Elastic, By the Yard

Politics is … lying. We’ve come to understand that fact over the past, oh, 250 years. It is how we live, and we are apparently not that uncomfortable with it. We blandly accept its practicality. It is part of the American Way.

We’ll return to this thread in a second, but first, a Gene Pool Gene Poll.

Historians typically rank the performance of presidents via these criteria: Decisiveness / Critical Thinking / Communication / Honesty & Integrity / Empathy & Compassion / Crisis Management / Courage / Vision for the Future. 

Okay, back to today’s theme, which is not unrelated. With politics, we seem to recognize that any striving for mass public support will involve distorting one’s principles, assuming one has principles, to accommodate political realities such as the need to pander to dubious public opinion in order to get elected.

I am reminded of a poem by the Danish scientist and polymath Piet Hein:

Yes, he was tempted, and yes, he fell,
But judge him not too hard.
It does take character to sell
Elastic, by the yard.

Politics is the sale of elastic.

Witness Barack Obama — a mostly truthful fella — telling the country when he was running for reelection and needed the broad middle of the electorate that he was not yet quite comfortable, just couldn’t get quite on board, with the notion that gay people should have the right to marry the people they love. This was a stance startlingly anathema to Obama’s core beliefs. It would be as though Abraham Lincoln, speaking before an audience that feared he was unduly influenced by the needs of people of color, snickered that it would be preposterous for a white man to ever even want to marry a black woman. Oh, wait. Lincoln once did exactly that.

This tendency to warp and stretch opinions toward political realities takes place in both the smallest and grandest political arenas, and has become particularly rancid and omnipresent in the modern era of politics as warfare. Gonna talk about this whole issue a bit.

In Washington D.C., a seat on one of its Advisory Neighborhood Commissions is unpaid. ANC commissioners spend long tedious hours at meetings listening to complaints and suggestions from people in their neighborhoods, then they try to beg people with actual authority to listen and do something about something that needs to be done. It is democracy at its most wonderful, and shabbiest, levels, at the same time. It’s a grass-roots, straight-from-the-people job, but nearly invisible. If you go online to try to find out the name of your local Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner, you will be instructed to contact your local elections board for that feeble information.

Outside a local polling place in 2022, on Election Day, Rachel and I encountered a pleasant-looking man running for ANC commissioner in our district; he was standing beside his lawn sign, with his name on it. His name is Brett Astman. I of course immediately made fun of that name, because of what it sounds like, which is a man who favors shapely derrieres. He cheerfully agreed it was a ridiculous moniker (he wanted our support), without committing himself one way or other on the issue of keister admiration. Then, inasmuch as the job earned no pay, I asked him if his business model was going to be taking bribes. He laughed at that, too, and suggested he’d be too unimportant to bribe.

He was being cordial, self-deprecating, and funny. Authentic. The three of us had instant rapport. Rachel told him she had already voted, and had voted for him, largely because of the humor of his name; she confessed she was fuzzy on his positions because she’d been unable to find an accounting of them online, but had seen that his opponent supported sleeping policemen — speed bumps to reduce recklessly fast driving in residential areas.

“I do, too!” Brett said. “I’m for them! People drive too fast!”

I said I opposed them. Many of the bumps in our neighborhood, the ones he was praising, were car-rattling. “I think they are a nuisance,” I said, “and can damage your car if they catch you by surprise. And they can damage you, if you hit your head on the roof and shiver you spine.” Rachel concurred.

Silence. It took Mr. Astman a few seconds to reorient. He was thinking, plotting, perhaps bending his a view a little bit with his mind, like what Uri Geller does to spoons. The total vote count for this race would be in the low three figures. Every vote counts, and he didn’t know if I had voted yet, or if I might influence other voters.

“I agree with you,” he said at last. And that is precisely why, he said — I believe he was making this up as he went along, yeah, that’s the ticket, like Jon Lovitz’s congenital liar character on SNL — he was giving serious thought to possibly opposing the proliferation of the higher, shorter, joltier speed bumps in favor of speed “tables,” which are gentler. The issue, he said, is worthy of consideration, by gum, and he’ll possibly maybe address it as soon as he is lucky enough to get elected!

We were seeing grass-roots, Silly-Putty stretch-democracy in action. It was breathtaking. I like Brett Astman. He’s smart and funny and wily. He won. I’ll vote for him next time.

