Lamont Jumps Off Brooklyn Bridge

When you told your mother that you really ought to have a new bike because Tommy next door got one, your pragmatic mother, if she was at all like my mother, responded somewhat as follows:  “If Tommy jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge, would you follow him?”

This response usually concluded the discussion, and it was unanswerable. You were not Tommy, and his circumstance, you were led to believe, were far plusher than your own. Discussion over. You would have to work, saving up your meager salary for a new bike, or perhaps fortune would smile on the family, a rich uncle would die – there were none – and he would favor the family and you in particular with a bike in his last will and testament.

Governor Edward Miner Lamont Jr. – “Ned” to you – white-privileged and brought up in the lap of luxury, likely never had to face such narrow circumstances. Lamont’s gold-platted pedigree is widely available to all curious journalists in Wikipedia.

He is the great-grandson of former J. P. Morgan & Co. Chairman Thomas Lamont. His father was an economist who worked on the Marshall Plan and served in the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) during the Nixon administration. He is the grand-nephew of American Civil Liberties Union Director Corliss Lamont and a “distant descendant of colonial diarist Thomas Minor, from whom he gets his middle name.” Lamont lives in toney Greenwich and is the padrone of Sky Farm, on the island of North Haven, Maine, a family “summer cottage.”

The rich are very different than you and I, says F. Scott Fitzgerald.  Lamont is very rich, and he married well. His capable wife Ann, a venture capitalist, puts far more bread and butter on the family table than does her husband.

Armed with a Bachelor's Degree in Political Science from Stanford University, Ann is reputed to be a faithful political advisor to her husband. Some critics of the Governor, by no means all Republicans, have been known to grouse that Ann may be her husband’s only political advisor. Not as bristly as his predecessor, Dannel Malloy, Lamont has not burned up the phone lines seeking advice from Democrat or Republican leaders in the General Assembly, a body that has been put into suspended animation by the Coronavirus plague.

Lamont has jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge, we are told by NBCNY: “Cuomo, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy and Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont jointly implemented the restricted travel list last month in an effort to ward off local COVID resurgence. It applies to states that exceed 10 percent daily test positivity rates or 10 new cases per 100,000 residents over a seven-day rolling period.”

The plan – to prevent Coronavirus contagion from other states – makes sense only as a political ploy to garner votes in the upcoming 2020 elections from the terminally stupid among us and journalists who have not re-read Edgar Allen Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death.” This is a story that centers on the inability of politicians to prevent a plague from entering a fortified castle. Sturdy walls, Lord Prospero soon discovers, cannot prevent the Red Death from penetrating his fortifications. And the Lamont, Cuomo, Murphy travel restrictions will fail in preventing Coronavirus seepage into Connecticut for two reasons.

Reason number one: the plan cannot be effectively implemented. All travelers from out of state – or those, such as UConn sports players, who travel out of state and return – must submit to Coronavirus testing. If they test positive for Coronavirus, they must submit to a 14 day sequester. The plan is extensive and will involve all modes of travel, whether by plane, train, bus or car. Lamont has posted travel cops at airports. But, one may be sure, no such enforcers, armed with forms that must be signed by the traveler, will share a ride with any commuter traveling by car from Mayor Bill de Blasio’s New York City to Fairfield County; ditto train and bus travelers. The walls of Prospero’s castle are semi-permeable.

Reason number two: Even if the Lamont, Cuomo, Murphy plan were perfectible, the plan’s premise is fatally faulty. Months of exposure to Coronavirus should have convinced politicians that prophylaxis is insufficient to prevent the spread of Coronavirus. Only a vaccine or natural immunity can prevent people from contracting the virus. The human body is an anti-body production machine, and sequestration -- as Cuomo has been forced to admit – delays the natural production of antibodies in people, such as school children, who are NOT at risk of developing serious Coronavirus complications. More than 60 percent of those who fell fatally ill with Coronavirus were self-quarantines.

Indeed, people who were most at risk of dying “with” – not “from” – coronavirus were the elderly in nursing homes left to their own insufficient resources by Lamont, Cuomo and Murphy.

The real; danger for Connecticut lies here: Lamont cannot jump off the Brooklyn Bridge, along with other destructive governors Cuomo and Murphy, without taking the entire population of Connecticut with him.

People in Connecticut should ask their practical-minded, abstemious mothers how they think such suicidal jumps off bridges will work out for those in Connecticut who plan to mail in their votes early for savior politicians who pretend convincingly to solve problems they are responsible for creating.