Don Pesci: ‘Shrouded in silence’

The riderless (caparisoned) horse named "Black Jack" during the departure ceremony as President Kennedy’s body was taken from the U.S., Capitol.

VERNON, Conn.

I had been playing basketball and decided, possibly for the second time in my first year as a student at Western Connecticut State College, to take a shower. Most often I showered at Mrs. Gallagher’s, about three city blocks from the college, where I had been boarding with a roommate, Edward Kennedy, a red-headed Irish pool shark.

Mrs. Gallagher was our sometimes eccentric landlady whose features suggested that she was a stunner as a young lady. She liked Kennedy’s red hair. And he, who could easily wind people around his pinky, joined Mrs. Gallagher for rum toddy once a week before bedtime.

The sky, as I remember it, was overcast, the weather around 38 degrees. The November wind was gentle. Girls were bent over a red convertible, its top down, weeping over the blare of a radio.

“What’s happened?” I asked as I passed them.

“Someone killed Kennedy,” one of the girls said.

Almost whispering to myself, I muttered, “Who would want to kill Ed Kennedy?’

President Kennedy was assassinated on Nov. 22, 1963, the Friday before Thanksgiving that year. Four of us, two close friends and a student I did not know well, left the day after the assassination for Washington, D.C., to pay our respects to the fallen president. We thumbed our way, bearing a large handwritten sign: “Washington DC – Kennedy funeral.”

We made the trek in three rides, astounding I thought at the time, but then our sign was an emotional passport. The assassination had scrambled everyone’s brains and hearts. And on this day, the wounded heart of the nation lay open, dissolving all the usual political oppositional chatter.

Our last chauffeurs were two young men, both taciturn Southerners who were in need of gasoline money to make their way home.

“We don’t have much, but we can give you what we can spare.”

We gave the two $10 and were let off late at night at Union Station, a short walk from the Capitol.  All four of us fell asleep on the hard benches.

Early in the morning, I felt the soft tap of a baton on the sole of my shoe, and a gentle voice peeled the sleep from my eyes.

“Time to get up boys and be about your business,” the police officer said.

Even early in the morning, the streets were lined, number crunchers later said, with upwards of a million people, some having waited patiently – silently – for 10 hours and more.

The silence suited me. During my four years in Danbury, unable to shake off a sometimes debilitating shyness, I had found comfort in the well-stocked library of Danbury State College, renamed during my time there Western Connecticut State University, writing from time to time for Conatus, the university’s literary magazine – nothing political. The political writing came much later, during the early 1980’s.

My literature professor asked me on my return from D.C. whether I had planned to write anything about the Kennedy assassination. I declined with a sharp “No.”

He would never have understood my reasoning, if one could call it reasoning.

I did not want to shatter the muffled silence – holy, in its own way – that touched everything during the ensuing days and weeks that followed. I just could not join in the general chatter, which I felt was, in some sense, obscene, because much of it was self-glorifying nonsense.

My mother, I recalled, had voted for Kennedy after the Kennedy-Nixon debates, in September 1960. My father, who was one of a handful of Republicans in Windsor Locks, Conn., a Democratic Party bastion, was astonished by this, and asked her at the supper table, where delicate matters were discussed, “Why on earth did you vote for a Democrat?”

“I found Nixon’s eyes shifty,” she said.

This revelation was followed by a muffled silence.

I married my wife, Andree, during my last year at Danbury. On a visit to her house in Fairfield, Conn., I found a framed picture of Kennedy near the family organ adorned by palms, blessed during Palm Sunday, fresh and smelling like the incense-drenched church in which we were married.

That day in Washington, we stood silent as horses’ hooves beat a tattoo on streets. First came the coffin born by white horses, wintry plums of breath streaming from the horses’ wide nostrils, these followed by “Black Jack’’, a riderless horse, boots strapped backwards covering its stirrups, then the crowd. All was shrouded in a holy silence in which, if one was paying close attention, one might hear the voice of Blaise Pascal saying, “In the end, they throw a little dirt on you, and everyone walks away. But there is One who will not walk away.”

Don Pesci is a Vernon-based columnist.

National Hat Co. factory in Danbury. For many decades Danbury was famous as a center for hat making. Sadly, mercury was used for making the felt that made up most of the hats, poisoning many workers and polluting the Still River. Connecticut didn’t ban this use of mercury until 1937.

Don Pesci: Beware Democrats' ‘government of force’

VERNON, Conn.

Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont has probably learned more than he has been willing to say from recent state and municipal elections

If one could stretch Lamont out on a comfortable couch and peek into his political psyche, one might find him sharing space with Virginia’s new governor-elect, Glenn Youngkin, and the bête noir of the progressive wing of the national Democratic Party, Sen. Joe Manchin, of West Virginia.

Manchin is something of a Democrat budget hawk, whose hectoring, residual moderates believe, is very much needed in a party that has adopted improvident spending as an operative political principle.

Singing from the balcony of the party’s once vibrant moderate center are =. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, and the lead choir boy, President Biden, all of whom have borrowed hymns from  socialist Bernie Sanders's progressive song book.

Budget watchers generally agree that the redistributionist Democratic Party budget, as well as the ideological arc in the once moderate party, has been heavily influenced by Sanders’s eccentric socialistic notions. There are in political parties king makers and budget makers. Sanders and members of the so called "Squad" have become important leftist budget and policy makers in the Democratic Party. 

Ideology, the fierce commitment to a political doctrine, is the iron bar in the politics of force. What, we may ask, is the opposite of the politics of force? Surely, few will disagree that its opposite is the still revolutionary notion that government derives its authority to govern from the consent rather than the conquest by power and force of the governed.

Asked shortly after the polls had closed in Virginia whether he thought “the sagging poll ratings of President Biden could affect next year’s elections for Congress and governors’ offices around the country,” Lamont first quipped that “he had spent time Tuesday night,” when election returns were rolling in, “watching the final game of the World Series,” according to a report in a Hartford paper.

Two days later, Lamont was less flippant. The shadow of the New Jersey race had fallen over many Democrats. In New Jersey, Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy won re-election by a breathtakingly small margin, according to Politico: Murphy 1,285,351, Jack Ciattarelli 1,219,906.

Lamont told a reporter, “I certainly feel like there’s a sense that the middle class is getting slammed, but I’ve felt that since I’ve been governor … I think that dysfunction in Washington, D.C., put a cloud on Democratic races…They did have a big tax increase in New Jersey, which I think got people’s attention. We’re in a very different place here in Connecticut. I’ve got to talk to Phil and see what else I can learn from that.”

During his first year in office, Biden, Pelosi and Schumer together have been the principal force leaders in their party. Both have threatened to eliminate the Electoral College in favor of the election of presidents by popular vote, a measure that would allow large population centers, mostly on the East and West coasts, to deprive small states and low-population-density areas of the country of an equitable voice in presidential selection. This measure, like the packing of the Supreme Court, would in the short run benefit a Democratic Party that values force above government action tempered by constitutional restraints. {Editor’s note: A constitutional amendment would be needed to eliminate the Electoral College.}

None of the force leaders in the Democratic Party have hesitated to use the power of government agencies to enhance their own political standing with the American public. The recently concluded elections are the first indication that the American public is, in both the pre- and post-COVID-19 epoch, generally opposed to a mode of governance that has succeeded elsewhere in the world only through the sustained application of the kind of persistent force that raises its horned head in every page of Machiavelli’s The Prince. Pelosi’s own daughter, intending to bestow a compliment, said of her mother, “She’ll cut your head off, and you won’t even know you’re bleeding,” a frighteningly accurate description of the politics of force.

Governments of force are the same everywhere – boringly vicious. Their shared characteristics are: the use of government agencies, unaccountable to the general public and not easily dismissed, to subvert the representative principle, traditional democratic government and the rule of law; the pitiless demonization of political opponents, an over reliance on propaganda and government imposed sanctions; a reliance on messaging, rather than practical and efficient policies, to capture the affections of the general public; and the transference of wealth and decision-making from the private marketplace to an overweening and seemingly omnipresent central government.

“Character,” said Thomas Paine, when the American experiment in republican government was yet in its infancy, “is better kept than recovered.”

If Lamont were a close student of history, rather than a millionaire whom fortune has blessed, he would understand why Biden’s approval ratings are abysmally low, 38 percent by at least one poll, understand what happened in in New Jersey, understand why Democrats are losing their grip on unaffiliated voters, as well as soccer moms, and why it is much easier to keep liberty, justice, constitutional government, the republic and a decentralizing power principle – the separation of the three branches of government – than it would be to restore the characteristics of the American experiment in freedom and representative government after the essential nature of the country had been deformed -- not reformed -- by leftists with knives in their brains.

Don Pesci is a Vernon-based columnist.

Don Pesci: Simone Weil’s faith amidst the world’s agonies

Simone Weil (1909-1943)

VERNON, Conn.

When you were very young, in college, you ran across some authors, almost by accident, who took your breath away, so lucid and creative were their minds. And you promised yourself – someday I will return to your table and feast again on your wisdom. Will it be as nourishing then. you wondered, as it is now?

Simone Weil (pronounced VEY), whom Albert Camus thought was the most courageous person among the writers of his day, some of them, including Camus, literary giants, was hauled into the Christian faith by the following George Herbert poem:

Love (III) 

Love bade me welcome. Yet my soul drew back

                              Guilty of dust and sin.

But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack

                             From my first entrance in,

Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning

                              If I lacked any thing. 

A guest, I answered, worthy to be here:

                             Love said, You shall be he.

I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah my dear,

                             I cannot look on thee.

Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,

                             Who made the eyes but I?

Truth Lord, but I have marred them: let my shame

                             Go where it doth deserve.

And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame?

                             My dear, then I will serve.

You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat:

                             So I did sit and eat.

 Weil, whose parents were of Jewish background, was strongly tempted to join the Catholic Church but resisted, she wrote in letters to Father Jean-Marie Perrin, a member of the Dominican order, because she felt her place was outside formal structures. She could best serve from the outside, looking in.  And she loved what she saw.

Five years after her soul had been besieged by Christ, she knelt for the first time at the shrine in Assisi and persuaded herself at last to say the Pater Noster daily with such attention that she felt at each repetition Christ himself had “descended and took her.”

Her’s was a hard mind and brilliant, like diamonds. Her religious experiences did not – could not – separate her from the agonies of daily life. She was driven by the wild horses of her personality never to separate herself, in any fashion, from the misfortunes of others. For this reason, she refused for a time to leave Paris, then occupied by Nazis. She eventually joined Gustave Thibon, a lay theologian in charge of an agricultural colony in the south of France. Later, she would petition Charles De Gaulle to parachute her into Paris. He refused.

