The Rego Park Vigilante: C’est Moi!

If a visitor to my borough of Queens in New York City were to stroll along the streets of my neighborhood, he might encounter me out for a walk, white hair and all. The steep hills promote great calf muscles for pedestrians, and both the Long Island Railroad and Queens Boulevard (the twelve- to fourteen-lane “Avenue of Death”) provide geographic boundaries for many of the homes of a particular ethnic mix in mid-Queens.

And what a mix it is.

First, a little history. Rego Park is an entity or village named and largely built by the real estate development firm Real Good Construction Company beginning in the 1920s. Prior to that time, the area was mostly farmland or fields, and was part of the great Hempstead Swamp first settled in 1653 by Dutch and English farmers as agricultural land. Eventually, the colonial farm families leased their property to Chinese farmers, who grew crops for the Manhattan Chinatown markets.

Queens is far from the myriad attractions of Manhattan, reached by seemingly endless subway rides—frequently lengthened by a variety of delays due to poor maintenance and decades-old trains—or numbing, congested car commutes. And Queens, like the borough of Brooklyn to its south, forms part of the western end of Long Island, containing highways and commuter trains traveling toward the outer reaches of the summer playgrounds of wealthy Manhattanites, joined by the Hampton Jitney buses transporting still more residents, summer employees, and beach lovers.

Queens is the most ethnically diverse urban area in the world, with between 176 spoken languages in the public schools to as many as 800 spoken languages in the borough, many almost extinct and no longer found in their places of origin throughout the world. Fewer than 50% of Queens children under five years old speak primarily English in their homes. Nearly one-quarter speak Spanish as a first language, and about 10% speak Russian or Bukhari (Jewish Russian Uzbeki, a cousin to Farsi). “It is the capital of language density in the world,” said Daniel Kaufman, an adjunct professor of linguistics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. The greatest number of Chinese-speakers outside of China proper live in Queens, or about 18% of the borough’s population, plus a number of other Asian-language speakers, including Indians, Koreans, and Filipinos.

Living in the midst of such diversity can be a challenge. Most Latino immigrants know enough English to get by, and the younger Bukhari generations have been in the country long enough to become fluent in spoken English. But the elderly Bukharis who emigrated with their children are often lost and isolated, or associate only with each other, and the great numbers of Chinese who have been settling in Rego Park to escape overcrowded Flushing further east in Queens (let alone the well-known but shrinking and gentrifying Chinatown in Manhattan) seem to have arrived from the mainland more recently. Their command of English is just about nonexistent for the older generations, and the younger set exchange spirited comments in Mandarin or other Chinese dialects. The youngest children are growing up bilingual, the usual tradition of immigrant children, often translating for their parents.

The city children’s services language access policy, by executive order, requires that essential public documents be printed in English, Spanish, Chinese, Russian, Haitian Creole, Arabic, Korean, Bengali, Urdu, and French. Some of these languages are more prevalent in Brooklyn or the Bronx, or even Staten Island and Manhattan. The non-Hispanic Caucasian population now constitutes a minority of the 8.4 million New York City residents, and in Queens, the most populous and second-largest borough, nearly half the population is foreign-born.

Alas, many immigrants are unfamiliar with American rules and regulations, especially for vehicular traffic (nor do many of them seem interested in learning those rules and regulations). And the neighborhood where I live is so congested that auto owners may circle the block for an hour or longer to park their cars legally. It is common for pedestrians to be physically threatened by impatient drivers at intersections who often circle those intersections while hoping to find a legal parking space, affecting the safety of hapless pedestrians trying to cross the street. Loud car honking and double parking are endemic.

This writer brooks no threatening vehicles. That is, although I realize that many Rego Park drivers are unfamiliar with the words “pedestrian” or “right of way,” and may not have encountered stop signs or traffic lights in their native cities or towns, they surely understand the concepts involved. Moreover, I am not easily intimidated. If I think I am in the right entering a crosswalk on foot—and I walk slowly with a slight limp—but some impatient driver attempts to flatten me with a car, I will catch the driver’s eye and hold up my hand in a “stop” position, and continue on my way.

Unfortunately, this is not always effective. And it is probably foolhardy. I may end up like the Roadrunner cartoon character splayed out flat on the pavement.

