Who's Checking Up?

I seem to remember there was a song back in the 50s or 60s that went: "Who's checking up on the man who's checking up on the man who's checking up on the man who's checking up on me?"  Personally, I don't care who checks up on me as long as they get it right.  When I was trying to sign up for DISH satellite TV, they didn't want to sell it to me because they ran a credit check which led them to believe that I didn't exist.  I had to send them a photocopy of my driver's license and Social Security card to prove that I was a real person.  While it's true that we hadn't bought anything on credit for awhile, there was that construction loan in 2000, less than a decade previous, which we paid off ahead of schedule.  Apparently that didn't count.  I saw something on the TV news the other day about Face Book blocking the U.S. Declaration of Independence as "hate speech".   They apologized for the error, blaming one of their algorithms that apparently needed some tweaking.

Speaking of the Declaration of Independence, I believe it was 1976, the year of the bicentennial, when somebody stood on a street corner asking people if they wanted to sign it, but they didn't tell them what it was.  Many of the subjects glanced at the document briefly and refused to sign it, saying that it looked like subversive propaganda which, ironically, it was.

It makes sense that the term "sheeny" used to be applied to Jews in Chicago because there was a big open air market on Maxwell Street where street peddlers plied their trade.  I think many of those street peddlers must have been Jewish because, whenever my sister or I hollered too loudly for her taste, my grandmother used to say, "You sound like a Jew on Maxwell Street."

I remember that Black people used to be called "shines", among other things.  I even remember this old joke:  "How do you spell Polish? - p-o-l-i-s-h.
                 How do you spell polish? - p-o-l-i-s-h
                 That proves that there's no difference between a Polack and a shine."

Note to Google, or whoever else might be monitoring this post: Please do not delete the preceding joke as hate speech.  I only wrote it as an historical educational tool so that today's young people can witness the low brow humor that was prevalent back in the days before political correctness was invented and appreciate how lucky they are to have been born in a more enlightened age.