Connecticut state seal. Note the grapes. The state has some fine vineyards.
MANCHESTER, Conn.
His innocent enthusiasms sometimes get the better of Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont, so a few weeks ago he celebrated a new country song purportedly about Connecticut by the musical impresario Rusty Gear. But the song's only lines about the state were not really so complimentary, and criticism by the governor's Republican challenger, Bob Stefanowski, made them a bit infamous:
Back home we thank the governor
For the blessings that we got.
We can gamble on the Internet
And it's cool to smoke some pot.
Of course, these days you can gamble on the Internet and smoke marijuana in most states without getting in trouble with the law, and if such activities really are to be considered great achievements, the country's decline becomes easier to explain.
Clever and catchy as it may be, the new song also can be criticized for historical and artistic inaccuracy. "Songs about my state are hard to find," Gear sings, suggesting that this is because not much rhymes with "Connecticut." (Gear makes do with "etiquette.") But there are at least nine other songs about or involving Connecticut, and of course you don't need to rhyme it to sing about it. You can rhyme other lyrics.
What may be the best of the Connecticut songs was recorded in 1945 by Bing Crosby and Judy Garland. It includes many references particular to the state, as well as gratuitous cracks at two other states. Crosby and Garland conclude:
Circled the globe dozens of times.
Seen all its wonders, known all its climes.
I've searched it with a fine-toothed comb
And found that I only have one home, sweet home.
Connecticut always will be my home.
Hit this link to hear the song.
Back then nobody needed Internet gambling and marijuana to extol the state. Instead Crosby and Garland celebrated it for being "peaceful and fair" and having "village greens," "childhood scenes," "moonlit streams" and "nights full of stars."
Perhaps a bit daring for the times, they added, "You'll find the chicks slicker" and "Every Yale guy is a male guy through and through."
Of course this was 77 years ago, before new sexual manifestations were discovered, and besides, hard as it is to rhyme "Connecticut," try rhyming something with "LGBTQ+."
The important things here are appreciation of what one has and the patriotism it should evoke despite its failings -- even as Connecticut has many failings, especially now that anyone pursuing the "peaceful and fair" in Hartford, New Haven and Bridgeport is just as likely to find gunshots, squalor, child neglect, despair, drug addiction, and depravity. Rhymes for those are more easily found.
But trouble like that did not discourage the philosopher, theologian and writer G.K. Chesterton.
"The world," Chesterton wrote a century ago, "is not a lodging-house at Brighton, which we are to leave because it is miserable. It is the fortress of our family, with the flag flying on the turret, and the more miserable it is, the less we should leave it.
“The point is not that this world is too sad to love or too glad not to love. The point is that when you do love a thing, its gladness is a reason for loving it, and its sadness a reason for loving it more.”
Hartford, Connecticut's capital city, was once thought to be the richest city in the country but now is among the poorest.
Bridgeport, once the state's manufacturing center, is not only desperately poor but pockmarked with the empty and crumbling factory buildings of its former fame.
Almost as poor is New Haven, which, once a pinnacle of scholarship, now produces instead much of the country's political correctness.
Nevertheless it is June and for a few months ahead government-addled Connecticut will be, in its natural condition, just as Crosby and Garland sang, probably the most beautiful place in the world, quite without gambling on the Internet and dope-smoking.
Hartford's Latin motto is "Post nubila phoebus" -- "After the clouds, the sun." As Chesterton envisioned, enough love, loyalty, effort and courage may vindicate that motto yet.
Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester.
