Keeps them moving
“Geisha-Revue, The Dance on the Volcano’’ (1911/13, oil on canvas), by Georg Tappert, at the Wadsworth Athenaeum Museum of Art, Hartford. It’s part of the show “The Dance on the Volcano: German Expressionism at the Wadsworth,’’ through May 30.
The ecological empires of oaks, Charter and otherwise
Large white oak
Adapted From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
That Southern New England has so many kinds of trees helps explain much of its ecological richness. Oaks are among the most common. I always thought of them as rather boring, especially because their leaves turn blandly brown in the fall and tend to hang on until spring. (I do have fond memories from childhood of tree houses in them and acorn fights.) But Douglas W. Tallamy, an entomologist at the University of Delaware, talks up oaks in his new book, The Nature of Oaks: The Rich Ecology of Our Most Essential Native Trees.
Mr. Tallamy explains how oaks support more life-forms than any other North American tree genus. They provide food (especially acorns and caterpillars) and protection for birds, mammals (consider squirrels, racoons, bears and bats), insects and spiders, as well as enriching soil, holding rainwater and cleaning the air. And they can live for hundreds of years.
“There is much going on in your yard that would not be going on if you did not have one or more oak trees gracing your piece of planet earth,” he writes in the book, which shows us what’s happening within, on, under, and around these trees.
Mr. Tallamy offers advice about how to plant and care for oaks, and information about the best oak species for your area.
Hug your oak trees and/or plant some. (And if they get uprooted in a storm, they make about the best firewood.) Fewer lawns, more oak trees, please. Now that it’s April, those remaining ugly brown leaves from last year will soon be pushed out and we’ll soon be enjoying the shade under oaks’ expansive canopies.
“The Charter Oak” (oil on canvas), by Charles De Wolf Brownell, 1857. It’s at the Wadsworth Atheneum, in Hartford.
The Charter Oak was an unusually large white oak tree in Hartford. It grew from the 12th or 13th century until it fell during a storm in 1856. According to tradition, Connecticut's Royal Charter of 1662 was hidden within the hollow of the tree to thwart its confiscation by the English governor-general. The oak became a symbol of American independence and is commemorated on the Connecticut State Quarter.
Photos of acorns by David Hill
Chris Powell: Conn. can be a golden state again
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Connecticut's lawns are turning green again. Robins are scouring them for worms, which are returning to the surface despite the high taxes and accusations of racism above ground. Redwings are trilling madly over the ponds, brooks, and marshes.
Daffodils and crocuses are in bloom. Leaf buds on the trees are swelling. Many days are blessedly sunny and mild.
Kids are going back to school -- not that anyone ever will be able to tell from their test scores, but at least they're out of the house again. Virus epidemic restrictions are fading as people get vaccinated. Money for state government doesn't just grow on trees now; it rains down from the heavens as never before.
Indeed, in another month Connecticut, in its natural state, may become, as it does for a while every year, nearly the most beautiful place on Earth, just as it may be climatically the safest and most temperate.
Politically there will be as much to complain about as ever, but consider the alternatives.
Connecticut people wintering in Florida, many of them tax exiles, are planning to return north to escape the summer heat down there, as well as the alligators, Burmese pythons, lizards, and insects as big as pumpkins.
Texas, another state without an income tax that lately has drawn many people from Connecticut, was also without electricity and drinking water for much of February, and soon its heat and humidity may make its Northern transplants miss snow.
Tennessee, which also manages without an income tax, lately has been suffering floods and tornadoes on top of country music.
California, once the "golden state," has been impoverished by bad public policy and is being overwhelmed not just by taxes but also by poverty, homelessness, drugs, illegal immigration, and political correctness. State government there seems oblivious as many middle-class people depart or sign petitions to remove the governor.
Maybe the recent arrivals in Connecticut who hurriedly escaped New York can give their new neighbors some valuable reflections.
Of course no place is perfect, but nothing about geoe agraphy or climate stands in the way of Connecticut's regaining the advantages it had before it succumbed to the old corruption of prosperity -- the belief that prosperity is the natural order of things, not something that had to be earned and must be constantly re-earned. Whether Connecticut can restore its prosperity is entirely a political question, a question of whether its people retain enough civic virtue to discern and assert the public interest over the government class and other special interests.
If glorious spring in Connecticut cannot persuade people that such an undertaking is worthwhile, nothing can. Those who often threaten to leave but haven't left yet should take a bigger part in the struggle.
xxx
WHERE'S THE RACISM?: Maybe the people who are accusing Connecticut's suburbs of being racist will explain how it is racist not to want to be stuck with a school system like Hartford's, whose chronic absenteeism rate among students approaches 50 percent.
It's not the fault of school administrators and teachers. The other day The Hartford Courant reported about the daily circuses being staged by city schools to entice students to show up. The circuses seem to be helping a little, but it is not cynical to ask: Where are the parents of the chronically absent kids? Are racists blockading their homes?
Is the exclusive zoning in many suburbs why so many city kids have been skipping school?
Zoning doesn't know anyone's race. Zoning does have a good idea of people's financial circumstances and the financial capacity of the town that enacted it, and it wonders: How does any town benefit from a large population of unparented and desperately disadvantaged children who run school performance way down and expense way up?