That is, some drivers play “chicken,” starting and stopping close to me as I cross the street to see if I will move aside so they may enter the crosswalk while I am still walking in it. Usually, pretending not to see these bullies will keep them at bay, but more than one has circled around me in the crosswalk with a vehicle, missing me by inches.

In such a case, if I can reach the car I will bang on the trunk with the flat of my hand as the car moves by to let the driver know this is verboten. (I try to take into account the repressive/permissive societies in the drivers’ countries of origin that encouraged this kind of direct action, coupled no doubt with bribes and other indicia of many third-world or former U.S.S.R. populations.) Generally, when events go this far, the driver (95% of the time a young male driver oozing testosterone) will pause for me. But there are times when a car has sped up inches from me and I recently screamed in fright when one of these child-like men used this tactic to try to intimidate me.

One young woman nearly ran me over during a turn into my crosswalk while speaking on a cell phone. When I told her that it was illegal to talk and drive, she looked at me blankly and continued her conversation.

And often one of these drivers will stop his car (frequently blasting rock, hip hop, rap, Spanish, Bukharan, or Arabic music), open the door and step out to give me a piece of his mind. When the drivers realize I am not a young stud like them spoiling for a fight but a senior citizen trying painfully to walk across the street, they tend to give up and return to their cars. One screamed F___ Y__ at the top of his lungs, letting the sound echo through the block as he drove off with his arm out the window and his index finger pointing skyward. I am then tempted of course to respond in kind, but playing with fire can get you burned, so I tend to limit my response to slapping the trunk of such a car as it drives by.

It is hard to adapt to a neighborhood where profanity is profuse in public, and street noise rarely stops. That’s what a resident of a lower middle-class neighborhood must expect in the electronic age in particular, where people have for years been typing out (often illiterate) cursing accusations and exclamations against anyone who posts an opinion that differs from that of the writer. Thus has anonymity of the Internet raised the stakes and made profanity (misspelled and mispunctuated) more the rule than the exception, verbally as well as typed on the Internet, at which I shake my head as much at the truly poor English as at the unbridled sewer language that has become common and predictable in the purported egalitarian electronic era.

But I digress.

Being the building and neighborhood scold means more than confronting misbehaving auto drivers. It encompasses:

(1) Writing down plate numbers and descriptions of parked cars with car alarms that may go off every hour for days on end, no doubt purchased used from former Manhattan owners whose replacement vehicles have better alarm systems. I may leave a note on the windshield of such vehicles telling them to get their hair-trigger alarms fixed or face a report to the police. One such owner was watching me write him such a note from an adjacent location and started his car remotely inches from where I stood, startling me.

(2) Reporting other street problems to the police, such as the placement by a stressed superintendent of a full-sized refrigerator by the curb for recyclable pickup the next day. I had already advised the super that he had a legal obligation to secure the door, to keep children from suffocating inside due to curiosity. That provided no response except a nasty remark, so I noted the street address and reported the problem to the police. Some hours later, I checked the refrigerator and saw that a chain had been fastened around the door. A young life potentially saved.

(3) Contacting utilities that have done work in the roads outside my window (used jackhammers to dig into the street to gas or electric lines, cable lines, water or sewer lines, and the like) and then left an unfinished worksite covered with one or more very heavy large steel plates (either emblazoned with the name of the utility doing the work or identified by a small saw horse bearing the utility's name next to the curb). Often the work is begun at the end of the workweek and the plate(s) left on the street through the weekend or considerably longer awaiting completion of repairs. For many of these plates, all four corners are not level with the street so that when a heavy vehicle such as a small truck or even an ordinary car drives over it, the plate may resound like a bomb going off, and this happens day and night. Hence, I find myself at odd hours checking the sites to determine the culpable utility and then make the requisite telephone call to get the errant plate adjusted. We don’t tend to have explosions in Rego Park, but when one of these plates is being subjected to a series of vehicle drive-overs, it can sound like a war zone (and wake the entire neighborhood in the middle of the night).

