The GOP, the Fourteenth Amendment, and those anchor babies

The New Neo Posted on by

Mitch McConnell has stirred up a hornet’s nest on the left (see, for example, the comments here) by suggesting that we should hold hearings on the question of whether every child born in the US, even if his/her parents have come here illegally, should be entitled to full US citizenship.

The left’s response has been the predictable hue and cry that the racist GOP wants to repeal the 14th Amendment. But the Fourteenth Amendment was not meant to explicitly grant citizenship to the children of illegal immigrants—its purpose was to make sure that former slaves were not blocked from receiving citizenship. The operative words are in the so-called citizenship clause, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

The history of the clause also includes the following:

There are varying interpretations of the original intent of Congress, based on statements made during the congressional debate over the amendment. During the original debate over the amendment Senator Jacob M. Howard of Michigan””the author of the Citizenship Clause””described the clause as excluding Indians, who maintain their tribal ties, and “persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers.” He was supported by other senators, including Edgar Cowan, Reverdy Johnson, and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lyman Trumbull…

The provisions in Section 1 have been interpreted to the effect that children born on United States soil, with very few exceptions, are U.S. citizens. This type of guarantee””legally termed jus soli, or “right of the territory””” does not exist in most of Europe, Asia or the Middle East, although it is part of English common law and is common in the Americas. The phrase “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” indicates that there are some exceptions to the universal rule that birth on U.S. soil automatically grants citizenship.

The Fourteenth Amendment was passed in 1868. At the time, it could not have been meant to apply to illegal immigrants, for the simple reason that in 1868 there were few if any restraints on immigration, and therefore virtually all immigration was legal. Back then, the situation re immigration was exceedingly different from today’s. Unlike now, much of the country was still largely unsettled and immigrants were greatly desired to facilitate expansion, especially in the west.

Immigration to this country had not yet reached the enormous levels it achieved later in the 19th century and the early part of the twentieth. Most of the immigrants prior to that came from western Europe, and were considered to be part of the same cultural groups that had founded this country. The very un-PC thought that the US should strive to preserve that cultural mix as much as possible was commonplace then, and was also responsible for some of the laws that were passed later in the 19th century that put brakes and limits on legal immigration.

For example, just to name a few, one of the first was the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act; then later on a series of quota systems based on national origins were enacted between 1917 and 1924; more quotas were established in 1952. These laws setting limits based on national origins remained firmly in place until the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which abolished the national quotas and replaced them with a general quota instead.

That’s a very brief overview of a very complex system. The most important points in terms of the issues at hand are that, when the Fourteenth Amendment was passed, virtually all immigration was legal; and then afterward (and until quite recently) the bulk of immigration could be controlled and monitored much more easily than now because it occurred by ocean vessel, either from Europe or Asia. The authors of the Fourteenth Amendment clearly never envisioned the situation we are facing today, when the country reaches from sea to sea, the vast influx of immigrants are illegal and come across the Mexican border clandestinely, some are dealing in drugs and violence, the federal government has no interest in policing the situation, the citizens already here are outraged about it, and an unknown number of these illegal Mexican immigrants are alleged to be coming here while pregnant for the express purpose of taking advantage of the Citizenship Clause in the Fourteenth Amendment and having so-called “anchor babies.”

[NOTE: The history of immigration from Mexico to this country is a long and fascinating one, with a push-pull between the perceived need for laborers (mainly agricultural ones) and the need to control the influx of them—how many to allow in legally, how long they should be allowed to stay, and what to do with illegals. For example, many Mexican workers whose illegal presence here had been previously tolerated in times of plenty were deported during the Great Depression. The Bracero program, which later established rules for Mexican workers to come here temporarily and legally during WWII and a time of labor shortages in this country, was eliminated in the 60s. Then the influx of illegals began to accelerate (with a few reversals such as 1954’s Operation Wetback), ultimately reaching the huge numbers we have today.]

Another wedding

The New Neo Posted on by

It probably did not escape your notice that Chelsea Clinton got married this past weekend.

The bride and groom and her parents seemed happy. I’m all for that.

And I really don’t care how much they spent on the wedding, as long as it was their own money and not mine. I’m just that big a capitalist.