Complaints of "structural racism" don't answer that question. They distract from it and prevent any inquiry into why so many children have no parents and are so neglected.
If structural racism was really the problem in Connecticut, laws long in place would have solved it already. But structural poverty remains to be addressed, and, worse, remains even to be acknowledged.
Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester.
Chris Powell: Another golden age coming for 'earmarks'
Huey P. Long (1893-1935), Louisiana governor and U.S. senator and famed demagogue. He died in an assassination. He would have liked “earmarks”.
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Congratulations to one of Connecticut's forever members of Congress, U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, Democrat of New Haven, for teaching the country a wonderful political-science lesson.
Having ascended to the chairmanship of the House Appropriations Committee, DeLauro has just revived the infamous practice of putting "earmarks" in the federal budget -- requirements that funds that ordinarily would be appropriated for general purposes be reserved for patronage projects desired by congressmen. Now DeLauro is forwarding her chief of staff, Leticia Mederos, to a national law and government relations firm, Clark Hill, whose office on Pennsylvania Avenue is within walking distance of the Capitol and the White House. Mederos will become a lobbyist, and her close connection to the House appropriations chairwoman will be a swell advantage to her clients.
This stuff is sometimes euphemized as public service. Where candor is permitted, it is called influence- peddling or even plunder.
The political-science lesson taught here by DeLauro and her outgoing chief of staff is like the one taught by Huey Long when he was governor of Louisiana in the 1930s. Gathering his closest supporters just after his election, Long is said to have told them:
“You guys who supported me before the primary will get commissionerships. You guys who supported me after the primary and before the election will get no-show jobs. You guys who donated at least $10,000 to my campaign will get road contracts. Everybody else will get goood gummint.”
Thanks to DeLauro and the rest of the new Democratic administration in Washington, $1.9 trillion in “goood gummint ‘‘ is on its way to the country in the name of virus epidemic relief.
DeLauro estimates that more than $4 billion of that money will be given to state and municipal government in Connecticut for purposes leaving wide discretion in its allocation. That $4 billion is equivalent to almost 20 percent of state government's annual spending and is $2 billion more than what state government estimates it has spent responding to the epidemic. That extra $2 billion will be a grand slush fund.
Gov. Ned Lamont and the General Assembly will decide just where to spend the money, and spending it carefully will be a huge challenge that is not likely to be met well.
Of course, much of the federal largesse will be spent in the name of education, but how exactly, and more importantly, why? After all, Connecticut has been increasing education spending for more than 40 years without improving student performance, just school-staff compensation. Even now half the state's high school graduates never master high school math or English and many take remedial high-school courses in public "colleges."
So the most promising educational use of the federal money might be to finance remedial summer school for Connecticut's many under-performing students over the next several years, since so many have missed most of their schooling during the last 12 months and were already far behind in education when the epidemic began. Using the education money for remedial summer school would minimize the problem school administrators fear. That is, if the emergency federal money is incorporated in recurring school operations, it will leave a disruptive gap when it runs out in a year or two.
xxx
As "earmarks" return to Congress, Connecticut's bonanza from Washington is sure to induce more earmark fever at the state Capitol, where it long has infected bonding legislation. Already Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin imagines spending billions for high-speed railroad service from the city to New York and Boston and development of the city's riverfront, as if the lack of those things is Hartford's big problem. At least the mayor is no longer boasting about defunding the city's police. In the 48-hour period that included his "State of the City" address this week, six people were shot in separate incidents in the city, one fatally. Maybe Hartford's most pressing need is for more police officers.
But if the governor can persuade the Democratic majority in the General Assembly not to spend the federal money too fast, enough will remain in the slush fund to get them past the 2022 state election without raising taxes, if also without making state government any more efficient and effective.
Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester.
'Blowing in the same bare place'
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
— “The Snow Man,’’ by Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), Hartford-based lawyer, insurance executive and famed poet
Earliest known photo of a snowman, taken in Wales in 1853
Chris Powell: Military-industrial complex is fine with Conn. delegation
This building in the affluent Hartford suburb of Farmington, Conn., was United Technologies’ headquarters in 2015-2020.
— Photo by Daniel Pennfield
MANCHESTER, Conn
In his farewell address 60 years ago President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned against what he called "unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex." Since he was a military hero, perhaps only Eisenhower could give such a warning during the Cold War without risking denunciation as a Communist.
But Eisenhower's warning has never been heeded, and President Biden, with his defense secretary, is essentially proclaiming the victory of the military-industrial complex. The new secretary is retired Army Gen. Lloyd Austin, who upon leaving the Army a few years ago joined the board of directors of military contractor and Waltham, Mass.-based Raytheon Technologies Corp., which recently acquired Connecticut-based United Technologies Corp. Austin will have to sell Raytheon stock he received for serving on the board. It may net him as much as $1.7 million.
Acknowledging what will be his continuing potential for conflict of interest, Austin pledges to avoid decisions involving Raytheon for a year. But this can't worry Raytheon much about its investment in the general, since the corporation plans to be doing government business a lot longer than that.
With Austin at Defense and former Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen becoming Treasury secretary after receiving at least $7 million in speaking fees from big banks and investment houses in the last three years, the federal government's two most lucrative agencies will have been securely captured by their primary beneficiaries.
