It appears that gun control will be an issue in the upcoming election. We say this because Hillary Clinton says so, and is already bringing it up in her primary campaign. She may even have some emails on the subject. We hope so. It gives the Republicans a chance to spend a few million dollars to find out.
Our position on guns is clear. Guns don’t kill. People do. So if you shoot all the people, problem solved.
In Florida, if someone introduces a bill allowing you to shoot everybody, it would probably pass. What would not pass is a bill saying that crazy people should not be allowed to shoot people. The second amendment does not speak to that. But polls sure do. As recently as Tuesday’s Sun-Sentinel, a poll conducted for the University of South Florida said 85 percent of those surveyed favor mental health screening before a person can buy or receive a gun.
That is a pretty lopsided poll, but consistent with studies elsewhere. You would think such attitudes could be easily translated into law. If that happened, there would be very few guns out there. There are basically three categories of people who possess handguns. One is law enforcement people who sometimes need to shoot the second category—bad people who need guns to protect themselves if something goes wrong when they are committing a crime. The third category, which may be the largest, is people who are crazy.
These are the people who think they need a gun to protect themselves from category two criminals, which doesn’t happen very often, and when it does it is often somebody shooting somebody without any real good reason, except maybe they are drunk, and then claiming self defense under Florida’s “stand your ground” law.
If these people really feel threatened, they are at least a little paranoid, which is a form of mental illness, depending on the degree of paranoia. If there’s someone who read about a mass shooting, and immediately ran out and bought a gun (often another gun, because they think that government is going to take their guns away, so they need to own several of them), then they are seriously paranoid, which does qualify as crazy. And if they think they need to own a military assault rifle for protection, then they are seriously crazy.
One way or the other, such people would have a hard time qualifying for a gun if they had to pass a mental health test and explain why they needed a concealable handgun or an assault rifle. They would be refused the purchase of a gun on the grounds they were crazy. In summary, most people who wanted to buy a gun would be deemed crazy, and therefore couldn't have one. This is such a basic concept that it would make a good book.
Problem is somebody already wrote it. It is called Catch 22.
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While Gov. Rick Scott is in New York urging businesses and people to move to Florida, people in Florida are wondering where they will go when the state disappears under the waves. The timing could not be more ironic. The governor makes these recruiting trips when something as predictable as high tides give South Florida a foretaste of the kind of flooding that climate experts say is only going to get worse, possibly much faster than originally thought.
The page one story in Tuesday's Sun Sentinel reported that South Florida may have passed the point of no return for some cities—even if the current emissions of greenhouse gases gets no worse. Now, we are not scientists, as Republicans like to say, but most of our faculties are intact and that is enough to note that floods are getting worse and more frequent, and roads we haven’t seen flooded in 40 years are now routinely covered by storms or high tides.
Just around the corner from where we sit, a small canal (actually a natural branch of a river that has been canalized) flooded for a day. The current there does not seem very strong, but it was enough to erode about 10 feet of the bank and start crumbling part of the roadway. In just one day. It was a mini-version of the erosion that took away part of A1A along Fort Lauderdale’s public beach when Hurricane Sandy (which did not hit close to Florida) caused unusual tides to hammer the road.
The Sun Sentinel story provides some scary statistics. It says that even extreme cuts in greenhouse gases would preserve by 2,100 high ground in Fort Lauderdale now occupied by only 17,555 of the city’s 165,521 residents; Boca Raton would do somewhat better, losing only about 25 percent of the land now occupied by humans.
And Gov. Scott goes to New York to ask more people to come here. To accommodate them, many South Florida officials seem happy to approve high-density projects in areas already prone to flooding. Even small plots of open land, which can accommodate vegetation to absorb water, are paved over to worsen the situation by channeling more runoff into rivers and canals.
We wonder if part of the urge to build on the part of developers stems not so much from ignorance, as from the unnerving knowledge that if they don’t move fast they may be too late. Are they thinking they have an expensive piece of property where they can only preserve their investment by building as much as they can and sell out as quickly as they can? Before laws or simple old-fashioned morality will force them to tell prospective buyers that their highrise water view may someday be straight down at parking lots where their cars sit half submerged.