But it got me thinking. And when I think, I Google. And when I Google, I find this:

hillbillwedding.jpg

And this:

hillbillwedding2.jpg

The House, ethics, and race

The New Neo Posted on by

Four members of the House of Representatives are being investigated on ethics violations, and two (Maxine Waters of California and Charles Rangel of New York) seem intent on defending themselves in public trials before the House ethics committee.

All four are Democrats and all four are African-Americans. This Politico piece focuses on the resultant inevitable question:

The question of whether black lawmakers are now being singled out for scrutiny has been simmering throughout the 111th Congress, with the Office of Congressional Ethics a focal point of the concerns. At one point earlier this year, all eight lawmakers under formal investigation by the House ethics committee, including Rangel and Waters, were black Democrats. All those investigations originated with the OCE, which can make recommendations ”” but take no final actions ”” on such cases.

There’s a “dual standard, one for most members and one for African-Americans,” said one member of the Congressional Black Caucus, speaking on condition of anonymity.

We are becoming exceedingly familiar with this sort of defense based on accusations of racism. It’s not new, either; for quite some time, whenever there appears to be an over- or under-abundance of a minority in a category deemed undesirable—whether it be criminals, underachieving students, or terrorists—the cries of “discrimination” go up.

The idea behind such a defense (usually mounted by liberals/progressives) is that, if ethnic and racial groups were actually treated exactly equally and discrimination did not exist, all the races and/or ethnicities would be distributed in every category (bad or good) in the same percentages as their distributions in the general population. Achievement would be equal and representational, job hiring likewise, and criminal and other bad behavior would likewise be equal, among the groups.

To believe otherwise would require people either to believe that there are some innate differences between groups, or to believe that there are cultural differences or other environmental differences other than victimization and racism that can account for the variation, or perhaps a bit of both. The environmental explanation is at least marginally more PC than the innate explanation, but neither are acceptable (or useful) to those who prefer to play the racial victim card.

But life is not like that, and distributions do not follow the liberal playbook. And when life does not follow the PC rules, the explanation at hand is racism on the part of those doing the selecting, whether it be the employer, the lender, the teacher—or the House ethics committee.

What is the House ethics committee—otherwise known as the Office of Congressional Standards—and who is on it? To avoid charges of political bias, this particular committee is composed (unlike others) of an equal number of Democrats and Republicans, and none of the current ten members are African-Americans, which of course is hardly evidence of bias. At any rate, in the cases of the four black House members currently charged or under investigation, it’s not the House ethics committee that started the whole thing. The charges against two—Rangel and Waters—originated with another body, the “OCE” mentioned in the Politico quote above. And the investigations of the alleged offenses committed by Weeks and Jesse Jackson Jr. originated in criminal probes by the Justice Department (Weeks was caught up during an investigation of some Queens, NY politicians, and Jackson was implicated in the Blagojevich case, hardly an operation that can be said to have been aimed at an African-American target).

So, what is this Office of Congressional Ethics OCE, otherwise known as the Office of Congressional Ethics?:

[It] is an independent, non-partisan entity charged with reviewing allegations of misconduct against members of the House of Representatives and their staff and, when appropriate, referring matters to the United States House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct (commonly referred to as the Ethics Committee).

The OCE was created by House Resolution 895 of the 110th Congress in March 2008. Governed by an eight-person Board of Directors, Members of the OCE Board are private citizens and cannot serve as members of Congress or work for the federal government.

The OCE is an entity created by the Democratic Congress during the last months of the Bush presidency. There are eight current members, four from each party, most of them former House members: David Skaggs, Porter Goss, Yvonne Burke, Jay Eagen, Karan English, William Frenzel, Allison Hayward, Abner Mikva. Two names seem especially interesting to me in terms of the racism charge: Burke, an African-American former House member from California who has recently been active in local Los Angeles politics (and who faced her own more minor and local ethics accusations in 2007); and Mikva of Chicago, a judge and former House member who was an early mentor and fervent supporter of one Barack Obama. Neither would be especially vulnerable to charges of anti-black racism.

No, it would appear that the reason the four House members are under suspicion at present is that they have done things that appear suspicious. And, should they be found guilty, one might indeed wonder why it is that African-Americans appear to be disproportionately involved in these sort of violations.