There’s a second level of political deception that I find more dangerous. It’s not about politicians deceiving us. It’s about self-deception: Us deceiving us.

In 2016, as the presidential election approached, Rachel and I attended the wedding of a friend of hers. There was an older man there, and the three of us got to talking. He was a harrumphing type, set in his ways, apparently a veteran of the armed services. He didn’t disclose his political views exactly — he had found himself among younger, leftier people, and was holding his tongue. But he did have something he wanted to reveal, some insider information he had about the candidate Donald Trump.

Trump, he said, purchases houses and gives them away to veterans. By the dozens, apparently. The guy said he’d gotten this information from friends of his who knew about it. He seemed to have names. Trump evidently wanted this whole bit of charity kept a secret, probably out of respect for the recipients’ privacy.

It was a bald-faced, absurd claim; Trump has never been bashful about taking credit for anything in his life, he has no respect for the military, and he didn’t give to charities, he stole from charities.

There didn’t seem to be anything to say in response, but Rachel found something to say, and said it. It was a challenge, but it was not a lie.

“We are journalists,” she said, “and if there is truth to this, it would be very important to get it out, because then the public might think of Trump in a completely different and fairer way. Can you give us people to talk to? This could help Trump a lot. Potentially.”

Silence.

Silence.

Eventually the man said that he didn’t think his informants, or the recipients of the houses, would want media-circus attention. Nor would Trump. Then he kind of shambled off.

We wondered how many people he’d told this story to, and what percentage of them believed him.

That’s where we stand today. There are questionable things people want to do — this guy wanted to vote for Trump and feel okay about it and persuade others of the wisdom of that — and so they construct rickety, tessellated edifices of doubtful accuracy to help climb there. And they believe it when others do the same thing,u and tell them about it. You believe what you want to believe. It is human nature, but it sucks.

Just a few weeks ago, I attended a luncheon thrown by a former employer of mine. Gathered there were a dozen former employees of his; together, many, many years ago, we had started a newspaper in New York. It had thrived. We were there to celebrate its anniversary.

Our host was the former publisher, a genial man and good employer. He’d been born rich, into a publishing empire, but had struck out on his own and become vastly successful in the field. He’s a pretty major player. We liked him and respected him and were grateful to him. On this day, what became obvious to us, immediately, was that he had changed.

“I am VERY conservative,” he announced, at the table.

The room was full of journalists, retired journalists, former journalists, lawyers. Lefties. Skeptics. Our host got some sharp questions, one of the more insolent of which came from me: Would he vote for Donald Trump?

He declined to answer, as had the man at the wedding, but he did manage to answer, in a way, just like the man at the wedding. He opined — unprompted, as I recall — that how despite unfair media speculation, Donald and Melania were deeply in love. He said he had some inside dope on this. When asked for specifics, he told a wan story about the couple having a debate over buying mattresses; it started nowhere, and led nowhere and then petered out.

Then he opined that modern newspapers were suffering financial losses and readership declines — he mentioned The Washington Post in particular — in part because they weren’t covering the sort of news people want to read, which apparently is crime against the affluent by the poor and crazy. He said that the friend of a friend of his had gotten her tooth punched out in broad daylight, outside of Macy’s, by a vagrant. The media is conspiring to hide the depth of the crime problem by not covering stuff like that, he said. They seem to be in league with the criminals!

Oddly — perhaps coincidentally — we had recently heard a very similar but not identical story from an influential right-leaning commentator; it had happened to one of her friend’s friends.

Whatever.

And finally, when asked for any ways that he wished Trump would change his act, our former publisher said that he wished that Trump had been starring in a silent movie. Meaning, I believe, what many uneasy Trump supporters contend: The guy’s policies are great, but I wish he’d shut up about all those stupid, ignorant, bigoted, insulting, infantile things he says that have nothing to do with who he — and we — really is. Are.

So we have come to the point where I get to the point. Silent movies. I am about to share with you the greatest silent short film ever made. You have likely never seen it before, or even heard of it. It is barely two minutes long. The director and cinematographer were the same individual: a police security camera, operating in 2002.

Now, I know what you are thinking: You are thinking that the greatest silent short film was probably some avant-garde thing like Un Chien Andalou, a surreal noir masterpiece directed by Luis Buñuel in 1929 in partnership with Salvador Dali. Un Chien Andalou would be a good nominee, but it would fall to Un Cheval Saratogan, the name I have given this film.