Not being scientists, we have no authority to wonder if the destruction of a section of A1A by a hurricane a thousand miles away might be repeated sooner rather than later on a much larger scale, perhaps totally wiping out a beach road and sending water into the lobbies of hotels and condos where the smell of new construction is still fresh.
The answer from people who are admittedly not scientists: bring more polluting people and build while you can. And consider cranes on houseboats.
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The news arrived via the media. The Sun Sentinel reporter told my wife, Peggy, that our daughter was one of three kids picked to meet the pope at Miami International. She doubted him. She thought Julie was one of a bunch from her school who would be at the airport—some minor role in greeting the Polish pope. No, said the reporter, only three and he wanted to know all about Julie.
Turns out he was right. The late Father Timothy Hannon, pastor at Fort Lauderdale’s St. Anthony Parish, had been asked to pick a mainstream kid from his school to be among three children greeting Pope John Paul II when he arrived in the U.S. Naturally a priest from Ireland (we used to call him Canon Hannon from Shannon) picked a kid with an Irish name and Irish freckles. Julie was 9, in the fourth grade.
And so it came to pass, one September morning in 1987. Julie, wearing a new Blessed Mother blue dress, was there at the bottom of the ramp when the pope’s plane pulled in. President Ronald Reagan, also a widely known figure at the time, was also present with his wife. We were in a grandstand 50 yards away, closely watched by 10,000 secret service guys. It had been an exciting day for the school and our neighborhood. Tom Adler, our neighbor, gave Julie some marketing advice.
“When you get close to the pope shout ‘Coca Cola’ and you’ll never have to work for the rest of your life,” he said. Julie was just old enough not to do that. Instead, she said whatever they had told her to say, which was, “Welcome to Florida,” or something like that. The pope told her she had a nice smile, which she did, despite missing a few front teeth. It was a busy day. Julie talked to reporters from everywhere, and at the request of Kevin Boyd, managing editor of the late Hollywood Sun, she wrote a personal account of her day. We scooped the Sun Sentinel and Miami Herald big time. Late in the day, as we drove home, Julie fell asleep.
The next day, a thousand miles away at Notre Dame, one of his roommates asked Mark McCormick what his little sister was doing the day before. Mark, who had sort of forgotten about the event, thought that question odd. “Well, she’s on the front page of the Chicago Tribune,” the roommate said.
That was true. Not just the Tribune, but also just about every paper in the country carried the same photograph. For weeks friends around the country were sending copies of the front pages of their local papers. It was a day to remember, and last week when the current pope made his highly publicized rounds of Washington, New York and Philadelphia, Peggy was glued to the television. She was watching Pope Francis excite much of the country, but she was seeing memories.
Meanwhile, in Washington, Julie McCormick Donovan took her children, ages six and four, to be among the crowds gathered to see the pope drive by. She sent a cell phone video of the kids pressed against a formidable fence as the entourage passed by. You can hear her say, “Look for the little car. There it is!”
We acknowledged receipt of the video with a memory. “You had a better view last time.”
The Republican debates, which started well, showed a decline in audience the second time around. At this rate the show will be cancelled before its first season is complete. Can this program be saved? The answer is yes, and here’s how.
First, the entrance of a dozen or so candidates needs some cosmetic help. Their appearance should be accompanied by a trumpet playing “My Old Kentucky Home” which is the only other place you will find such a crowded field. Instead of jockeys, who often don’t speak English, each candidate should be escorted by a scantily clad young woman, similar to those who hold up the signs indicating the round at minor boxing events. We hope they still do that; we haven’t seen a live fight since Joe Frazier beat Oscar Bonavena in the Garden in 1966.
Anyway this should get the audience aroused, but it is just a start. The big problem in the first two debates is that the candidates, when not insulting each other, say things that are either true or not true. The average person has no way of quickly verifying if Carly Fiorina was a good president of Hewlett-Packard who just had the misfortune of hitting a bad economy and an unhappy board of directors, or was as incompetent as Donald Trump says she was. It takes days to sort that out, as with former Florida Governor Jeb Bush’s claim that Donald Trump gave him money to land a casino in our state. Who knows? In politics both sides can be right.
It is easier to say that Donald Trump, when pouting as he does a lot, bears a strong resemblance to Benito Mussolini, who was once a supporter of Adolf Hitler but was slightly less ethically challenged and still wound up being hung upside down. Hitler, always posing as a humble leader, wore a plain military uniform without rank. Mussolini was less inhibited, sporting snappy outfits, and because he did not have Trump’s hair, fancied unusual hair pieces, such as a fez with glittering insignia.