My personal opinion is that the racial aspects are rather incidental, and that other factors are more likely to be at work. A great many black House members are Democrats from highly urban areas, districts in which winning the Democratic nomination is tantamount to winning the whole shebang. Once they become the nominees, they are elected, and ordinarily can continue to be re-elected quite easily as long as they might choose to run. This is a situation that tends to resemble what used to be known as machine politics, and which especially lends itself to corruption. (For example, Chicago politics has become practically synonymous with this sort of thing.)

White politicians are by no means immune to the temptations of political corruption, and many are the mighty who have fallen. What is unavailable to them, however, is the defense that they have been falsely accused because of racism.

[NOTE: A previous effort to rein in the OCE was mounted by Marcia Fudge and nineteen other members of the Congressional Black Caucus back in June (and by the way, can you imagine if there was a parallel group called the Congressional White Caucus?). There has also been a fair amount of bipartisan criticism of the OCE—perhaps because both parties feel potentially threatened by its power to investigate them. Before the OCE was established, the House ethics committee was the name of the game, and it often appears to have downplayed Congress members’ violations:

Yet even Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) acknowledges that the House may have to take a second look at the powers of this outside ethics office, which has the authority to publicize its inquiries, unlike the formal House ethics panel, which is much more secretive.

The [June 2010 CBC] resolution would curtail the OCE’s power to comment publicly on cases that it dismisses; preclude the release of OCE findings if the ethics committee dismisses a complaint; prevent the ethics committee from receiving reports from the OCE in the 60-day window before a primary or general election involving an accused member and require public complaints to come from witnesses with firsthand knowledge of alleged wrongdoing.

Under current rules, the OCE can initiate investigations into lawmakers and aides based on news reports or complaints ”” even anonymous ones ”” from the public. It can recommend that the House ethics committee, a bipartisan panel composed of members, undertake its own investigation into a matter. If the OCE makes such a recommendation and the ethics committee dismisses the complaint, the OCE can release its full report to the public.

Pelosi said that the CBC suggestions to curtail the OCE will be deferred till the beginning of next session; I guess by then the swamp won’t need as much draining. But the Waters/Rangel scandals and possible trials (which could occur this fall, before the 2010 election) are the sort of thing the CBC and Pelosi might indeed wish to prevent in the future.]

[NOTE II: In further news today, House whip and Democrat of South Carolina James E. Clyburn:

…said it was inevitable that some political opponents would try to turn the ethics questions into a race issue. “Those Tea Party people that showed up at the health care debate, they will not hesitate for one moment to racialize something,” said Mr. Clyburn, a member of the Congressional Black Caucus. “They did, and they will.”

Ah yes, those racists Tea Partiers, the carefully-constructed false meme that keeps on giving. Mr. Clyburn, of course, would never stoop so low as to racialize anything.]

The chance of Obama’s resigning…

The New Neo Posted on by

…some time during his first term is virtually nil, IMHO, although it’s been discussed at times in the comments section of this blog and others.

I don’t think there’s even a small chance of his resigning from office before the next election, unless he is about to be impeached and conviction looks absolutely inevitable, or something equally devastating and politically destructive seems very likely to happen to him. I don’t foresee the impeachment/conviction scenario happening either, even if Republicans take control of both chambers; they wouldn’t have the Senate numbers to succeed in getting the two-thirds vote for conviction, unless perhaps Obama is caught unequivocally red-handed, as it were.

No, he will stay his term—if only to block the new bills and/or repeals of the bills voted in by any Republican Congress that might be elected in 2010, to consolidate his tremendous gains (such as HCR), and to make further fundamental changes via various extra-legislative back-door routes (amnesty for illegals, anyone?). After that, however, if the writing on the wall is crystal clear that he’s on the way out, he might choose not to run in 2012.

However, if he does pull an LBJ/68 in 2012, it will most likely be for strategic reasons—to make way for a more electable candidate with the same far left agenda to run as head of the Democratic ticket (although that candidate will hide his/her far left agenda, something Obama will have lost the ability to do), one the public hasn’t yet turned against.

Still not getting it about Obama

The New Neo Posted on by

On reading two recent pieces about Obama—this one by Jeff Shesol for The Daily Beast, and this by Jay Cost of HorseRaceBlog—I get the idea that both authors are still struggling to understand the guy and still not quite getting it.