She worked in the vineyards with peasants until her health, always fragile, broke down.  At first Thibon mistrusted her motives. She had already attained a reputation in Paris as a radical intellectual, and here she was perversely “returning to the soil,” eating what peasants ate, sleeping as they slept, clothed in poverty, and giving lectures to them on the Upanishads.

In time, Thibon became closely attached to her – as did many others with whom over the years she had established close contact. It was to Thibon that she entrusted her journals and occasional jottings, which he decided to publish after her death, caused in part by her refusal to eat any more than French soldiers had at their disposal. She died in exile, in London, in 1943.

Fr. Perrin, the anvil upon which she hammered out her thoughts on Christ, was a great friend and confidant. In the introduction to Waiting on God, a invaluable collection of Weil’s letters and essays, Leslie Fielder writes, “One has the sense of Simone Weil as a woman to whom ‘sexual purity’ is as instinctive as breath; to whom indeed any kind of sentimental life is scarcely necessary. But a few lines in one of her absolutely frank and unguarded letters to Father Perrin reveal a terrible loneliness which only he was able to mitigate to some degree and vulnerability which only he knew how to spare: ‘I believe that, except for you, all human beings to whom I have ever given, through my friendship, the power to harm easily, have sometimes amused themselves by doing so, frequently or rarely, consciously or unconsciously, but all of them at one time or another.…’”

For Weil, who suffered from crippling migraines for a good portion of her life, suffering is not a nullity. Nor was it a nullity for Christ pinned to a cross: “…persevering in our love, we fall to the point where the soul cannot keep back the cry ‘My God, my God, why hast though forsaken me?’ If we remain at the point without ceasing to love, we end by touching something that is not affliction, not joy, something that is the central essence, necessary and pure, something not of the senses, common to joy and sorrow – the very love of God… Extreme affliction…is a nail whose point is applied at the very center of the soul, whose head is all necessity spreading throughout space and time… He whose soul remains ever turned towards God, though pierced with a nail, finds himself nailed to the center of the universe…at the intersection of creation and its Creator…at the intersection of the arms of the Cross.”

It is nearly impossible for the postmodern, materialistic mind to believe that such airy effusions are other than poetry, and dangerous poetry at that. But if postmodernism wishes to argue the point with Weil, its arguments will lack conviction; for Weil’s larger point is that the believing Christian is, in truth, a slave to the truth, a convict of Godly love. To attend is to love.

It may shock the shriveled, inattentive mind of postmodern academics that Herbert’s poem, which opened to Weil a window on the splendor of Christ the criminal, is not poetry either. It is the life-giving breath of God.

Don Pesci is a Vernon-based columnist.

Don Pesci: In a place of unchecked, secretive power

Entrance to the MacDougall Walker Correctional Institution, in Suffield, Conn., where Brent McCall spent time.

Sham: Inside the Criminal Correction Racket, by Brent McCall ($12.95). {He was convicted of violent crimes.}

VERNON, Conn.
People who have never been inside a prison – most of us -- think: 1) the purpose of a prison is to provide punishment, not rehabilitation; 2) justice essentially means, “If you did the crime, you do the time; 3) every prisoner has duped himself or herself into thinking he or she is innocent and therefore any punishment, however unjust, is merited; 4) egotism does not stop at prison doors, and the notion that one should  take a prisoner’s testimony as gospel truth over that of prison authorities is patently absurd; and 5) books written by prisoners nursing grievances should be taken with two tons of salt.

People convinced that the above propositions are indisputably true will not be persuaded otherwise by Brent McCall’s latest book, Sham, which presents a strong case that the administrative architecture of modern prisons, many of which put themselves forward as rehabilitation centers, have yet to throw off certain medieval characteristics. Sociologists who spend their days probing various administrative organizations – schools, the family, corporations, political parties, etc. -- should turn the pages of Sham with some interest, because prisons are among the first age-old repositories of unchecked, secretive and personalized administrative power.

When the cell door is locked and the key thrown away, also discarded is any critical word from prisoners concerning administrative justice or humane treatment. At its most primitive, punishment without mercy is terror. Central to terror is arbitrary, personalized treatment by an overpowering force. That is the message of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s partly autobiographical novel The Idiot.

Written twenty years after Dostoevsky’s own imprisonment, Prince Myshkin, the protagonist of the novel, tells a story of an execution that intentionally resembles Dostoyevsky’s own mock execution: “...But better if I tell you of another man I met last year...this man was led out along with others on to a scaffold and had his sentence of death by shooting read out to him, for political offenses. About twenty minutes later a reprieve was read out and a milder punishment substituted...he was dying at 27, healthy and strong...he says that nothing was more terrible at that moment than the nagging thought: "What if I didn't have to die!...I would turn every minute into an age, nothing would be wasted, every minute would be accounted for... (Part I, chapter 5).”

In The House of the Dead, Dostoevsky traces the path of a “diseased tyranny,” always related to the unbridled personal power of one man over another: “The human being, the member of society, is drowned forever in the tyrant, and it is practically impossible for him to regain human dignity, repentance, and regeneration...the power given to one man to inflict corporal punishment upon another is a social sore...it will inevitably lead to the disintegration of society.”

The subject of McCall’s Sham is not personal vindication. Sham is a brief against personal tyranny, the tyranny of an administrative organ hidden from public view and, deployed outside of administrative guidelines, inescapable. Sunshine, we are often told, is the best disinfectant. What is brought to light no longer festers in the dark. Prisons are meant to be, by design, dark. And prisoners are meant to be invisible. Any prisoner who flips on the light switch is bound to be greeted with sour disfavor.

Sham is McCall’s second book. I also reviewed his first, Down the Rabbit Hole: How the Culture of Corrections Encourages Crime, co-written with Michael Liebowitz, McCall’s friend and cellmate at (MacDougall-Walker CI in Suffield, Conn.) in February, 2018.

Following the publication of their first co-written book, the two co-authors were separated, McCall being shuttled off to Cheshire Correctional Institution.  Both authors had been heard semi-regularly on Todd Feinberg’s radio talk show program at WTIC News/Talk 1080. 

At the center of McCall’s disfavor was an embarrassing sham he had uncovered that involved salary padding on the part of prison officials. Both McCall and Liebowitz had agreed that none of their publications should be made available to other prisoners, a stipulation that since has been faithfully adhered to by all parties. The publications were intended to be corrective, not unnecessarily destructive to prison order or discipline. Both authors favor discipline when it is merited, just punishment and administrative order.

Indeed, the chief point of both books is that chaos on occasion replaces both discipline and order in some prisons because in some instances non-professional administrative staff and administrators find chaos, for a number of reasons, to be preferable to order and discipline.

Sham is jam-packed with such incidents. Such “troublesome themes,” McCall writes, play out time and again in many prisons, even when gross “dereliction of duty” presents clear and present dangers to both prisoners and guards.

An episode involving a guard and two quarreling prisoners in which the guard was clearly baiting the prisoners rather than repressing the quarrel, a clear dereliction of duty, induced McCall to write a letter to the Commissioner of prisons. Naturally, as on so many other occasions, McCall was not advised that the guard had been disciplined.  Prisoners who had witnessed the quarrel drew the right conclusions from it, namely that order and disciple in the prison was not a high priority for administrators.

McCall writes that the same theme, always destructive of rehabilitation, “took place at MacDougall’s prison industries… First, there was obviously nothing of rehabilitative value in staff colluding with inmates to bilk Connecticut taxpayers out of fraudulent overtime hours (not to mention the various other kinds of thefts going on there).

“Secondly, I went from being ignored to being transferred, with the staff creating the climate that ostensibly made that transfer necessary… Finally, even after all this time, I have no idea whether any of the staff at MacDougall industries were ever held responsible for the crime they had committed or the CDOC [Connecticut Department of Corrections] directives they openly violated.”

True discipline should not be confused with a “foolish consistency,” the “the hobgoblin of little minds,” according to Ralph Waldo Emerson. In prison environments, the two often walk hand in hand.

Chapter 5 of Sham, headed “Correctional Lemmings”, carries a quote from George Orwell: “The heresy of heresies was common sense,” and it describes in meticulous deatail the orderly procession of chow lines at Cheshire CI. “On the whole,” McCall writes, “East Block’s chow procedure is one of the most orderly and well managed things I’ve ever seen the Connecticut Department of Corrections do.”

It is a choreographed dance, flawless in every step.

Then comes chow. The prisoners are seated, and chaos – disruptive conversations that run afoul of CDOC’s Code of Penal Discipline – follow in due course, while unperturbed guards pretend not to notice the disorder.

“Why regulate seemingly innocuous behavior, McCall ruminates, while ignoring misconduct that would likely get one arrested for breach of peace and disorderly conduct at the local Burger King?”

Why must arbitrariness rule like a king in prisons? Is not the arbitrary the enemy of discipline, precisely in the same way a foolish consistency is the enemy of constructive order?

McCall makes the attempt – most often successfully – to answer questions such as these.

Full of footnotes but lacking a proper index for quick reference, Sham is an easy read, because McCall writes well, and his analytic powers are fully mature. The purpose of analytical writing is to dispel the darkness and shed light.

After he had finished reading Witness, Whittaker Chambers’s account of his own rise from demon communism to the light, Andre Malraux told the former soviet operative, “You did not come back from hell with empty hands.”

Sham is brave, clear in its witness, and well worth a read.

Don Pesci is a Vernon-based columnist.

Don Pesci: The body count in New Haven

New Haven from the south, with The Hill in the foreground. East Rock is visible in the background

— Photo by Emilie Foyer

VERNON, Conn.

Paul Bass of the New Haven Independent is keeping a body count.

From January to March alone, the publication notes, “Alfreda Youmans, 50, and Jeffrey Dotson, 42, were found dead by the police inside a Winthrop Avenue apartment, Jorge Osorio-Caballero, 32, was shot and killed in Fair Haven, Marquis Winfrey, 31, was shot and killed in Newhallville, and Joseph Vincent Mattei, 28, was shot and killed in the Hill. Someone shot Kevin Jiang, 26, to death in Goatville on Feb. 6. Angel Rodriguez, 21, was shot to death in Fair Haven in mid-February, his body dumped by the Mill River in East Rock. Dwaneia Alexandria Turner, 28, was shot to death in the Hill on March 16 during an argument with two other women.”

And the year’s total body count so far for the city that has given us Yale, two nationwide recognized pizza houses, the inimitable Roger Sherman, and William Celentano, a funeral director and the first Italian-American mayor of New Haven -- indeed, the last Republican mayor elected in New Haven 68 years ago – is 21.

“There have been 21 homicides in New Haven this year,” NBC Connecticut reports. “Twenty murders were reported citywide in 2020, according to statistics from the New Haven Police Department” – and we have about 3 months left to close out the year.”

It promises to be a record year, not only for new Haven but for all major cities in Connecticut.

