Part 1 In A Series Of Self Interviews: On Connecticut Commentary
Q: Reading over your blog, “Connecticut Commentary: Red Note From A Blue State”, I don’t see many “I’s”.
A: Modesty.
Q: No really, why?
A: Political commentators fall into two categories: those
who write about themselves, and those who write about others and ideas. This
last group tends to dispense with “I’s”.
Q: Well, we’ll see if we can remedy that lapse here. You
have quoted Chris Powell, for many years both the Managing Editor and the
Editorial Page Editor of the Journal Inquirer, on his motivation. You said to
him once – correct me if I’m wrong – that he had been writing opinion pieces
longer than you, and you have been working in the commentary vineyard for more
than forty years. You complimented him. His opinion pieces were perceptive,
well written and necessary, a tonic for what ails the state, you said. Yet,
politicians at the state Capitol who decide Connecticut’s destiny did not
appear to be paying much attention. So, you asked, what keeps him going. He
flashed a smile and said, “Spite.” Does spite keep you going?
A: I doubt Powell ever bought the notion that political
behavior swings on the writings of political commentators. His primary
motivation is plain on the face of his opinion pieces, both editorials and
op-ed commentary. He wants to set hard truths before the general public, hoping
that not every citizen is motivated by spite or enclosed within a Berlin Wall of
invincible ignorance. Off camera, so to speak, Powell has a quiet, infectious
sense of humor. And a sense of humor is a sense of right proportion. He was
joking. It’s possible that joking in the 21st century will be a capital offense
punishable by exile, as were serious crimes against the state in Roman and
Greek times. In modern times, burning down buildings, liberating high-toned
stores of merchandise, throwing Molotov cocktails at police buildings, are all
okay; but we draw the line at making jokes. The Greek tyrant Creon feared
Aristophanes as much as an invading army. One day, one of Creon’s factotums met
Aristophanes in the street and asked him in a fury, “Don’t you take anything seriously?”
Aristophanes answered, “Yes, I take comedy seriously.” Mark Twain also took
comedy seriously, and his long suffering wife, Olivia Langdon Clemens, worked
tirelessly to protect him from a public whipping. In "The Chronicle of
Young Satan, Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts,” Twain has Satan
say, “Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand.”
Q: So, you are not spiteful then?
A: Spite, like humor, is salt, to be used always sparingly.
I acknowledge that every sealed closet has some bones concealed in it. I can
only say I don’t feel spiteful,
though I do think spite can flower into gorgeous commentary. I’m thinking of
Alexander Pope’s long poem, “The Dunciad”. We should love lovable things and
hate hateful things. The record -- and it’s a long one; “Connecticut
Commentary” contains to date about 3,141 separate pieces, nearly all submitted
as columns to a host of Connecticut papers – I think will show that I’m
interested in the public persona of politicians, the face they
present to their constituents. I’m certainly not interested in delving into the
private soul of, say, US Senator Dick Blumenthal, about whom I’ve written a
great deal, much of it unpublished by Connecticut’s print media. It’s best to
stay away from amateur psychology. Rummaging in private souls is very much like
rummaging in attics – too many spider’s webs, hanks of hair, abandoned diaries,
and moldy, old dolls.
Q: I’ve seen the Blumenthal cache. Much of it is well
written, certainly publishable. And you’ve said that nearly all of
that cache had been sent out to various Connecticut newspapers. Much of it
never saw print. Why not?
A: Thanks for your labor of love. It’s a good question. I
suppose much of it may have rubbed editorial fur the wrong way. Part of this is
business. Smaller newspapers, as you know, have been swallowed up by
journalistic leviathans. The larger chains have a stable of dependable writers
they may draw from. The whole of New England is a left-of-center political
theater and has been for a long while. The General Assembly in the state has
been dominated by left-of-center Democrats for a few decades; all the
constitutional offices in the state are manned by Democrats; there are no
Republicans in the state’s US Congressional Delegation; virtually all the
justices of the state’s Supreme Court have been placed on the bench by highly progressive
former Governor Dannel Malloy. Larger cities in the state – Bridgeport, New
Haven and Hartford – have been, some would say, mismanaged by Democrats for
about a half century. And it is not news that the media does political business
mostly with incumbents. So, while it is not at all excessive hyperbole to say
that most of the state’s current difficulties may be laid squarely at the feet
of immoderate Democrats, incumbents are, mostly for business reasons, lightly
leashed.
Q: Why lightly leashed?
A: You cannot get water from a rock, and you cannot get
printable news from non-incumbents. If the political state is largely
progressive, the state media will follow suit.
Q: Why “immoderate” Democrats?
A: Because Connecticut Democrats are no longer moderate, no longer centrists, no longer “liberal” in the sense that President John Kennedy or justly celebrated Governor Ella Grasso were liberal.
Q: You knew Grasso.
A: I did. She, her family and my father and his family,
while occupying opposite ends of the political spectrum, were friends all their
lives in the social and political petri-dish of Windsor Locks. During those
times, friendship transcended politics. And politics itself was well mannered
and soft spoken.
Q: Not now.
