Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

  The Cynic The Cynic at the Diner The Country Mouse looked his friend over carefully. He hadn’t so much as spoken word to him in nearly a half century. The Cynic was much the same. The timeless features of humans – the sound of the voice, the color of an eye, the general bone structure of the face, a smile in motion – remain steadfastly constant. And, of course, though The Cynic was still tall, he had put on some pounds and his muscles were in retreat. He still had a full head of hair, tinged with white. Genetics are decisive, thought the Country Mouse. “Do you remember…” The Cynic a week earlier had begun their phone call. For the Country Mouse, this was an incantation that had always opened the mercifully locked doors of memory that connected him immediately with a specific painful or joyous moment. Before The Cynic had finished the sentence, a scene flashed like lightening through the Country Mouse’s mind. He saw them both traveling in an old row boat ladened with cem...

  The Cynic                                                        On Reading the News Critically It’s always dangerous, the Cynic said, to read a newspaper – or, more often these days, a blog site or a twitter platform – without first activating your critical brake lights. Passive readers engorge themselves and soon develop unwanted mental cramps. Cautious readers are abstemious gourmands. The Cynic likes to be out and about. His main beef with Coronavirus is that it has cramped his lifestyle – his routine – which is, to take a coffee once a week at a crowded diner, while he marks up a newspaper as he reads various stories. Presence is important in the lives of cynics. My Cynic loves the smell of humanity, the human heat a crowd throws off, the muffled sounds of crowd chatter, music to his ears. Since he has been marking up newspapers, onl...

The Cynic The Cynic And The City Mouse At The Oracle The Oracle is owned by a hedge fund manager in lower Connecticut. The restaurant opened briefly when Coronavirus first started breathing on its windows and, as quickly, was shuttered by order of the honorable Governor Ned Lamont, along with many other restaurants in Connecticut, including the two diners most frequented by The Cynic for breakfast. The reader, if he is attentive to the post-modern snake pit, may have noticed that Americans, as a general rule, are a tolerant people. They are disarmingly tolerant of revolutionary minded politicians; how else to account for the popularity and frequent press notice of a radical political zephyr such as New York U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez? However tolerant Americans may be of politicians given to revolutionary experimentation, they guard jealously their own personal prerogatives. The Cynic greatly resented the facemask he had been forced to wear for a full year, regar...

Q: It may or may not have been the most significant presidential debate in living memory, but it certainly was the most touted presidential debate in “Click Nation USA.” What are your general impressions? Cynic: In Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest,” one character says to another, “I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and really being good all the time; that would be hypocrisy.” Neither of the presidential candidates this year needs worry about that. Hillary Clinton’s presentation, more than Trump’s, was unbearable pretentious. She needed to confess but boasted instead of her essential goodness. She is not a good person – never has been, never will be. But she is a Democrat and, in our time, political affiliation is a substitute for moral rectitude. Q: Is she evil? Cynic: No, she lacks the energy to be evil. The root is old and dry. Vladimir Putin is evil. That little runt in North Korea is evil. Donald Trump bubbles wi...

CC: We haven’t talked with you in a while. How are you?   Cynic: Likely not as good as you, from the looks of you.   CC: Meaning?   Cynic: You are young, I am old: “I wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.”   CC: Ah, T.S. Elliot. And Connecticut? How goes the state?   Cynic: Politically, economically, and in other ways, it is living up to its motto, still the “state of steady (bad) habits.” Connecticut, under the last few governors and legislatures, has hardly scratched the surface of its gargantuan debt. I noticed that you noted in numerous blogs that the state has an unaddressed spending problem, made worse by political inattention. [Governor Ned] Lamont’s pretenses are becoming wearisome. How often do we see the word “spending” presented in newspaper accounts as a serious problem?   CC: Which of Lamont’s pretenses annoys you the most?   Cynic: His carefully crafted pretense to moderation. Moderation among state Democrat...

The Cynic Cynicism, my friend the Cynic tells me, has been given a bad rap. The cynic, throughout history a moral activist, questions everyone and everything because he mistrusts everyone and everything – initially. His intellectual allegiance may be bought, but the price is high, and he will, ultimately, refuse to serve any unprincipled party. Antisthenes , a student of Socrates who founded the Greek Cynic School, was no respecter of persons. Historically, it is possible to trace a direct line from Greek Cynicism to Roman Stoicism to the early Desert Fathers of the Christian church, all highly moral, ascetic and mistrustful of the kind of leisure and loose ethics that great wealth brings in its train. Since cynics regard virtue rather than knowledge, though the two are not unconnected, as the road to human felicity, you must convince the cynic you are right and upright, and he is a tough customer. At a time during which – just to keep the discussion focused on politics – clev...