The movie was shot late at night in the city of Saratoga, New York. I have referred to it once before many years ago, but not in this exalted context. For your viewing pleasure I have stripped it of its lamentable internet chatter, which tediously explains what it is. You get it here, naked. You will learn from it as it goes. First, DISABLE YOUR SOUND. Okay? Trust me on this. Here it is.

Have you watched it yet? If not, watch it now. My patience is not inexhaustible.

Okay, good. It is about drunks, yes, and vandalism of a fiberglass horse outside a bank, to be sure. The drunk body language is great, and genuine: real, not acted. But the whole thing is quite evidently about The Meaning of Life. These drunken men are competing for the drunken woman. They are trying — in their inept, ignorant, besotted way — to advance the species beyond the lamentable level it has achieved.

In microcosm, this short video is the story of existence, of humanity, of the desperate need for reaching immortality through our genes and despite our foibles and foolishnesses. To put our stamp on the universe. It is deeply flawed but ultimately, when viewed charitably, noble. Like politics.

And while we are all here:

The Gene Pool is successful. Many thousands of people are reading us for free, and many hundreds of people are paying a bit. (We cost $4.15 a month.) Might you consider leaping graciously from the first group into the second? Or even leaping from no group into the first? To help you in this endeavor, just click on the handsome orange button, below. It will help us stay alive and thrive.

And now for your questions and observations …

which I will answer in real time. Many of them involve my call on the weekend for funny / compelling true stories you have had with your neighbors. Some are responding to a previous call for song lyrics that blow you away.

Please remember to keep refreshing the screen. New items, and responses, will be filed in real time.

Q: A few months before covid became a thing I received a statement from a credit card I rarely use. My balance was the card's credit limit, in the low five figures! Someone cashed one of those checks they send you in the mail. I immediately called the bank to dispute the charge. A couple days later the bank contacted me to ask if I knew a particular person who cashed the check; I did not and the bank opened an investigation. Through an internet search I discovered this person lived across the street and down the corner. The mail must have misdelivered my check "offer" to him. The man is in his 90s. A week later I received a letter from the neighbor, profusely apologizing for cashing the check. I was torn between replying with "No worries, that's okay" and "What's wrong with you, can't you _read_???" Being a busy parent I never got around to it. My opinion of the matter has hardened into "Can't you _read???"

A: I once had a $200 gift box of chocolates, pies, etc. mis-delivered, and days later, found out from UPS to whom it had been delivered: My next door neighbor.  I went to ask him if he had seen it, and he said, yes, it’s in the back.  It was.   It was opened and several items had evidently been removed and eaten.  I simply took the remains and left.  

Q: A reader recently asked you why nail clippers are sold with a rounded cutter, when medical authorities say you supposed to cut your nails straight across.  I have an answer: There are curved clippers for fingernails, and straight clippers for toenails.

A: Ah, that would be so great if it neatly answered the question.  It does not. The person who wrote in about this paradox was right: It is, indeed, a paradox.  The American Academy of Dermatology officially recommends this: “To trim your fingernails, cut almost straight across the nail. Use a nail file or emery board to slightly round the nails at the corners, as this will help keep them strong and prevent them from catching on things like clothing or furniture.” So why are 95 percent of all commercially available fingernail trimmers curved?  Two reasons: I suspect it’s like Q-Tips. Q-Tips are not supposed to be used in the ears.  The packaging says don’t use ‘em in the ears.  Everyone uses ‘em in the ears, because they want to. Everyone’s happy. It’s all about sales and marketing. And laziness. Men ain’t gonna use no nail file.

Q: In the mid-1960's we lived for a time in new duplex unit in a suburb of Buffalo. Our neighbors were a couple with two young children and a a hoard of noisy relatives and friends randomly coming and going, The dad had an irregular work schedule, but it seemed to pay well, I couldn’t help notice the difference between our second-hand and budget furniture and their rather grander “suite.”. We were friendly but not close. Then after a particularly noisy night with a lot of coming and going we awoke to find the place empty. We kidded about a possible business opportunity, “Midnight Movers: Discretion guaranteed.- cash in advance.” A few weeks later a man called on us, asking if we knew where they’d gone. “No, but if you find them, my husband would like his power drill back”. His FBI identification appeared genuine. He allowed that the family was known to him but didn’t elaborate beyond saying the wife’s mother was a stripper, He was looking for them, he said, because “Business was light and he was doing a favor for “our Canadian counterparts, looking for an associate of the departed family who had jumped bail north of the border. Our new neighbors were less interesting.