(4) Policing the halls of my co-op building from the intrusions of soliciting strangers. Dozens of menus may litter the hallways, left by employees of neighborhood restaurants. Worse, there is a con outfit calling itself IDT Energy that illegally gains access to homes, claiming that it can discount gas and electric costs if the resident will provide copies of recent Con Edison and National Grid electric and gas bills and then sign an authorization form. There is plenty of anti-consumer fine print in the sign-up contracts. This is, of course, a scam, but many elderly immigrants are so easily convinced by someone in a suit with an ID badge that they can pay lower rates that they let these people into the building and permit them to have free access to all the residents.

When I encounter these people, generally four or five aggressive young people swarming through the building on a weekday afternoon when most of the younger men are out working, I remind them that they are illegally trespassing on private property and must immediately leave the building or I will call the police. The last time this happened, quite recently, four men and one woman screamed abuse at me and initially refused to leave. As I yelled at them to get out, other residents came out of their units but did not help me, being wholly unacquainted with the problem (and possibly not understanding English anyway), although it has existed for years. The leader of the pack held up a video camera as he refused to budge and filmed and threatened me. He confronted me physically. By this time I was in the hallway with my keys and my phone, having locked my door behind me.

It took quite a while to move these five people off the third floor and down to the lobby and toward the entrance. Finally, having reached the local police who urged me to call 911, I telephoned the police emergency number and, at that point, the group of scam artists went to the building next door after attempting to ridicule me to concentrate their efforts on cheating our neighbors down the block. It took another fifteen minutes for the police to respond, and I was warned never to come out of my unit to “escort” these thieves from the building.

I can be pretty loud and aggressive when I feel it is warranted, and would do it again. And no doubt will. Especially since my building management and board of directors have ignored this problem for many years.

This is my promise: To be a royal pain toward anyone who is illegally in my building trying to sell anything.

But maybe it’s time to get a can of mace. Or pepper spray. Or both.

This might net me a medal (or a bullet) some day.

You can’t be too careful.

Maybe a good camera would help. Rego Park is not the garden spot of Queens. Or New York City generally.

It is, instead, the recipient of huge clouds of carbon monoxide that waft up from Queens Boulevard (and from within the subways under the road), or as my niece, a transplant nurse, once advised me, not a place where lung transplants are accepted. Nor, for that matter, are any lungs from New York City considered appropriate for transplants. The air pollution, while considerably healthier than Beijing or other megalopolises, is downright unhealthy much of the time and just about always next to the main roads.

This neighborhood should probably pay me a salary since I have become its watchdog, watchman, watchlady, or (best of all) its safety guard. I may not escort small children across the road to attend school, but I keep my eyes open and don’t hesitate to speak up. It’s too bad that Curtis Sliwa moved away from Forest Hills down the road a bit a few years ago. I could use a few Guardian Angels to patrol more regularly.

Readers?

Donald Trump: People Will Eventually Catch On

As anyone who follows American politics has been made aware, billionaire Donald Trump claims to be running for the Republican nomination for President. As a Libertarian.

He says he is actually running. He holds rallies with significant turnout. He leads the fifteen other Republicans who are vying for the nomination in the polls. His private jet takes him all over the country to meet his public. He promises to release his financial statements including income tax returns (just as soon as Jeb Bush does the same), claiming a net worth of $10 billion, perhaps less than half what he really owns. He appears at a variety of press conferences. He is a guest on news programs. He gets invited to some talk shows.

There is even a Twitter hashtag #TrumpYourCat that features photos of cats wearing Trump hairpieces made with their own combed-out fur—such as Grumpy Cat a/k/a the scowling Trumpy Cat.

Just what and who is this strange-looking pontificating windbag with the flying locks that threaten to ascend like a helicopter in a stiff wind?

He is a 69-year-old native New Yorker born in the Borough of Queens, of German and Scottish ancestry, a billionaire who was given his financial start by his successful father, a New York City real estate developer. As a teenager, the young Donald had been dismissed from a private Queens secondary academy for behavioral problems, and thereafter transferred to the New York Military Academy, where he played numerous sports, including football. He attended Fordham University and the Wharton School to concentrate on real estate studies, graduating with a B.S. in economics and anthropology—as well as a war chest of $200,000 courtesy of his father. Some years later Donald John Trump was even awarded an honorary doctorate by the evangelical Liberty University of Lynchburg, Virginia, founded by that avatar of the Moral Majority, the late Reverend Jerry Falwell.

This was some years after Trump’s Bavarian paternal grandfather changed the paterfamilias surname of Drumph to the more dazzling Trump.

