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.”

Newspapers should have no friends – Joseph Pulitzer Sometime in the past few years, nearly everyone in Connecticut, with the possible exception of the state’s ebullient left leaning writers, became a cynic. And cynicism has increased in direct proportion to the inability or unwillingness of status quo progressives in the General Assembly to confront the state’s most pressing economic problems. “We've been sitting through the last days of the legislative session doing everything BUT paying attention to the state's economy and fiscal situation,” Representative Gail Lavielle notes on Facebook. Procrastination is the typical response of a do-nothing politician to a serious problem.

"A little learning is a dang'rous thing; Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring: There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, And drinking largely sobers us again” – Alexander Pope The following paragraph, which appeared in a Hartford Courant editorial, “ A Bad Bill Worsened , ” a day after April Fool’s Day, is itself more shallow than most of the assertions made by the paper in a previous thoughtless editorial : “The state is forgoing much-needed revenue — about $27 million a year at the current price level —that most drivers won't miss. This is money that could be used to balance the budget or to repair bridges and roads — an area the state is short on by $1.4 billion. Research indicates that poor roads increase maintenance costs. So pennies' worth of savings for drivers could mean millions of dollars in repair costs for the state.” The state -- by which we are to understand Governor Dannel Malloy and the Democratic dominated General Assembly but not,...

Cain Leads UnAble Republican presidential hopeful Herman Cain is now leading President Barack UnAble by a slender 3 point margin in the latest Rasmussen poll . Obama Says No, Yes Campaign pepper coursing through his veins, President Barack Obama has announced that he is against the repeal of his health laws long term CLASS Act (don’t ask), despite the prior announcement by his government that the program was dead in the water, according to The Hill . Demagogueing The Dirt There are two governing plans before the American people President Barack Obama told a group of people who had come to hear the president spread sweetness and light on the campaign trail : "My plan says we’re going to put teachers back in the classrooms, construction workers back to work. Tax cuts for small businesses, tax cuts for hiring veterans, tax cuts if you give your workers a raise – that’s my plan. "The Republicans plan, boils down to this: Dirtier air, dirtier water, less people with...

After reading a well-reasoned piece in UConn’s Daily Campus writtenby Thomas Dilling , it is difficult to avoid reaching the conclusion that presidential candidate   Ron would make a far better governor of Connecticut than present Governor Dannel Malloy. Mr. Malloy earned 15 minutes of fame recently for calling Mr. Paul an idiot. Mr. Paul suggested doing away with FEMA and delegating its powers to states and municipalities. “Although the governor will likely dismiss me as an idiot,” Mr. Dilling writes , “there is good reason for Connecticut to believe that FEMA should not be a federal responsibility.” Surely, Mr. Dilling reasons, the flow of money from Connecticut to Texas should interest Connecticut’s governor: “…according to FEMA's website, Texas leads the nation in declared disasters since 1953 with 85 compared to Connecticut's 27 (47th place). Yet, despite this realization that FEMA takes money from Connecticut and spends it in Texas, Connecticut's governor n...

Everyone very likely will recall the Moody-Rell-Arts And Tourism incident, then Gov. Jodi Rell’s Teapot Dome scandal. Lisa Moody, Rell’s chief aide, ordered that an address list of art and tourism organizations be put on a disk, which she then shared with Rell’s re-election campaign committee. It was assumed at the time, by very nearly everyone who had access to a computer keyboard, that the campaign committee would use the names to furnish funds for “Snow White.” This mini-Teapot Dome affair was stopped in its tracks by a vigilant press. The incident delighted anti-Rellites in both the opposition party and the media. Then Speaker of the House Jim Amann strummed the chord of corruption until the strings on his rhetorical harp broke, without once asking why Bill DiBella had not followed Ben Andrews to jail. And the media began humming “Schadenfreude, My Schadenfreude” in its sleep. The moral epigones guessed Moody was far more corrupt than U.S. Rep. John Murtha, the powerful Chai...

“Am I proud? Yes, why should I not be, When even men who do not fear God Fear me? Those few lines were written by Alexander Pope, an English poet and critic active in the early 1700’s, who had some reason to be proud. He was a fine poet and an even better journalist who delighted in pricking the airy balloons of the high and mighty of his time, sometimes anonymously. Prisons yawned in the 18th century to swallow libelers, and men kept their dueling pistols near at hand. His biographer tells us that Pope’s physical defects – he was misshapen owing to a fall from a horse at an early age – “made him an easy target for heartless mockery.” He also had a religious problem: “Pope's father, the son of an Anglican vicar, had converted to Catholicism, which caused the family many problems. At the time Catholics suffered from repressive legislation and prejudices - they were not allowed to enter any universities or hold public employment. Thus Pope had an uneven education, which was often int...