A: Thank you.  In a mildly related incident, many years ago I went to a party at a neighbor’s house in Bethesda. Our kids were friends.   Nice people.  Something odd about the adults, they seemed to be speaking quietly to each other in small knots about international affairs and operations in progress.  Gradually, I figured something out, and blurted to my wife, a little too loudly, “They’re all spooks!”  Conversations around us ceased and the party broke up not soon thereafter, a little early.  People knew I was a reporter for the Washington Post.  The hostess – mother of my kid’s friend – eventually told me, yeah, we are all CIA. 

TIMELY TIP: If you’re reading this right now on an email:   Click here to get to my webpage, then click on the top headline (In this case, “Elastic, by the Yard…”) for the full column, and comments, and real-time questions and answers. And you can refresh and see new questions and answers that appear as I regularly update the post from about noon to 1 p.m. ET today.

Readers who began on the webpage, of course, also need to refresh.

Q: Do roommates count as neighbors?  I had a roomie who had a condition (maybe hemophilia?) that required him to see a doctor with some frequency.   Whenever he was put in a room to await the doc, he’d get impatient if he had to wait more than about 15 minutes, so at that point he’d stretch out on the floor, arms and legs splayed as though he had fainted or died.  That’s what the doc saw when he finally came in.  I don’t know why he was never killed with a scalpel.  I believe he became a personal injury lawyer.

A: Superior.  

Q: Best song lyric ever: I nominated “Red Hot,” by Billy “The Kid” Riley.  

A:This was one of Dylan’s earliest influences! Released in 1955.  Here it is.   The genius of this song, IMO, is the refrain, which is delivered as a sort of  conversation between the frontman  and his backup singers: “ My gal is red hot” / “Your gal ain’t doodly squat.”   You can see this, as I do, as a fight, playing the dozens.  Or you can take it as one person’s opinion sung by the band as a group: That his own gal is red hot and YOUR gal (the audience’s gal?) ain’t doodly.   I love it.

This is Gene. I have to say I am surprised by the results of the Gene Poll so far! I’m not sure what it means and would like some guesses. To me, honesty is important but we’ve had some dishonest presidents who’ve been high in other categories and did splendidly. I suspect historians would agree.

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Q: About 20 years ago, we had two ratty old outdoor plastic trash cans. They did the job. Our new and extraordinarily tidy neighbor, apparently, did not like them. We went on vacation, and returned to find two brand new trash cans in their place, with a letter from Rubbermaid taped to the top of one of the lids, saying we had been nominated for their Best Neighbor award. We had won, and our prize was two new Rubbermaid trash cans, replacing ours. But there was no Rubbermaid logo or masthead on the letter. I'm a former journalist, so my suspicions were raised. I called Rubbermaid, and found out there was no Best Neighbor award, and the person who had purportedly signed the letter did not work for Rubbermaid, or possibly even exist. Two weeks later, I found our old trash cans in our neighbor's bulk trash waiting for the county to take them away.  

A: That is a very weird neighbor. 

Q: Great lyrics? Warren Zevon has many. "He was an accident waiting to happen/ most accidents happen at home/ maybe he should have gone out more often..."

A: Tom Shroder nominates an equally good one from Zevon:  “And if California slides into the ocean / Like the mystics and statistics say it will / I predict this motel will be standing until I pay my bill.”

Q: I lived in a Midwest city, in a Victorian neighborhood where homes were quite close to one another. I was friendly with the two guys who lived next-door, to the point of having a drink on each other’s porches, or going to dinner. We were trying to sleep one beautiful spring evening, with the windows open, but the earsplitting, thumping bass from the neighbor’s music next-door kept us up most of the night. The next day, my partner saw them outside and asked them if they could be more careful about turning the music down late at night. Approximately two hours later, the owner came over, sheepish, with a wireless switch that we could use to cut off his sound system, if it ever got too loud. We never had to use it. When I moved, I gave him back that switch, and we had a big cryfest. We are still close, even though we live on opposite coasts now.

A: I almost wasn’t going to use this, but then decided it was quite poignant.

