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| New York 2022 |
A New Year’s wish is the secular equivalent of a prayer. There are however differences between the two. You pray to a deity you hopefully suppose may grant your prayer. But there is no Wizard of Oz behind the curtain of a New Year’s wish. Unlike a curse, forbidden according to Holy Writ, but much in evidence in our age of religious unbelief and anti-clericalism, a New Year’s wish is completely harmless, because it lacks a devil, a god or a congressman to enforce it.
With that in mind, here are a few harmless New Year’s wishes:
That Dr. Anthony Fauci, drawn to television cameras as moths
are to flames, would just go away and leave the airways free of “science”
hawkers peddling political programs.
That Boards of Education in Connecticut would be just a
touch more receptive to the people who elect members of the board to office.
The principle of representation, which always involves gobs of modesty,
requires an attentive ear to the general public, and this usually means
steering a course around special interest groups such as teachers’ unions and
the left of center editorial boards of increasingly thin newspapers.
That newspapers should become in the New Year bulkier and
more, not less, contrarian. This for two reasons: 1) controversy is politically
sexy, and 2) any government authority that has charge of our wallets and
regularly bullies its way through the china shop of our harmless prejudices --
such as an earnest devotion to God, the country, flag, apple pie and Mom –
wants watching.
No one outside of government can do this better than a
slightly cynical reporter. William Randolph Hearst, after which the Hearst
chain of newspapers is named, famously said, while politicians were endlessly
discussing the propriety of invading Spanish Cuba, “You give me the picture [of
the sinking of the USS Maine], and I’ll give you the [Spanish American] war!” Privately, Joseph Pulitzer, whose New York World was just as yellow but
less war mongering than Hearst’s New York
Journal, thought that "nobody outside a lunatic asylum" really
believed that Spain sanctioned Maine's destruction. Mark Twain,
always best when a fit of cynicism was upon him, heatedly registered his
objections to the war.
Controversy sells papers! And to have a controversy, you
must present in the body of your paper two people of opposite opinions who
controvert each other -- preferably right there on the op-ed page.
Pulitzer, after whom the eponymous Pulitzer Prize is named,
once said “A newspaper should have no friends.” He clearly was referring to
political friends. On this score, reporters should examine their consciences
every Monday and Wednesday to discover if the wall of separation between
politics and reporting is still standing.
That Governor Ned Lamont’s possibly unconstitutional
executive powers should be terminated forthwith, and coincidentally that the
leaders of Connecticut’s General Assembly should recover their courage and give
back to the people of Connecticut its co-equal branches of government.
State government has for two long years curtailed our
ancient liberties for health reasons. In the New Year the traditional three
branches of governance, should be reestablished, so that the governor’s plenary
powers may be redistributed between a fully functioning legislative branch
constitutionally charged with getting and spending, a judicial branch that
insures the peace and security of Connecticut citizens by imposing suitable
punishments upon convicted criminals, and an executive branch that enforces
laws promulgated by a watchful legislative branch free of special interests and
beholden only to the general public.
It is becoming plain to all that Connecticut’s government in
the post pandemic era is still fighting a battle it has won. There is no need
for further economic casualties – 2022 is not 2020.
Then too, it would be refreshing to learn that state government
is able to learn from the mistakes of others. Governor Andrew Cuomo was forced
from office for a number of reasons. He was too domineering, lacked sufficient
modesty to govern ethically, and misused his extraordinary emergency powers
when he sent elderly New Yorkers afflicted with Coronavirus into New York long-term
care facilities, where they fatally infected other elderly residents, many of
whom probably voted for Cuomo as governor. New Jersey’s numbers were worse than
New York’s, and Governor Phil Murphy, running against a nobody, barely survived
reelection to office.
Now that lifesaving therapeutics have become available, are largely Democrat governors in the northeast laying plans to quick-pump new therapeutics such as Merck’s Molnupiravir into hospitals and long-term care facilities, and is a vigilant media spearheading the effort? And why, oh why, haven’t governors yet recalibrated their daily infection statistics to include natural immunity -- recently called by one prominent doctor “nature’s vaccine” – especially now that Fauci-like alarmists have decided to inoculate very young children whose mouths they intend to wrap in winding cloths before they are permitted to attend kindergarten and elementary schools?
Happy New Year.
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