With the exception of Sen. Richard Blumenthal, the members of Connecticut's congressional delegation -- all supposed liberals -- are fine with this exploitation. After all, the state is full of investment bankers and military contractors and what's good for them may be considered good for the state. As for the country, that's something else.
Even Blumenthal's concern about Austin probably became a mere quibble. Federal law prohibits military officers from becoming defense secretary until they have been out of uniform for seven years, so Austin needed a waiver from Congress. Such waivers have been granted twice before. Blumenthal said that to uphold the principle of civilian control of the military, he opposed another waiver. But few other members of Congress objected to it, and Blumenthal and those others still had it both ways, voting against the waiver and then voting to appoint Austin once the waiver is granted.
Besides, with the Democrats in full control of the federal government, conflicts of interest and civilian control will barely register against the party's new highest objective in Cabinet appointments -- racial, ethnic and gender diversity. Austin is Black and so meets the decisive qualification.
xxx
PAY AS YOU THROW?: The administration of Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont seems to have determined that state government no longer can make any money by burning trash to generate electricity at the state Materials Innovation and Recycling Authority's facility in the South Meadows section of Hartford. Such generation apparently is now much more expensive than electricity generated from natural gas, and the facility's equipment already needs renovation estimated to cost more than $300 million.
So the authority plans to close the facility by July 2022, turning it into a trash-transfer depot and shipping to out-of-state dumps the trash now being burned. This is not only retrograde environmental policy; it likely will raise costs for the authority's 70 client towns. As a result the authority and the towns are discussing how to reduce their "waste streams" -- possibly by charging residents a fee for every bag of trash collected, a system called "pay as you throw."
There would be some sense to this, since it would cause people to take more responsibility for their trash, the packaging of what they buy, and recycling. But this also would increase the risk of illegal dumping, even as Connecticut's roadsides and city streets are already strewn with trash.
It might be best for state or federal sales taxes or fees to recover in advance the disposal costs of everything sure to wear out, as the state already does with beverage containers and mattresses and used to do with tires.
Government needs to teach people more about the trash issue. But all that roadside litter suggests that many people are unteachable slobs.
Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.
'Foundation of all free government'
“To the Friends of Literature in the United States,’’ Webster's prospectus for his first dictionary of the English language, 1807–1808
“The foundation of all free government and all social order must be laid in families and in the discipline of youth. Young persons must not only be furnished with knowledge, but they must be accustomed to subordination and subjected to the authority and influence of good principles. It will avail little that youths are made to understand truth and correct principles, unless they are accustomed to submit to be governed by them.”
― Noah Webster. (1758-1843) an American lexicographer, textbook pioneer, English-language spelling reformer, political writer, editor and prolific author. Webster's name has become synonymous with "dictionary" in the United States, especially the modern Merriam-Webster dictionary that was first published in 1828 as A Dictionary of the English Language. He was born in Hartford and died in New Haven. He’s an example of the New England enthusiasm for education that goes back to Puritan times.
A 1932 statue of Webster by Korczak Ziółkowski stands in front of the public library of West Hartford, Conn.
Title page of Webster's Dictionary of the English Language, c. 1830–1840
'A local abstraction;'
Mist upstream of the Bissell Bridge, between Windsor and South Windsor, Conn
”It is the third commonness with light and air,
A curriculum, a vigor, a local abstraction . . .
Call it, one more, a river, an unnamed flowing….’’
— From “The River of Rivers in Connecticut,’’ by Wallace Stevens (18790-1955). It’s “about” the Connecticut River. Like many in the Nutmeg State in his lifetime, he was an insurance executive.
“View of the City of Hartford, Connecticut,’’ by William Havell, a 19th Century painter
If you’re not partly a coward you’re not brave
— Photo by Makemake
The Mark Twain House, now a museum, in Hartford, Conn., where he lived in 1874-1891. He then lived abroad and in New York City before spending his last years in Redding, Conn., in the grand house below, which burned down in 1923.
“Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear-not absence of fear. Except a creature be part coward it is not a compliment to say it is brave; it is merely a loose misapplication of the word. Consider the flea! - -Incomparably the bravest of all the creatures of God, if ignorance of fear were courage. Whether you are asleep or awake he will attack you, caring nothing for the fact that in bulk and strength you are to him as are the massed armies of the earth to a sucking child; he lives both day and night and all days and nights in the very lap of peril and the immediate presence of death, and yet is no more afraid than is the man who walks the streets of a city that was threatened by an earthquake ten centuries before. When we speak of Clive, Nelson, and Putnam as men who ‘didn't know what fear was,’ we ought always to add the flea-and put him at the head of the procession.”
— Mark Twain, in Pudd’nhead Wilson (1893)
Don Pesci: Driving police away from where they are most needed
The "thin blue line" refers to the concept of the police as the line that keeps society from descending into violent chaos. The "blue" in "thin blue line" refers to the blue color of the uniforms of many police departments.
Police officers of all kinds, both old-hands and newly minted officers, are leaving Hartford, according to a piece in The Hartford Courant.
No surprise there. The job, as everyone knows, is fraught with danger. Police are not accountants or legislators tucked away in a malfunctioning Connecticut Coronavirus General Assembly; still less are they social workers. The pay and benefits are okay in the cities but better in suburbs. And a new “Sweeping Reform Bill” -- inspired, we are told, by police assaults on George Floyd and Breonna Taylor -- has driven multiple wedges between police across the state and their employers, Democrats and Republicans and, eventually, the urban population that police are sworn to protect.
