Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

US Senator from Connecticut Chris Murphy held a behind the curtain meeting with Iran’s Foreign Minister Javad Zarif. Sometime after the meeting, Murphy ran into a wall in the person of Mollie Hemingway, after which a Zola on his staff wrote up, very late in the day, an extensive apologia that very likely will fizzle, even among Connecticut’s Murphyites. The Journal Inquirer took Murphy to task in a February 22 Editorial, “ Murphy was wrong to meet with Iranian official ,” that is worth quoting in full: “Sen. Christopher Murphy’s recent meeting with Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif was a mistake. Murphy’s rationalization that we need to keep doors open with Iran is faulty. Iran is a clerical fascist state and is a sworn enemy of the United States. It will remain so as long as Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei remains in power.

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.”

“The rich are very different from you and me,” F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, to which Ernest Hemingway is said to have replied, “Yes, they have more money." House Speaker James Amann, D-Milford, the leader of the Democratic caucus, gets half of it. Amann understands, as do most Democrats, that the rich have more money than you and I. For this reason, and because he and the Democrats have finely honed senses of justice, Amann and his cohorts plan to relieve the rich in Connecticut of some of their assets to help pay for an ever expanding budget. Once again the state has come up short in its budget. Amazingly, there are Democrats in the state’s legislature who think they have been cutting taxes rather than spending money like the proverbial drunken sailor, though unimpeachable proof of their wild spending spree may be deduced by examining the steadily increasing bottom line of successive state budgets. The last non-income tax budget was approximately half the bottom line total of t...