And like Howard Hughes before him, The Donald has a “morbid fear of shaking hands.”

Trump began his real estate empire in middle-class real estate in Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island, and then turned around a forlorn Cincinnati apartment complex belonging to his father, selling it for a tidy profit. Focusing again on New York City and a variety of larger building projects, Trump ultimately used a $40 million city tax abatement to turn a bankrupt Commodore Hotel into the Grand Hyatt, and created The Trump Organization. By 1988 he had acquired his first gambling casino, and then another, nearly losing all in a corporate bankruptcy shortly thereafter. The year 2001 saw the completion of the 72-tower Trump World Tower across from the United Nations (which Trump insists is 90 stories high), perhaps the tallest residential building in New York, glass walls gleaming with dark bronze tint in the sun. Trump claims to have considered a career as a film producer or studio executive, but chose to concentrate on more lucrative opportunities in real estate development.

The Donald has built a number of other residential and commercial towers, including the luxurious 52-story Trump International Hotel and Tower completed in 2003 and located at Columbus Circle, characterized by a golden world globe at the intersection of Central Park West and Central Park South. A recent kerfuffle over the disappearance of marble benches in the lobby for the use of the public at another Trump tower located at 725 Fifth Avenue—replaced by stores selling luxury goods marketing the Trump name—has received almost no attention by the New York Department of Buildings.

The Trump Entertainments Resorts, Inc. owns the Trump Taj Mahal, and formerly owned other gaming properties, most in Atlantic City. Four business bankruptcies, including one filed in 2014, have kept these properties afloat and protected Trump’s personal assets.

Other Trump businesses over the years have included:

— A television show that Trump hosted, “The Celebrity Apprentice,” which immortalized Donald’s favorite punchline, “You’re fired!”

— The Miss USA pageant, although it has suffered from adverse publicity generated by Candidate Trump

— Trump bottled water Trump Ice, which was short-lived and is hard to find

— The search engine GoTrump.com for luxury travel deals, which lasted about a year before it was shut down

— Trump Magazine, a glitzy annual magazine now known as the Jewel of Palm Beach, which is distributed at Trump properties and through a resort media group

— The New Jersey Generals football team, which lasted only a season or two

— Trump Airlines (formerly, Eastern Air Shuttle), which was a Trump property for about four years before being sold

— Trump University, which has been described as being an “extended infomercial” preying on student fears, is no longer in business, and has been sued by the New York State Attorney General for defrauding students

Real estate businesses are still the most lucrative enterprises in Donald Trump’s portfolio, but other less well-known ventures have met differing fates, i.e., there have been Trump Mortgage, which vanished shortly after the 2007 real estate crash, Trump Steaks, high-priced and still served in Trump properties around the world, Trump Vodka which may or may not still be marketed under the Trump name, and Trump: The Game, a Monopoly-like board game that has survived, barely.

The reader will note the preponderance of Trump’s name on nearly all of his businesses.

His personal life reflects his views on women: They must be young, gorgeous, and compliant. To date he has married a young Czech skier Ivana Zelníčková, who remained a celebrity in her own right, by whom he fathered two sons and a daughter. After their divorce in 1992, The Donald married the pretty young Marla Maples, fathered a fourth child, and was divorced within six years. He is currently married to the former Melania Knauss, by whom he has fathered a fifth child, now nine years old. His children have so far produced seven grandchildren.

No one seems to question his overt hostility toward women who may criticize or disagree with him. That is, as Jezebel noted only three years ago:

“The trouble with Trump is the hostility he reserves for the women he doesn't like, basing his insults and jabs largely on their looks, weight, and sex lives. The most notorious of these was his 2006 battle with Rosie O'Donnell—a fight that was such a media shitstorm that . . . years later, he continues to dredge up when he needs some attention. Responding to her comments on The View about his defense of Miss USA Tara Conner, Trump called O'Donnell a ‘fat pig’ and an ‘animal’ to basically anyone who would listen, from reporters to late night talk show hosts. The worst of it was probably a two-minute rant he filmed for Entertainment Tonight that was so vile, the show decided not to air it on television.”

