 |
| Don, Kathy, Andrée and Dublin |
A good vacation should give vacationers the opportunity to vacate – that is, to cleanse the spirit of the usual 21st century toxins.
Just as travel broadens the mind, so unexamined habits
narrow it. Opening a book – my wife Andrée is a voracious reader of books –
does for the mind what travel does for the spirit. Laziness in politics leads
inescapably to political entropy and authoritarian political structures.
Authoritarianism – but evidentially not the unchallenged authority of a single
party state -- has become a recent hobgoblin of the left.
If you are, as I am, a political commentator, a vacation
should be free of politics, newspapers, radio, television, and clamorous
neighbors, most of them already primed to vote, as they have always voted, in
favor of the party in power. In Connecticut, “the land of steady [bad] habits,”
that would be the Democrat Party.
It’s good to purge the spirit of all this stuff once or
twice a year. All persistent habits are bad habits. Ralph Waldo Emerson, whom my
wife Andrée taught to sometimes attentive students in High School, once said,
“To become perfect is to have changed often.”
Fortunately, I have at my disposal – though I would never
consider disposing of her – a vacation traffic cop, my long suffering wife of
56 years, who is determined that our minds during our vacations together should
be focused on the irrecoverable moment and cleansing purgation.
In our younger days, we traveled all about the European
world – a partial listing of places visited would include Italy, France, Spain,
Scotland, Malta -- and brought home with us narratives that delighted our
relatives. Lately, we have been traveling in the United States, far less expensive,
and nearly everyone here helpfully speaks English or, as Oscar Wilde might have
said, American.
Wilde: “Great Britain and the United States are two counties
separated by a common language.”
Some cleansing purgations are more difficult than others. Both
Dennis Port and Plymouth Rock, not yet removed by persnickety neo-progressives,
are on Cape Cod.
The New Puritanism
If neo-progressives had their way, the Pilgrims who
disembarked from the Mayflower in December of 1620 and later went on to settle
much of New England would have been turned away by Native Americans – and good
riddance to them.
It didn’t happen that way, we all know. And 531 years after
Christopher Columbus first opened the Americas to European settlement a cup of
coffee at Dunkin Donuts in Dennis Port costs $2.50. Tobacco, a Native American
product introduced into Europe by Spanish traders in the 1500s, has virtually
disappeared in Connecticut’s tobacco Valley. In colonial days and long after,
tobacco drove much of the economy of the North Atlantic World. The lucrative
tobacco trade kept colonies in Maryland and Virginia above water in stressful
economic times.
In the present period, thanks to a confiscatory tax on
tobacco products and the strenuous exertions of former Attorney General of
Connecticut Dick Blumenthal, now the state’s senior U.S. Senator, “Tobacco
Valley” in Connecticut has all but disappeared. Tobacco fields have been
replaced by housing developments and massive warehouses.
Some neo-progressive harridans would consider all of the
above progress: less tobacco, less lung cancer; less fossil fuel, less
environmental degradation; fewer people, less…
Ah well, the overarching point is that human beings, Native
Americans excepted, are a curse on the earth.
Neo-progressivism, our newest fashion-forward ideology, can
best be understood as a secular variant of the kind of mob-thought parodied by
Henry Menken when he wrote that Puritanism was "the haunting fear that
someone, somewhere, may be happy."
Now, of course, extreme Puritanism has long made its way to
the exit doors in Connecticut. No woman in The Constitution State need fear,
circa 2023, that she will be bound and thrown in the local pond in an effort to
find out whether a suspected witch was indeed a witch, the test being – if the
lady does not sink to the bottom, she is innocent of the charge brought against
her by Puritan purists.
Arthur Miller, Marilyn Monroe’s husband, wrote a well
receive play about all this, The Crucible,
in 1953.
On the whole, the new crop of neo-progressives takes its
secular and political sins seriously. And, on the whole, neo-progressives are a
dour bunch about whose heads swarm black clouds of universal misery. One cannot
imagine a neo-progressive fury laughing at Mark Twain’s quip that, while
everybody talks about the weather, no one ever does anything about it.
The Cotton Mathers of the unsmiling environmental movement
know exactly what to do about the weather.
Environmental extremists who want to ban the internal
combustion engine in three or four decades – the eupeptic Governor Ned Lamont
is one of them -- are not animated by laughter or irony or an appreciation of
fallible human nature. They are, for the most part, unsmiling when contemplating
the secular sins they wish to purge and the sinners they wish to correct. If
you resist them, you are certain to get a public dunking.
Dunkin’ Donuts, a Refuge in the Storm
It rained the first few days we arrived at our “Tiny House”
in Dennis Port. I searched my GPS unit immediately for a Dunkin Donuts, always
a sign of civilization for the storm-tossed traveler. My old mom’s apothegm –
“When in doubt, eat” – has always stood me in good stead and prevented any
encounters between myself and the noble art of psychoanalysis, about which the
great German social critic, Karl Kraus,
once said –“ Psychoanalysis is the mental illness it purports to cure,” and
“The psychoanalysts pick our dreams as if they were our pockets,” and
“So-called psychoanalysis is the occupation of lustful rationalists who trace
everything in the world to sexual causes -- with the exception of their
occupation.” Kraus, a contemporary of Sigmund
Freud, once wrote a play the performance of which lasted nearly a week.
