Don Pesci: My Journal of the plague year, continued

Thank God for such friends.

October 25, 2020

VERNON, Conn.

Life goes on. {My wife} Andree’s brother Ernie died in Florida. Titan, Andree’s guide dog for the last dozen years, died as well. And my cousin, the city mouse, writes to tell me: “There are two kinds of cynics among us, Republican cynics and Democrat cynics. The Democrats are better able than Republicans to dress their cynicism in gorgeous, empathetic cloth. They are here, they want us to know, to help with the problems they have caused. It all reminds me of a quip by Karl Kraus on psychoanalysts – they are the disease they purport to cure”

In an earlier letter, he wrote, “Whatever the problem is, you may be sure that a political solution to it can only make matters worse.”

And he wonders why cultural antibodies in the United States have not yet produced an Aristophanes or a Lucian, author of the biting satirical play The Sale of Philosophers. Instead we are confronted daily with unintentionally comic politicians. And our too, too serious politics has murdered comedy. Lincoln could never have survived this poisonous sobriety.

Fall has arrived. Brown leaves are scattered across the property. I’m waiting for the wind to do the work of raking. The wood pile and the furniture out front and down by the lake, now sprinkled with a bib of leaves, have been covered with tarpaulins. We are waiting on winter. Certain as the arrival of dawn and midnight, it will come and cover all in a blanket of purist white silence.

Andree is having some difficulty in attaching the new dog’s name, Dublin, to her commands, and the commands too have changed. Thank God and Fidelco for Dublin, a sleek and attentive, male German Shepard with large eyes and silver-tipped fur. Andree mentions to the many strangers who pause to comment on the dog, “He is the only Irish German Shepard in Connecticut.”

Every so often, Titan’s name is mentioned. This is usual; in our naming and our prayers, we cling to a safe and bountiful remembered past. I have had two dreams in which my father was a presence. This is very unusual for me. One does not dream of the center joist of a house. It is simply there in one’s life, preventing the whirlwind from carrying away all treasures; for that is what a home is – a bank of treasures much more reliable than bank notes.

The pandemic, the city mouse tells me, is useful primarily as a political hobgoblin to frighten people into an attitude of compliance and submission, not to say that it is not a serious threat.

He certainly has his finger on something there.

Did I watch the last presidential debate, he asks?

God no!

To the country mouse,

Well then, you missed a gaudy show, a significant part of it – Hunter Biden’s delinquencies, and his father’s memory lapses -- unreported by Connecticut’s left of center media. Trump was his usual solipsistic best. Biden looked as if he had been biting bullets for weeks while hunkering down in his bunker. The less one sees of Biden, the more popular he becomes. His is the first “front-porch-campaign” the nation has seen since the McKinley’s 1896 campaign and the advent of 24/7 news.

The opposite is true, of course, with {Connecticut} Governor Ned Lamont. As befits an autocrat, he is seen everywhere, rearranging the constellations in the sky, crowing up the sun, destroying yet another business, citing for the hundredth time the death toll in Connecticut, 60 to 70 percent of which is attributable to bad political decisions made by the autocratic governor.

There will come a time when even the most insensate retailer of fact in Connecticut realizes that Coronavirus is not responsible for a single business closure in the state – all of which have been shuttered by politicians, not a virus – and that our economic malady is every bit as serious AND DEADLY as Coronavirus.

But not yet. Perhaps after the November elections have been concluded to the satisfaction of the state’s dominant left of center party, the truth may once again resurfaced and break the hard-shelled exterior of campaign propaganda. 

My city cousin certainly is right there. Coronavirus is a viral infection, not a politician, and viruses, unlike governors out rigged with plenary powers, are powerless to close by gubernatorial edict a school or a nail salon.

A Hartford Courant front page, above the fold, headline screams, “Just how bad could the latest spike get?”

About a week and a half before Election Day, Lamont, it would appear, has hoisted himself on his own petard. Connecticut’s Coronavirus numbers, though still far below spring numbers, are rising steadily. Connecticut is now “on the pathway to being bad.”

“I am concerned,” Lamont said. “I take nothing for granted.”

Sure, sure, but when will be pull the lockdown trigger?

“We need to slow the resurgence right away,” a Courant editorial barks this Sunday. Clamp down on the number of people allowed at indoor gatherings; stop playing softball with coaches and sport parent; order all schools to revert to hybrid learning models, and stop saying the surge was “expected.”

Find a hole, jump into it, pull the hole in over your head. Don’t worry about Connecticut’s economy. The state is in arrears in payments to its public employees by about $68 billion; we are among the highest taxed, most progressive states in the nation; businesses have fled the state for greener pastures elsewhere; clamorous state employee unions are still petted by the progressive politicians they help to re-elect; and the only sunbeam shining through the darkness is that the real-estate sector is flourishing, because whipped millionaire New Yorkers are fleeing that state and settling in Connecticut’s Gold Coast, abandoned by companies such as GE and Raytheon Technologies, formerly United Technologies.