The new bill is the brain child of State Senator Gary Winfield, who is Black.
The reader will note the capitalization of “Black.” The new Associated Press reporting guide requires every mention of “Black” in news reports to be capitalized, even though the word designates a color rather than a race. White is also a color, though the AP reporting guide does not suggest the capitalization of the word, possibly because the capitalization of “white” might be regarded by some as a gruesome exercise in white privilege.
This grammatical irritation may be adduced by some as a strong indicator that systemic racism in the United States is ebbing, though Winfield’s bill, suggests that little progress has been made since 1619, the year, The New York Times tells us, that marks the true beginning of the founding of the United States – the American Revolution against British overlords, the Continental Congress, U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights be dammed.
As a side note, it should be mentioned that the 1619 founding of the United States, during which the first slaves were shipped to the New World, occurred 117 years after what some consider an unfortunate sea journey by Christopher Columbus from Spain to San Salvador, in the Bahamas -- literal translation, “Holy Savior”. Columbus was a Christian, as were many of the Connecticut politicians who winked at the beheading of his statue in Waterbury by Brandon Ambrose, 22, of Port Chester, N.Y.
The Winfield Bill creates a state independent Office of the Inspector General that will be charged with investigating all uses of deadly force by police and all instances of death in police custody; it permits a state's police accreditation body to revoke law-enforcement officers’ credentials if they have been found to have used excessive force; it bans neck restraints, or "chokeholds," unless a law-enforcement officer "reasonably believes" such a hold to be necessary to defend from "the use or imminent use of deadly physical force"; it eliminates “qualified immunity” for police; and it subjects all police officers in the state to civil suits, leaving police officers the option of claiming immunity only if they "had an objectively good faith belief” that their conduct did not violate the law. The law opens a wide door of police prosecution on many counts.
The Winfield bill was politically divisive, Democrats voting for it, Republicans against it. All the Democrat legislators who voted in favor of the bill, many of them lawyers, understood at the time they voted that exposure to civil suits, well founded or not, is a very expensive proposition, and that suits served on urban police working in Connecticut’s large cities were much more likely than similar suits in more toney towns such as West Hartford and Greenwich, both of which have been trending Democrat for some time.
The city to town migration of police officers in Connecticut was predictable the moment the bill had been passed in Connecticut’s General Assembly -- even before the Winfield bill had been affirmed on a partisan vote last July.
Good news is a tortoise, bad news is a hare, and it did not take long for the bad news to reach the ears of Connecticut law-enforcement officials and city police officers. Police unions across the state are now endorsing Republicans.
At the polls, where matters really matter to politicians, the Winfield bill and its inevitable consequences – reduced police recruitment in urban areas, where a strong police force is a necessity, a greater opportunity for socially disruptive elements to ply their various trades uninterrupted by fully manned police forces, clogged court systems and, ironically, an increase in racial disparity, among many other unintended consequences – may not affect the current elections in Connecticut. But some social bombs have long fuses.
“As a police officer the last thing you ever want is to be hated,” commented Hartford police union President Anthony Rinaldi. “It kills your drive, your love for wanting to give back and help your communities. It causes officers to feel rejected and not wanted.” The drive gone, it will not be restored by the usual palliatives: increased pay and benefits for shattered urban police departments. You can only kill a police department once; after that comes the deluge.
Don Pesci is a columnist based in Vernon, Conn.
'An inert savior'
— Photo by Dietmar Rabich
“After the leaves have fallen, we return
To a plain sense of things. It is as if
We had come to an end of the imagination,
Inanimate in an inert savior.’’
— From “The Plain Sense of Things,’’ by Hartford-based poet, lawyer and insurance executive Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)
Very strange summer and now a fearsome fall
Time to jump? Fall foliage at Lake Willoughby, in Vermont
From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
As we slip into the mellow season (except for politics), and we start to crunch dry brown fallen leaves on the sidewalks, I’ve been thinking about how we lived during this pandemic summer.
Yes, it was sometimes claustrophobic and included far too many repetitive activities (recalling the movie Ground Hog Day) but the warm weather made it easier to spend a lot of time outside, when it wasn’t too warm. It was also easier because there’s been little rain, which is mostly bad: We’re in a severe enough drought that woodland fire warnings were posted last week for southern New England. (You start to unduly worry about global warming and something like the West Coast fire catastrophe happening here. The lawns have looked as if desertification is getting started.)
Thank God that the pandemic didn’t start last November, at the start of our mostly indoors season.
Many of us fortunate enough to have a porch or backyard have found seeing friends there very pleasant, and safe enough to please most worrywarts about COVID-19. That’s not to say that social distancing and marks don’t make it harder to understand each other. I wonder if hearing-aid sales have surged since last winter. I hear a lot of shouting, including my own.
Meanwhile, we walk, walk, walk and wear out our dogs.