We digress. Back on topic, the scantily clad women would have a role in bringing transparency to the debate. They would stand behind the candidates, and be equipped with one of those technical devices that suggest untruth by reading a person’s voice and body language. When an untruth, or partial deception, registers on their registrars, an enormous klaxon would sound and the women would hit the candidate in the face with a cream pie. Some of them would need a lot of pies.
Perhaps a better idea would be to have the candidates sit in swings above a vat of water, as in carnivals where one throws a baseball, and if it hits the bull’s-eye, sends the swinger falling into the water. Each time the untruth register goes off, a wild cackle like the witch in the fun house would sound, and the candidate would be plunged into the water, only to be jerked quickly back up, dripping and ready for the next dipping. Alternatively, a bucket of iced Gatorade would sit above each candidate’s head, and the deceptive statement would send it pouring down upon them.
And because Americans love a winner, and instant gratification, we will not wait for the networks to give us an opinion. Instead we will have the audience decide by cheering at the end, or doing a wave, or whatever. And one of the scantily clad women will present the winner with a Mussolini hat. Non-shrink, of course.
When Gaeton Fonzi moved to Florida in 1972, he took the state seriously. He got into boating, got his captain’s license and spent many hours over the next several decades maintaining a sailboat, and occasionally even using it. He once made it all the way to the Bahamas, but when returning to Miami he encountered the gulfstream and wound up in Palm Beach, and was happy to be there. He also eventually got into distance running and knocked off a marathon or two. He also played tennis, and liked to write about it.
It was tennis that almost brought Jimmy Evert into his life. Gaeton’s wife Marie decided it would be a hoot to buy Gaeton one lesson from Chris Evert’s father as a Christmas present. Chris at the time was young in what would be an illustrious career. It was a touching idea, and of course Jimmy Evert did not think so. He explained to Marie that one lesson for a 38-year-old man wasn’t exactly what he did for a living. He did not have to explain that he worked with young players, such as his own kids, getting them ready for Wimbledon.
Marie knew that, of course, but she can be persuasive, and she explained that it would mean a lot to her husband. She probably did not tell Mr. Evert that Gaeton would likely write an amusing article about it. The Fonz was known for hard-hitting investigative pieces, such as his stories in Philadelphia magazine that helped prompt the publisher of The Philadelphia Inquirer, the powerful Walter Annenberg, to sell the newspaper and leave town. Or, after Fonzi came to Florida, his work on the Kennedy Assassination that has gone a long way toward convincing most of our countrymen that JFK was killed by a government conspiracy, and not by a lone nut. But he also had a delightful touch on shorter, less earth-shattering topics, such as growing up above the Hudson River in New Jersey, dreaming of becoming Joe DiMaggio.
As fate would happen, the tennis lesson never happened. According to Marie, the lesson was scheduled twice, but both times canceled because of rain. It must have been summer. Marie lost interest in pursuing the matter, and we feel sure Gaeton was not nuts about wasting a great teacher’s time in the first place. Since Gaeton left us two years ago, and Jimmy Evert just recently, that will remain a lesson untaught. There is scant evidence that the history of tennis would have been altered in any event.
Now an Evert family story that did happen was some 20 years later. One of the qualities of Jimmy Evert and his wife Colette was that they never let daughter Chris’ fame affect their lifestyle much. For a while you might even call them the first family of Fort Lauderdale, but they remained a low-key couple, faithful to the values they grew up with. Their kids all went through St. Anthony School, which was within walking distance of their first home.
Their five kids were long gone from the school in the early 1990s when our mother-in-law, well into her 80s and not well, came to live with us. She wasn’t up to attending Sunday mass, but Catholic parishes have a program that brought communion to the homes of the sick. For several years a very pleasant woman who showed up faithfully week after week performed this duty, cheering on our mother-in-law throughout the process. The communion bearer’s name was Colette Evert, mother to a champion, wife of a legendary coach and provider of a lesson in humility, grace and kindness.
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Round two of the Confederate flag war is underway. Now we see the pushback from those who like to flaunt the stars and bars. Unfortunately, they are the same motorcycle and pickup truck set that branded the flag as socially unacceptable in the first place.
