Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Anyone hoping to hammer into a coherent ideology Mark Twain’s robustly critical admonitions on politics and politicians is bound to be disappointed. Here is Twain on the Congress of his day: “An honest man in politics shines more there than he would elsewhere.” That is taken from A Tramp Abroad, written in Hartford, Connecticut . Twain wrote most of his important novels in Hartford, including The Adventures of Tom Sawyer ,  The Prince and the Pauper ,  Life on the Mississippi ,  Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and  A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Towards the end of his life, tragedy became the uninvited guest at Twain’s table. He lost his beloved wife, both a spiritual anchor and a literary censor. Twain did not believe writers should self-censor. Olivia Clemons was concerned about her husband’s place in the world, as all good wives should be, and worked to keep his combustible politics from bursting into flame – at least publically -- and sing...

It would be difficult for anyone other than politicians on the right, often the butt of his jokes, to disdain Colin McEnroe. We in the land of Mark Twain do love and forgive our humorists their hyperbole, and Mr. McEnroe is the closest thing Connecticut has to, say, Aristophanes, the famous Greek comic playwright of the 4 th century BC. Time, as we know, is the enemy of sound scholarship. The ruin of Greece has left huge gaps in our understanding of, among other things, Greek comic playwrights. Only eleven of Aristophanes’ 40 plays survive virtually complete. Modern scholarship, which relies on multiple disciplines –archeology, for instance -- to fill in the gaps, shows us an Aristophanes who was an arch political critic, though he wore many masks. In his plays, Aristophanes mercilessly and subversively routed by means of humor the larger and more offensive pretentions of his day. Plato’s beef against Aristophanes was that his play “The Clouds” slandered Socrates and so led to th...

Even Greece at the height of its powers had a “gadfly.” The Greek term was used by Plato to signify the rather uneasy relationship between Socrates and the political scene in Athens. Plato described Socrates as the goad of Athens, a city he compared to a dimwitted horse. Athens, as we all know, had the last word in its dispute between the city’s most famous gadfly and city fathers who could not abide what Socrates himself called the sting of truth: “If you kill a man like me, you will injure yourselves more than you will injure me.” Socrates considered his role as that of a public critic whose purpose it was “to sting people and whip them into a fury, all in the service of truth." Athens convicted Socrates of corrupting the youth of the city and forced hemlock upon him as a remedy to quiet his fearless outspoken tongue. Not to put Senator Len Suzio in quite the same category as Socrates or even Jeremiah, the irritating prophet who compared Egypt to “very fair heifer” but note...

The rapidity with which the “candidate of change” changes is astounding. In choosing as his Vice President Joe Biden, a fixture that has been in the senate long enough to acquire cobwebs, Obama has surrendered any claim to be the candidate of change in Washington. What Obama's choice really signifies is that the promises a primary candidate makes on the campaign trail “ain’t worth a pitcher of warm p**s,” as FDR’s Vice President John Nance “Cactus Jack" Garner once said of the vice presidency. Garner, incidentally, was not a cynic. He served in Congress for 30 years, two of them as Minority Leader and two as Speaker of the House. He ran for president against Roosevelt but released his delegate to FDR at the nomination convention, for which he was awarded the warm pitcher of p**s. He opposed Roosevelt’s decision to run for a fourth term, challenged FDR for the party’s nomination, lost, and thereafter retired to his Texas homestead, regaling the locals with colorful stories abou...