The New Haven Independent, whose reporting on murders in New Haven has been more granular than some might wish, tells us the latest shooting victim is Trequon Lawrence, 27 years old, employed by Yale New Haven Hospital, and a new home owner.

“I purchased my first multi-family dwelling,” Lawrence wrote on Facebook. “Truly blessed and highly favored. Yet this is a bitter sweet time in my life. As some of you may know I lost my baby girl a few weeks back. And in all honesty she was my motivation for buying the house. When she left a piece of me left with her. Nonetheless I still had to make this move toward putting my family in a better position. In life we will experience many highs and many lows. But without the lows we can’t truly appreciate the highs. I am GRATEFUL overall and will continue to strive for greatness in light of my daughter.”

Lawrence was shot eight times. The shooting occurred, the publication noted, “down the street from the home of state Sen. Gary Winfield,” who “observed afterwards that the police department has not been giving the public much information about what’s behind this year’s flood of shootings.”

Contacted for comment by the publication, Winfield said, “My experience over a couple of decades is that you don’t get the intimate details of the shooting itself. But you get, ‘This is what we’re seeing. We’re seeing these are isolated incidents.’ Or: ‘They’re related to gangs or cliques’ …. You get some kind of trending information to give some sense of what is actually happening,’ Winfield said.”

Sure, sure. The causes of shootings in New Haven this year are not materially different than the previous year, and the year before that, and the two decades before that.

Even so, the accumulative data apparently is not sufficient to allow the General Assembly to remediate city shootings through legislation.

“While the police need to keep certain details about individual shootings confidential while they investigate,” the publication noted, “in the past they have communicated more about what’s behind outbreaks of violence, Winfield said. He argued that officials and the community can’t craft an effective response without more information.”

The notice posted on Dante’s Gates of Hell was, “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.” Things are not quite that bad in New Haven. The state delegation, Winfield said, has “reached out to the mayor to have a conversation about what has been going on. In order to tackle the problem we need to know what is actually happening. People in the city have fear. Some of that is born from what is going on. Some of that is born from a lack of information.”

New Haven has had a surfeit of insouciant Democrat politicians over the last 60 years, but Winfield’s indifference to a murder in his city that occurred “down the street from his home” is a high bar to surmount.

Whatever can Winfield mean when he says he lacks the proper data from New Haven police to fashion an answering piece of legislation – other than that legislation for which Winfield is best known: a bill that withdraws from all police officers in the state a partial immunity from suits that would allow plaintiffs to seize the personal assets of police officers in Connecticut? The removal of protective immunity in Winfield's signature bill, some have argued, likely contributed to a drop-off in urban police recruitment, and a flight from urban areas to the suburbs by city police officers, this at a time when New Haven’s murder rate is growing by leaps and bounds.

Following an affirmative vote on the Winfield bill, police chiefs warned, “There is not and cannot be an alternative to this for any police officer or agency. We strongly believe that the loss of qualified immunity will destroy our ability to recruit, hire, and retain qualified police officers both now and in the foreseeable future. We are also very concerned about losing our current personnel at a higher rate than we normally can replace. Any impact on our ability to recruit qualified personnel in general will also impact our minority recruitment efforts, which is a goal in this bill that we strongly support.”

Any of the survivors of the relatives of victims listed by the New Haven Independent in its granular coverage of New Haven murders doubtless would appreciate a clear answer to the above question?

Surely it is the greater part of Winfield’s obligation as a state senator to fix his attention on murders that occur right under his nose and to propose legislative fixes that really do fix the problem.

Don Pesci is a Vernon-based columnist.

Don Pesci: A reunion at the end of the plague time

“Diogenes Searching for an Honest Man:”(c. 1780) attributed to J. H. W. Tischbein. Diogenes (about 412 to 323 B.C.), a Greek, was a one of the founders of Cynic philosophy.

VERNON, Conn.

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 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 rowboat ladened with cement bags towards a small island a half mile off the mainland.

The two were to build a wall around the island, owned by a dentist who would, at some distant point in the future, build his retirement house there. Walls make good neighbors, but lakes, particularly when one is on an island surrounded by water, make better ones.

That was why Orwell, said The Cynic, retreated to the remote Scottish Island of Jura to stretch his mind around Nineteen Eighty-Four. It was why the monks of the dessert took to the dessert, to better commune with the molten God burning in their souls. And it was why Antisthenes, thought to be the father of Greek Cynicism, established his school in a famous gymnasium built to service the nothoi, the bastard children of Athens.

The Cynic, nearly always a solitary, had asked The Country Mouse to help him build the wall, a self-terminating endeavor, thought The Cynic, because the unpredictable effects on water disturbed by wind, rain and the pull of moon will overturn even the best laid plans of mice and men. But the pay was a bonus for the two student roommates who needed pocket money from time to time.

It was summer; the lake was blue ice, its quiet surface hiding the clamor and rough motion below the surface. What if the old boat sank? Would any attempt be made to save the cement? Would one, or both the project managers, drown, pushed under the quiet surface of the lake by a weight of weakness and ungovernable laughter?

“Who could forget that wall?” The Country Mouse had replied, before making arrangements to meet at a local diner.

Not he, not ever. The job amused The Cynic. His unappeasable κυνικός burst forth not in frowns but in what he called therapeutic laughter. Laughter, he had once told The Country Mouse are tears turned, like socks, inside out.

“Comedy,” he said, “is the tragedy that happens to your worst enemy.”

And now here was his old friend in the flesh. There was no “catching up” between these two. Heart spoke to heart. Time was foreshortened, and the two picked up pretty much where they had left off. Friendship, The Country Mouse thought, is rooted in requited expectation.

The Cynic, like The Country Mouse, was no stranger to politics. Both had written about Connecticut’s political absurdities for more than 30 years, and each had followed the other’s occasional writings, though neither had felt the need to reestablish contact, perhaps from fear that re-contact would abort a cherished friendship. Why spoil the past by resurrecting it, dripping with mold and moss, from its comfortable grave?

The Cynic had proposed a project that would allow both of them to create a semi-perishable narrative that might be of interest to people not too far gone in partisanship, as is the case, The Cynic pointed out, “with nearly 90 percent of the state’s highly compromised media. Searching for dispassionate reportage from this group was like searching in a whore house for glints of modesty and shards of morality, not,” he hastened to add, “that immorality was a bar to honest truth seeking.”

“Your figure might be low,” The Country Mouse replied, though he instantly had accepted the proposal.

Both had for the past three decades been “writing on water,” The Cynic’s formulation, for a slumberous audience that could not, or perversely would not, recall what had happened yesterday. Then too, the windy horror stirring on Connecticut’s horizon hardly ruffled these bouts of self-enforced somnolence. Working in the moment had unfitted them for unabashed journalism. So, why not disturb some restless ghosts?

“We should,” said The Cynic, bestowing a smile upon his omelet, “draw up an enemies' list.”

“A friend’s list,” said The Country Mouse, “would be shorter and more manageable. I can think of two reliables.”

“None for me,” said The Cynic.

Now, whenever The Cynic’s temperament was aroused, his voice, rose as well, and he pronounced every syllable of every word as a Shakespearian actor might. Naturally, this captured the attention of nearby diners who began leaning into the conversation.

Responding to The Country Mouse’s remark that beaten people in Connecticut seemed emotionally exhausted by measures that had been taken to shut down the state, The Cynic launched the following philippic:

“At some point, someone – and if not the media, then who? – must scream loudly enough to pierce waxen ears -- ‘THE EMPEROR IS NAKED!”’

This produced a stir at a nearby table.

“Too few in the state’s media do it,” The Cynic continued. “Politics is the only profession on earth that professes nonsense without media reproval. We’ve just recovered from a Coronavirus ‘pandemic.’ The entire state was shut down – and NOT BY THE PANDEMIC – for a year.

“Just take one instance, and try to remember that the state’s political hegemon, the  Democratic Party, has controlled politics, without the least interference from Republicans, in all three of the state’s larger cities for nearly half a century, plenty of time to set things right.

“Whatever is wrong with Connecticut’s cities, the solution to urban social disintegration and lawlessness cannot be a bill to provide previously illegal pot in every urban pot.”

This produced some suppressed laughter from a couple sitting in a nearby booth.”

“Urban problems cannot be solved,” The Cynic continued in a lower voice, “or even addressed, by a state that asserts the elimination of zoning restrictions in suburbs will magically solve problems in cities related to causes untouched by the proposed solution.”

This produced slight applause and appreciative nods and smiles from a different booth.

Quieter still, The Cynic continued, “Removing partial immunity from prosecution within urban police departments will not reduce criminal activity in the state’s cities. Still less will early release from prison and the decriminalization of crimes reduce criminal activity in cities, though it may improve the kinds of statistics politicians cite in the heat of a campaign. The elimination of partial immunity celebrated by Connecticut’s progressive Democrats will reduce the number of police in urban police departments. In fact, a little noticed migration of police officers from urban to suburban departments has already begun. And it cannot be good sense to reduce police presence at a time when crime in urban areas is “MOVING FORWARD,” a favorite expression of blind progressive mice, at warp speed. Any politician unwilling to attack the rot at the root of a problem cannot be said to care for the plant.”

A lady to the left of the two reunited friends waved her fork in their direction. All the Coronavirus protective masks in the diner had been discarded. For the first time in a year, both The Country Mouse and The Cynic, who regarded the masks as emblems of subservience to autocratic governors, could once again read faces. And this one was smiling, the Country Mouse thought, sardonically.

“Excuse me,” she said, “who ARE you?”

“He’s The Cynic,” answered The Country Mouse.

Don Pesci is a Vernon-based columnist.

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Don Pesci: Of husbandry, debt, 'investing' and politics

VERNON, Conn.

Neither a borrower nor a lender be,
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry” 

– Shakespeare, in Hamlet

Most people in the United States – indeed, in the world – are either 1) buyers or 2) sellers, or 3) people who facilitate buying and selling.

Politicians consider themselves service providers. Their opening, invariably, is “We’re here to help.” As a general rule, politicians collect money from some people, launder it through bewildering, little understood administrative ganglions, and give it to those who, they determine, need help. A sizable chunk of the gift is devoted to the labor costs of the administrative apparatus, and other parts are parceled out to grease the political machine.

Politicians call this “investing.” They imagine that they are doing what millionaires do effectively in what is still laughingly called, here in the un-United States, a “free market.” A free market may be defined correctly as an unregulated selling floor, where people who want goods and services are free to purchase them from sellers without undue interference from third parties not directly involved in buying and selling.

In our Coronavirus cancel-everything era, we have seen autocratic governors swollen with plenary powers shut down the whole economy -- schools, restaurants, businesses, even the legislative and judicial branches of government. 

The political universe, in which politicians invest additionally in their own continuance in office, is not at all like a public marketplace where goods and services are freely exchanged. In fact, in many ways, the political trade is just the opposite of a free market. It is where regulations are made that encumber the free flow of goods and services, sometimes in the interests of the general public.