What is disturbing is not so much the depiction of the Confederate flag as a symbol of slavery, which has evolved into racism, but the tendency of the flag-haters to distort the reality of the whole Civil War. We saw a black congressman on television attacking the flag and saying that if the South had won the Civil War, he would be a slave today.
Such nonsense. Can anyone seriously believe that slavery would have continued for long in this country had there been no Civil War? Moral reasons aside, the industrial revolution alone was rapidly replacing human work with machines. But moral reasons alone had already turned much of the world against slavery. Even some prominent Confederate leaders, beginning with Robert E. Lee, gave service to their native states even as they were personally turning against slavery. It was doomed.
As we noted in round one, the flag debate has had the unfortunate side effect of hardening the belief that the Civil War was only about slavery. It is true that slavery was the economic cause of the war. Southern state legislatures were dominated, much as most states are today, by commercial interests, and they were the slave owners. As today, the middle class had little voice in the decision to secede. And yet the middle class (if we can use that term for 19th century life) did the fighting and dying.
The common soldier owned no slaves, but in that era his first loyalty was to his state. Overwhelmingly, one’s neighborhood roots trumped ideology. There are countless examples of this. Wesley Culp died at Gettysburg fighting on Culp’s Hill—land owned by his uncle, and where he played until his late teens when he moved with his employer to Virginia. Much to his family’s chagrin, he returned to die as a Confederate soldier.
John Pemberton, the Confederate commander in defense of Vicksburg, was from Philadelphia (where he died after the war), but had married a Southern girl. He fought for his new home. Confederate General Richard Ewell was pro-union at heart, but, as was the case with Lee, could not go against his native Virginia. Ewell, like Arkansas General Patrick Cleburne, favored freeing the slaves and making them Southern soldiers.
The exceptions to the neighborhood rule are so rare they are conspicuous in history. Union General George Thomas was a Virginian. His family considered him a traitor when he stayed with the North. Confederate General James Longstreet was a friend of Union General Ulysses Grant before the war and remained a friend after it—a different kind of loyalty that clouded his reputation in the South for generations.
This was the reality of the 18th century. It is our history. The Confederate flag was part of a sad chapter. It need not be honored at state capitols. Nor should it be degraded by historical revisionists.
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When the Warren Commission Report on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy was released in 1964, hardly anybody read it. People took it as gospel that a lone nut had murdered an American president. Among the few who actually read the entire 26 volumes of evidence supporting the report was a Philadelphia lawyer named Vincent Salandria. He didn’t believe it.
Salandria challenged the report in a Philadelphia legal newspaper, which few read. One who did, however, was Gaeton Fonzi. Fonzi was early in a career at Philadelphia magazine, which would make him one of the best investigative reporters of our time. Fonzi suspected Salandria might be a bit of a nut himself, but thought he might make an interesting story.
Fonzi’s initial meeting with Salandria, which we happened to attend, convinced us both that Salandria was anything but a nut, and had identified major discrepancies in the Warren Commission’s findings. It was a natural Philadelphia story, for Salandria’s questions dealt mostly with the “magic bullet” theory, upon which the whole notion of a single gunman depended. The man who came up with that theory was Arlen Specter, an assistant district attorney in Philadelphia who would go on to become a longtime United States senator.
Fonzi interviewed Specter and was stunned that the man who developed the “magic bullet” theory could not explain it. Specter had not been questioned in detail before that, and he fumbled all over the place when confronted with specifics about the president’s wounds. Fonzi wrote about Specter in a piece for Philadelphia magazine. Although it created quite a local stir, the story was not picked up by Philadelphia papers or any national media. It seemed that a sensational development in the case had just died.
However, one who had read, and remembered Fonzi’s story was Richard Schweiker, a congressman from the Philadelphia suburbs who, a few years later, was elected a U.S. Senator. In his capacity as a member of a Senate intelligence committee, Schweiker did some personal investigating into the background of the alleged JFK killer, Lee Harvey Oswald. Schweiker concluded that the ease of Oswald’s movements, to Russia and back, and his subsequent activities as a high-profile pro-Castro figure, suggested a connection to U.S. intelligence. In Schweiker phrase, “he had the fingerprints of intelligence all over him.”
