Connecticut Down, Part 4

 

The Cynic

                                                       On Reading the News Critically

It’s always dangerous, the Cynic said, to read a newspaper – or, more often these days, a blog site or a twitter platform – without first activating your critical brake lights. Passive readers engorge themselves and soon develop unwanted mental cramps. Cautious readers are abstemious gourmands.

The Cynic likes to be out and about. His main beef with Coronavirus is that it has cramped his lifestyle – his routine – which is, to take a coffee once a week at a crowded diner, while he marks up a newspaper as he reads various stories.

Presence is important in the lives of cynics. My Cynic loves the smell of humanity, the human heat a crowd throws off, the muffled sounds of crowd chatter, music to his ears. Since he has been marking up newspapers, only one person, a slightly hard of hearing Canadian with a Quebec accent, ever has asked him what he was doing writing notes on newsprint.

“I write about politics, God forgive me, and this is how I compose my word poems,” said the Cynic.

The hard of hearing Canadian with the Quebec accent said he understood. He had given up reading newspapers long ago. The product was too expensive and inferior. He never bothered with editorials or op-ed pages, but went always straight for the meat: obituaries, sport pages and the comic section.

There followed a long conversation about all manner of things and, whenever the Cynic’s understanding was stopped cold by the Quebec accent, he politely nodded his head, and the Quebecer smiled in appreciation. People are perfectly content, the Cynic thought, to misunderstand each other in this way.

The widespread notion that Cynics are misanthropes is mistaken. Only socialists, the Pierrot of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Aria Da Capo tells us, “love humanity, but hate people.” Cynics mistrust propositions, but they love both people and humanity, riven through, as it is, with fault lines.

The news of former New York Mayor Andrew Cuomo’s last public announcement as Mayor appeared on page 3 of a Hartford paper on Tuesday, August 26, the day following a storm that had not lived up to meteorological expectations. The meteorological audience was grievously disappointed. Some threatened to sue the weathermen; others contented themselves by writing nasty tweets.

Cuomo Again

The Cynic found the AP story, “Cuomo rips media, defends his record”, darkly comedic.

Cuomo’s last public address as Mayor – really his swan’s song – was prerecorded. He “boasted of making government effective,” cited approvingly “his work battling the Covid-19 pandemic,” and “struck a defiant tone on the harassment allegations.”

Dead elderly New Yorkers infected with Coronavirus moved from hospitals into nursing homes on Cuomo’s orders -- thus making the Governor of New York the state’s Coronavirus-Spreader-In-Chief -- might disagree that Cuomo had successfully battled Covid-19, said the Cynic, had they been alive to protest his narcissistic self-characterization.

The report, and news accounts, that toppled Cuomo was light on the nursing home Coronavirus infestation and heavy on allegations that Cuomo had molested 11 women, no inconsiderable accomplishment.

An earlier AP story had summarized the findings of the New York Attorney General’s report: “Investigators said he subjected women to unwanted kisses; groped their breasts or buttocks or otherwise touched them inappropriately; made insinuating remarks about their looks and their sex lives; and created a work environment ‘rife with fear and intimidation.’”

According to the AP story recounting the Governor’s swan song, Cuomo “said the report that triggered his resignation -- an account of what Attorney General Letitia James said was sexual harassment or inappropriate touching of 11 women -- was ‘designed to be a political firecracker on an explosive topic, and it did work,’ Cuomo said. ‘There was a political and media stampede.’”

And there it is, said the Cynic, a strong intimation that Cuomo, like his female accusers, had been victimized, molested by a critical media determined to drive him from office.

“Victimology,” said the Cynic, “has become the last refuge of scoundrels.”

Cuomo may well wish in the near future he never had his day in court, after he has had his day in court. Courts these days are used by political opponents to beggar the accused. However, at first glance, it is laughably absurd to view Cuomo as a victim, except in the sense that powerful men are victimized by the choices they freely make. Real victims are those who cannot make choices that redeem the day.

“If you want to compile a long list of victims, have a look-see, with open, unclouded eyes, at the soon to be victims of the Taliban in Afghanistan.”

Ukraine Again

The Cynic, perhaps because he has been writing political commentary for forty years, has a jeweler’s eye for underreported stories.

“News,” he says, “is ten percent thought and ninety percent repetition.”

The underreported story that caught his eye he found on a back page of a Hartford paper, a brief news services report titled “Biden meets Ukraine leader in long sought visit at White House.” The Cynic found a fuller account of the truncated AP story on a different site: “Biden meets Ukraine leader in long-sought Oval Office visit.”

We find, said the Cynic, referring to the brief account in the Hartford paper, that Biden “didn’t mention Afghanistan in his brief appearance with [President of Ukraine Volodymyr] Zelensky … but he highlighted his concerns about Russian aggression in the region. Biden in making his case to end the war in Afghanistan repeatedly said winding down the 20 year conflict would allow the U.S. to put greater focus on combatting malevolent acts from adversaries Russia and China.”

The Cynic’s eyes sparked at all this, a sardonic smile quivering on his lips. The picture accompanying the fuller AP story shows Zelensky and Biden chatting amiably together, and the caption to the picture reads: “WASHINGTON (AP) President Joe Biden used his first meeting with a foreign leader since ending the war in Afghanistan to send the message Wednesday that the United States, unburdened of its ‘forever war,’ is determined to become a more reliable ally to its friends, in this case Ukraine.”

“We do recall,” the Cynic said, “President Lyndon Johnson having said about one of his inept political opponents that the man ‘couldn’t walk and chew gum at the same time.’ Is Biden really saying that he was forced to deliver Afghanistan to Taliban terrorists because this would give him time and space to address properly Chinese and Russian aggression? And, perhaps more importantly, did Zelensky believe him?”

“Do you believe him?” I asked the Cynic.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“For two reasons: First because what he is saying is incredible, and second because he is incredible. An aged, well-seasoned politician, Biden is the victim of his own past dissimulations. And the same may justly be said of Democrat Congressional leaders Nancy Pelosi in the House and Chuck Schumer in the Senate. In Ukraine, Russia and China, Biden and his Democrat associates have all been outfoxed. And Biden is personally vulnerable, owing to the part played in both Ukraine and China by his dissolute and wayward son, Hunter Biden. There can be no squaring of the Afghanistan circle. It is what it is, a peace of 20 years shattered. Politicians lose wars in their minds before they lose them on the battlefield. And Biden’s mind has been left shattered in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, and eventually the whole of the Middle East.”