The Shakespearian line quoted above is spoken by Polonius, who is giving fatherly advice to his son Laertes before his trip to Paris. Do not borrow or lend, the father advises, “for loan oft loses both itself and friend.”

Modern banking has solved the problem of lost friendship owing to imprudent borrowing because, as we all know, bankers are not friends. One who refuses to pay a loan from a bank quickly loses his credit, but never a true friend.

We know, either from bitter experience or hearsay, the dangers of imprudent getting and spending – assuming we are not profligate spenders like the majority of politicians in the so called “land of steady habits.” It is the special mission of progressives to unsteady habits.  Here in Connecticut, governmental debt is $67 billion as of September 2020. Nationally, the debt is much larger, about $26.70 trillion as of August 2020, but one cannot expect a small state to keep up with so large a spendthrift neighbor.

Polonius tells his son that imprudent borrowing “dulls the edge of husbandry.”

Whatever can Shakespeare mean by that? What was husbandry in the Elizabethan era, and how is the sharp edge of it dulled by borrowing and imprudent spending?

When Banquo says in Macbeth, “There’s husbandry in heaven; Their candles are all out,” he means that the angels are illuminating fewer stars in order to economize.

It turns out that Shakespeare was a notorious borrower of the literary labor of others and, at some point, Thomas Tusser's Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry may have fallen under his eyes. The book was very popular in its day.

“Husbandry,” we learn from Tusser and others, was a term that had developed from the word “husband.” It was used to refer to the ordering and management of the household. The term, used more broadly, applied as well to animal and agrarian management. The farmer who excelled at husbandry was, in a word, thrifty, which was why women in Shakespeare’s day were attracted to good husbands. Nowadays, a different alchemy, occasionally involving cosmetics and minor surgery, is used by non-farm women to catch wanted “partners”, not necessarily husbands, in their subtle nets. A good Hollywood husband, a gym rat and buff as a new penny, is one who leaves you in material comfort after the divorce.

Divorce and household management aside, the question of good husbandry –thriftiness and economizing -- is conspicuously absent in both Tinseltown and politics, because husbandry in the Shakespearian sense and marriage in the post-modern period are both regarded as steps backwards and a lamentable indication that one has failed to “move forward,” whatever horrors the future may hold for us, some of which may be glimpsed in urban fatherless families and politicians who little care what sprouts from their spendthrift progressive soil.

Don Pesci is a Vernon-based columnist.

Don Pesci: The City Mouse fatalistically faces the spreading stupidity pandemic

1912 Drawing derived from the Aesop’s Fables tale “The Town Mouse and The Country Mouse,’’ by Arthur Rackham

VERNON, Conn.

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 homogenously progressive Connecticut culture -- Connecticulture? -- and differences of opinion clouded the air.

The City Mouse was not surprised that Yale law students had launched a lawsuit against 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 the Yale students, 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 regulations in Woodbridge are not racist. They regulate lot size, which has attracted middle-class homeowners to Woodbridge. How many Yale students finding employment opportunities in Connecticut’s Gold Coast, or in an increasingly impoverished New York City, have over the past few decades settled in Woodbridge rather than, say New Haven? How many of New York's tax-tortured residents have moved to New Haven rather than Woodbridge or other Connecticut Gold Coast communities? The students’ attack upon zoning regulations in Woodbridge is what it appears to be on its face – an assault upon representative municipal governance first by the courts and, at some point in the near future, by a compliant progressive legislature.”

Their server, Brian, approached to refill their wine glasses. He was a young man – well educated, both could see – who was working his way through college. He had been at a Connecticut university for a couple of years, gliding through on a partial scholarship, and both had talked with him at length before.

“Brian,” Lady Friend said, “your restaurant appears to be reviving now that Coronavirus restrictions have been lifted. Good for you, right?”

“Yes. There’s plenty of work. But a different problem has cropped up.”

“Ah,” Lady Friend asked, “What is it?”

This question caused some unease. Brian, suitably masked, looked cautiously over his shoulder, then ventured in a whisper, “The restaurant is having a problem securing help.”

“From state and federal government, you mean?”

“No, everyone there wants to undo the harm they’ve done through shutdown regulations. Help… you know, servers, dishwashers and the like.”

Looking conspiratorially over her shoulder, The Country Mouse said, “Well, no slur intended on you, Brian, but you don’t need a Harvard education to serve food and wash dishes. And there is a huge untapped, unemployed population in Hartford that has not graduated from Yale or Harvard law schools and may be tapped to work in restaurants -- so, what’s the problem?”

“They have other means.”

“I don’t understand,” said Lady Friend.

And here, the City Mouse broke in. “Brian is suggesting that welfare payments and superior benefits keep the unemployed on the public payroll.”

“Is that it?” Lady friend asked, a note of quiet desperation in her voice.

“That’s it,” Brian said, and sped off to another table.

“I can’t imagine,” the City Mouse said, with a sardonic trill in her voice, “what the solution to that problem might be, apart from bringing restaurants onto the public dole. State support of restaurants could be sold on the supposition that restaurants might be better managed by legislators rather than restaurant owners. But you and I know -- don’t we? -- that it would drive up the cost of everything. Just look at the spikes over the past five decades in welfare costs, state employee salaries and pensions and so called ‘fixed costs,’ which cannot legislatively be unfixed without unseating certain legislators.”

“Imagine that,” said Lady Friend, “you solve one problem, and another knocks you on the head.”

“Like sowing dragon’s teeth,” the City Mouse mused.

The problem has been solved, I reported to The City Mouse. On May 3, the Hartford City Council proposed an equitable solution: “City exploring universal basic income.”

The lede to the story in a Hartford paper ran as follows: “The city of Hartford is considering experimenting with a universal basic income [UBI], starting with designing a pilot program that would give no-strings-attached monthly payments to participating city residents.”

The program would “target single, working parents, with a goal of learning whether extra, guaranteed income improves recipients’ physical and emotional well-being, job prospects and financial security.”

The lessons apparently already have been learned by the City Council.

The story bulges with approving quotes from a University of Connecticut economist, the council president, various council members, all Democrats, and a solitary Working Families Party member. Those outside Connecticut should know that the state’s Working Party lives in the basement of the state’s progressive Democrat Party.

A 2018 study of a similar UBI program in Alaska, the paper reported, found that “it did not increase unemployment as some critics feared and had actually increased part-time work.”

“So, no need to worry anymore,” I teased The City Mouse.

Her response, delivered with a painful sigh:  “If only stupidity were as easy to dispose of as Coronavirus.”

Don Pesci is a Vernon-based columnist.

Don Pesci: Avoid 'cheap grace': Bring migrant kids to Conn.

U.S. Border Patrol officers processing migrant children in Texas

Central American migrants charging their phones in Mexico City on their way to the U.S. border.

VERNON, Conn.
The crisis at the border has now officially become “a border crisis.” A story in The Hartford Courant boldly labels it as such: “Lamont was personally asked by Vice President Kamala Harris recently if Connecticut could provide space for some of the thousands of children who are being kept in detention centers along the Texas border after fleeing from their Central American countries. Their numbers have increased as the federal government is facing a border crisis (emphasis mine).”

“Crisis” is not a term often found waltzing around with the new administration of President Joe Biden. But it has become impossible in recent days for Friends Of Biden (FOBs) to overlook the massive numbers of illegal – shall we, for once, call things by their right names? --  immigrants that have poured over the US border after Biden, a few weeks into his presidency, opened the door to illegal immigration while telling the huddled masses yearning to breathe free in Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico, “Don’t come in just yet. We’re not ready for you.”

They came, in numbers impossible to ignore.

Biden honeymooners scattered throughout the United States have managed thus far to obscure the predictable consequences of Democratic attempts to rid the nation of any trace of Trumpism. Slathering such failed attempts with political slant-ointment has not worked to obliterate the failed results of Biden’s thoughtless border policies. George Orwell taught us that the most difficult thing that writers must do is to notice what is lying right under their noses, and some people in the news business have taken his admonition to heart.

The unmanageable influx of illegal immigrants quickly became a crisis after the Biden administration disassembled Trump’s effective, though imperfect, multiple solutions to illegal border crossings. The Trump protocols included a wall, much derided by anti-Trump Democrats; an arrangement with south-of-the-border states that illegal immigrants passing through other countries on their way to the United States must apply for asylum in the pass-through countries, and tighter border security. All this was washed away, mostly by executive fiats, following Biden’s elevation to the presidency.

The came the deluge. Suddenly everyone was woke.

Now that the immigration horses have escaped the barn, the Biden administration is reconsidering patching breaches in the border wall and bribing – shall we call things by their right names for once? -- South American countries plagued for decades by failed socialist policies, so that the governments of said countries might consider giving the Biden administration a hands-up concerning illegal border crossings.

Answering a plea from Vice President Kamala Harris, Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont has agreed to lend a hand as well. After all, why should a border crisis that affects the entire nation be borne solely by  California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas, states lying on our country’s mystical borders?

Good question. Is it not a form of cheap grace for progressives in Connecticut to refuse to put their muscle where their mouths have been? This time, Connecticut progressives are not marching in lockstep with their brother progressives in the Biden-Harris administration.

Connecticut progressives are wiggling on the point.  Middletown Mayor Ben Florsheim, perhaps the most progressive politician in the history of Middletown {home of Wesleyan University}, expressed reservations. “Taking kids out of cages in the Southwest and moving them into cages in the Northeast, Florsheim said, “is not an immigration policy. This is a literal decommissioned child prison. It’s a detention facility.” Actually, was a detention facility; no one has been detained in the closed Connecticut Juvenile Training School since April 12, 2018. Then too, Harris was not whispering policy prescriptions into Lamont’s ear during her visit to Connecticut. She was begging Lamont to let down a much needed political life line and, really, doesn’t the temporary housing in Connecticut of distressed children merit a soupcon of compassion from the progressive Mayor of Middletown? We are, after all, a nation of immigrants.

The Connecticut Justice Alliance’s executive director Christina Quaranta, said that the former juvenile-detention center “was not built to care for, support, or heal youth — especially youth already going through such significant trauma. Even if all evidence that [the training school] is a maximum security, hardware secure facility is removed, it still remains a large, cinderblock building, with inadequate living space for young people.”

Nope, Lamont said, “I visited there last week. I had no idea what to expect: cafeterias, classrooms, big outdoor recreation, indoor rec areas. I think the federal government would come in and make sure that when it came to where people actually sleep, they can do that in a way that the kids feel safe and feel like they’re at home. It’s secure, but it’s also welcoming.”

And that is the point, isn’t it? Lamont and Harris are right on this one: Connecticut should share the burden of national problems – the sooner the better. Welcoming illegal immigrant children to a facility that easily can be adjusted to meet their needs is no different than welcoming illegal immigrants into Connecticut’s sanctuary cities, and progressives who lodge flimsy objections to this mission of mercy are practitioners of cheap grace.