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...

The Cynic The Cynic tells me, with a wry smile, “We are all cynics now.” He is cynically referring obliquely to an often quoted quip in late 19 th century, when socialism first bestrode Europe like a colossus  -- “We are all socialists now.” President Joe Biden, my Cynic says, is protean, crossing and re-crossing political barricades with impunity because, ideologically weightless, he is able to assume the character of whichever emergent group he wishes to appeal to. He is thinking, he says, of the sloppy mental ruminations of U.S. Representative  Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez , and others like her. Biden is a derivative, rather than a creative, politician. That is why plagiarism for Biden is not an error in judgment but a habit of mind. Recently in France, Biden referred to himself as “Jill Biden’s husband,” a line he borrowed without attribution from President John Kennedy. The quip must have confused some French people who likely are aware that Jill Biden’s maiden name is J...

The Cynic The “beef with Biden,” the Cynic says, is that he campaigned for President as a Democrat moderate and has governed ever since as a half-crazed, addled progressive. If you are indifferent to politics, as many voters in the U.S. are, you will be hugging your resentments as you march to the polls in November, because the entirely predictable consequences of the postmodern itch to make the world over has now settled itself in our easy chairs, and most professional politicians, notably here in deep blue Connecticut, have succumbed to “ The Absurd Effort to Make the World Over .” That effort in recent days has been costly. The prices of goods and services have increased dramatically during the first year of President Joe Biden’s administration. Even well-wishers are beginning to talk darkly of a malingering recession. Recessions occur when there are too many dollars chasing too few goods. Excessive public debt, business closures by governors wielding extraordinary, extra-consti...

Q: I have lots of questions. A: I’m sure I do not have lots of answers. Q: I’ll ask the questions anyway. A: You always were persistent, an indispensable virtue among good reporters. Q: You were a reporter once, right?. A: No, a columnist. Reporters dig up the truffles, columnists make use of them in their pâtés. Q: When did you start publishing Connecticut Commentary? A: About 2004, thirteen years after then Governor Lowell Weicker destroyed the character of Connecticut, once a magnet for companies seeking to escape the withering hand of autocratic government, by instituting his ill-advised income tax. Q: And you were writing columns back then as well. A: Before then. I’ve been fulminating for more than 35 years. The income tax, a new revenue stream saved the Democrat dominated General Assembly the necessity of pruning back spending over the long term. It resulted in a catastrophic, uninterrupted increase in spending, the efficient cause of the...

J, To Dust Thou Shalt Return It was a stroke of luck, or the hand of Providence, that forced you to move from Connecticut to South Carolina. For more than twenty years, you have been out of the way of Connecticut’s inexorable getting-and-spending steam roller. Distance may not make the heart grow fonder, but it does prevent the spirit from being mauled by current events. Here in your former home state, where you reared your family, we are all pretty much clawed by an administrative machine that is at once both solicitous and rapacious.

The reader will find below three self-interviews that are meant to serve as a prologue to a longer piece – “Connecticut Down.”  The first is set a little more than a month after Governor Ned Lamont had been sworn into office; the second is set just before Lamont presented his budget to the General Assembly; and the last is set a day after the Lamont/Looney/Aresimowicz budget was passed by the state Senate.

The Cynic Interview With The Cynic Whatever the Cynic says, it all sounds alarmingly commonsensical. I asked him why Republican moderates in Connecticut consistently lose to progressive Democrats. There is no question that post-modern progressives within the Democrat Party in Connecticut far outnumber silent Democrat moderates, he said. What we might call the Democrat moderates, John F. Kennedy remnants, becoming ever smaller, may secretly want to bite the state employees’ union bullet, but they are certain, if they do so, the bullet will go off in their mouths. And so they remain mute. And the status quo marches on – more spending, more debt, to be passed along, as always, to the children and grandchildren of the debtors. The ever dwindling number of moderate Republican politicians are also silent on important social issues of the day and, as we know, silence signifies assent, both in law and politics. But Republicans cannot remain silent forever and hope to mount in reliably bl...