Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

The Country Mouse The merry month of May has burst upon Connecticut. The City Mouse went to lunch in Hartford with one of her lady friends – sans mask , while they were eating – and a conversation arose concerning the age old quarrel between city and country. The City Mouse is a no-nonsense character, a quality disappearing quickly in our homogenous, progressive Connecticut culture -- Connecticulture? -- and differences of opinion clouded the air. The City Mouse was not surprised that Yale law students had launched a suit on a wealthy suburb because, the students asserted, Woodbridge had, through its zoning regulations, frustrated the construction of low rent housing in what had been historically a predominantly Middle Class municipality. If the suit were to be decided in favor of Yale, a certain percentage of low income housing would be required in all Connecticut municipalities, not solely in Woodbridge. “Law students will be law students,” the City Mouse said, “but the zoning ...

The City Mouse After nine years of strenuous gym workouts, the City Mouse, who lives in Hartford, had let her membership elapse. “I feel,” she told the Country Mouse, “liberated. Good to know that the Coronavirus plague was good for something. Because gyms everywhere in Connecticut have been closed for more than a year on orders of His Excellency Governor Ned Lamont, I felt no pangs of conscience, and I managed to save $500 last year in membership fees.” “Good for you,” the Country Mouse wrote back, but what about this: “ Sex, gender and discrimination dominate arguments at the Supreme Court in a case about women’s privacy at gyms .” The Country Mouse emailed the newspaper story to the City Mouse and waited for what he imagined might be an explosive but humorously sardonic response. The City Mouse, pickled for years in temperature raising satire, is afflicted with a sense of humor – unlike Connecticut’s Supreme Court. The case before the Court involved a suit brought by the humor...

  The City Mouse Her friendship, but not the friend, died about a year ago today. The City Mouse knew her twenty year old friendship was over and, now it was over, she was having some difficulty imagining how it had begun. The brief note she had received from her former friend was the coffin in which their once vibrant friendship lay lifeless. She knew it. She knew she could not answer her friend, although she had prepared in her throbbing brain a point by point response that would have satisfied the most exacting prosecutor. No, there could be no answer. Let the dead bury their dead; life belongs to the living. “I wish,” she thought of answering, “we had thrashed all this out face to face. Because then, if you had seen my face as you said these things, you would have seen in my eyes how unjust they were. Letters are blind; they have no eyes. We might have smiled at each other, laughed even, and gone our different ways, our friendship intact, remembered fondly over the ta...

The City Mouse November 11, 2020 The city mouse writes: To the Country Mouse, You’ve written quite a bit – perhaps more than is necessary – about political personae, the various masks politicians present to the public. Our next president, it would appear, will be former Barack Obama Vice President Joe Biden. It may be safe to assume that the U.S. Supreme Court will be reluctant to overturn the vox populi as expressed in votes, however appealing the arguments pressed by President Donald Trump’s crowd of lawyers may be. Proceeding on the assumption that Biden will be the next president, would you care to say something about Biden’s personae? There are more than one, no? I wrote back to her: To the city mouse, Biden wears more than one mask, and this is the case with most politicians. Fielding a question from an   audience in Danbury – I was present on the occasion – Bill Buckley was asked, following his comments on President Richard Nixon’s trip to China, all of them bitter...

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...

The City Mouse I must admit I was nervous six months ago. The city mouse and I had not met in ten years. Our connection had been entirely by means of e-mail on my part and written letters on her part. She no doubt would notice the buzz-cut of my thinning hair, just forming jowls, lips thinning, eyes narrowing, speech more deliberate, more carefully considered and reflective, less spontaneous and daring, and I had gotten a pair of new glasses, more modern than the old, round, owl-eyed looking glasses I wore in college and after years. I was prepared for some changes on her part too, though I understood her to have been careful about her looks – sorry, her presentation; not the same thing as “looks”, she often reminded me – from the early days of our acquaintance. She was always modestly well dressed, never went out without makeup and had shimmering, cornflower blue eyes. Funny, you carry around in your mind an image of people that does not change through the years, provided you do...

The Country Mouse The City Mouse, now retired, was once an American Studies professor back in the day when American Studies was yet a new pedagogical venture. She has lived in one of Connecticut’s major cities, Stamford, now finds herself within hailing distance of a second, Hartford, the state’s Capital City, and talks in full sentences. She still considers herself a John F. Kennedy Democrat and draws a sharp, categorical distinction between Kennedy liberalism and postmodern progressivism. “President Kennedy,” she wrote to me some time ago, “has been buried twice: once in 1963 following his assassination, and more recently following the continuing upsurge of postmodern progressivism, to which I am temperamentally opposed. “Not,” she added, “that anyone in my ideologically battered party would take my temperament into account when making political judgments. “Old-goat Democrats, such as Biden, Pelosi and others, most of whom have now brashly and publicly turned a new postmodern, ...

The City Mouse The City Mouse and I had a long discussion at the Four Star Diner in East Hartford concerning Connecticut’s future prospects. The name of the diner has here been changed to protect all concerned against possible political recriminations. Asked how he would determine the extent of censorship in Europe, Voltaire said the depth of censorship can be plumbed by posing the question: What cannot be written or said? Here in Connecticut, there is much left unprinted in the state’s left-leaning media, she insisted. “Such as what?” I asked. “Well, a couple of days ago, Governor Ned Lamont adjusted his air travel ban. The ban was installed to prevent Coronavirus seepage into Connecticut from states that met a certain testing threshold, which you have said, in one of your unprinted columns, may have been set too low by ‘scientists.’ Like the weather, Coronavirus prognostications change rather quickly here in ‘the land of steady habits.’ “Presently, all air traffic is subject ...

The Country Mouse October 28, 2020 To the country mouse, We’ll be kissing our cousins from afar this year. Secularists have already stripped Christmas of Christ. Now come the politicians, pleading Coronavirus, to strip the seasons of relatives. Scrooge made the celebration of Christmas difficult, but not impossible like everyone’s daddy and mommy, Governor Ned Lamont. It is not enough that enlightened, “science based” politics has driven our relations out of state. The Coronavirus Governor of Connecticut now threatens to prevent their return during Thanksgiving and Christmas. Travel itself has been interdicted by King Ned. Bradley Field airport, voted one of the best airports in the country, is now a wasteland. Here is Ned throwing ashes on the joy of Thanksgiving and Christmas: “With Thanksgiving a month away, Lamont said he’s concerned college students returning home for the holiday might bring COVID-19 with them. “’I am really worried about thousands of kids coming ba...

  The City Mouse The City Mouse has a friend who is a libertarian. She has interviewed him below. Interview with a libertarian on pot profits Q: You’re a libertarian. Could you tell us briefly what that means? A: It means I’m a person who believes that people, as a general rule, should be free to be their potty old selves. That’s Bill Buckley’s definition of libertarianism. Q: How does libertarianism differ from anarchism? A: The anarchist is set upon overthrowing government so that he might luxuriate in the ensuing chaos. ANTIFA, the anti-Nazi Nazis, are anarchical, much worse, in my opinion, than some few violent members of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, who want to rub white faces in flames and free stores of overpriced sneakers. The libertarian is set upon perfecting limited government by removing unnecessary impediments to fructifying liberty. As a general rule, he or she believes that less government maximizes personal freedom, and the maximization of personal f...