A: No longer.
Q: What changed?
A: Do you mean nationally or state-wide?
Q: Both.
A: Nationally, the Huey-Long-like personality of President Trump has thrown the right-left national polarity into sharp relief, but this polarity preceded Trump by decades. When everyone, including the overarching, permanent political apparatus and a politicized media, has a dog in the fight, a permanent dog fight should surprise no one. State-wide, Connecticut has become, within a very short period of time, perhaps the most left-leaning state in the northeast. The drift leftward here began long ago. It was “maverick” Republican Lowell Weicker who, first as senator then governor, took the road not taken by pervious governors when he forced through the General Assembly Connecticut’s income tax, a levy that has resulted in improvident spending, outsized budgets, preening politicians and a poorer proletariat.
Q: That was the turning point?
A: It was a crossing of the Rubicon by a small-minded man
who had contemplated for years the destruction of his own state Republican
Party, which Weicker had betrayed numerous times, that finally gave him the
heave-ho. Without turning over the molding psychological dolls in Weicker’s
attic, I think it is proper to conclude that the man was motivated principally
by unalloyed malice, what aphorist-philosopher
Friedrich Nietzsche would have called resentment, an awful curse.
“Whoever fights monsters,” Nietzsche warned, “should see to it that in the
process he does not become a monster.” I never heard Weicker toss off a laugh
line that was not spiked with malice. I’m referring here only to the man’s
public persona, you understand. In private, he may have been Henny Youngman for
all I know. In politics, it is the characters who determine the play. And in
Connecticut, neatly all the characters who advance the play are progressives
motivated chiefly by a rancid lust for power, very Nietzschean. Without
will, you cannot secure your ends. But when the will becomes the end, it’s
doomsday. Nietzsche never quite worked that into his calculations. But the
great tyrants of the 20th century – Hitler, Stalin, Mao – did.
Without God, Dostoyevsky said, “anything is possible” – even Weicker, the first
of many of Connecticut’s “savior politicians.” The business of these savior
politicians is to create the problems from which they pretend to save us.
Q: That seems a bit cynical.
A: Critical and descriptive, not cynical. The real cynics
among us are those who believe positive knowledge is impossible. A perverse
inability to see what lies right under your nose, George Orwell’s formulation,
is the very definition of cynicism.
Q: Can you give us an example.
A: I think it is cynical to pretend not to notice the predictable
effects of Lamont’s shutdown of state businesses. Even a state legislator
hiding under his bed, trembling in fear of Coronavirus, cannot fail to have
noticed that a prolonged business shutdown would result in a diminution of
state revenue; that the fatal failure of state government to provide adequate
and targeted resources to nursing homes would result in needless deaths among
people exposed to Coronavirus; that tax increases always transfer power and
responsibility from citizens to the unelected administrative state, a
descriptive rather than a cynical term; that a one party state necessarily
results in political oligarchy, which easily dispenses with representative
government; that...
Q: Alright, alright, we don’t have all day here. Without
being too cynical – excuse me, too descriptive – how do you see Connecticut’s
future unfolding.
A: What was it Yogi Berra said – the future ain’t what it
used to be? In a representative republic, we used to rely on the common sense
of voters to turn out politicians who pursued public policies inimical to
representative government and the public good, one of the reasons Grasso
agitated against an income tax. One of Grasso’s biographers is Lieutenant
Governor Susan Bysiewicz, who argues that Grasso, a great governor, was wrong
about the income tax. Well, Grasso was right about the income tax,
and she was right for the right reasons. Weicker was right about the income tax
when he said, during his gubernatorial campaign that instituting an income tax
in the midst of a recession would be like pouring gas on a fire, and he was
wrong when, as governor, he poured income tax gas on Connecticut’s recession.
The progress from Grasso to Bysiewicz, from Grasso to former Governor Dannel
Malloy and Ned Lamont is a fool’s journey in the wrong direction. The false
solutions and the consequent havoc lie right under our noses. And it is long
past time for Connecticut’s media to realize that the whole purpose of
journalism is to describe accurately, in Orwell’s words, “the thing that lies
right under our noses.” So, given our recent past history, our one party state,
our wall-eyed media, our seemingly indifferent citizens, our
representative-shy, inoperative General Assembly, which has just decided to
surrender even more of its constitutional and legislative responsibilities to
an incompetent governor, I would say Connecticut’s future looks bleak.
Q: Just one more quibble before we go. You lament the want
of common sense among voters. What made common sense a casualty of modern politics?
A: Both common sense and the conscience, an inseparable
pair, have been surrounded and taken prisoner by wily politicians and a
cowardly media. The founders of the republic feared, almost to a man that
common sense – the moral imperative, the ethical genius that lies in all of us
– could not survive immoral and ambitious politicians seeking to promote their
own rather than the public good. We can only pray to God for the restoration of
a moral order. God, Otto von Bismarck once said, favors drunkards, the poor,
and the United States of America. Pray he was right, because, except on their
tongues, politicians in Connecticut, mostly pretending to be progressives,
favor none of the above. And, once again, I am being descriptive here, not
cynical.
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