The idea that JFK’s assassin could be an American intelligence agent had enormous implications. Furthermore, Schweiker suspected an Oswald connection to the CIA and anti-Castro Cubans in Miami. When he learned Fonzi was living in Miami, he asked him to check some stuff out. In the next year, Fonzi discovered a prominent Miami anti-Castro figure who off-handedly told him he had seen his CIA handler, who used the name Maurice Bishop, with Oswald in Dallas shortly before the 1963 assassination.
That CIA contact turned out to be David Atlee Phillips, who had risen to a top post in the agency. Although Schweiker’s committee expired shortly thereafter, it had opened a door that led to the House Select Committee on Assassination, where Fonzi worked for the next three years. In 1980, that committee issued a report saying the Kennedy assassination was a conspiracy, but offered only several theories to back it up. Fonzi by then was convinced that if the CIA was not behind the Kennedy murder, it surely engineered an elaborate cover-up — controlling the Warren Commission in the1960s and thwarting efforts of investigators over the next few decades. He wrote, in effect, a dissenting opinion as two long magazine articles in Gold Coast magazine (he was a partner at the time), which years later became his book, The Last Investigation in 1993.
That book, the first on the assassination written by a man who had an insider’s perspective working on government investigations, has become must reading for students of that great crime. It inspired numerous other researchers who continue to this day, and who develop further evidence that an American president was killed by his own government. Upon Fonzi’s death two years ago, The New York Times praised his work as among the most important books on the subject.
But without Richard Schweiker, who died last week, it may never have happened. His obituary in the Philadelphia papers did not even mention his connection to the Kennedy investigation, although The New York Times did. Most of the obits cited his friendship with President Ronald Reagan, whose vice-presidential running mate he would have been if Reagan had been nominated in 1976. They also mentioned the respect Senator Ted Kennedy had for the man’s work as secretary of health and human services under Reagan.
Schweiker himself was quoted as saying his most important legacy was from his years in the Reagan administration, “fixing the amounts Medicare pays for medical treatments, instead of leaving costs open-ended. That will have the greatest impact of anything I was able to do."
Some, with slightly longer memories, would disagree. Most respectfully.
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Philadelphia—With so many people running for the Republican nomination for president of the United States, it is impossible if not hard to get them all together for a debate. A democracy deserves better, which is why we came to Philadelphia, the capital of American rowing, if not the whole world. This is the city of the famous Boathouse Row (pictured above), where 13 boat clubs sit side by side, very close to the stately Art Museum, which "Rocky" made famous by using its steps for aerobic activity. In season, the boathouses host crews from every major college in the Philadelphia area, and a few dozen high schools as well.
Years ago the sport of rowing solved the problem of too many boats in a race, and this solution applies nicely to the Republican dilemma. It is called a repechage, a French term for giving a loser a second chance. A number of sports use it, but it is most fitting in rowing because weather conditions, such as wind and current, sometimes affect one boat more than another. So in a race with 18 entries, where only six boats can fit in a body of water at one time, they have heats of six.
The winner moves on to the semi-final race, but the second boat, and sometimes the third, gets a chance in a second race. You get the idea. After the repechage, the winner makes it to the semi-finals and, with luck, might make it to the final race. Possibly even win—it has happened.
This concept is ideal for the large Republican field, most of which is made up of obvious losers. You can't have all the candidates in one debate. But it is not fair to leave somebody out just because polls say they are a loser among losers. We therefore propose at least three debates, with six candidates in each heat. After the polls show who has won, and who was close, those two would advance to the finals. In the likely event that wealthier candidates buy their own pollster, and the polls do not agree, simply take a poll to show which polls have the most credibility.
If, in the likely event that more Republicans declare, you simply declare additional heats, which would make semi-finals necessary, as it often is the case in rowing. That would provide great excitement for the fans, and tremendous commercial opportunities for a capitalist society. In this campaign, it is important that Donald Trump make the finals, no matter how he polls in his heat. The fix must be in. You can't let polls stand in front of ratings.
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It is mid-summer, and people are complaining about traffic in downtown Fort Lauderdale. Just wait until January.
Well, some people don’t want to wait. They think they have waited too long to begin complaining about the overbuilding of Fort Lauderdale’s central core that's threatening to make the fine old neighborhoods that distinguish Fort Lauderdale unlivable.