That’s unsurprising. To a certain extent Obama is inscrutable, I believe purposely so. What’s more, IMHO, to understand him requires thinking outside the box. If a person approaches the task with the idea that Obama is just a politician, or in the mold of past presidents of this country (whether admired or detested), that person isn’t going to understand what’s actually happening here.

Cost writes about Obama’s vanity, and declares that it “makes him do silly things like appear on The View” and “strips him of a sense of self-awareness,” causing him to make obviously insincere statements like “We shouldn’t be campaigning all the time” during his stint in front of the show’s cameras.

Cost goes on:

Obama ran for and won [the Democratic] nomination based upon the claim that he could sell the party’s ideas to Americans who regularly hesitate to pull the lever for Democrats. He is failing to do that, and his vanity is one reason why…The party is going to need crafty, deft leadership if it hopes to avoid ceding further ground to the Republicans. I have my doubts that this President – overcome as he seems to be with self-adoration – can supply it.

Cost is right to doubt that Obama can supply that leadership to the party, but he’s wrong in thinking that it might be a priority of Obama’s to do so. And while I agree with Cost that Obama is vain, I disagree with the idea that it’s a garden-variety type of vanity that is an obstacle to Obama’s political success and could be overcome with more awareness on his part.

No. Obama’s vanity is more on the order of grandiosity of the type common to tyrants, a sense of his own power and superiority to all surrounding him. It makes him believe he has the right to jettison the usual checks and balances of government in his quest to have his way. And saying something as absurd as “we shouldn’t be campaigning all the time” in the face of the bald fact that he, almost more than any other president, has been in continual campaign mode since the day he was inaugurated is more in the nature of the Big Lie than anything else.

Obama lies with the smooth and unruffled mien of the con man. There is little reason for him to stop now, nor could he. Most of his life he has gotten away with lying and benefited from it. What’s more, if he abandoned lying, he would have almost nothing left except the truth about himself and his intentions—which he knows the American public would reject. So what else is he supposed to do?

Like Cost, Shesol also misses the mark. He thinks—along with Joy Behar on The View, Maureen Dowd in a recent column, and Bob Shrum—that Obama’s problem is that he’s “lost control of the narrative,” and needs “a compelling framework” to grab the nation’s attention.

Shesol is a former Clinton speechwriter, and an expert on the history of FDR’s term of office. He counsels Obama to take a leaf from the book of the latter and to present an animating vision that can speak to America and inspire it with renewed faith in him. What Shesol does not understand is that Obama is very far from being FDR or Clinton. One of his strongest characteristics—one that has often puzzled both left and right—is the fact that he ignores the wishes of the American people, something neither FDR nor Clinton would ever do.

What’s more, the public—or much of the public, anyway—has caught on to that fact. Obama sees the public as his enemy, a stumbling block that he needs to get around if he is ever to reach his goals. For Obama, the public is an entity to deceive and manipulate if possible, and he regards it contemptuously rather than respectfully. He no longer needs to inspire people. He just needs to exercise power over them.

Pelosi’s most ethical Congress ever…

The New Neo Posted on by

…is planning two trials of long-time House members:

The expected trial [of Democrat Maxine Waters of California], coming just after the start of a similar proceeding on Thursday for Representative Charles B. Rangel of New York, would be a modern-day precedent for the House, Congressional officials said. At no time in at least the last two decades have two sitting House members faced a public hearing detailing allegations against them.

It would also be an embarrassment for the Congressional Black Caucus. Ms. Waters and Mr. Rangel are two of its most revered and long-standing members, and both have spent decades as key leaders in banking and financial services issues in the House.

Power corrupts—if not inevitably, then certainly often. Both Waters and Rangel are claiming innocence, of course, and it’s possible that they actually are. But somehow I suspect not. And President Obama isn’t waiting for a trial, at least in Rangel’s case—it’s under the bus with him:

“I think Charlie Rangel served a very long time and served his constituents very well. But these allegations are very troubling,” Obama said on the “CBS Evening News” in his first comments on the Rangel scandal.

“He’s somebody who’s at the end of his career. Eighty years old. I’m sure that what he wants is to be able to end his career with dignity. And my hope is that it happens.”

Looking at that quote again I’d like to revise my remarks; maybe it’s not so much that Obama is throwing him under the bus as asking him to crawl there himself. Neither Rangel nor Waters seems inclined to do so; they are both choosing (at least so far) to fight the charges.