Lucian, where are you?

... to be continued

Don Pesci is a columnist based in Vernon.

Don Pesci: Representative government crouched in fear

Painting by Peter Paul Rubens of Cronus devouring one of his children

VERNON, Conn.

The Hartford Courant paper points out the brutal irony:

“Connecticut has averaged 366 new cases a day over the past week or about 10.3 per 100,000 residents, just above the threshold at which states are added to the travel advisory. The advisory, which currently includes 38 states and territories, is updated each Tuesday in conjunction with New York and New Jersey. It requires travelers arriving from those states to either produce a negative coronavirus test result or quarantine for 14 days...

(Connecticut Gov. Ned) Lamont said …he’s considering a dramatic overhaul to the advisory, saying “It’d be a little ironic if we were on our own quarantine list.”

Connecticut’s list of quarantined states has grown by leaps and bounds, very likely because the parameters initially were set too low. The gods of irony will not be mocked. Cronus is now eating his own children.

It is nearly impossible to determine definitively who set the parameters, but we do know that Governor Lamont has been borrowing his Coronavirus defense system from New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy.

In the absence of an advice-and-consent General Assembly whose Democrat leaders, Senate President Martin Looney and House Speaker Joe Arsimowicz, relish pretending that Connecticut’s greatest deliberative body had been sidelined by Coronavirus, Lamont has become the King George of Connecticut, wielding nearly absolute power, and the sharpest weapon in Lamont’s rhetorical arsenal has been – fear of Coronavirus.

The pandemic is not a governor festooned with plenary powers. It is a virus, and viruses cannot suspend the operations of government and businesses across the state. We are where we are because politicians have made the choices they have made.

Gone are the days when President Franklin Roosevelt sought to stiffen American spines, first in the face of the Great Depression and then of the oncoming World War II – by advising his countrymen, “… let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is...fear itself.”

Americans rose to the occasion. The Great Depression receded, as most depressions and recessions will do in a vibrant free market economy. The United States later officially entered the war on Dec. 8, 1941, the day after Pearl Harbor -- more than two years after Nazi Germany attacked Poland, in 1939, beginning the war -- and saved Western Europe from the Nazi Hun. Much later during the so-called “Cold War,” beginning in 1946-47, Western Europe and the United States combined to save Western Civilization from the Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist beast. In 1987, President Ronald Reagan blew his horn, and the hated Berlin Wall soon came tumbling down, followed in due course by the dissolution of the Soviet satellites in Eastern Europe.

Since the Founders “brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty,” in Lincoln’s often repeated words, the United States has survived colonial mismanagement – see Sam Adams on the point – an anti-colonialist revolution, various crippling recessions, a Civil War – which we thought, before Howard Zinn’s dyspeptic take on American history began to infiltrate public schools, buried slavery along with “the honored dead” at Gettysburg --   two World Wars, the prospect of nuclear annihilation,  and many other disrupting disasters that we had collectively survived.

The government of Connecticut, the “Constitution State”, faced with Coronavirus, has simply shattered. And the merchants of fear among us are still merchandising fear. That irrational fear has all but destroyed scores of small businesses across the state, the prospect of state surpluses, sound state and municipal budgets, public hearings, trials in the remnant of the state’s judicial system, public education as we have known it ever since the General Assembly in 1849 established the first public higher-education institution in the state, now Central Connecticut State University -- and representative government.

There is not a single politician in Connecticut familiar with Aristotelian causality, the living root of most modern science, who would testify under oath that a virus, rather than cowardly politicians, is the efficient cause of all these problems. The Coronavirus fear, like Cronus of Greek legend, is now devouring its own children.

Roosevelt rallied the nation to stop hiding under the bed. But the Coronavirus governors, who through their negligence are responsible for the majority of nursing-home deaths associated with Coronavirus in their own states, want representative government to remain crouched in fear under the bed. They want no public hearings, no votes on gubernatorial dicta by a full General Assembly, no attacks by columnists on their own criminal delinquencies, no suits in a crippled court system, and no contrarian opinions in editorial pages. They will tolerate no effective opposition. And should minority Republicans in Connecticut engage in reasoned opposition, they will be denounced by everyone hiding under a bed of complicity with President Trump who, despite his glaring vices, still is not Hunter Biden’s dad.   

Don Pesci is a columnist based in Vernon.

Don Pesci: The coronavirus, King Ned and the Conn. economy

VERNON, Conn.