Donald Trump has pretended to enter the race for the presidency at least twice in recent presidential election lead-ups, and then dropped out quickly. But in 2015 he is actually proceeding with his “campaign,” having achieved significant notoriety in recent years with his endless shrill demands that President Obama produce his birth certificate, claiming that Barack Obama is not a natural-born U.S. citizen (causing the President to actually produce the birth certificate). A remarkable display of crazy, playing right into the hands of similar constituents.

Trump has in recent weeks before huge, boisterous crowds:

— Described immigrants who yearn for a path to legal citizenship or even residency as being violent offenders, including rapists, purposefully sent to the U.S. to harm Americans, and adding that U.S. officials were being "dumb" in dealing with immigrants in the country illegally: "These people wreak havoc on our population.”

— Characterized Senator John McCain, who endured more than five years of captivity and torture by the North Vietnamese, as no war hero, suggesting that McCain might have been a war hero if he hadn’t been caught. (Trump sought and received four Vietnam War student deferments and then was reclassified 4-F for purportedly having bone spurs in one or both feet; draft records are incomplete and neither support nor contradict this claim.)

— Been described by South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham as a “jackass,” and in response, Trump yelled out Graham’s private office telephone number at a public rally and urged his audience to let Graham know how they feel about him

— Criticized candidate Texas Governor Rick Perry for wearing glasses as a foil to make voters think he looks intelligent

— Become a bombastic hero to crowds of ignorant conservative Republican voters who are thriving on Trump’s outrageous rhetoric and finding an outlet for their anger at feeling helpless under an onslaught of circumstances that they do not understand and cannot accept (and which the Republican party has largely created)

Republicans worry whether any of the other hopefuls in their party can keep up with Trump’s fast (and profane) mouth on a primary debate stage: possibly the quick but mean-tempered Chris Christie, maybe another contender with courage and a thick skin.

In the final analysis, let us look at Trump’s own prediction from one of his ghost-written books, Trump: The Art of the Deal: “You can create excitement, you can do wonderful promotion and get all kinds of press, and you can throw in a little hyperbole. But if you don’t deliver the goods, people will eventually catch on.”

Twenty-First Century Human Males Nesting in Manhattan Island

The New York City unmarried, heterosexual man over age fifty who resides chiefly in Manhattan is an evolving species, an improvement over the Neanderthal but not quite on a par with the average Twenty-First Century Homo Sapiens (“HS”). In my admittedly unscientific sampling, I’d have to say such men are still evolving lackadaisically to make it all the way to HS. “Hetero Sap” might be a good evolutionary point at which to begin our analysis.

Some say such men have been spotted in Central Park since the early 1900s, rarely making fires but rather occasionally jogging slowly around the park with glazed eyes and limping gait. When not moving, they may be spotted carrying The New York Times as well as books about manhood, America, sports, politics, and sex, according to Esquire. They are generally easy to identify since most are balding and wear caps and sport unkempt beards and sparse long hair to compensate.

I can’t remember the other details of their sartorial appearance, especially the ones over age sixty-five. Their clothes are often nondescript, unironed, occasionally unwashed, and may well have been plucked from the chaos of a dusty, darkened closet. These men tend to own a favorite bedraggled sweater or college jacket with frayed necklines and sleeves.

Most of the time their socks match. I try not to look at their feet if they are wearing only sandals.

Ties, a relic of their bar mitzvahs, are nowhere in evidence.

And they have about as much sex appeal as orangutans.

Some say most aging New York Hetero Saps are either exploding with self-importance or halfway to comatose. They remember the cute young things that got away, wishing they were still twenty-five and didn’t need Viagra. Any female over forty is dismissed as Over The Hill.

On the plus side, they get their pants hemmed, unlike the under-forty crowd, male and female, who would rather walk all over the bottoms until their pant legs become dangerously rent trip hazards. Even more important, these aging men tend to live in rent-controlled or rent-stabilized Manhattan apartments, frequently in fourth- or fifth-floor walk-ups where they moved forty to fifty years ago and hence cannot be legally forced out, and as a result pay rent that is significantly lower than the average struggling young family.

Many have nice pensions and Social Security Retirement checks. They can eat out every meal. They may not be living on Easy Street but they will never be homeless or have to patronize soup kitchens.