As for dining out at restaurants, we’ve done it inside and out. I prefer inside to avoid the street noise, car fumes, yellow jackets, jackhammers, leaf blowers, sidewalk lunatics and other distractions. Ignore the theatrics of “deep cleaning.’’ The chances of getting COVID from touching something are remote. It’s an air problem! Does the restaurant has a good HVAC system? Can all its windows be opened wide? Of course, some people won’t go to any public places. How long will they keep that up? I confess I’m not much of a COVID alarmist and do have claustrophobe tendencies. But often when I suggest meeting people at a restaurant or coffee shop the response is an anxious “no, not yet.’’
It’s been tougher than we had expected early this summer to travel even within New England because of testing rules, with frequent delays in getting results, and the 14-day quarantine orders. Maine is particularly draconian – very heavy fines. Still, after adjusting to that challenge, consider that there’s lots to see in our compact region, a relief for those for whom the pandemic makes traveling further afield impossible. Consider that maps show that Americans aren’t welcome in most of the world now, including – how embarrassing! – Canada. Close to home, the likes of the Maine Coast and the Green Mountains are well worth the aggravation of a test. However, that COVID has closed many roadside attractions (my favorite are old-fashioned diners for breakfasts) is dispiriting.
This is an anxious time in America: A vicious pandemic that has killed almost 200,000 and clipped everyone else’s wings, a deep recession, a mobster/treasonous president and his sycophant enablers, the expansion of dictatorship around the world and scary symptoms of man-made global warming, of which the West Coast fires and the population explosion of tropical storms are just current examples.
(Speaking of Trump’s enablers, read about Michael Caputo, the Looter in Chief’s propaganda minister and re-election-campaign manager at the Department of Health and Human Services:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2020/09/15/michael-caputo-election-violence-conspiracy-theories/5802225002/
He’s a fitting representative of the Trump regime.)
Whatever, it’s a beautiful time of the year hereabouts – mild, still verdant (where watered) and increasingly colorful until that first heavy frost silences the cicadas and crickets for good. Let’s wander outdoors as much as we can. In the long run we’re all dead.
The late Hartford-based poet and insurance executive Wallace Stevens wrote: “The most beautiful thing in the world is, of course, the world itself.’’
'The world itself'
“The most beautiful thing in the world is, of course, the world itself.’’
— Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), Hartford-based poet, lawyer and insurance executive
Mr. Stevens enjoyed wandering in Elizabeth Park. With more than a hundred acres of gardens, lawns, greenhouses and a pond, the park often appeared in his poems, including "The Plain Sense of Things," which includes the lines:
“Yet the absence of the imagination had
Itself to be imagined. The great pond,
The plain sense of it, without reflection, leaves,
mud, water like dirty glass, expressing silence…’’
— Photo by Ragesoss
The Rose Garden at Elizabeth Park in West Hartford, Conn., with a greenhouse in the background on the left. Part of the park is in Hartford.
Chris Powell: Police are forced to deal with cities’ social disintegration
Main Street in Hartford
Responding to complaints about a fireworks party in Hartford on the evening of July 4, three city police officers were pelted with explosives, one device going off just as it struck an officer in the chest. Their injuries were not serious but easily could have been, even fatal.
While the horrifying incident may be dismissed as part of the worsening social disintegration afflicting Connecticut's cities, disintegration that also is reflected lately by the cities' appallingly small response to the U.S. Census work now underway, one can't help but wonder. Was the attack on the Hartford officers inspired or encouraged by the "defund the police" demagoguery raging here and throughout the country?
Of course, the Black Lives Matter movement has a peaceful component, with compelling objectives that most of the country endorses. But even in Connecticut a big part of the movement is not peaceful. It often blocks traffic, even on superhighways, and shouts people down, and its ridiculous demand to reduce or even eliminate policing just where it is most needed harmonizes with the simultaneous demands to release all criminals from prisons, even the murderers, as well as with the general lawlessness, vandalism, and anarchy breaking out in many places.
In the face of the July 4 incident in Hartford and worse incidents around the country, police officers may be feeling like the small-town southwestern sheriff played by Gary Cooper in Stanley Kramer's 1952 Academy Award-winning movie High Noon.
With a vicious criminal gang on its way to take revenge on his town, the sheriff appeals to the townspeople to mobilize to help him but all the able-bodied men refuse. Many urge him to flee. But he holds fast to what he understands as his duty and instead awaits the gang alone.
Their confrontation produces an extended gunfight in which the sheriff takes the gangsters down one by one with some crucial support from his new wife. Then, as the cowardly townspeople gather in the street to marvel at the sheriff's triumph, he tosses his badge into the dust with contempt and rides off in a carriage with his wife.
Like everyone else, police officers may make mistakes, especially in the heat of the moment. As with many other people, some police officers can be cruel, malicious or corrupted by power, and they must be held accountable. That they often have not been is the fault of cowardly elected officials.
Far more often, of course, police officers are brave and heroic even as this is seldom noted — and they are all we've got against the social disintegration that our elected officials have caused, pretend not to see, and do nothing about.
So it was disgraceful that among Connecticut's elected officials only Mayor Luke Bronin and City Council President Maly D. Rosado said something about the July 4 incident in Hartford. Elected officials throughout the state should stop being intimidated by the lawlessness and start demanding better from their constituents.
Indeed, the state's elected officials should find the courage to acknowledge the social disintegration all around them and confront those who claim the right to bypass democracy and disrupt and destroy. For the calls to defund the police and empty the prisons are essentially claims that there is no way of getting the underclass to behave decently, no way of elevating the underclass and stopping the disintegration.