Q: Chilling and well written story about the tomato guy. It got me wondering, though: how could his tirade have been so personal if he barely knew you? Or had he been furtively observing your activities and interactions?

A: This is in reference to the skin-crawling story I told in The Gene Pool on Saturday, about the tomato thief.  He didn’t really know me.  His tirade was personal only in the sense that it was racial.  To him I was the Evil Other, because of the color of my skin, and he railed on about that for a full five minutes. 

Q: One summer day the fire dept rang our doorbell. There was a gas leak from the rowhouse next door and did I have a key? No. If they couldn't find someone with a key they'd have to break the door down. The neighbors were away. They hadn't lived there long and I hardly knew them.. [racking brains] From their last name I surmised that they were Jewish, so I called the nearest synagogue and asked if they were members there. They were, and the secretary could give me Irv's office number. I called it and explained the situation, and presently someone showed up with a key. 

Q: A tepid story, frankly, but it leads magnificently into this one, which I had forgotten, so thank you.   When I was a kid in the Bronx, there was an epidemic of a certain scam.  Dozens of people fell for it.   Two guys in overalls came to the door and identified themselves as city gas inspectors.  Said there were reports of gas leaks, and they were going door to door checking pipes.  Could they come in and look at the basement for just a moment?  They did.  As one guy was talking to the homeowner the other guy surreptitiously sprayed some gasoline on a pipe.  (Could be a water pipe.)  The first guy then lit a lighter to see better into crevices, and when he approached the gasoline line, it flared.  “Whoa, you have a problem there!”   We need to close down your gas line until we can get a repair crew over.  Could take a few days.”   You see where this is going; the homeowner would bribe the con men to do it themselves.  They took a half hour, puttering around down there, but basically just wrapped some fancy looking duct tape around a pipe or three.  Typical bribe-fee was $100.

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Q: An only-in-the-DMV story: When I lived in a condo in South Arlington, I was frequently contacted as part of clearance checks of various neighbors. After a contact about a particular neighbor I was interested in getting to know better, I asked her about her job the next time I ran into her. She said she worked for the Secret Service investigating threats against the president, who would have been Clinton at that time. I said, "Wow! That must be really interesting!" She suddenly got a forlorn look on her face and said, basically, no, it's the most boring job known to humankind. She had to investigate every drunk who shot his mouth off a little too much in a bar. She was quitting and moving to North Carolina to do something entirely different. So much for getting to know her better.

A: Good story. Please don’t refer to the Delaware - Maryland -Virginia area as the DMV.  DMV will forever be associated with the Department of Motor Vehicles,  historical the titans of delay and bureaucratic lassitude.   

Q: Since rap was underrepresented in the song lyrics submissions, here is a great one from Jay-Z. Rap lyrics are hard to share in this format because to truly appreciate all the word play that is going on requires background knowledge about the rapper, knowledge of other rap songs, knowledge of disputes between rappers, and knowledge of street slang. A lyric that can be very funny to someone familiar with rap and has 3 or 4 meanings won't make sense to someone who doesn't listen to rap because they don't have enough context to "get" the meanings of the lyric. 

From "Brooklyn (Go Hard)" "I father, I Brooklyn Dodger them / I jack, I rob, I sin / Aww man, I'm Jackie Robinson /'Cept when I run base, I dodge the pen." 

This one has multiple things going on that aren't immediately obvious. The "I father" line and "Aww man" are also slant rhymes for "Our Father" and "amen" where his list of crimes are actually a prayer of confession. 

"I Brooklyn Dodger them" is an allusion to being a Brooklyn version of the artful dodger--a thief, and also a reference to the origin of the Brooklyn Dodgers name that people had to carefully weave their way around the trolleys, just as the rapper has to dodge the police while committing crimes. "When I run base, I dodge the pen" has 3 meanings (1) baseball (2) when he sells cocaine, he dodges going to the penitentiary (3) when he "runs bass," meaning he listens to the bass track for a song, he freestyles rather than writing down his lyrics. This last meaning also completely changes the meaning of the previous verse to say "I father" he brings his lyrics to life, "I Brooklyn Dodger them," he weaves through words and meanings, "I jack, I rob, I sin" he incorporates things he's gotten from other songs or artists, "I'm Jackie Robinson" he is one of the legends of his profession.

