Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

O ne of my college professors – let’s call him Stringfellow – spoke in long, flowing sentences, each of which might easily have been parsed into sparkling separate mini-poems. He liked Faulkner, disliked Hemingway, and tolerated Tennessee Williams for two reasons. Williams consciously structured some of his plays on classical Greek models – compare “Suddenly Last Summer” with Euripides’ “The Bacchae” – and Tennessee, he thought, was a name one could conjure with, as Wallace Stevens did adeptly in "Anecdote of the Jar," the first line of which runs, “I placed a jar in Tennessee/ And round it was, upon a hill …” One day, a student asked Stringfellow – this would have been in the middle 60’s – “When do you plan to join the 20 th century?’ to which Stringfellow replied, “It would be a very wicked thing to wish to be a part of the 20 th century.”

Governor Dannel Malloy, Democratic Party Bigwigs in Connecticut and the members of the state’s all-Democratic US Congressional Delegation are, at long last, in for Hillary Clinton as their Party’s presidential nominee. For weeks, the Democratic crowd had been indifferently plunging their big toes in the nomination pool. Now, in unison, all have jumped in, satisfied that Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, a fire breathing progressive, has earnestly decided to withdraw behind the nomination curtain. Fresh from having indicated he would not veto a progressive state budget that effectively violates every important promise he made on the gubernatorial campaign stump – no tax increases, no red ink budgets, no untoward budget gimmickry, and the like – Mr. Malloy now has found time to issue a generic endorsement of Hillary Benghazi.

"The past is never dead. It's not even past"  – William Faulkner Faulkner’s notion that we drag the past into the present with us in order to plot our futures is just common sense. In our life’s play, perhaps the most important character, ever-present but invisible, is the lived and remembered past. We learn from the past because we do not wish to be doomed to repeat fatal errors. And this applies in a darker sense to those who have suffered grievous wrongs. The moment is never far from them, and sometimes the moment, if you are a woman who has suffered a vicious assault, is present as a recalled event, a haunting ever present horror and a future possibility. After Deanna Pichette was assaulted by James Bartis III in December 2000, she was immediately hospitalized. This was the second go-around for Mr. Bartis, who had served six months in prison for a prior assault on Ms. Pichette, then his girlfriend. The hospital report on the injuries sustained by Ms. Pi...

We often say here in America that politicians with a past are carrying a lot of baggage into office with them. Hillary Clinton’s baggage, as everyone who has not slept through the past two decades may have realized, is husband Bill. And no, I am not referring to what the press used to call in Bill’s Monica Period the president’s sexual “peccadilloes.” We like to turn our pages on our pasts, and America is after all the land of second chances. Most Americans were quite willing to forgive Bill his “indiscretions” about five minutes after the cigar incident. The few women in Bill’s past who were crying “infidelity” – and in at least one case “rape” – were dismissed, even by the feminists, as implausible publicity hounds. No, all that lies in a past that, despite William Faulkner’s misgivings, is over. Faulkner said the past was not over, “It is not even past.” Hillary’s big problem is with husband Bill’s warmongering. In a review of two recent books on Hillary, “Hillary Clinton: Her Way” ...