VERNON, Conn.
It does not take a majority to prevail... but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men
– Sam Adams
Bob Whitcomb used to be the editorial page editor of The Providence Journal at a time when Moxie was plentiful in Connecticut. Sadly, that is no longer the case. Moxie in “The Nutmeg State” has become rarer than modest politicians. Whitcomb was my editor at The Providence Journal back in the day.
And this is one of my pet peeves – that journalism is no longer able to produce editorial-page editors such as Whitcomb, perhaps because journalism lacks “moxie.”
A piece in Whitcomb’s New England Diary tells us that Moxie is “a carbonated beverage brand that was among the first mass-produced soft drinks in the United States. It was created around 1876 by Augustin Thompson (born in Union, Maine) as a patent medicine called ‘Moxie Nerve Food’ and was produced in Lowell, Mass.”
The extravagant claims of patent medicine pushers in the post-Civil War period were, of course, patently absurd. But this was the age of P.T. Barnum and Woodrow Wilson, an early progressive and a racist who had a beef with the U.S. Constitution. The progressive beef, briefly, was that the Constitution served as a breakwater against the overweening ambitions of progressives to make the world anew from the ground up.
Ronald J. Pestritto tells us in his essay“Why the Early Progressives Rejected American Founding Principles’’ that the progressives “had in mind a variety of legislative programs aimed at regulating significant portions of the American economy and society, and at redistributing private property in the name of social justice. The Constitution, if interpreted and applied faithfully, stood in the way of this agenda.”
Progressive patent nonsense has been revived in our own time, but the post-progressive movement – pushed forward by political malcontents such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D.-N.Y.), Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), better known as “the squad” -- lacks the intellectual rigor that Wilson brought to his make-the-world-over project. See William Graham Sumner’s in Connecticut Commentary on “the absurd effort to make the world over.”
The era that gave us Wilson also made Moxie a national beverage, a saving grace for those of us who have acquired the requisite "acquired taste."
Moxie is not a first love. She is the one that you plan to marry after your first two loves have gone their ways without you.
I used to be able to buy Moxie in one of three grocery stores within reasonable driving distance of my house.
No more.
“You used to carry Moxie,” I told the soda manager at one of the stores. “No more?”
He mumbled something.
“I can’t decipher what you’re saying.”
He was double-masked, removed both, and then said, popping every plosive, “Moxie has been bought out by Coke. If you ask me in a few weeks, I’ll see what I can do.”
But Coronavirus swept over us, weeks went by, and Moxie, along with the smiles of middle-class workers, suppressed by masks, disappeared from the shelves of all three stores.
I gave up the struggle, but the irritation chafed. It is small irritants, not large deprivations, that produce revolutions. The French Revolution began as a protest in Paris over the lack of bread. The American Revolution began as a protest over a tax on tea. In both cases, irritant had been piled on irritant until something in the human breast shouted – revolution!
Autocrats in Connecticut had better give some thought to little irritations. Most of us have been free of masks for weeks. Our restaurants have re-opened. Waitresses and waiters, the wait staff much depleted but unmasked, have shown their welcoming faces to repeat customers.
We read those faces, smile back … and now, owing to a strain of Coronavirus more contagious but less disabling among the general population, the national business shutdown-industry has been pondering new impositions: punishments for people who, whatever their reasons, have yet to be vaccinated; possible future business shutdowns; yet more extensions of anti-constitutional gubernatorial executive powers, and “More mask,” the dying last words of Friedrich Nietzsche.
It is a matter of some debate whether revolutionary brushfires lit in the hearts of men, or a lack of moxie, will be the spark that produces a revolutionary restoration of constitutional rights and immunities.
The word “moxie”, the New England Diary tells us means “daring, or determination. It was a favorite word of the ruthless Joseph P. Kennedy, father of the famous political family that included President John F. Kennedy. If he liked someone, he’d say ‘he has moxie!’’ {small “m” in that generic use}.
Or, “Moxie makes you foxy.”
Unfortunately, Connecticut has no moxie and is not foxy.
Don Pesci is a Vernon-based columnist.