The crisis elsewhere should come home to roost, if only to show that Connecticut is better than those who pray in the church of cheap grace. Jesus, incidentally, called the practitioners of cheap grace “the tombs of the prophets.”

Don Pesci is a columnist based in Vernon.

Don Pesci: Critical Race Theory is intellectual tripe

The Indian Harbor Yacht Club in rich Greenwich, Conn., a town where admission is all about money, not race.

VERNON, Conn.

Mike Winkler, a progressive – very progressive -- Connecticut state representative from Vernon, tumbled into a postmodern mare’s nest when he attempted, poorly, to discriminate between different kinds of discrimination.

During a public hearing on bills before the state General Assembly Planning and Development Committee, Winkler said that Greenwich Housing Authority member Sam Romeo had counted Asian-Americans among minorities suffering from invidious discrimination. Winkler had just suggested that Greenwich officials had deployed zoning regulations to deny access to African-Americans, and here was a Housing Authority member claiming that 37 percent of the population of Greenwich were members of minority groups.

Well, yes, Winkler grudgingly conceded. However, “You count Asians and other minorities that have never been discriminated against,” Winkler said during the hearing, at which point the frigid waters of Critical Race Theory closed over Winkler’s head. Critical Race Theory holds that the law and legal institutions are inherently racist, and that race itself, instead of being biologically grounded, is a social construct used by white people to advance their own political and economic interests at the expense of people of color.

As a matter of history and common sense, one must admit that Winkler may have had a point: There are different kinds and degrees of discrimination.  But, flourishing the wrong end of the point, he ended up stabbing himself.

Surely all participants in the conference shown on YouTube would agree there are differences in degrees and kinds of discrimination. The discrimination that Martin Luther King Jr. bravely faced during three protest marches from Selma, Ala., to the state capital of Montgomery surely was different in kind and ferocity than that faced by some black and white Americans attempting to move into Greenwich. In the matter of discrimination, things have improved remarkably since dogs were set on Selma protestors in 1965.

If Greenwich had ever relied on redlining to maintain what Critical Race Theorists may regard as the purity of the towns’ racial stock, those provisions have long since been swept from zoning regulations throughout all of Connecticut’s municipalities. Times change, sometimes for the better.

No, no, nearly everyone from butcher to baker to candlestick maker cried, more or less in unison. The price of admission to Greenwich is dollar-related. Not everyone can afford to live in Greenwich. If state Senate President Martin Looney has his way, soon progressive Democrats may impose a tax on Connecticut’s “Gold Coast” mansions, which would have the unfortunate effect of making access to wealthy towns throughout the state even less attractive to people of color who might be able to afford the price of the mansions. Zoning provisions in Greenwich do not exclude potential admission to the town for reasons of race, religion or color -- provided that the potential applicants have sufficient greenbacks in their bank accounts.

Howitzers were fired at Winkler from every direction. Republican state Sen. Tony Hwang, an Asian-American, stepped forward to turn against Winkler a point often advanced by Critical Race Theory-soddened Democrats. According to an account in a Hartford paper, “Winkler, a white man, simply cannot grasp the pervasiveness of Asian-American bias, ‘‘ Hwang said. ‘You believe they have been discriminated less. You have never been in their shoes.''' Democratic Atty. Gen. William Tong, the state’s highest-ranking Asian-American elected official, joined in. Tong “recalled being asked during a debate in the House whether Asian- Americans count as people of color. ‘Let me assure you that Asian-Americans count and the hate and discrimination against us is real,’ Tong said Tuesday.’’

The public scourging followed its usual course, and the sinner eventually showed repentance, apologizing for his ill-considered statement. “My comments are inexcusable, especially with the recent rise in violence against Asian-Americans,” Winkler said, according to a piece in CTMirror. “There is a long, painful history of Asian-Americans experiencing racism in this country, and I sincerely regret that I ignored that history and those experiences in my comments.”

No one knows at this point whether Winkler will receive an absolution from the new priests of Critical Race Theory. And no Republican office holder has yet emerged to claim that Republicans generally were not willing to surrender to Democrats pride of place in the matter of resisting aggressions against blacks. In past times, the Democrat Party had supported slavery, Jim Crow, the Klu Klux Klan, and the loosing of dogs on courageous protesters such as Martin Luther King Jr. who fought for freedom.

So it goes. No one seems willing to close on the chief point – that, while traces of both racism and discrimination may still exist somewhere in America’s dark cultural backwaters, the beast has largely been caged. Times really have changed. King actually won his battle for freedom, one of the reasons the nation celebrates Martin Luther King Day.

If we are determined to proceed along lines indicated by Critical Race Theory, Democrats, historically associated with the raw racism of the post-Civil War period – Woodrow Wilson, an early progressive, approvingly showed in the White House in 1915 the film Birth of a Nation, a celebration of KluKluxery – should change the name of their party, so warmly have Democrats in the past embraced racism and discrimination.  This is worse than nonsense. It is reckless and silly nonsense.

The view that the sins of the father should fall like an executioner’s axe on the necks of their distant grandsons and granddaughters is, combined with cancel culture, a petard that may be used to destroy the foundational principles that King referred to in his “I have a dream Speech.”

Zoning regulations in Greenwich are not “inherently racist” because they are not racist at all. The Greenwich zoning board is not motivated by racism. And Critical Race Theory is intellectual tripe. You cannot denounce a racist past by bleaching it out of history books, and racial McCarthyism -- according to which any member of a presentday political party is deemed racist because the political party with which they associate had in the past promoted racism – is every bit as destructive as political McCarthyism, when the imputations are wrong and unjust.

It’s long past time for everyone to grow up.

Don Pesci is a Vernon-based columnist.

Don Pesci: And now Conn. considers a wealth-repelling 'mansion tax'

The Branford House, in Groton, Conn., on the Avery Point campus of the University of Connecticut, which rents it out for events. Branford House was built in 1902 for Morton Freeman Plant, a local financier and philanthropist, as his summer home; he named it after his hometown of Branford, Conn. The house is on the National Register of Historic Places.

VERNON, Conn.

”There will be time, there will be time

To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.’’

– T.S. Eliot

Connecticut is running out of time to prepare a face to meet the faces it will meet. “The whole world is watching,’’ as kids in the Sixties used to say when, caught in the grip of an unwanted war, TV cameras showed them sticking flowers in the barrels of National Guard rifles warding them off .

Clever politicians may hide behind their own designer masks, but the face that Connecticut presents to the world and other states cannot be hidden. The question that politicians in Connecticut should be asking, and acting upon, is this one: What is the face that Connecticut has been presenting during the last few decades to revenue producers? Is it attracting or repelling the entrepreneurial capital that the state desperately needs to finance both its operations and its best prompting from the angels of its better nature?

Consider a recent story in a Hartford paper titled “Lamont tells Connecticut businesses he opposed ‘mansion tax.’” The mansion tax is the latest sunburst from Martin Looney, the most progressive president pro tem of the state Senate in Connecticut history.

The Looney state property tax would be levied on the assets of millionaires in Connecticut. The mansion tax, we are told in the story, will “funnel more money to municipal governments.… It will raise $73 million a year as part of a package to provide property-tax relief for cash-strapped communities like his hometown of New Haven.-

The quickest and most efficient way of shuttling money from state coffers to municipalities is to reduce any tax and allow people in municipalities to retain their own assets. Doing so would avoid the trip that a dollar makes from the municipality to the state and back again – minus administrative costs – to the municipality. But this method would short circuit the progressive afflatus and considerably reduce the political influence of progressive redistributors. One imagines Looney gagging on such a solution as being too simple, workable and efficient.

The new mansion tax drew an immediate response from millionaire Gov. Ned Lamont: “I don’t support it. I don’t think it’s going anywhere, and I don’t think we need it,” Lamont told “Chris DiPentima, president of the Connecticut Business & Industry Association” on a webcast conference call.

Lamont, we are told, issued his comment “a day after a public hearing among state legislators who called for a separate 5 percent surtax on capital gains, dividends and taxable interest.” In addition, the progressive legislators want to increase the personal-income-tax rate for earners making more than $500,000 a year and couples earning more than $1 million annually.

In addition, progressive lawmakers – nearly half the Democrat caucus in the General Assembly are progressives – “support reducing the Connecticut estate tax exemption of $2 million and [eliminating] the current cap on payments that would yield higher” revenue payments from millionaires in the state who foolishly decide to remain on the spot, there to be cudgeled and deprived of their assets by tax greedy progressives.

This concerted attack on wealth accumulation in Connecticut is designed, consciously or not, to drive creative revenue production out of the state the way St. Patrick once drove serpents out of Ireland and, in the long run, the effort will succeed. Millionaire snakes will slither out of Connecticut on their way to enrich competing states.

Seen from outside the state, what does the face of Connecticut look like?

Well, it is among the highest taxed states in the nation; business flight is rampant; out-of-state companies have gobbled up Connecticut home-grown companies, such as, United Technologies, now merged with Raytheon Technologies, based in Waltham, Mass.; Sikorsky, now owned by Lockheed Martin, headquartered in Bethesda, Md.; Aetna Insurance Company, now a subsidiary of CVS Health, which is based in Woonsocket, R.I.; Colt firearms, bought by the Ceska Zbrojovka Group, a Czech company; and it seems likely that The Hartford, a company that once insured Abe Lincoln’s home in Illinois, will in the near future be bought by Chubb, incorporated in Zürich, Switzerland. This is not a fetching portrait of Connecticut's face, but it is an accurate one.

This is not a fetching portrait of Connecticut's face, but it is an accurate one.

When the Coronavirus high tide recedes, very quickly now, it will leave on the shore the wreckage of Connecticut’s economy that had been apparent to everyone before the Wuhan, China, virus arrived in our state. Connecticut, if it is to remain competitive with other states, must address a legion of problems that cannot be settled by politicians more interested in saving their seats than their state. The state’s spending spree, unchecked since 1991, must be addressed. Taxes are too high, and politicians much too clever and committed, body and soul, to unchecked spending, neither of which advances the public good.

Don Pesci is a Vernon-based columnist.

Don Pesci: Time to pivot in Connecticut

The neo-classical City Hall in Bridgeport, like all Connecticut cities heavily Democratic

— Photo by Jerry Dougherty

The Connecticut state seal. The Latin motto means “He Who Transplanted Still Sustains"

VERNON, Conn.

