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As little as I enjoy going out to Centerville, I must turn up occasionally, if only to discover how difficult my life is in the city – the gangs of juvenile criminals crowding the sidewalks, the marauders with machine guns hidden under their coats who you find standing beside you in the A&P selecting the ripest tomatoes, while my informants remain oblivious to the fact that there are more deadly weapons in most homes in Centerville than there are in whole blocks of the city.

A lunch with Cousin Fran is in the cards. On my most recent visit we met at the Soup Spoon as usual—I suggested that we try someplace where they changed the oil on the French fries more frequently, but Fran said that those places were too snooty, the waitresses always sat you next to the kitchen if you didn’t tip them a dollar.

Cousin Fran seemed a little dour, and as I lifted my martini glass I said so.

“Why wouldn’t I be? Most Americans don’t realize what these people are doing to them.”

“By these people I suppose you mean Obama and Joe Biden.”

“Who else? People should get somebody else’s opinion once in a while.”

I took a comforting sip of my martini. “The Republicans?”

“Sure. The Republicans aren’t so hot either, but at least they’re trying to rein in all the government programs that these immigrants think they have a right to.”

“Like Social Security and Medicare.”

“Yes.” Her chicken croquettes came and she jabbed her fork into one. “Why should the taxpayers have to support all these welfare cheats”?

“Fran, everybody on Social Security isn’t a cheat. Most people on these plans have been putting in to them for years.”

“What about all these immigrants? They haven’t been paying in for years. The Republicans are right to go after them.”

“Fran, if the Republicans think they’re going to win elections by cutting people’s Social Security they’re in for a jolt. It’s mind boggling, and some of them realize it. This former Senator Kay Hutchinson said flat out that her party had to stop fighting on issues like abortion and same-sex marriage, which the majority of Americans aren’t terribly troubled by, and let the party include people with a variety of opinions on these issues. I don’t have exact figures, but a huge percentage of American women have had abortions.”

She shook her head firmly. “And allowing gays to get married? If I’m not married, why should they be?”

“Fran,” I said gently. “You never wanted to get married. You always said that you weren’t going to spend your evenings listening to some guy grunt over his newspaper the way your dad did. If you don’t want to get married, that’s your business, but a lot of people don’t have a problem with gay marriage. At least gays aren’t likely to need abortions.”

“You’re always getting off the subject,” she said. “I don’t care if gays have abortions or not. They can have all the abortions they want as far as I’m concerned. There’ll be a lot less gays around if they do. People ought to remember what Jesus said.”

I shrugged. “I haven’t any idea what Jesus would say, and I don’t think anyone else does, either.”

“Do you think Jesus would stand for abortions?”

“I haven’t any idea,” I said, finishing off my martini. “In truth, I doubt if many Americans think that abortion is a peck of fun. But most Americans seem to agree that when a sixteen-year-old gets pregnant, abortion might be considered.”

“She shouldn’t have gotten pregnant in the first place. People need to learn self-control.”

“Fran, self-control doesn’t come as easily to everybody as it does to you.”

“It would if they’d been properly brought up.”

“That’s one way of looking at it,” I said, forking up a portion of potato salad. “But I should point out that nearly every other industrial nation provides people with a lot of services that we don’t offer here. Generous unemployment benefits, support for the ill and the indigent, the physically or emotional crippled.”

Again she gave me her suspicious eye. “That sounds an awful lot like

Socialism to me.”

“It ought to. In a lot of countries they’ve found a way to mix capitalism with socialism so that the economy remains robust but nobody drops through the cracks. There are problems with it, but in places like Europe and Japan the distance from the top to the bottom is less than it is in the United States. Not so much poverty, not such extremes of wealth enjoyed by a very few.”

“That’s what’s wrong with those places—right there. If people are smart and work hard they’re entitled to be rich. That should be obvious.”

I swallowed the potato salad. “I’m not so sure, Fran. Of course if people work hard they ought to get something out of it, but as far as I can see, many people with big money inherited it—or inherited enough to give them a leg up. Or they went into jobs where it’s possible to make a lot of money, like banking, the stock market, high finance. They don’t go into trades with clear social utility like teaching, farming, driving buses, which usually pay modest salaries.”

She shook her head. “Everyone can’t be rich. The country doesn’t have enough money for it.”

“But Fran, who chooses who should be rich? The guy who changes the oil on that beat-up old wreck of mine is doing a more useful task than most financiers. Why is he in the bottom half of the earnings table, while somebody else is raking in a heap of dough for raising mortgages rates on middle-class homes for the benefit of banks and their shareholders?”

“Oh, brother,” she said. “If that isn’t socialism, I don’t know what is.”

“It probably is, but that’s the policy in a lot of industrial nations. It doesn’t work perfectly. You’ve got some very rich people in some of these supposedly socialist nations, and some others who’ve fallen through the cracks. But at least they’re trying to see that everybody gets a fair shake.”

She waggled her head obstinently. “That’s other places. We don’t do it that way in the United States. Here everybody starts off even and the best person wins.”

I nodded, and there was a moment of silence as I sawed off a piece of chicken. “Listen, Fran,” I said, “What about the Mets? You think they’ve got a chance?”

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