Most live alone with either a dog or a couple of cats, their most recent significant relationship with a female Homo Sapiens having ended fifteen or twenty years earlier. The dog walkers consider their fellow dog walkers to be their real best friends, and plan the walks to encounter these fellow canine exercisers with whom they share the cherished bond of Cleaning Up The Poop.

They also tend to believe that being able to cook one good dish demonstrates that they are accomplished chefs. They may cook that same dish for three months at a time before altering their cooking rotation.

They are less prone to pepper their emails with LOL, prolly, IYKWIM, or thx, but use real words. They rarely text, if they even know how. Most of them can spell rather well, especially as compared to their younger counterparts, excepting young Indian-Americans who generally win the Scripps Spelling Bee.

Many Hetero Saps watch porn on their computers, tablets, and iPhones. Others prefer fantasy card games such as Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft; Ascension: Chronicles of the Godslayer; Star Realms; and Hex: Shards of Fate—titles worthy of escapist adolescents. Still others play video games including the most popular (League of Legends) for hours at a time, most of them violent and misogynistic. Nearly all these games feature omnipotent heroes, otherworldly villains, dragons, dangerous animals, voluptuous maidens in distress, in short, the animated stuff of early comic books come vividly to life on a small dark screen and sold as software on playing platforms.

For those of us who are unfamiliar with the gaming culture, it is a huge world unto itself, lucrative, apparently mesmerizing, with all failures remaining online—not visible to real people. After all, Hetero Saps fear public humiliation above all things.

The men who spend so many hours watching porn and participating in gaming tend to be proficient in utilizing the hoards of new apps flooding the electronic market. They enjoy technological challenges. When I was a kid, they might have been trading comic books or blowing up chemistry kits in the family basement.

Which is to say, they’re not ignorant, merely dumb.

It’s when they try to relate to people, especially those of the female persuasion, that they fall short of the mark. Pretty damned short, if you ask me.

So I’ll put it to the Hetero Saps of the city with whom I cross paths from time to time: Why won’t you make an effort to have a real conversation? What emotional distress are you sublimating that needs to be aired? Why are you so afraid to be part of the real world? And what childhood/young manhood traumas trigger adrenaline and other stress hormones to send you running from your female contemporaries without a backward glance or farewell?

Did a favorite aunt try to smother you with a pillow in your crib? Were you forced to help your mother do the laundry? Did your father humiliate you for your inability to hit a baseball further than ten feet? Were you generally the last to be chosen for games at recess? And have too many marriages dissolved when your wives walked out on you or dates ended when your female companions simply disappeared?

What caused you to quit evolving all the way to Homo Sapiens and regress to your childhood? Was Darwin mistaken in his groundbreaking book On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection? Or have the Manhattan Hetero Saps simply been overtaken and left behind during the selection process?

What's the Matter with Kansas (Redux)?

I read the news and I shudder.

Thanks to the curdled “leadership” of Governor Sam Brownback, Kansas welfare recipients cannot, according to a new bill just signed into law, access their $400 per month benefits in cash except to a limit of $25 per day from an ATM. That would mean making 16 withdrawals each and every month. Or, the Governor suggested, people could pay their bills with money orders. If their creditors would not accept payment by the state’s debit cards.

Hey, Gov, money orders can cost up to $5 each (when’s the last time Sammy boy bought a money order to pay for anything?). Four hundred dollars won’t go far if money order fees consume a chunk of it.

And suppose it’s February, like the February we just survived, and the temperature is below zero and folks really don’t feel like going to the ATM in order to get money for food or other necessities.

A Kansas advocacy group issued a statement pointing out that this new law will prevent many poor families from participating in other support programs, including a Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or food stamps.

There’s more, a whole lot more.

Welfare recipients who have the misfortune to live in the great state of Kansas, home of some of the craziest of the right-wing loonies, cannot use their benefits to spend money for alcoholic beverages, casino gambling or gaming, jewelry, tattoos, massages, body piercings, spas, nail salons, lingerie (you mean they can’t buy underwear?), tobacco, vapor cigarettes, fortune-tellers, bail bonds, video arcades, movies at theaters, access to swimming pools, cruise ships, theme parks, race tracks or off-track betting, lottery tickets, concert tickets (no Taylor Swift or Eminem for you!), most sporting events, any other entertainment events open to the general public, sex paraphernalia, strip clubs, and places where minors under 18 are not permitted (i.e., bars and sex clubs).