Optimists who believe in free markets – the opposite of which are unfree, illiberal, highly regulated markets – knew, shortly after Coronavirus slammed into the United States from Wuhan, China, that the virus and the free market were inseparably connected. The more often autocratic governors restricted the public market, the more often jobs would be lost, and the loss of jobs and entrepreneurial capital everywhere would necessarily punch holes in state budgets. In many cases, the holes were prepunched by governors and legislators who, before the Coronavirus panic, had failed to understand the direct connection between high taxes, which depletes creative capital, and sluggish economies. For the last thirty years, it has taken Connecticut ten years to recover from national recessions.

The dialectic of getting and spending is a matter of simple observation and logic: the more governments get in taxes, the more they spend; the more they spend, the greater the need for taxation. Excessive spending – more properly, the indisposition to cut spending – takes a toll on capital formation and use, which leads to business flight and all its attendant evils, such as high unemployment, entrepreneurial stagnation and lingering recessions.

There would come a time, post-Coronavirus, free-market optimists thought, when states would begin to pivot from artificially constricting the economy by means of gubernatorial emergency power declarations to a much desired return to organic normalcy. That pivot already has been put in motion by governors in many conservative woke states.

The entire Northeast has for many years been the victim of the past successes of Democrat politics, which involves harvesting votes by buying them, usually by dispensing tax dollars and power-sharing to reliable political constituencies. Large cities in Connecticut – Hartford, Bridgeport, New Haven, have been held captive by Democrats for nearly a half century. During the last few elections – President Donald Trump’s 2016 election, disappointing to Clintonistas, being the most conspicuous exception to the rule – Democrats have been able to cobble together epicentric majorities in most power centers in the Northeast, relying upon large cities to carry them over the election goal line. This strategy has had, until now, little to do with political ideology and a great deal to do with campaign acumen and a leftward lurch on social issues long abandoned by Connecticut Republicans. Presence in politics has always been more important than little understood ideologies, and Connecticut Republicans have been absent without leave on social issues for decades.

Over time, Democrats, by focusing on social issues, have managed to move what used to be called the “vital center” in national politics much further to the left. And this ideological shift has hurt 1) Republicans who seem unable or unwilling to gain a foothold on important social issues, 2) liberal “{John} Kennedy” Democrats now caught in political limbo following a recent neo-progressive upsurge, and 3) disadvantaged groups, once the mainstay of liberal politics in the ‘”Camelot” era of President Kennedy, now frozen politically and socially in empathy cement, finding no way forward into what once had been a robust middle class.

There is no question, even among progressives who wish to move money from privileged, disappointingly white millionaires to despairing non-white urban voters, that a vibrant economy lifts all the boats. The distribution of zero dollars is zero, and there simply is not enough money in the bulging bank accounts of Connecticut’s millionaires to finance the state’s welfare system for more than a few years – even if it were possible for eat-the-millionaires, white, privileged, neo-progressives to expropriate all the surplus riches of Connecticut’s “Gold Coast” millionaires and send the dispossessed to work in re-education farms in West Hartford. No middle class tide, no lift. Yesterday, today and tomorrow, it will be Connecticut’s dwindling middle class that will carry the “privileged” white man’s burden.

Like other governors in the Northeast, Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont, who stumbled into Nutmeg State politics without much political experience, has become, thanks to Coronavirus and the inveterate cowardice of legislators, a plenary governor the likes of which the Republic has not seen since American patriots – the word “patriot” was first used as a reproach against benighted revolutionaries by monarchists – chased agents of King George III out of their country.

Both Lamont and his friend New York Gov Andrew Cuomo have worn their plenary powers well, but the Coronavirus scourge is receding, and Cuomo has “slipped in blood.” Worst of all, representative government in some states appears to be making a comeback, and people are beginning to resent facemasks and gubernatorial edits as signs and symbols of their own powerless assent to a very un-republican subservience.

Politicians across the state and nation would be wise to step in front of a populist republican reformation before they are carted off in revolutionary tumbrils.

Pivot now. Later will be too late.  

 Don Pesci is a Vernon-based columnist.

Don Pesci: Can Lamont govern after COVID-19?

Ned Lamont

VERNON, Conn.

“But I have promises to keep’’ – Robert Frost, in “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’’

In a recent CTMirror story, “In third year, still an uncertain relationship for Lamont and legislators”, reporter Mark Pazniokas harvests the following quote from Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont:

“Gov. Ned Lamont has had two very different years in office. During the first, he had to contend with the Connecticut General Assembly, but not COVID-19. During the second, he faced COVID, but not lawmakers.

“Any guess which he found easier?

“’Obviously, this last year has been very different. I mean, the legislature went home. That was amazing. We got a lot done,’ Lamont said recently. Then laughing, he added, ‘You know, I kind of liked it.’

“A joke, perhaps.”

The joke, perhaps, may have been intended to raise a chuckle among Connecticut’s legacy media but, if the present Coronavirus trajectory holds true, Lamont will soon find that he must negotiate with a reinvigorated General Assembly, a body controlled by progressives on the hunt for new taxes. That the General Assembly is controlled by progressives is, some commentators in the state are beginning to relize, no joke.

The state legislature, we all know, has not assembled for about a year, and recently the General Assembly, one of the oldest political bodies in the nation,  has voted, virtually of course, to extend Lamont’s ill defined “emergency powers” another three or four months. The Democratic- dominated General Assembly voted, in other words, to continue to make itself irrelevant for a few additional months. The open-ended extension benefits two political bodies – the state’s Democratic governor and the long recessed Democratic-dominated General Assembly that has easily escaped voter accountability for the last year.

The autocratic powers currently wielded by Lamont simply dispense with what we here in the “Constitution State” used to call representative democracy. Lamont has for more than a year been given the opportunity to play Caesar with Connecticut’s budget and its once free economic marketplace. Even Caesar, Rome’s first important imperator, left Rome’s burgeoning marketplace relatively free of autocratic control.

Caesarism has always been a less troublesome mode of governing for chief executives than constitutional republicanism, which tends to be rather raucous, transparent and messy, involving as it does the consent of the governed by means of proportional representation. But even during the Rome of Julius Caesar, republicanism was always churning under the surface, and it’s doubtful that the republican afflatus, operative in Connecticut ever since revolutionary republicans of 1776 threw off the British monarchy, has been effectively extinguished during the plague year.

As herd-immunity increases and Coronavirus disappears, republican government in all its pristine glory once again looms like a giant over the horizon. There are some political leaders in Connecticut, as well as some thoughtless and timid members of Connecticut’s legacy media, captives of incumbency, who suspect that Lamont will not be up to the job of negotiating successfully with a legislature dominated by progressives, whose chief ambition just now is to increase state revenue, again, by dunning millionaires, instituting new road based taxes and extending, once again, the borders of state spending. The more they get, the more they want. The more they want, the better they feel. So, eat millionaires at every meal.

Historically, most progressive taxes – the federal income tax began as a 1 percent tax on wealth accumulation to pay off Civil War debt – trickle down to the broad middle class. A quick glance at pay stubs will convince even accomplished masters of progressive propaganda that a progressive tax, once levied, becomes less progressive as it descends more broadly to the middle class, thus temporarily satiating the ravenous appetite of special interests dear to progressives and relieving legislators facing mounting debts of the necessity to cut spending.   

As the Coronavirus plague recedes at some point in the near future, everyone in the state who regards face masks, however useful, as a sign of subordination to an unrepresentative and overreaching chief executive and a useless legislature may be inspired to create on the state Capitol lawn an auto-de-fé in which their masks may be publicly burned – oh happy day! -- much in the way bras were burned in the 1960s by feminists liberating themselves from oppressive social norms.

None of us in The Constitution State should emerge from Hell with empty hands. Constitutions are the indispensable foundations of republican, representative government. And the further unmoored politicians become from their foundations, the more piratical they will be.

In this the winter of our discontent…

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,   

But I have promises to keep,   

And miles to go before I sleep,   

And miles to go before I sleep.

Frost’s promises that must be kept, he makes clear in other of his poems, are the hitching posts of the American Republic.

Don Pesci is a Vernon-based columnist.

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Don Pesci: Business and taxes in Conn.

Official portrait of Calvin Coolidge in the White House, by Charles Sydney Hopkinson

"The business of America is business."

-- Calvin Coolidge, president from 1923-1929

Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont likes to talk shop with business people. A Hartford Courant story, “Gov. Ned Lamont tells Connecticut businesses he’s ruling out ‘broad-based’ tax increases,” will not please Democrat progressives in Connecticut who seem fully prepared to eat businessmen and businesswomen for lunch. The large and overbearing contingent of progressives in the state's Democratic Party caucus cannot be satisfied with sentiments such as this: “I’ve been pretty clear. I have no interest in broad-based tax increases,” Lamont told president of the Connecticut Business and Industry Association (CBIA) Chris DiPentima. And, he hastened to add, “Every governor, Republican or Democrat since, or including, Lowell Weicker, has done that and it did not solve the problem.”

The problem is, of course, lavish, continuing, long-term spending -- and consequent increases in taxes. Taxes in Connecticut have been permanent, while cost-cutting measures have been temporary; this is because the force driving spending is more powerful than the force that would, were it applied, reduce long-term costs permanently. If one discharges deficits by reducing such costs, tax increases would be unnecessary. And the prospect of unnecessary tax increases would reduce the influence of – just to pick one snout at the public trough – Connecticut’s imperious public employee unions. But reducing the influence of the state’s public employee unions would deprive Democrats of funds and worker bees they rely upon to win elections.

Lamont was not prepared to tell DiPentima that, during the rest of his first term as governor, he would deploy his considerable resources to remove SEBAC, a union political organization and lobbying group that some have characterized as Connecticut’s fourth branch of government, from collective bargaining with the state on salary and pension contracts. Some have argued that such contracts give union leaders a Keystone pipeline to the wallets of Connecticut taxpayers, in the process shifting from the General Assembly to Connecticut courts control over a taxing authority that belongs constitutionally to the legislative branch of government. Why aren’t state employee salary and benefit packages set unilaterally by the General Assembly, which alone is constitutionally authorized to take in and disperse tax money? (SEBAC, by the way, stands for State Employees Bargaining Agent Coalition.)

One may be certain that this is not a discussion Lamont will be having anytime soon with President Pro Tem of the Senate Martin Looney or Speaker of the House Matt Ritter, neither of whom are disposed to cut off their union related campaign funds to satisfy their less binding constitutional responsibilities.

Over a long period of time in Connecticut, dating possibly from the unlamented Lowell Weicker administration, Machiavellians within the Democratic Party have discovered that it does not matter a whit whether they employ a Big Stick on the backs of business men and women or whether such contributors are induced to open their pockets to Democrats through special preferments; both methods may be deployed at the same time without diminishing campaign contributions from Connecticut’s larger businesses. The Big Stick lashes are generally offset by Big Business preferments – tax carve-outs, low- or no-interest loans, taxpayer money bribes to induce large companies to remain with their necks on the tax butcher-block in Connecticut, an offer they can’t refuse that is usually overridden by some other low-tax, business hungry state.

