I happen to be writing something on Mark Twain’s politics, and I couldn’t help
but wonder what he might have thought rather than written – for Twain was
fairly cautious, some would say over-cautious, while his wife and censor Oliva
was still alive – about recent Connecticut politics.
Surely Twain would have noticed that the flight of
progressive politicians from their sinecures have followed the flight of
businesses and entrepreneurial capital from his beloved state. There’s got to
be some heavy levity, Twain’s specialty, in there somewhere. Not even Olivia,
the keeper of Twain’s reputation, could have prevented him from poking fun at
Connecticut’s political Grand Guignol. Following a fatal dip in the polls,
Governor Dannel Malloy has chosen not to run again, and he has been followed
out the door by his Lieutenant Governor, a promising Democrat gubernatorial
prospect who has not spent time in prison, Comptroller Kevin Lembo, Attorney
General George Jepsen, and other Democrat celebrities, all banging their tushies,
frantically attempting to put out pant fires.
We don’t have Twain with us anymore. But Chris Powell, whose
retirement from the paper is still pending, will be with us for some time to
come. Though he will be leaving the paper after 50 years, Powell will maintain
his column – good news for the good guys, bad news for the bad guys.
Senator Joe Markley said on Facebook that Powell was
Connecticut’s “indispensable man,” and this flushed out some doubters. One
would think in the era of President Donald Trump, country and state would have
got used to a little hyperbole. A little rich, one guy thought. We hauled that
guy off to a dark corner and gave him a public thrashing, because Powell really
is the indispensable man. It’s OK; you can do this sort of thing on Facebook
and, if you are President of the United States, on Twitter, which has become a
kind of tumbril used to transport distasteful politicians to the guillotine.
I
provided half a dozen items -- all written by me; interviews with
Powell on Connecticut Commentary, mentions of him in past columns, his
indispensable review of Lowell Weicker’s autobiography “Maverick,” which Powell
titled “Mr.
Bluster Saves The World,” and such like -- to support Markley’s
thesis.
At the same time, I received from my nephew Craig Tobey, who
is living in California – please don’t ask me why – a message on LinkedIn
congratulating me for having spent 38 years writing columns. Powell is wholly
responsible for this. So, I wrote Craig back saying “Thanks. It’s a long time
to have been writing on water.”
When the waves break, when time passes, all of it is writing
on water. You try to say some things that will stay fresh on the shelf, and
Powell is better at this than most. He’s quotable and memorable, always the
sign of a superior intellect. And he likes all the right thinkers
-- Frédéric Bastiat, for instance, and G.K. Chesterton. Tethered to either
of these sane anchors, you cannot wander far from the truth.
There are, as we know, two kinds of truths, pleasant and
unpleasant -- mine and yours. It is the unpleasant but necessary truths we all
instinctively retreat from.
We all are servants of the truth, not its masters. Writing
in “The Examiner” in 1710, Jonathan Swift said it best: “Besides, as the vilest
writer has his readers, so the greatest liar has his believers; and it often
happens, that if a lie be believ’d only for an hour, it has done its work, and
there is no farther occasion for it. Falsehood flies, and the truth comes
limping after it; so that when men come to be undeceiv’d, it is too late;
the jest is over, and the tale has had its effect.”
It is the business of honest journalism to see to it that
the truth is not washed away by lies. To lie is to say the thing that is not, and
journalists should avoid this too common practice like the plague. For fifty
years in journalism, that has been Powell’s honorable trade. He will never
receive a Pulitzer – neither did Bill Buckley, astonishingly – but he has
retired from the paper only, and during his long haul he has kept faith with
Joseph Pulitzer’s ever-fresh observation that “good journalists should have no
friends” -- in the political world, I should hasten to
mention. Isn’t it uplifting to think that we will have Powell with
us to kick around threadbare politicians a bit more?
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