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| Kasser |
When the story fell under the nose of a cynical friend, he sighed, “Only in Greenwich, and then internally quoted F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The rich, they are very different than you and I.”
Actually, the rich are not so different, Ernest Hemingway remonstrated.
They are just richer.
The story will make happily married people happy they are
married, not divorced, and blissfully happy they had never entered politics.
The cynic was referencing a story titled “A signed, Jackson Pollock collage has
become a point of contention in former state Sen. Alex Kasser’s long-running
divorce.”
The poor do not own Jackson Pollock paintings, and the poor
I know would not adorn their walls with Pollock paintings even if they were
rich as Croesus – or Alex Kasser’s not yet ex-husband.
The reporter is a professional, and so there was not a hint
of a snicker in the piece. It was all straight reporting, intentionally non-provocative.
Possibly the piece had been referred to the paper’s legal department. One does
not want to become a part of “a long running divorce” legal fandango. These are
bone crushing vortexes, especially when the divorcing parties have not
privately reached what the lawyers refer to as an amicable breakup.
Though, owing to the wonders of the postmodern world,
divorce has been made available to both the poor and the vanishing middle class
in Connecticut, the lower orders cannot afford the frisson of a contested divorce
and, for this reason, their mutual partings are less contentious, more pacific,
and less crowded with jabbering lawyers, a murder of highly educated crows.
When large fortunes are at stake, divorce proceedings
sometimes become rude and unmannerly. Among the lowest of the lower orders,
there are fewer divorce problems because in many cases there are fewer marriages. Or, more
properly speaking, the very poor are married to the state, which parcels out relief
only to “partnerships” in which there is no father of a child in the household.
Boyfriends, provided they do not contribute to household expenses, are
permitted.
However, the very poor are different than you and I, a
postmodern Fitzgerald might say. They are more clever than the state and sometimes
pull the wool over the eyes of the few fraud investigators the state employs
who do not always check every dotted “i” or crossed “t”. Some more ambitious members of the lower
orders have jobs and are paid under the table, which allows them to supplement
their income. Others are living with partners who are not the fathers of their
children and who contribute to the family income. If one cannot marry rich like
Kasser, one may always partner rich with some enterprising fellow who has been accustomed
to wink at the law.
Perhaps a postmodern Hemingway might say: The poor are no different than anyone else.
They are just poorer.”
And, because they are
survivors in a social Darwinian universe red in tooth and claw, they may be
more creative than their patron the state which, being an institution rather
than a person, has had no direct experience in marriage, divorce, childbearing,
or living on the income -- comparatively generous in Connecticut, if one includes all dispersals of welfare -- the state provides to fatherless poor children.
Kasser’s course since her divorce proceeding has been bumpy and
unconventional. The Kasser-Jackson
Pollock story provides the following details: “First elected to the legislature
in 2018, Kasser — then using her former last name of Bergstein — was part of a
blue wave of Democrats from Fairfield County. Bolstered by a surge of
anti-Trump sentiment, she unseated Republican Scott Frantz to become the first
Greenwich Democrat elected to the state Senate since 1930. She was reelected in
2020.
“Soon after her election she came under fire when she
acknowledged she was paying one of her aides out of her own money. She later
said she was in a romantic relationship with the staffer. In an op-ed published
in the Stamford Advocate last year, Kasser said she came out as gay more than a
decade ago.”
In a post-Andrew Cuomo political universe, feathering the
bed of your paramour with tax funds certainly would be regarded as a no-no.
But Kasser, like the creative poor, was a very inventive State Senator. Somewhere during her political Pilgrim’s Progress, she must have realized that her road, like that of Cuomo’s, had become a dead end. And so she did the honorable thing – Kasser declined to run for office because, she said, her three year old contested divorce would be taking so much time that she could not in good conscience continue to represent her constituents, besides which, her future plans necessitate a move out of Greenwich.
The moral of this tale for rich and poor is the same: Get
married, ideally before you have children; stay married, if at all possible;
get a job; keep your job – avoid divorce and state patronage. This may not
bring you riches, but you may enjoy the before tax happiness that independence and hard
work brings you.
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