A: You opened my eyes here.  Did some research.  All of this seems to be right, according to the artist.  Thanks.

Q: Wait. Who are very good presidents who ranked low on Honesty and Integrity?

A: You can debate all of this, but I think historians, based on their rankings, would nominate Jefferson, Jackson, Wilson, Clinton …

Q: Our neighbor cuts our grass, and our lawn isn’t small. (Not quite an acre, but with the push mower, it takes me a couple hours.) He also maintains our lawn, seeding and fertilizing when necessary. He said he doesn’t want any money, instead claiming it is his form of therapy. Isn’t that nice for us? Well, as you surely know, there’s no such thing as a free lunch and our “free” lawn care isn’t an exception. Our neighbor decided we needed fresh grass, so he put down extra smelly fertilizer (human waste - “humanure”) and then covered it with sod. Oh, and the new in ground sprinkler system - that he controls - went in before that. Our lawn - OUR lawn - is now part of a multi-neighbor group of lawns that he calls “the park.” We see him walking around our lawn, ahem, “the park,” almost every morning. My wife, who hates fences, is ready to erect one. Oh, and the in ground sprinkler, humanure, and sod that WE NEVER ASKED FOR will cost us $12,000. I guess that’s the new price of “free.”

A: This is like “The Man Who Came to Dinner,” an excellent 1942 play about a man who came to dinner and never left. 

Q: I had a rather nasty piece of work for a neighbor once. He decided he needed to build a shed in his yard so he could loudly work on the secondhand motorcycle he’d bought. But he didn’t think much of paying for a survey, and began putting up a structure with eaves that were clearly over the property line. When I pointed this out, he proffered a solution that involved calling me names: “bitch”, “pussy” and others; as I’m a man, he clearly felt I was challenging his own manhood somehow by telling him to stay within the lines. So I asked county inspectors what their opinion was of his latest project and they were very, very interested, though not so much for the property line issue. Nonetheless, his work slowly, and now (thanks to me) expensively progressed, and we ultimately had our day with the zoning board. I’d already gotten the side of his enormous shed shorn off, so it looked even more ridiculous than it did by size alone; my property and the title thereto were thus secured. I insisted on some awkward re-guttering, because he’d illegally put the downspout right on the line, dumping water into my yard. But when I was given the option to push that the whole thing be razed, I blinked. I knew if he were to lose his vanity project he’d take it out on his wife and perhaps their young daughter, so I let him keep those parts of it which wouldn’t complicate the sale of my house later.

A:  In the neighborhood in which I used to live, there was a couple who were notorious, nasty  busybodies.  The once called the police on their next door neighbor who was drinking a glass of wine in his own front yard. (This, idiotically, was technically against the law.  Cops came, gave him a big citation.  The next day the guy with the citation walked next door and rang the bell, and when the neighbor came to the door, he punched him in the face.  Cops were never summoned again, even for the punch.  The puncher had something on the police-callers that would have required some significant dismantling of their property, and the callers knew it.

Q: It's hard to capture the myth of capitalism and the failures of the American Dream more powerfully than Yip Harburg did in 1932: Once I built a railroad, I made it run Made it race against time Once I built a railroad, now it's done Brother, can you spare a dime? 

A: Agreed.  Brilliant lyrics.   

Q: In my neighborhood around Atlanta in the early 1960s we had a real-life Boo Radley, the scary, mentally ill  guy from To Kill a Mockingbird who no adults wanted their kids to be around.  He lived inside his mind.  He seldom left his house. He was a big guy with hollow eyes.  He talked to himself. The neighbors were conservative and judgmental.  Our Boo was named (I think) Jacob, and he was judged and convicted without any charges or any trial or any incident or any reason to turn him into the local monster, but they did, and he was shunned.  Guess what happened? Like Boo Radley, he was shown to have a heart of gold and rescued children from an adult intent on killing them.  

No.  This is not fiction.  Our Boo eventually killed chickens, then a dog, then himself. 

A:  Whoa.  

Q: You once "started a newspaper in New York"? Have you ever mentioned this before? You can't mention something big like this and then leave us hanging. Details. We need details..

A: Nah. I was hired as a writer and editor in its infancy. I’ve talked about it before. Not naming it here because I’m quoting from a private party.