Ah, but there is a saving grace in the Gov’s bill: Kansas recipients of welfare can buy guns with their Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) cards. (Does this mean that our friends and neighbors on welfare might apply for TANF just to acquire money to buy a Ruger, a Glock, or a Smith and Wesson? And then hold up their friendly neighborhood grocery stores? Or even the aforementioned off-limits liquor stores? The possibilities are endless.)

And what is to prevent these needy folks from withdrawing cash and then spending the money on any of the verboten items in Brownback’s miserly legislation? Nothing at all. There appears to be no provision for body cams or electronic tracking devices to be attached to the ankles of the presumed-to-be-guilty-of-spending-money-to-survive recipients of TANF money. (What? No surveillance? But Kansas has implied that people who get welfare are up to no good. Unless you are a gun-owner. Then you are exercising your Constitutional rights.)

We used to label folks who receive welfare (generally, single mothers with young children) “welfare queens” who drove Cadillacs and had a dozen out-of-wedlock kids just to increase the amount of their welfare benefits and live the high life. Until Bill Clinton put an end to that (which really never existed except in the fevered minds of the Wall Street gang and their toadies). That’s right, folks, the Clinton welfare reforms tended to limit the number of years that people could receive welfare benefits and put parents with children of school age to work for a number of hours each week as a condition for being eligible for benefits.

So the era of easy living on welfare (the fantasy of easy living on welfare, because believe me, it isn’t easy at all) came to an end a couple of decades ago, and the American public, a/k/a the filthy rich politicians and their billionaire corporate cronies, got its money’s worth from those lazy folks who just didn’t want to work for a living. (Trust me, taking care of children is full-time work, hard work: no maids, nannies, or play dates for these families.)

Sam Brownback is rumored to be interested in running for President in 2016. In preparation, he has cut $45 million in his state’s public school funding. The Kansas public schools and colleges are struggling to stay open and it’s only April. He cut taxes for the wealthy so much that he may be forced to raise them again. And now he has become an inspiration to the governors and legislators in other states that have set strict limits on what, exactly, welfare recipients may spend the state’s money on, as if such people didn’t need every dime to pay for rent, food, and transportation. No limousine liberals on TANF.

As the LA Times put it, Kansas is breaking new ground in demeaning the poor. And states such as Missouri (where a bill is pending to deny poor people the right to purchase cookies, chips, energy drinks, soft drinks, seafood, or steak with food stamps) are emulating Kansas. Some role model.

The New Republic has pointed out that in Brownback’s rush to create a “conservative utopia,” he instead established a “conservative hell.” I need hardly mention that Kansas has rejected the establishment of a state ACA Medicaid program, relinquishing $5.3 billion in federal funding and $2.6 billion in Medicaid reimbursements. Kansas is the only state with a reported increase in the percentage of uninsured individuals between 2013 and 2014, according to Karla Anderson, writing for HealthInsurance.org. This includes a number of disabled recipients who have lost their coverage altogether.

“Navigators” who assist people to sign up for ACA coverage pursuant to the federal exchange, under a Kansas bill that could have authorized them under a proposed state health insurance exchange, would have been subjected to onerous additional eligibility requirements, leading to further increases in the number of Kansas uninsured. Such individuals would have been required to undergo criminal background checks including fingerprinting, provide their credit histories, and pay a $100 annual registration fee. Scrooge is alive and well in Kansas. Cutting off his nose to spite his face, as my mother used to say.

In closing, let’s not forget Brownback’s local booster club: The Wichita-based Koch Brothers, the largest contributors to Brownback’s campaigns. Now there’s a fan club worth cultivating. D’ya think maybe Charlie and Dave Koch had a little chat with Sammy B? You bet your life they did (apologies to Groucho).

For God’s Sake, Open the Door!

In our worst nightmares we speed toward destruction in the dramatic style of film characters Thelma and Louise, whose car is last pictured frozen in time hurtling over the abyss of the Grand Canyon, forever out of reach of law enforcement, plunging hundreds of feet to oblivion. These two icons have, in a hasty but decisive act to avoid capture and imprisonment, elected this catastrophic ending as a last resort.

We the viewers know the car would fall and crash in real time, but we’d rather remember the exuberant women who sought respite from humdrum lives only to become ensnared first by violence and then by their resulting need for survival and escape as they locked hands and sped toward the void.

