actions of the Post Office in (a) issuing a stamp to honor “anti-McCarthyism,” and (b) not issuing any that can by any stretch of the imagination threaten the separation of church and state by so much as mentioning anything about any religion whatsoever in any connection whatever. This got me to remembering people like Bishop Manning, who didn’t think that religion barred them from taking any part at all in the public affairs of this country. He wouldn’t have seen anything wrong with putting a picture of a religious figure on a stamp. Neither do I. If we can have stamp series honoring ballplayers, movie stars, cartoon figures, civil righters and dozens of other categories, how much harm can it do to have some showing famous preachers, missioners, chaplains, etc.? I’m for it, and I propose the first person honored should be the Reverend William Manning, D.D., Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of New York.






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POST OFFICE STAMPS OUT GOD A few weeks ago, since I sometimes buy stamps by mail I was sent a copy of USA Philatelic, the Post Office’s monthly bulletin announcing what new stamps have been issued and what older ones are still available for sale. One of the new issues announced was a stamp in honor of Margaret Chase Smith, the first woman Senator from Maine, who served in Washington in the Fifties. The citation for the stamp said that she was one of the first to stand up to “McCarthyism.” I took this kind of hard. Didn’t the Post Office realize that McCarthyism was an ethnic slur, intended to demonize (a) Irish Catholics, (b) Republicans, and © anti-Communists in general? So I did something unusual. I wrote a letter to the Postmaster General pointing this out to him and suggesting that he had made a mistake. I told him the bad word was nothing but a party slogan, dreamed up by the Democrats to denounce Republicans, and as such had no more right to qualify anyone for the postage stamp hall of fame than a Republican slogan like “creeping socialism” or “big government.” People didn’t get immortalized for this kind of thing, but only for uncontroversial things like winning battles or being “a voice for women” or “the father of the TVA.” Stuff like that, not name-calling. I got an answer back in due time, solemnly assuring me that politics never entered into the stamp-issuing process and my comments were deeply endruciated and would be entered into the records of the Dead Letter Office for the benefit of popsterity and blah, blah, blah. I wrote back threatening to expose the Red cell in the P.O. and to get the Postmaster drummed out of the Republican Party, to which he presumably belonged, and also to have the same done posthumously to Margaret Chase Smith. I did not, however, actually send this letter. Instead I discovered another flaw in the weave at the post office requiring attention, as I will now show. To appease me, shut me up and at the same time convince me of the purity of their motives, the posties sent me a brochure “Creating U.S. Postage Stamps”, explaining the whole process and intended to renew my confidence in their high ideals. The trouble is, one of their criteria is that there shall be a total absence of religion from any entanglement with postage stamps. The rules and regulations (not laws) read “Stamps…shall not be issued to honor religious institutions or individuals whose principal achievements are associated with religious undertakings or beliefs.” Take that, you religious nuts. That was it. No apologies, no explanations. This is the way the post office establishment wants it and this is the way it’s going to be. Religion is a dirty word and we don’t want it mentioned in this house. Anyone opening his mouth to do so will have it washed out with soap and will be sent to a re-education camp for an attitude adjustment. Why is this? Is religion so awful that all evidence of its existence must be eliminated from postage stamps--yes, postage stamps--for fear of the shock that would be given to the innocent minds of those who might come in contact with an envelope or a postcard bearing a stamp that contained one of the forbidden images? But how do we square this with the Christmas stamp that gets issued every year carrying the image of the Virgin Mary and the child Jesus? We know that this is done because Christmas is the greatest Christian holiday and can’t be ignored in a still largely Christian country. Compensation has been made, though, by the issuance of stamps for other holidays of other religions. Demands for more of the same are piling up as more and more Fire Worshippers and Holy Rollers and other seekers of truth crowd into the country. Outside of the holiday concessions the P.O. has handled this problem in the worst possible way. They have eliminated religion for fear of the protests that will come if one religion is favored over another. It’s been decided that because all beliefs are legal here today and enjoy equal privileges, then the P.O. can only choose neutrality and can only preserve it by ignoring all religions equally and giving none of them any stamp space. This means that only today counts and history is to be ignored. Stamps teach history, as everyone knows. If religion is completely eliminated from them, as it is now, then history is falsified. And if this is done with stamps, then what’s the matter with doing it with history books too? It’s a precedent that will be used in schools, no matter who tries to dismiss the possibility. The P.O. has got to bite the bullet and face the fact that America was founded as a Christian country and at least up to recent times has been the most Christian country in the world. That’s a truth and no one has the right to change it or to object to it either. So lets lift the ban on the forbidden subject and give the religious pioneers of this country their due. In colonial Massachusetts everyone was religious, but for stamp purposes it appears that Governor John Winthrop was the outstanding person. There were plenty of others too, Roger Williams, Ann Hutchinson, Cotton Mather, et. al Later there were the English evangelists, John Wesley and George Whitefield, who traveled the country, drawing huge crowds. In the 19th century America reciprocated, sending Moody and Sankey, preachers and hymn-writers, to England. Also in the 19th century Marcus Whitman, an ordained minister, led the first settlers into Oregon. Henry Ward Beecher was the best-known preacher in America. His sister Harriet wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin. America was a Protestant civilization, but there were Catholics in circulation and Jews also. Some of the early explorers were French priests like Marquette and Hennepin. Later there were bishops like John Hughes of New York and Cardinal Gibbons of Baltimore. In New York in the Thirties religion was led by Rabbi Wise, the Protestant Bishop Manning and the Catholic Cardinal Hayes. Religion is part and parcel of American history. For any government department to ignore it is blatant discrimination If the victims are mostly Christians, that still does not excuse it. Lets put a stop to it now. Let the Post Office start telling history like it is.

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