While Connecticut’s Democratic-dominated General Assembly was napping, Raytheon, formerly United Technologies (UTC), announced it was cutting 15,000 commercial aerospace jobs. The cuts will affect Pratt & Whitney and Collins Aerospace. Raytheon CEO Greg Hayes, who moved UTC’s headquarters to the Boson area following UTC’s merger with Raytheon, figures that it will take at least three years for the air travel business to recover.

According to the report, Raytheon had seen “aircraft and pentagon orders surging” before the move. The company said it had “planned to hire 35,000 workers over five years.” And now? Raytheon’s defense sector, Hayes said, is still strong – owing to Trump military procurements. However, as of Sept. 4, commercial air traffic was down about 45 percent globally. To save costs, airlines are “deferring maintenance,” which hurts Pratt & Whitney, based in East Hartford, Congressman John Larson’s bailiwick.

Two questions present themselves: 1) Are the airline restrictions that Gov. Ned Lamont deployed in Connecticut at least partly responsible for the job losses related to a reduction of airline traffic? And 2) Will politicians such as Larson suffer because of these policies?

The answer to 1) is: A policy that discouraged air travel through the imposition of unusual restrictions – passengers coming from restricted states were required to self-quarantine for 14 days if they had not submitted to a Coronavirus test – certainly does not help. And the answer to 2) is: Nothing short of a nuclear winter in gerrymandered districts such as Larson’s 1st District and Rosa DeLauro’s 3rd District may interrupt their political careers, although this year DeLauro, a fashion maven  who has spent nearly 40 years in Congress, has a worthy opponent in Republican Margaret Streicker.

The Lamont directives are not only unusual; they interrupt normal business activity, do not provide uniform continuity of political action, may be unconstitutional, and are whimsical and palliative rather than curative.

The real cure for political action that hurts entrepreneurial activity in Connecticut – how is any restaurant to survive when it is being ordered to reduce its seating by half? – is to put a halter on runaway gubernatorial directives. And this cannot be done in the absence of a General Assembly that has been put in “park” for the last half year. There are some faint indications that, at some point down the road -- possibly after the 2020 elections, during which all the seats in the General Assembly will once again be secure in Democratic hands -- the state may return to some sort of normalcy. The real threat facing Democrats is not that the Coronavirus will mutate into the Red Death, but rather that Democrats, who have refashioned Connecticut into a quasi-socialist wonderland, may lose their majority status in both houses of Connecticut's recumbent General Assembly.

The signs of the times, at least in Connecticut – no longer the pearl in New England’s crown -- suggest a continuation of ruinous business policies. Connecticut’s General Assembly – more properly a fistful of Democratic legislators, a rump legislature – has just extended Lamont’s extraordinary powers by five months. Those powers allow Lamont to open and shut Connecticut’s entrepreneurial valves at will, and businesses, we know, react with horror at uncertainty.

We may well ask for whom is this a problem? Qui bono? Who profits by it -- certainly not representative government? Among Connecticut journalists, only Chris Powell, for many years the managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, seems to be troubled by Connecticut’s highly unorthodox political arrangement. Powell suspects that Democratic-run government, rather than democratic government, is the principal beneficiary of the new, now nearly year-long constitutional re-configuration.

The extension of arbitrary gubernatorial directives allow Democrats to claim hero status at both ends of the politically caused pandemic. Through the imposition of fickle gubernatorial powers, the governor saves us from a fate worse than death; and, by calibrating the business closures, he appears to be saving us from the economic pandemic he and his Democrat do-nothing compatriots in the General Assembly have caused. The German critic Karl Krauss once described Freudian psychology as “the disease it purports to cure.” Similarly, the inscrutable and lawless Lamont business shutdown is the disease he and other heroic Democrat legislators are now purporting to cure – by partly opening the businesses they have closed through dubious constitutional means.  

Lamont is not up for re-election in 2020, but all the members of Connecticut’s General Assembly will be on the political chopping block next month.. So Lamont is content to take the political thwacks for the time being; the memories of average Connecticut voters are short-lived, and any autocratic directive issued by Lamont, both in the recent past and for the un-foreseeable future, will not bear the fingerprints of Democrat legislators, many of whom will be left unpunished in the coming elections.

It is doubtful that any directive issued by “King Ned” will benefit anyone but autocratic politicians. All such directives destroy creative solutions by restricting normal business decisions to a governor who cannot be corrected by either the legislative or judicial branches of government. A deliberative legislature may produce far superior solutions than those forcibly imposed by Lamont and his close advisers on the entire state, no corner of which is now represented by members of the General Assembly pretending that they are doing their jobs.