Unlike Thelma and Louise, most of us wake from our nightmares unscathed, understanding that we were merely dreaming. Perhaps we even speculate about the meaning of such dreams: Do our lives feel like we’re going off a cliff, losing control, heading for disaster? If so, we do our best to exercise restraint if our feelings seem to be accelerating toward calamity. We seek peace, loss of anxiety, and a secure future.

Maintaining status, control, job security—these goals were slipping away from Andreas Lubitz, the young German commercial airline co-pilot who could imagine no life worth living beyond piloting a Lufthansa Germanwings Airbus across Europe, but could not in the end control the demons that caused his “severe subjective burnout” and depression, accompanied by suicidal thoughts. Instead, as he confided to a former girlfriend, he speculated that, “One day I will do something that will change the whole system, and then all will know my name and remember it.”

He was instructed to provide his employer with several medical reports that specified he was not fit to fly. Instead he discarded those reports in the trash. He apparently consulted with up to five different German clinics about both his mental health and troublesome eyesight, possibly a side effect of his anxiety or medications for same. None of the doctors could give him hope (nor did they appear to investigate further or report their findings to Lufthansa, regardless of German medical privacy laws that arguably did not entirely prevent them from doing so under the totality of the circumstances).

Days before the flight Andreas researched online how the Airbus cockpit locking mechanism could be set in play, when and how it could be opened, and how it could be rendered unassailable. The stage was set. He encouraged the pilot in charge to take a bathroom break after the plane reached cruising altitude near the Alps, leaving him alone in the cockpit. He then locked the door to the cockpit, set the cruise mechanism to descend to 100 feet—far below the Alpine terrain—and overrode the efforts of the pilot to regain admission to the controls.

This pygmy of a man who believed his life was over if he could no longer be at the controls of an airliner then sat in silence for an excruciating eight minutes, breathing evenly, even accelerating the plane's speed, while the pilot banged and hammered on the door, ground control was unable to obtain an audible response, and passengers finally started screaming in terror as the inevitable crash loomed.

The resulting impact after a descent from 38,000 feet to the altitude of the French Alps, at about 6,000 feet, occurred at a speed of about 700 kilometers per hour or 435 miles per hour. The plane and its occupants were pulverized when the plane hit the mountains, the debris field covering several adjacent slopes. Rescuers have relied on DNA to identify victims.

There were 149 passengers and crew who died with Andreas Lubitz when he set an Airbus on an automatic course to crash into the French Alps last week. Available audio indicates that the chief pilot was screaming and beating at the impregnable door, perhaps with a fire ax, yelling, “For God’s sake, open the door!” As the plane inexorably descended, the passengers were shouting in fear, their fate determined by a 27-year-old man who could not face his future without aviation but instead sought immortality through a breathtaking act of barbarity.

Thelma and Louise made an improvised pact in their last few conscious seconds to drive off the rim of the Grand Canyon to their deaths rather than spend the rest of their lives in prison, but Andreas Lubitz made no pact with any of the occupants of the plane he piloted into the side of a French mountain. They had no chance to opt out. They had no warning. They were not willing to end their lives. And so the 149 passengers and crew, young and old, seasoned fliers and nervous inexperienced travelers, were carried to their doom by the fears and insecurities of a selfish, dishonest, pitiable excuse for a man.

It is not hard to kill oneself; there are dozens of ways to do this publicly or privately. And in lovers’ quarrels, it is not unusual that a heartsick or revengeful partner kills his wife or girlfriend as well as himself, even other family members such as minor children.

But to methodically pilot a planeload of the innocent to their doom from the clouds to the mountains below is beyond diabolical. It is an act of aggression against the common good that does not suggest doing “something that will change the whole system, [so that] all will know [his] name and remember it.”

It is madness. It is a crime against humanity. It is the ultimate fear that clutches our hearts every time we are in the air and depend upon the skill of a pilot to bring us safely back to earth. If a well-respected airline such as Lufthansa cannot protect us from savagery like the Germanwings suicide crash, then none of us will ever be safe.

We do not wish to remember Andreas Lubitz. His remains should be buried in an unmarked grave. And although his act may never be forgotten, his infamous name should be obliterated from history.