Any jurisdiction that yields to such madness won't deserve police officers any more than the town in High Noon did.
Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.
Chris Powell: Hartford mayor confronts the mob while legislators pander
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Maybe black lives matter a little more now, but mainly, it seems, when they are taken by white cops. When they are taken by anyone else, that seems to be nobody's business.
For where are the protests of the murder of New Haven high school basketball star Kiana Brown, 19, shot to death a week ago as she slept at her home, apparently killed by a stray bullet fired from outside? And who is protesting the fatal shooting of Luis Nelson Perez, 27, on a New Haven street a few days later?
New Haven may be the most indignant city in the world but it gives its own social disintegration a pass. Indeed, the social disintegration underlying most wrongful deaths in Connecticut gets a pass not only in New Haven but throughout the state amid the clamor to end racism and defund the police.
At least Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin last weekend became the first elected official in Connecticut to talk back to the mob. Hundreds of protesters descended on his home, demanding that he take their wrath out on the city's cops. The mayor tried to explain why law enforcement should not be abolished but he was interrupted, jeered, and largely drowned out. The protesters wanted only to intimidate.
But Bronin's plan to create a civilian agency to respond to seemingly noncriminal incidents such as mental breakdowns and drug overdoses, eliminating police response, won't appease the mob and is not realistic anyway. For the mentally ill and the druggies are not always harmless. They quickly can become violent.
Does the mayor not remember the nearly fatal stabbing of a Hartford police officer two years ago as she responded to a commotion caused by a mentally ill woman resisting eviction from her apartment? Any social worker or therapist responding to the incident would have faced the same threat. Police already try to reduce tensions at incident scenes. Their authority to use force is more a help than a handicap. Social workers and therapists get less respect.
While Bronin got the mob treatment, Connecticut's state legislators are being let off too easily -- and not just by the protesters to whom they have been pandering. Nobody is asking legislators who was in charge while Connecticut's police became so unaccountable and social disintegration worsened, especially in the cities.
Last week state Senate President Pro Tem Martin M. Looney, D-New Haven, at least was asked if legislators would do anything about the provision in the state police union contract that allows concealment of brutality complaints. Looney replied that the current contract can't be revised but the law might be changed someday to forbid similar provisions in future contracts.
This was a dishonest dodge. For the General Assembly and Governor Lamont could nullify the secrecy provision by repealing the law authorizing state employee union contracts to supersede the open-government law, as the state police contract does. Then the contract wouldn't have to be changed. The legislature and governor also could repeal collective bargaining for the state police. Such a threat might induce the union to concede the secrecy provision immediately.
No one asked Looney how the state police contract provision came about and how it so easily got past the governor and those legislators who now are insisting that black lives matter. Just whom were the governor and legislators serving when they agreed to conceal complaints of police brutality? Not the public.
Feigning impotence, Looney and his colleagues still think that the contentment of government employees matters more than black lives.
Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester.
Mayor Luke Bronin
‘Light masculine’
State Street, Hartford, in 1914. The city long called itself “The Insurance Capital of the World’’.
It is Hartford seen in a purple light.
A moment ago, light masculine,
Working, with big hands, on the town,
Arranged its heroic attitudes.
But as in an amour of women
Purple sets purple around. Look Mater,
See the river, the railroad, the cathedral..."
— From “Of Hartford in a Purple Light,’’ by Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), Hartford-based poet and insurance executive
But not exactly a pleasure dome
The Connecticut Capitol
“The gold dome of Hartford gone
At sunset starts the thought of one who did
Of the mind a gold dome make
Accessible to strangers. Kubla Khan….’’
— From “Passing East of Hartford,’’ by Ernest Kroll (1914-1994
xxx
Kubla Khan
Or, a vision in a dream. A Fragment.
By Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round;
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:
And mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean;
And ’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!
The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!
A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight ’twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.
Xanadu (here called Ciandu, as Marco Polo called it) on a French map of Asia made by Sanson d'Abbeville, geographer of King Louis XIV, dated 1650. It was northeast of Cambalu, or modern-day Beijing.
Chris Powell: Yale isn't why New Haven is poor
Yale’s OId Campus at dusk
Listening to some of the speakers at the Martin Luther King Day memorial service in New Haven last week, anyone might have thought that Yale University is why the city has so many poor people. Connecticut State Treasurer Shawn T. Wooden was especially overwrought. According to the New Haven Independent, Wooden asked: "Is it fair for a city as poor as New Haven to give a $146 million tax break to institutions as wealthy as Yale University and Yale New Haven Hospital?"
But New Haven doesn't provide that tax break. It's state law that exempts charitable, religious and nonprofit educational institutions such as Yale and its hospital from municipal property taxes. If Wooden, a Democrat, ever dares do more than preach to the choir, he could raise this issue with the governor, also a Democrat, and the General Assembly, which has a comfortable Democratic majority. Yale may be the biggest nonprofit in Connecticut but it's not the only one, and they all enjoy the exemption.