Former Gov. Dan Malloy’s Office of Policy Management director, Ben Barnes, once asked by a courageous reporter why he wanted to raise taxes on hospitals, replied in the accents of infamous bank robber Willie Sutton when asked why he robbed banks, “Because that's where the money is.”

The state's revenue stream has been swollen by Connecticut-based financial firms, but these firms have wings on their heels and may move, at the drop of a tax hatchet, to other less predatory states. Lamont may have discovered this disposition on the part of financial firms during an occasion pillow conversation with his wife Annie, who is a successful venture capitalist and the moneymaker in the family.

For these reasons, Lamont may be genuinely indisposed to kill the goose laying Connecticut’s golden tax eggs. On the other hand, union leaders, who have twice refused attempted Lamont cutbacks in their court supported salary and benefits contracts, are barking for MORE spending, as always, and the Democrat-dominated General Assembly is barking for MORE taxes, as always.

For now, Lamont has drawn a red line on “broad-based tax increases.” Lamont has a veto power he has not yet promised to deploy on behalf of a beleaguered CBIA or businesses destroyed through governmental edicts. Democrat leaders in the House and Senate know they have majorities nearly large enough to overcome vetoes.

“The game,” as Sherlock Holmes might say, “is afoot.” Pity there is no Coolidge on Connecticut’s political horizon.

Don Pesci is a Vernon-based columnist.

Philip K. Howard: The administrative state is paralyzing American society

VERNON, Conn.

Philip K. Howard’s powers of concision are remarkable. In a very readable Yale Law Journal piece, “From Progressivism to Paralysis,” Howard, founder of the nonprofit and nonpartisan reform group Common Good (commongood.org), writes:

 "The Progressive Movement succeeded in replacing laissez-faire with public oversight of safety and markets. But its vision of neutral administration, in which officials in lab coats mechanically applied law, never reflected the realities and political tradeoffs in most public choices. The crisis of public trust in the 1960s spawned a radical transformation of government operating systems to finally achieve a neutral public administration, without official bias or error. Laws and regulations would not only set public goals but also dictate precisely how to implement them. The constitutional protections of due process were expanded to allow disappointed citizens, employees, and students to challenge official decisions, even managerial choices, and put officials to the proof. The result, after fifty years, is public paralysis. In an effort to avoid bad public choices, the operating system precludes good public choices. It must be rebuilt to honor human agency and reinvigorate democratic choices.”

The gravamen of the article is that progressive precisionism causes paralysis because laws and regulations must be general and non-specific enough to allow administrative creativity. And, a correlative point, administrators should not be permitted to arrogate to themselves legislative or judicial functions that belong constitutionally to elected representatives.

Why not? Because in doing so the underlying sub-structure of democratic governance is subtly, and sometimes not so subtly, fatally undermined. The authority of governors rests uneasily upon the ability of the governed to vote administrators and representatives in and out of office, a necessary democratic safeguard that is subverted by a permanent, unelected administrative state that, like a meandering stream, has wandered unimpeded over its definitional banks.

Detecting a beneficial change in the fetid political air, Howard warns, “Change is in the air. Americans are starting to take to the streets. But the unquestioned assumption of protesters is that someone is actually in charge and refusing to pull the right levers. While there are certainly forces opposing change, it is more accurate to say that our system of government is organized to prevent fixing anything. At every level of responsibility, from the schoolhouse to the White House, public officials are disempowered from making sensible choices by a bureaucratic and legal apparatus that is beyond their control.”

And then he unleashes this thunderbolt:

“The modern bureaucratic state, too, aims to be protective. But it does this by reaching into the field of freedom and dictating how to do things correctly. Instead of protecting an open field of freedom, modern law replaces freedom.

“The logic is to protect against human fallibility. But the effect, as discussed, is a version of central planning. People no longer have the ability to draw on ‘the knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place,’ which Nobel economics laureate Friedrich Hayek thought was essential for most human accomplishment. Instead of getting the job done, people focus on compliance with the rules.

“At this point, the complexity of the bureaucratic state far exceeds the human capacity to deal with it. Cognitive scientists have found that an effect of extensive bureaucracy is to overload the conscious brain so that people can no longer draw on their instincts and experience. The modern bureaucratic state not only fails to meet its goals sensibly, but also makes people fail in their own endeavors. That is why it engenders alienation and anger, by removing an individual’s sense of control of daily choices.”

Indeed, as a lawyer (sorry to bring the matter up), Howard probably knows at first hand that complexity, which provides jobs aplenty for lawyers and accountants, is the enemy of creative governance. The way to a just ordered liberty is not by mindlessly following ever more confusing and complex rules – written mostly by those who intend to preserve an iron-fisted status quo – but by leaving open a wide door of liberty in society for those who are best able to provide workable solutions to social and political problems.

Howard, I am told by those who know him well, is not a “conservative’’ in terms of the current American political parlance. For that matter, besieged conservative faculty at highbrow institutions such as Yale are simply exceptions that prove the progressive rule; such has been the case before and since the publication of Yalie William F. Buckley Jr.’s book, God and Man at Yale.

But I am also assured that Howard is an honest and brave man.

In an era in which democracy is being throttled by a weedy and complex series of paralytic regulations produced by the administrative state, any man or woman who can write this – “It is better to take the risk of occasional injustice from passion and prejudice, which no law or regulation can control, than to seal up incompetency, negligence, insubordination, insolence, and every other mischief in the service, by requiring a virtual trial at law before an unfit or incapable clerk can be removed” -- is worth his or her weight in diamonds.

Don Pesci is a Vernon-based columnist.

Don Pesci: In Connecticut, the politically royal Ritters, the House and an always looming outhouse

“The Genius of Connecticut,’’ in the state Capitol, by sculptor Randolph Rogers (work done in 1877–78), is a plaster version of the bronze statue (destroyed) originally mounted on top of the Capitol dome.

VERNON, Conn.

In politics, power is golden. Indeed, power, not riches, is the coin of the political realm. In Connecticut, the Ritters, a power family, are the closest we have come to political royalty.

Hartford Courant journalist Chris Keating lays out the political lineage of the Ritter clan in a piece titled “Hartford’s Ritter Family extends influence.”

“The Ritters,” Keating notes in the lead to his story, “a Hartford family whose public service spans more than five decades, have arrived at a level of political prominence and influence unseen in recent Connecticut political history.

“The family has sent four members — a grandfather, two sons, and a grandson — to the state Capitol as Democratic representatives in the state legislature. Ritter family members now control powerful positions in the General Assembly, state Supreme Court and among special-interest lobbyists.”

Matt Ritter, the incoming Democratic House speaker, started herding progressive cats when the General Assembly session convened on Jan. 6 and will continue until it adjourns, in June. Ritter replaces state employee union factotum Joe Arsimowicz, who, along with two leading Republicans, Sen. Len Fasano and Rep. Themis Klarides, left the General Assembly at the last session’s end.

Ritter and his counterpart in the state Senate, President Pro Tem Martin Looney, may, if he wishes, rule the roost without Republican support in the House or Senate. This was former Gov. Dannel Malloy’s preference, but Malloy’s heavy hand took a toll on his popularity. And when he threw in the gubernatorial towel at the end of his second term and accepted a position as chancellor of the University of Maine System, Malloy’s popularity was a burning wreck.

Democratic numbers in the General Assembly – a majority of 98-63 in the House and 24-12 in the Senate following the 2020 elections -- now allow the party to run roughshod over Republican sensibilities. Democrats, it had not been noticed by media savants in Connecticut, triumphed over Republicans by means of a magician’s trick; they ran against President Trump, who was not on the ballot in 2018 and who in 2020 was responsible for none of the shutdown regulations imposed by the Democratic governor and the Democratic-run legislature.

However, the sticking point in Connecticut are the progressive cats and, difficult as it may be to accept, some journalists  in Connecticut’s left-of-center media afflicted with an institutional memory who may not be willing to accept without modest resistance the continuing deterioration of the state’s economy in the post-Coronavirus era.

Ritter himself, a man of the House, may not be willing to sell his family’s long service on behalf of Connecticut for a mess of progressive-union pottage – which means that he may be more willing than Arsimowicz or Looney, a thoroughgoing progressive, to make common cause with Republicans on matters that promote the prosperity of his state and the honor of the General Assembly.

In days gone by, when Ritter’s grandfather, George Ritter, was serving on the Hartford City Council, thereafter “spending 12 years at the legislature starting in 1969,” as The Courant puts it, such solicitude for the honor and prosperity of the state was brashly called patriotic. And the state patriotism that burned in the heart of the grandfather may, as sometimes happens, still light the darkness enshrouding the grandson.

Why should raw politics, the pursuit of power for power’s sake, always be the victor in political battles? Honor in politics -- a genuine love and solicitude for the state of Connecticut as such -- is more than half the battle that must daily be fought. It is the whole battle, always and everywhere; for politics without honor, a foresight that sees beyond battles of the moment, is tyranny writ large or small.

The honor of the House demands that the House should convene as usual and, as usual, do the public’s business. The legislature, House and Senate together, a co-equal branch of government along with the chief executive and the judiciary, represents the voice of the people, and that voice should be heard loudly above the clamor of partisan divisions. The General Assembly must not operate longer as a Coronavirus victim, metaphorically afraid of its own shadow. The welfare of Connecticut depends upon the courage and patriotism of members of the state legislature, and this body cannot function properly as an agency that rents its constitutional prerogatives to governors or committee chairmen or union representatives.

Likewise, the judiciary is not, nor was meant to be, the servant of the governor; it is the servant of the law, and cannot perform its proper function hiding behind Coronavirus flower pots.

To be a representative body, the House over which Ritter will preside must first be, and Ritter's first and most difficult duty will be to restore the republican (small “r”) character of the House. Lincoln said rightly “a house divided against itself cannot stand.” But an outhouse -- simply an instrument of power politics -- pretending to be a House should not be permitted to stand at all.

Don Pesci is Vernon-based columnist.

Don Pesci: Looking out for their patrons' health and safety

— Photo by I, Ruhrfisch

VERNON, Conn.

In my mellowing age, I have become a creature of habits, some warring with others.

For the past few years I have taken breakfast on Mondays at one of three diners in East Hartford, West Hartford and Vernon, Conn., all of which are in compliance with Gov. Ned Lamont's possibly unconstitutional directives. 

This morning, I found the waitress glowing as usual.

Waitress: (As if greeting a cousin she hasn’t seen in months) “How are you?’’

This was said in such an upbeat tone and with such a broad smile and show of pearly teeth, that I understood her to be genuinely glad to see me and turned the question back on her.

Me: “I’m good (a forgivable white lie; it is difficult to sustain a conversation for more than five seconds with a morning grouch) But not as good as you.’’

Waitress: (Doubt shading her smile) “Well, we are all worried.’’