For some people, that happened last season when all those high-density buildings that had been vacant lots with “coming soon” signs suddenly appeared. People living in Victoria Park, the Las Olas Isles, Colee Hammock—just about any of the neighborhoods that made Fort Lauderdale unusual for their convenience to downtown—suddenly found themselves locked in traffic. On some days, a trip that used to take 10 minutes to the airport took half an hour.
City planners and officials are welcoming thousands of new residents and increasing numbers of winter visitors; they seem not to care about the people who have lived in the area for generations. We previously wrote about a prominent real estate family that had lived in Fort Lauderdale since the 1940s but found traffic in the Coral Ridge neighborhood so compressing that they decided to retire in the mountains of Tennessee. These people feel they are being forced out of the city they helped build.
This all broke like an unexpected storm last season, and for the first time people noticed all those vacant lots with “coming soon” signs depicting, for the most part, large buildings yet to come out of the ground, promising only to make the congestion worse in coming years.
The result: A recent series of meetings of leaders of neighborhood associations in an effort to form a unified protest against more high density development now under consideration on the beach or on the few roads leading to it. The proposed development in the Galleria area is a major target. As one city commissioner put it, belatedly, what good are the new attractions planned for that area if you can’t get to them?
The older neighborhoods are trying to get the attention of city leaders to make them realize that the arteries to the beach, which are about a mile apart, simply can’t sustain the traffic generated by all those people living or working in the neighborhoods between those few roads.
In the case of the Las Olas Isles—one of the nicest residential sections in Florida—there are days when bumper-to-bumper traffic to and from the beach locks them in their streets. It is good that many have boats, for soon that may be the only way out.
For some time we have been calling on Tri-Rail to do what should have been done when the service began in the late 1980s—expand to the FEC tracks. This is the railroad that runs through the downtowns of every city on Florida’s East Coast. It would be far more useful for a commuter railroad than the CSX tracks now being used. They are just a bit too far west to realize the potential of the service.
Well, now it is happening, but not the way we had envisioned. Tri-Rail is planning to use the FEC line, but only in deep Dade County. There is an existing connection between the railroads near 79th Street, and Tri-Rail wants to use it to connect to All Aboard Florida’s massive new station development in downtown Miami. This is a great improvement for Tri-Rail, which now ends near Miami International Airport. That is a useful destination, but not nearly as useful as a train that will be going into the commercial heart of Miami.
That’s good news, but not as good of news as Tri-Rail’s other expansion concept would be. That idea is to run some trains on the FEC all the way from West Palm Beach to Miami, serving high traffic locations such as Boca Raton, Fort Lauderdale, Hollywood and Aventura—before terminating at the All Aboard Florida complex in downtown Miami.
That idea is still on the drawing board, but that board appears less draw-able now that Tri-Rail is concentrating on the other idea. Meanwhile, All Aboard Florida’s proposed high-speed service to Orlando faces mounting opposition on the Treasure Coast. It now rivals the scandalous water situation as the hottest political issue in Martin, St. Lucie and Indian River counties.
It seems All Aboard Florida has a chance to defuse that issue by partially advancing the Tri-Rail scheme to use its tracks. All Aboard Florida plans to start its Orlando service on an abbreviated route—only from West Palm to Miami—while it undertakes the bigger task of building new tracks to connect its right-of-way to Orlando at Cocoa Beach.
This, temporarily, will be a high-speed commuter line for 60 miles from West Palm to Miami. It will only stop in Fort Lauderdale. Why not expand that a bit by anticipating Tri-Rail’s goal and add a station in Delray, Boca, Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International and Aventura? They need not be expensive structures, just wooden platforms that Tri-Rail used when it began in the 1980s. This service would have undoubted appeal, and its success could lead to an additional stop to the north in Jupiter. These stations could eventually be taken over by Tri-Rail.
A bi-product of this move would be to silence the critics on the lower regions of the Treasure Coast who say All Aboard Florida does nothing for them but add the commotion, and danger of a fast train cutting through their turf. And surely it would not be long before Stuart, whose residents would be driving to Jupiter to catch that train, would start saying, “Why not us, too?”
Tri-Rail will have at last achieved the usefulness it sought when it began almost three decades ago. And All Aboard Florida will have smoothed its path to making a good idea a reality.