The little post that grew

The New Neo Posted on by

It happens all too often. I see an article that catches my interest, and I think, Oh, I’ll write some remarks about that. It’ll just take a few minutes.

And then I begin. And I find I need to look up a couple of things. Just one or two. And those lead to a couple more, and I become curious about another thing, and before I know it I’ve spent a great deal more time than I originally expected to on the blasted post.

In fact, it readily becomes apparent that, to say everything I’d like to say, and back up my reasons for saying it, I’d have to write a lengthy article or even a book. Hey, maybe several books.

And so I stop, slap the post up there, and go on with my life. Case in point: today’s effort. It’s the tiny tip of a very large iceberg.

Schlafly and those unmarried women voting for Obama

The New Neo Posted on by

Phyllis Schlafly has made the news with the following remarks, which have earned that common appellation, “controversial:”

Conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly took aim at “unmarried women” at a recent fundraiser and in an interview with TPM, saying that they overwhelmingly support President Obama and are all on welfare. Democrats aim to exploit the comments to pressure the more than 60 Republican candidates who have earned Schlafly’s endorsement.

“Unmarried women, 70% of unmarried women, voted for Obama, and this is because when you kick your husband out, you’ve got to have big brother government to be your provider,” said Schlafly, president of Eagle Forum and infamous for her opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment.

Democrats can aim to exploit her comments all they want; it’s what they do. Personally, I don’t think that every candidate endorsed by Schlafly is deemed to have endorsed everything she might say (the same, of course, is true for endorsers and endorsees on the left). But hey, that’s just me.

What interests me more is what Schlafly actually said, plus the entire demographic “unmarried women,” which seems absurd to me. It’s a term used by various research groups in studies, but it describes a conglomeration of women so disparate as to be virtually meaningless as a unit.

Think about it—“unmarried women” consists of women who have never been married (mostly younger ones, who will probably become married in the not-too-distant future), divorced women (many of whom will remarry, sometimes briefly and sometimes long-term), women with children and without, and widows (mostly older, most of whom will never remarry). What do these women have in common, besides being women, and besides being at least temporarily single?

As for unmarried women voting for Obama—whatever their reasons—some of this can be explained by the fact that they are predominantly young. Take a look at the chart found here:

unmarried_webtable.jpg

You can see that nearly a third of “unmarried women” are under thirty, 22% are over 65, and the rest are spread out among other age groups. What’s more, if you look at the “race” part of the chart, you’ll note that almost 30% of the unmarried women are either African-American or Hispanic. We already know that the young voted very strongly for Obama, and that women were more likely to vote for him than men, and that African-Americans were almost 100% behind him and Hispanics strongly so. Therefore I tend to think it’s not straining credulity to believe that the bulk (although not all) of the unmarried female vote for Obama can be accounted for by a combination of these three factors: age, gender, and race.

One other thing—do divorced unmarried women generally fall under the rubric of Schlafly’s “kicking their husbands out?” There is some basis to that claim, at least according to a related statistic, which of the spouses initiates legal action. Data indicates that in about 2/3 of cases, divorce is initiated by the wife, at least in the legal sense, and at least in marriages with children.

Of course, this tells us nothing about why the wife decides to call it quits. In a survey of divorces in midlife and beyond, for example, the reasons stated were as follows:

According to an AARP survey of older divorced people, 66 percent of women reported that they asked for the divorce, compared to 41 percent of men. However, the same survey reported that most women in their fifties or older said the top killers of their marriages were physical or emotional abuse, infidelity, and drug or alcohol abuse””and they put almost all of the blame on their ex-husbands. On the flip side, most fifty-plus men said they simply “fell out of love” or had “different values or lifestyles.”

How representative is this of the bulk of divorces? With no-fault divorce widespread, it’s hard to say; divorce decrees don’t ordinarily discuss marital fault anymore, and we must rely on self-report surveys, which can be self-serving and unreliable.

Who initiates a divorce can actually be a rather poor indicator of what led to the decision to terminate a marriage, although it may be the best indicator we have. Just contemplate the fact that it was Tiger Woods’s wife Elin who initiated their divorce proceedings and you’ll see what I mean. Divorce is such a complex he said/she said process that in general it’s probably best to assume these things are usually unknowable, even (or perhaps especially) to the main protagonists in the sad drama, the warring couple.