Q: In the parking lot of my condo building, the woman with the assigned space to the left of mine chronically parks towards the edge of her sport, sometimes with her right rear tire sitting on the white line. I can live with it, as the spaces are angled and I can pull up to the point where my driver's door is past her car. But I always wondered why this happened. A few weeks ago the woman stopped me in the lobby and explained it wasn't her fault, but the fault of the next person over, who parked too close to HER spot. I told her not to worry, it wasn't a bother. (Silently I thought "I've seen her parking and it's not as bad as yours.") Then, a few days ago, I was reading the minutes of the condo board meeting, when there was an item about two people disputing their parking issues, which was hard for the Board to deal with because "both of the persons refuse to talk to the other person.”y

This is Gene. This will be the last post, because I am gonna follow it up with the top one-third of a story we ran in Tropic Magazine in 1987. It was by John Dorschner, and it was a finalist for a Pulitzer. It was about a neighborhood fight, like the one you just mentioned, only exponentially more vicious. A modern Hatfields and McCoys. Here it comes.

Here’s the story:

Nightmare on Cherokee Street

By John Dorschner

Summers are the worst: It was in the summer when someone chopped down the carambola tree, and the banana tree, and the grapefruit tree. It was in the summer when the locks on the carport gate were mysteriously changed, and the telephone lines cut, and the staghorn fern thrown to the ground, and strips of bark cut out of tree trunks, and poison spread on the hibiscus.

And so it is that summers seem to call . . . well, for extreme defensive measures. That's the way Bob Kelly figures it. That's why this summer, as he did last summer, he prepared to leave on vacation by rolling out 1,500 feet of barbed wire and spreading it through his back yard in spiraling coils. Then he set out a half-dozen rat traps, just the right size for a human foot.

Another 1,500 feet of barbed wire already line the six- foot-high wooden fence that surrounds the back of his property. The fence wire is coiled in double strands, one along the top of the fence, the other in the middle, weaving through the plumbagosand aralias, glinting in the sunlight, ugly and threatening.

It's a suburban combat zone: On one side of this wooden fence are the Kellys, Bob and Ros. On the other side are the Mitchells, Margaret and Ed. They live in Miami Springs, population 12,000, an Anglo enclave wedged between the bustling airport to the south and Hispanic-dominated Hialeah to the north, a quaint imitation of a Midwestern town, with an old- fashioned downtown of pharmacies, barber shops, hardware store and supermarket.

Its tree-lined streets of concrete-block houses seem unusually placid, but it is here, for the past six years, that the Mitchells and Kellys have been enmeshed in a feud that has astounded cops, prosecutors and a judge for its bitterness, its longevity and its unrelenting pettiness.

More than 150 times, Miami Springs police have rushed to Cherokee Street to listen to the two families' frenzied complaints. Over the years, they have accused each other of hurling dog feces, of spraying water on each other, of throwing pebbles and rocks at their cars, of dumping poison on plants, shouting threats, cutting up garden hoses. Bob Kelly has been shot in the back with a BB gun. The Mitchells' house was broken into by a friend of the Kellys. Several times, the Mitchells have hung a sign on their house, facing the Kellys': "Hi Whore." Once, police arrived to find all four adults on the ground, wrestling, kicking and biting.

"The Hatfields and the McCoys," Springs police have dubbed the two families, but that is both trite and wrong, for these are not Appalachian primitives. These people are middle-class, college-educated. Bob Kelly and Ros Kelly are teachers in the Dade school system. So is Margaret Mitchell. Her husband, Ed, is a manager in a manufacturing company.

Many of their actions might seem like the broad slapstick of a silent-movie comedy, but there is a dark patina to the humor. Their dispute has probably cost Miami Springs' residents more than $15,000 in police expenses, and then there's thousands more that county taxpayers have been paying for the school system and the state attorney's office to investigate the torrent of complaints that keep gushing from the feud.

Worse, there is the fear that, at any moment, the dispute could explode into something more than traded insults and trashed plants, something violent.

County Judge Robert M. Deehl, who has seen the Mitchells and Kellys many times in his courtroom: "I can't believe two couples can work up such a feud like that. They just have this insane hatred for each other. . . . I'm worried that it's going to end up in violence."

Patrick Gray, the school board's chief investigator of problem teachers, has amassed two thick blue notebooks on the teachers involved. He says school administrators have devoted more resources to investigating the Kellys and Mitchells than any other case he's ever seen -- and that includes Carl Brown, the junior high teacher who flew into a murderous rage in 1982 and slaughtered eight people in a Miami welding shop.