Bertholt Brecht was a friend and fan of the cultural satirist.
At 8:00 AM in the morning, Dunkin’ was full to bursting, awash
in retired marketplace lions sipping coffee and growling over the indignities
imposed upon them by their bosses and their political overlords.
I took root at a small table, spread out the September 26th
Wall Street Journal and read in the paper’s “What’s News” section: “Investors
worry that $100-dollar-a-barrel oil could become the latest in a string of
inflationary shocks to challenge the Feds effort to control price increases, as
analysts say that mark could be touched or surpassed later this year.”
Sitting at the table beside me was a solitary, elderly gent,
well dressed, with a bit of silver-tipped stubble showing on his upper lip and
chin.
“You know,” he said, “I’m 82, retired a few years ago, and
now they’ve rehired me. They pay for my coming and going into the city.”
“Where do you work?” I asked.
He mentioned the name of the largest investment house in New
York City, recovering just now from illegal alien overload.
He shook his head sadly, pursed his lips, and said that the
investment house had just unloaded more than a hundred young employees.
“Why?’
“They weren’t coming to work. They preferred working at
home.”
Before parting company, we found agreement on the following
points: well educated young people hired and soon fired by the largest
investment house in New York City were, perhaps, selfish and unacquainted with
business culture; politicians in Washington DC are, a good many of them,
self-seeking and unacquainted with the need and wants of the business world;
profits, on the whole, are good because businesses pay the costs of doing
business from profits; whatever interrupts an organic business process kills
creativity – and it is creativity, not profit, an incidental benefit at best,
that is the lifeblood of prosperity and economic welfare.
What, I wondered on my way back to our rented “little
house,” was the chance of meeting such a character? Like God, serendipity does
not always sleep.
“To meet a friend again, after a long absence, is a god” – An Ancient
Greek Saying
Andrée and Kathy have been friends for a long while. Kathy was
Andrée’s student when she taught for two years at Saint Mary’s Girls High School
in Greenwich, Connecticut.
Teaching at Catholic schools was for Andrée part of a long
process involving state certification for the legally blind to teach in public
schools that had eventually, thanks to Andrée persistence, ensnared then
governor of Connecticut John Dempsey.
When Andrée graduated top of her class from Danbury State
Teacher’s College – so it was called when she first enrolled at the school in
1962 – she was not permitted to teach in public schools, much to her disappointment.
This was, she thought, unjust, and injustice and Andrée have never been able to
live comfortably together. How can someone who is legally blind, teach in
public schools, the administrators reasonably asked.
She wrote to Dempsey and advised that she had graduated with
honors for High School teaching of English, appeared in Who’s Who in Colleges and Universities in the United States,
directed plays while in college, was Fencing Sportshead, etc., etc. She had
been legally blind since birth, but her disability had never deterred her.
Might the governor intervene with the school on her behalf?
Dempsey wrote back that there was nothing he could do to
assist her.
She then went on to receive a Master’s Degree from Fairfield
University in a new field, American Studies, while continuing to teach for
three years in two Catholic schools in Greenwich and Stamford, Connecticut.
She updated Dempsey on her achievements, but the result was
the same, a sorrowful – Sorry, there is nothing I can do.
After a persistent correspondence, Dempsey wrote back a
short note -- Andrée, you win. And a glass ceiling came tumbling down. She soon
received certification to teach in public schools – Ridgefield High School as
it happened, where she taught for a decade. She married me, my good fortune, in
1967, and suffered a name change during the time she and Kathy, a student only
a few years younger than Andrée, formed a fast friendship that has lasted more
than a half century.
Before leaving for vacation, we had attended at the Blake Center for Freedom and Liberty
in Somers, Connecticut, affiliated with Hillsdale College in Michigan, a
lecture on C.S. Lewis given by noted Lewis scholar Michael
Ward.
Lewis explores friendship in the fourth chapter of The Four Loves. True friendship, always
rare because few experience it, flowers when two or more companions have in
common something that others do not share. When friends walk side by side,
looking directly ahead and have an interest in common not shared by others,
Lewis writes, “The typical expression of opening Friendship would be something
like, ‘What? You too? I thought I was the only one.’”
What happened years ago continues to happen – and not just
in memory. That is why meeting an old friend again after many years have passed
is, to those bound in friendship, a god.
Beside a common experience of this kind, every difference is
a subordinate concern. The sun at high noon blots out the stars.
Kathy fairly frequently used to ride her bicycle from
Greenwich to Stamford to visit with Andrée. A former writer for the Wall Street
Journal in New York, Kathy was then, and is now, perceptive, intelligent and
adventuresome.
It rained heavily for two days of our vacation but, thanks
to the visit, it did not rain on Andrée’s pre-arranged parade.
Comments