She pointed to a newspaper I had begun to mark up with notes. Ominous headline: “Thousands more deaths predicted; Gov. Lamont: Still no plans to impose more restrictions,” featuring a picture of Coronavirus- masked Gov. Ned Lamont who, according to the story, was dubious about inflicting more crippling regulations on our battered state, restaurants in particular. Was Lamont prepared to follow in the footsteps of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who has indicated that he would shut down indoor dining if testing rates did not improve? Not yet, Lamont somewhat reassuringly said.

Me: “Yes, I know. When New York sneezes, Connecticut catches a cold. Lamont regularly has followed in the footsteps of his fishing buddy Cuomo.’’

Waitress: “That’s the worry around here. It’s on, it’s off, it’s up, it’s down. We can’t plan our schedules. We can’t plan our lives, and we don’t want this place to close.’’

Me: “I wonder how many separate decisions you and others associated with the diner make each day.’’

Waitress: (hesitating to venture an answer) “I would guess -- hundreds.’’

Me: “What do you say, are those decisions better made by you and others who work here, or by this guy?’’

I pointed to the picture of Lamont, now being pressed by local “scientists,” experts in academia, newspaper commentators, and other pestiferous busybodies, to shut down restaurants once again before the arrival of what I sardonically call “the Trump vaccine.”

Waitress: “Well, would you rather I take your order and serve you directly, or would you rather be served remotely by him?’’

Me: “You, definitely!’’

The waitress doubted that remote, virtual empathy could be more powerful than direct empathy. The diner’s staff, she pointed out, was perhaps more concerned with the health and safety of its clients than the governor, because all who worked at the diner depended upon repeat business and, if you kill a patron, he or she would not return. 

Lamont is so flighty, I told her, that it would take days before the food was put before me.  And my order was certain to be reviewed countless times before it was fulfilled by members of Lamont’s usual political troupe, such as his communications director, who, I pointed out to the waitress, had been tested positive for Coronavirus.

This produced a glowing smile.

But that is the problem, isn’t it? When we make a decision concerning who decides an issue, we have decided that someone else shall direct what should be done.

Competence here is decisive. Decisions are only as good as the data upon which they are based, and decisions made remotely by those incompetent to make them always point the way to disaster. The number of Coronavirus-related deaths in nursing homes in Connecticut and New York – more than 60 percent of pandemic deaths in both states – is a measure of the deadly incompetence of both governors, though one would never guess as much, given the praise showered upon Lamont and Cuomo by their state’s media.

On Nov. 20, an international academy announced, “Governor Andrew M. Cuomo of New York will receive this year’s International Emmy® Founders Award, in recognition of his leadership during the Covid-19 pandemic and his masterful use of television to inform and calm people around the world.”

Better a good breakfast than a misappropriated Emmy. The breakfast was done to perfection, the service cheerful and satisfying, and the diner is still open for business – for now. But my waitress fear that it may not be long before Lamont catches his second wind and is nominated for an Emmy award as well.

Don Pesci is a Vernon-based columnist.

Don Pesci: Biden and the pride of post-modern cultural Roman Catholics

VERNON, Conn.
Presumptive President-elect Joe Biden has let it be known throughout his half-century-long political career that he is a Kennedy Roman Catholic; in some quarters, Kennedy Catholicism is called cultural Catholicism.

Biden helpfully explained cultural Catholicism to Jack Jenkins, a reporter for Religion News Service (RNS). Hit this link to read it.

In it, Mr. Jenkins writes that “Joe Biden….was shaped by a very American Catholic faith: The way he manages his allegiance to Catholicism gives a glimpse of how Biden will govern as he takes hold of an office he has sought since 1988.’’

The piece lifts several quotes from Biden’s book Promises to Keep: On Life in Politics.

“I’m as much a cultural Catholic as I am a theological Catholic,” Biden wrote. “My idea of self, of family, of community, of the wider world comes straight from my religion. It’s not so much the Bible, the beatitudes, the Ten Commandments, the sacraments, or the prayers I learned. It’s the culture.”

Jenkins offers the following gloss: Cultural Catholicism is “a form of faith that experts," many of them cultural Catholics, "describe as profoundly Catholic in ways that resonate with millions of American believers: It offers solace in moments of anxiety or grief, can be rocked by long periods of spiritual wrestling and is more likely to be influenced by the quiet counsel of women in habits or one’s own conscience than the edicts of men in miters.”

One of the “men in miters” is, of course, the Pope.

John F. Kennedy, a Catholic running for president at a time when anti-Catholicism was still very much a force to be reckoned with – historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Kennedy’s chief biographer, characterized anti-Catholicism as the oldest prejudice in the United States – easily disposed of the notion that he would be the Pope’s cat’s-paw.

A month after Kennedy had met with a group of Protestant pastors, he traveled to Houston and there delivered a speech to a second group of pastors in which he said, “I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish; where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope.”

That distinction pretty much doused irrational fears that Kennedy as president would simply be an agent of the Vatican.

Since Kennedy’s day, many Catholics have served their country in various positions with distinction and fidelity both to their church and to the Constitution that they promised on oath to uphold. Catholicism, even the Catholicism of Popes, is not incompatible with patriotism.

Biden, Jenkins makes clear, likes the “culture” of Catholics, nuns and rosary beads, which he carries with him in his pocket. Cultural Catholicism, we are given to understand, is balanced in his thought processes with the theology of his church. The difficulty here is that there are among us cultural Catholics in open warfare against Catholic theology as explicated by the historic Roman Catholic Church, the Popes down through the ages, and leading Catholic clerics.

“Biden’s personal connection to the faith,” Jenkins notes, “remains a highly visible part of his political persona. He carries Rosary beads at all times, fingering it during moments of anxiety or crisis. When facing brain surgery after his short-lived presidential campaign in 1988, he reportedly asked his doctors if he could keep the beads under his pillow. Earlier this year, rival Pete Buttigieg noticed Biden holding Rosary beads backstage before a primary debate.”

Hilaire Belloc – author of the Road to Rome, a close friend of G.K. Chesterton and an unapologetic Catholic – also carried Rosary beads with him. One day, while campaigning for a seat in the British House of Commons, , he was accosted by a lady who shouted out to him from the crowd surrounding his campaign stump that he was a “papist.”

Belloc drew his Rosary beads from his pocket and said to the lady, “Madam, do you see these beads. I pray on them every night before I go to sleep, and every morning when I awake. And, if that offends you, madam, I pray God he will spare me the ignominy of representing you in Parliament.”

Unlike Biden, Belloc's rosary was more than a totem for him; it was the copula that linked him, both theologically and culturally, to the Catholic Church, ancient and modern, rolling through the years from Peter, the Rock against which the gates of Hell shall not prevail, to the sometimes twisted post-paganism of the post-modern 21st Century..

Kennedy’s sword of sundering has two cutting edges. The post-modern cultural Catholic suffers from inordinate pride; he really does think himself not only politically superior to popes, doubtful, but also superior to his church in matters of theology, faith and morals.

Don Pesci is a Vernon-based columnist.

Don Pesci: Puritan stink bomb explodes in the Northeast

Harry Clarke’s 1919 illustration for "The Masque of the Red Death"

VERNON, Conn.

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. The Coronavirus governors have raised his bid to destroy joy. And the governors of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut are leading the pack.

It is not enough that enlightened, “science-based” politics has driven our relations out of state, many of them in pursuit of fleeing businesses. The Coronavirus Governor of Connecticut, Ned Lamont, now threatens to prevent their return during Thanksgiving and Christmas. Travel itself has been interdicted at the borders, and those entering Connecticut from foreign parts – Massachusetts has recently been put on the interdiction list –- are beginning to feel what wretches feel.

It is less of a chore in Connecticut to bust the Mexican border and settle in one of our state’s sanctuary cities than it is for a gas-guzzling citizen of the “Land of Steady Habits” to escape the state’s onerous gasoline taxes by sneaking across Connecticut’s border to buy gas that is not taxed twice, once at the port and once at the pump. Bradley International Airport, voted one of the best airports in the country, is beginning to look like a wasteland. Here is Ned throwing ashes in The Hartford Courant on the joy of Thanksgiving and Christmas:

“….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 back from universities all over the country, places like Wisconsin and Nevada and Utah, where they have a 30 percent infection rate,’ Lamont said in Bridgeport.

“The governor said he’d work with governors in other states on ‘really strict guidance,’ perhaps asking students to quarantine for two weeks before returning to Connecticut, then get tested for COVID-19 when they arrive.

“Lamont said the Department of Public Health would soon issue guidelines for returning students.

“’I don’t want people just getting on that plane, going home, potentially putting their family at risk and their friends at risk,’ Lamont said.”

Really, with a daddy and mommy like Lamont, who needs daddies and mommies?

Thanksgiving, now that we are all toxic, will be less thankful. Halloween has flitted by like a ghost; no children were on the streets; the candy dishes are still full. All Saints Day was muted, church attendance having been clipped by Lamont’s emergency orders.

Facing a tsunami of atheist-tinged secularism G. K. Chesterton once wrote, “The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has today all the exhilaration of a vice.” On this score, not much has changed over the centuries.

The four cardinal virtues listed by Aristotle are prudence, justice, temperance and fortitude, all of them sadly missing in our politics, which gives us more than enough reason to fortify ourselves with them. A prudent, just and temperate policy on Coronavirus would allow and even facilitate the joys of Christmas, Thanksgiving and All Saints Day,

Long since secularized and bastardized as Halloween.

Columbus Day has passed without further Columbus statues having been beheaded by modern vandals, for which, exercising our First Amendment rights – but not in churches – we may thank God. Restaurants, those lucky few that have not yet gone out of business, are less than half full because they are only three quarters open on orders of the governor in preparation for a second wave Coronavirus panic.  Tomorrow, on a gubernatorial whim, the restaurants may be shuttered once again. The arts in Connecticut, all of them, are only virtually alive. Our cities are ghost towns. And though legislators, sequestered far from the state Capitol, have plenty of time on hand, not one of them appears to have had time to read Edgar Allen Poe’s 1842 short story “The Masque  of the Red Death’’. In it, precautions are taken by Lord Prospero to keep at bay the Red Death ravaging the countryside outside the walls of his castle: “With such precautions,” Poe writes, “the courtiers might bid defiance to contagion.”

Ha!!!

A Puritan stink bomb has exploded here in the Northeast and left behind the wreckage of joy. Handshakes are out; hugs are out; kisses are fatal; even our daring president-elect, Joe Biden, has lately refrained from smelling women’s hair and pawing uncomfortable strange children. The Puritan Calvinists of pre-Revolutionary Boston must be clapping in their graves, applauding because John and Cotton Mather would rather sink into Hell than dance in their graves or celebrate a Bob Cratchit Christmas.

Don Pesci a Vernon-based columnist.

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.