"It's very scary," says Leonard Lewis of the state attorney's office, who has listened to the Mitchells' and Kellys' complaints far more than he would like. "My children are no longer in the school system, thank goodness."

Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.

-- Leviticus 19:18

Shirley Morgan was a pale shadow behind her jalousied front door. "I can't talk to you," she whispered to the journalist. "They'd know. We're neutral. Very neutral. We can't take sides."

The journalist stood awkwardly on her porch, notebook in hand, wanting to know about the Kellys and Mitchells, who lived across the street from her. "We're neutral," she repeated, then sighed. "The last six years have been a grief."

One time, she said, she had visitors down from the North, and they were shocked to see police cars appear three times over the weekend, responding to complaints from the Mitchells and Kellys.

A few weeks before, she said, she had let Margaret Mitchell into her house for a few moments, because Margaret wanted to borrow a newspaper, and Ros Kelly had called her up, blasting her for allowing "that woman" inside her door. That's why she couldn't let the journalist in: she had to stay "neutral."

There was a time -- before television, before crime paranoia, before air conditioning, before the "mobile society" -- when we spent most of our lives in one neighborhood. We knew all our neighbors. We sat on the front porch and chatted with them as they strolled by. We gladly loaned a cup of sugar or took care of their cat when they went on vacation, and we expected similar help in return. The word "neighborly," after all, means friendly and helpful.

Now, we jump from city to city, from suburb to suburb. A house has become an "investment." Even the idea of neighborhood -- a place that represented a certain kind of person and architecture has given way to the new bland subdivisions, one blending into the next with a sanitized oneness. Now, many of us live in a place for months, even years, and don't know the names of the people who live around us.

These days, if we think about our neighbors, it's usually because there's a problem. Their dog barks too much. Their stereo is too loud. Their yard looks awful. Maybe we grit our teeth and say nothing. (Why antagonize a neighbor?) Maybe we start by offering a mild complaint over the back fence. If we get really fed up, we can call the cops. Call the cops several times, and an officer might gently suggest that we go to the Citizens Dispute Settlement Center, where each year hundreds of irate neighbors try to resolve their problems with the help of a mediator.

In extreme cases, gnawing anger builds into all-consuming rage. That was what apparently happened to Miami's Baldomero Manuel Fernandez, a 62-year-old churchgoer who had a long- simmering dispute with his next-door neighbor, James Escoto, a young male nurse. One Saturday afternoon in 1986, according to the allegations of police, Fernandez shot his neighbor with every bullet he had in his gun, then used the gun to pummel the victim over the head, and, when someone took the gun away from him, pounded the man with a rock to make sure he was dead.

Neighbors told police that Fernandez and Escoto had a long- standing dispute. It went back three years.

That's half as long as the Kellys and Mitchells have been going at it.

Six years is an astounding length of time to carry a grudge. What the cops, and school officials, and the judge, and the administrators of Miami Springs want to know is what went wrong on Cherokee Street, what bizarre psychological mechanism has taken over, what actions have fueled such a driving hatred?

Though it is often the case that neighbors feud when different national or ethnic groups rub up against one another, that is not the whole answer. Witness the Kellys and the Mitchells: Amid all the strife between ethnic and racial groups in South Florida, all the Anglo-Hispanic and Anglo-black and black-Hispanic hostilities in this divided place, both families are old-fashioned, American-born white folk.

No. Something else is working here, something that is deep, and poisonous.

The Mitchells say it began with the birdbath. Back in 1980, they say, when they bought the house on Cherokee Street, they thought a birdbath came with it -- the kind that costs about $20. "It was there when we first looked at the house," says Margaret Mitchell. "It was there when we signed the contract. But it wasn't there the night we moved in. I looked over, and there it was, sitting in the middle of her yard."

The Kellys say the original problem was the plumbagos. Margaret Mitchell complained that the Kellys' plumbago vines were on her property, because she believed her property line extended two inches beyond her four-foot-high chain-link fence. One day, Margaret reached over the fence with her weed-eater and started cutting the plumbagos. "I took it away from her," says Bob Kelly. "I told her, 'Don't cut things on my property.' And she said something like: 'Margaret Mitchell never loses. Margaret Mitchell always wins.' "

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