[NOTE: If anyone wants to wade through the sludge of this very lengthy report that attempts to shed light on the issue of what motivates divorce initiations by women, they are welcome to do so.]

It’s the its/it’s, stupid

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s the most common error in English, and Spellcheck doesn’t catch it (although Spellcheck catches me when I attempt to spell Spellcheck “Spellcheck,” much preferring two words or a hyphenation to my single word). This prompts me to recycle this post of mine (ever-so-slightly edited):

I try my best to pay attention to grammar and spelling, helped out by the always-handy Spellcheck (shh—don’t tell anyone, but I’m not the world’s best speller, unaided).

But Spellcheck has its limits. And one of them is the proper use of the word “its.” “Its,” that is, vs. “it’s.”

Have you ever noticed how often those two words are confused? Even though I try to pay close attention, I’m always catching myself messing up, and my bet is that, despite my best efforts, some of them have slipped by here. I see it all the time in the work of others, too (and no, I’m not going to do an exhaustive search and link to examples; you’ll just have to take my word for it. Or not.)

The error almost always goes in one direction only: the use of the apostrophe, as in “it’s,” for the possessive form of the word, when it should only be used for the contraction “it is.” Example (the one that sparked this rumination): originally, instead of “…see this from Reuters, not known for its right-wing bias” I had written “…see this from Reuters, not known for it’s right-wing bias.”

Why do we do this? Are we all just stupid! No, no, a thousand times no! We are actually very smart, because we are extrapolating a general rule to include this word, and that is the rule about forming possessives. Usually we do this by adding an apostrophe and an “s,” as you no doubt well know. But with the words “it’s” and “its,” we choose to reserve the apostrophe for the contraction, and that leaves the possessive hanging out there, alone and forlorn and apostropheless.

In this, however, we’re following another rule (are you still with me? or have I already bored you to tears?), that of the possessive personal pronoun: hers, his, theirs, ours, yours, for example. All lack apostrophes. But they’re not confusing, somehow—perhaps because, unlike “its,” they clearly refer to people, and are never given an apostrophe because they never become contractions.

Now, aren’t you glad I cleared that up? But I bet it won’t stop me from making the same mistake again—and again and again.

When I thought as a child

The New Neo Posted on by

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. —1 Corinthians 13:11

Children have a lot of time on their hands. In my case, there was a fair amount of solitary time, and I filled it with musings and experiments.

For example, there was lying-down-on-the-grass-and-looking-up-at-the-sky, great for studying floaters and musing on what they might be. Insects trapped in the eye? Single-celled creatures, likewise (close, but no cigar)?

And then there was the eating of dirt, an activity I tried only a few times before I abandoned it as unsatisfactory. But I still remember the taste—gritty and complex. Likewise, sucking on a wet washcloth during down time in the bath, an interesting combination of rough and refreshing.

Shining a flashlight on the fingers to see the red glow was rather nice. Lying in bed at night, waiting for sleep to overtake me, an entertaining feature was to press gently on my eyes with my fists and rub, causing the activation of phosphenes and a bit of a light show (the Greeks had described the phenomenon long before my time, but I was unaware of that and thought I’d invented the activity on my own).

Then there was the repetition of a familiar word until it became strange. This was accomplished by simply saying it aloud over and over to the point where it was leached of its original meaning and devolved to a mere sound. I recall this happening most effectively and dramatically with the word “pink,” but others will do quite nicely.

Many of these explorations took place in my yard, which had some dirt patches where grass stuggled to grow, and in the summer anthills were plentiful there. These were opportunities for some very mild ant torture that involved covering an ant with a bit of fine light sand and watching it emerge after a very short struggle, now temporarily and somehow satisfyingly light-colored rather than dark (did that make me both a budding racist and a PETA offender? Mea culpa!)

Our block—a dead-end street—featured areas that had been patched over with tar, and on hot days these bubbled up in splendid fashion. There was a plentiful supply of rocks in the gutters, the pointiest of which could be used to strike the tar bubbles and cause a pleasant pop, similar but not quite as good as the scented zap! of that same rock used on the dots that lined the paper rolls we otherwise would load into our cap guns as ammunition.

I wonder whether children still have the time and inclination to do these things. If they do, they’re not telling the adults. Nor did we—till now.