Yes, with an endowment of $30 billion, Yale is a filthy rich nonprofit. The joke is that Yale is a hedge fund masquerading as a university. But Yale is not why New Haven has so many poor people. The university and its hospital provide most of the better-paying private-sector jobs in the city and most of its commerce, cultural life, and appeal to the rest of the world. Without the university New Haven might blow away or be indistinguishable from Bridgeport, which might kill for a "problem" like Yale.
No, New Haven has so many poor people for the same reasons Connecticut's other cities do. The cities have much cheap housing, state welfare policy produces generational dependence instead of self-sufficiency, and state education policy fails to educate the unmotivated, instead keeping them unmotivated with social promotion.
But Yale does pose a special problem for New Haven, just as being the seat of state government poses a special problem for Hartford. Along with ordinary tax-exempt property like churches, university property in New Haven and state government property in Hartford are so extensive as to remove from the tax rolls half the land area of the cities.
While both cities are heavily subsidized by state government, Hartford gets far more. It gets not only the many state government jobs located there but also state payments in lieu of taxes as well as the benefit of state government's outrageous recent assumption of $500 million of the city's bonded debt, whereby state government essentially reimbursed the city for the $80 million baseball stadium it couldn't afford but built anyway as it neared bankruptcy.
By comparison Yale's annual $12 million voluntary payment to New Haven in lieu of taxes is pitifully small.
Speaking in New Haven last week, Treasurer Wooden, the former leader of Hartford's City Council, a stadium advocate, and a perpetrator of the city's insolvency, failed to acknowledge this unfairness.
With $30 billion in its accounts, Yale could afford to make a much larger annual payment to New Haven, which was a pillar of the platform of the city's new mayor, Justin Elicker, in his campaign last year. Indeed, the General Assembly should consider reducing the property tax exemption of any institution that controls such a disproportionate amount of a municipality's land area.
Not that this would improve New Haven much. For unless Elicker can change things, most of the extra money would be used only to increase compensation for employees of the city's incompetent and sometimes corrupt government
Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.
-END-
Don Pesci: Conn. truck tolls and searching for journalistic balance
Truck tolls on Interstate 95 north in Rhode Island
Photo by Scientificaldan
Surely no one is surprised that Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont has thrown his support to a trucks-only toll bill. {Rhode Island has already imposed truck tolls.}
Connecticut, according to a handful of media critics of the measure, needs a new source of revenue, pretty much for the same reason the prodigal’s son needed more dough from his dad. He overspent, drew down his allowance and took on debt, the way a sinking ship takes on water through a hole in its hull. If Dad can absorb the debt, there is no problem; he can in that case, quite literally, afford to be merciful. But if he himself has fallen on hard times, mercy comes at too dear a price. Connecticut is the prodigal’s father who has fallen on hard times.
The author of the new transportation initiative, we are given to understand from various news sources, is state Senate President Martin Looney, who seemed, only a short time ago, to have wrinkled his nose at the toll proposals then on the table for discussion, one of which was a trucks-only tolling scheme.
Democrats are now agreed that a new revenue stream is necessary and that Lamont’s rollout was defective. During his gubernatorial campaign, Lamont proposed truck only tolling; once elected, he proposed multiple gantries on major highways, about 58 gantries that would collect user fees from all road travelers. The new revenue source is necessary, Democrats continue to argue, because the Transportation Fund lock-box has been depleted – by legislators who, as it turns out, had diverted funds destined for the lock-box, dumping them into the General Fund so they might reduce the continuing budget deficits for which they absurdly do not claim responsibility.
This analysis barely scratches the surface, though it does point to the real problem. The real problem is that the ruling Democratic Party is disinclined to make long-term, permanent cuts in spending. Additional taxes, we all know, are always permanent and long term. If you raise taxes, you eliminate the disturbing need to cut spending. Additional ruinous taxation, at this point in Connecticut's descent into its three decades old death spiral, will help only politicians -- no one else.
Why are Democrats so averse to permanent, long-term cuts in spending?
They are operating, as we all do, on a pleasure-pain principle. All life on the planet tends to resist pain and welcome pleasure. Even a daisy raising its head to greet the morning sun operates on the pleasure-pain principle. So then, we should ask ourselves: which is more painful for the average Democrat legislator, incurring the displeasure of the many supportive special interests in his political universe, or incurring the much more defused displeasure of those people he claims to represent who will be adversely impacted by yet another tax?
Democrat legislators are supposed to represent the general good of the whole demos, not special interests such as state worker unions. That is the desideratum we find in textbooks on good government. If Connecticut could produce a Machiavelli and put him to work churning out editorials for most newspapers in the state, we should soon have a proper view of modern state politics. Chris Powell at the Journal Inquirer occasionally quotes Ambrose Bierce on this point. Bierce defined “politics” in his “Devil’s Dictionary as: “a strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.”
If that seems cynical, it is. But perhaps the state could use a strong dose of cynicism, purely as an emetic. In the golden age of Athenian democracy, cynics were the world’s first hippies: They questioned all authority. It may seem cynical to say so, but a questioning and contrarian posture is proper to good journalism. In fact, it is indispensable to good journalism. How, without a touch of cynicism, should journalists go about comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable? Journalism’s most deadly enemy is auto-pilot thoughtlessness and political sycophancy. There was a heroic journalist – whose name I have forgotten, so rare are instances of heroism in the field – who made it a habit of blowing his sources every five years or so because he feared falling into a slough of sycophancy.
Before we leave the question of cynicism, which is poorly understood, allow me to use the substitute term “contrarian.” We know a thing by contraries. If you want to know whether position A advances the common good, you cannot arrive at an adequate answer to the question without due consideration of position B -- B being “Not A.” Without a consideration of B, A will be accepted unreflectively without serious examination. In all areas of human life, we seek proportional balance. In Connecticut politics, we seek what has been called internationally a “balance of power.”
Indeed, I may observe parenthetically that both state and national constitutions provide a balance of power between three functions indispensable to democracy: the legislative power of writing laws, the executive power of executing laws, and the judicial power of judging laws. These powers should be separate and equal -- in a special sense. And they cannot be equal unless they are separate. Equality among the different departments is arrived at when each department is prevented from encroaching on the constitutional prerogatives of the other two departments. The powers are divided functionally so that each function may retain its integrity. That is constitutional balance. It is also good government.
The Sad Estate of Connecticut's Fourth Estate
The old Hartford Courant Building circa 1900. The Connecticut Courant began as a weekly on Oct. 29, 1764, started by Thomas Green. The daily Hartford Courant, which remains after many decades state’s biggest newspaper, traces its existence back to the weekly, thus claiming the title of "America's oldest continuously published newspaper", and adopting as its slogan, "Older than the nation."
It is important to bear in mind an adversarial balance when discussing, say, the proper relationship between political parties or the proper relationship between government and the media.
There is universal agreement that the relationship between the Trump administration and the national media is an adversarial one. Some wonder, however, whether in this instance the adversarial relationship is too much of a good thing. A judicious journalistic balance weaves like a battered boxer between too much and too little. Moderation in all things -- though Trump seems to be unfamiliar with the concept -- is still the golden rule. Then too, the chief pursuit of good journalism is the objective, politically unadorned truth, which ought never to be sacrificed to a strife of interests. Was the relationship between the media and the Obama administration an adversarial one? The frisson as Obama did what some saw as him pledging to do -- remake the United States from the bottom up -- was, as many of us remember it, mild to non-existent.
Coming back to home plate, is the relationship between Connecticut’s media and what we perhaps should call the Weicker-Malloy-Lamont administration – all three administrations favoring tax increases over long-term, permanent cost reductions – an adversarial one? On important questions of the day, are Connecticut editorialists and commentators truly objective? How many editorials in Connecticut papers may be described as objectively conservative?
Don Pesci is a columnist based in Vernon, Conn.
Chris Powell: Hartford mayor's brilliant fiscal overloading; will extortionist ex-mayor return?
Hartford’s Beaux-Arts City Hall.
Hartford could do worse than give Luke Bronin another term as mayor, as those who live outside the capital city may realize from former Mayor Eddie Perez's candidacy to return to City Hall.
A decade ago Perez got caught taking kickbacks from a city contractor and was convicted in state court of bribery by extortion. In case anyone had forgotten this, just a few weeks ago Superior Court Judge Cesar A. Noble revoked Perez's city pension. Perez's misconduct, the judge wrote, was "severe" and had caused people to lose confidence in the honesty and integrity of elected officials.
The judge may have overstated expectations of honesty and integrity in government, but at least Bronin seems to have run a clean administration, insofar as it can be done in Hartford. In any case he has performed a spectacular and lasting service to the city. That is, Bronin helped former Gov. Dannel P. Malloy snooker the General Assembly into passing legislation transferring to the state the city's more than $500 million in bonded debt, a measure legislators said they understood to be doing no more than giving the city $40 million in emergency aid. It may have been the Brink's Job of Connecticut politics.
The state's assumption of Hartford's debt will be worth millions of dollars to the city in interest payments every year, tens of millions over time. Of course this will cost state taxpayers the same amount. Governor Lamont's "debt diet" won't help; the damage has been done.
Will Bronin's re-election campaign tout the debt transfer? The mayor's boasting about it may not make friends for the city, but the people who were snookered can't vote there. While by seeking concessions Bronin has alienated the unions representing city government's employees, the debt transfer will save the city far more than concessions ever would. Somebody in Hartford should be grateful for that.
Perez isn't Bronin's only challenger but he is the best known and the only Hispanic in the race, which may mean something to voters if corruption doesn't. Like politics in Bridgeport, politics in Hartford is so grubby and grasping that city voters may consider corruption merely incidental, as voters in Bridgeport did when they re-elected Joe Ganim as mayor four years ago despite his conviction for bribery and extortion and his long imprisonment.
Ganim and Perez are Democrats and it already has been fun to watch Connecticut's Democratic leaders dance around an extortionist's return to power in the state's largest city. Imagine the awkwardness that might ensue if the capital city vindicated another extortionist.
But power will help the Democrats get over it, leaving the challenge to those remaining in the state who would prefer preserving some standards in public life.
That is, what does it say about the last half century of urban policy in Connecticut that city voters have such low aspirations or are so indifferent to integrity in government?
Could Eddie Perez's return to Hartford City Hall shock anyone in authority into suspecting that the state's urban policy doesn't work, that it just impoverishes, degrades, breeds dependence on government, and nurtures corruption? Could Perez's return even shock anyone in authority into suspecting that urban policy \ does work because it is meant to do those things, since they are so lucrative in politics?
Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.