Most recently, the Hartford Symphony has furloughed all of its musicians; restaurants are closing; the workforce at Pratt & Whitney will be reduced; principals and superintendents of public schools lack uniform direction from a government that appears to be operating on the throw of dice; and at some point down the line an exhausted public, frustrated and powerless, will turn against its self-appointed benefactors.

There are two incalculable benefits in hitting bottom: 1) the bottom marks the end of the downward fall, and 2) those who hit bottom know that the way up lies in an opposite direction.

Don Pesci is a Vernon-based columnist.

Don Pesci: The pesky ‘science’ and politics of COVID-19

Coronavirus seen with electron microscope

VERNON, Conn.
The New York Times, the old gray lady of Eastern Seaboard journalism, published a blockbuster story on Aug. 30, “Your Coronavirus Test Is Positive. Maybe It Shouldn’t Be,” that should be widely reported in other media formats. So far, the substance of the story has remained pretty much on the media shelf.

The Times has discovered that the easily corrected, most often used calibration for Coronavirus testing is not useful for "containing the spread of the virus.” The Coronavirus, of course, causes the disease named COVID-19.

According to The Times, “In three sets of testing data that include cycle thresholds, compiled by officials in Massachusetts, New York and Nevada, up to 90 percent of people testing positive carried barely any virus, a review by The Times found.

“On Thursday (8/10/2020), the United States recorded 45,604 new Coronavirus cases, according to a database maintained by The Times. If the rates of contagiousness in Massachusetts and New York were to apply nationwide, then perhaps only 4,500 of those people may actually need to isolate and submit to contact tracing.

The difference between 45,000 and 4,500 is, scientists and reporters may note, not a rounding error.

Leading public-health experts are concerned: “Some of the nation’s leading public-health experts are raising a new concern in the endless debate over Coronavirus testing in the United States: The standard tests are diagnosing huge numbers of people who may be carrying relatively insignificant amounts of the virus,” The Times reported.

To put the matter in terms that non-scientists may understand -- current Coronavirus testing is so over calibrated it cannot discover the four leaf clover in a massive field of clover.

“The most widely used diagnostic test for the new Coronavirus, called a PCR test,” the paper notes, “provides a simple yes-no answer to the question of whether a patient is infected.” However, similar PCR tests for other viruses, “do offer some sense of how contagious an infected patient may be: The results may include a rough estimate of the amount of virus in the patient’s body.”

Dr. Michael Mina, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, is calling for testing that can find the four leaf clover: “We’ve been using one type of data for everything, and that is just plus or minus — that’s all. We’re using that for clinical diagnostics, for public health, for policy decision-making.’’

But yes-no isn’t good enough, he says, according to The Times story. “It’s the amount of virus that should dictate the infected patient’s next steps. ‘It’s really irresponsible, I think, to forgo the recognition that this is a quantitative issue.’”

The problem is that current PCR tests are imprecisely calibrated. The PCR test, “amplifies genetic matter from the virus in cycles; the fewer cycles required, the greater the amount of virus, or viral load, in the sample. The greater the viral load, the more likely the patient is to be contagious.” The cycle threshold -- the “number of amplification cycles needed to find the virus… is never included in the results sent to doctors and Coronavirus patients [emphasis mine], although it could tell them how infectious the patients are.”

The Times story quotes Juliet Morrison, a virologist at the University of California at Riverside: “I’m shocked that people would think that 40 could represent a positive,” And Dr. Mina, who would set the cycle threshold limit at 30 or less, agrees. The change would mean, according to The Times’s story, “the amount of genetic material in a patient’s sample would have to be 100-fold to 1,000-fold that of the current standard for the test to return a positive result — at least, one worth acting on.”

Currently, the cycle threshold limit is set at 40, which means that you are “positive for the Coronavirus if the test process required up to 40 cycles, or 37, to detect the virus.”

However, “’Tests with thresholds so high may detect not just live virus but also genetic fragments, leftovers from infection that pose no particular risk — akin to finding a hair in a room long after a person has left, Dr. Mina said.”

And the figures deployed by most politicians, in the absence of more useful and predictive figures, are designed to induce in ordinary citizens a posture of compliance to gubernatorial edicts that depend upon medically useless data.   

The Times, not a Trump apologist, quotes another virologist: “It’s just kind of mind-blowing to me that people are not recording the C.T. values from all these tests, that they’re just returning a positive or a negative.”

Not for nothing is Coronavirus called a “novel” virus. There can be no “science” associated with a novel virus. But there are scientists, continuing research, and necessary adjustments in perceptions and medical data. One wonders how many doctors and reporters in Connecticut would be thunderstruck, as were Mina and Morrison, that the “yes and no” figures dangled before them were, to put the best face on it, medically misleading but politically useful.

Don Pesci is a columnist based in Vernon.

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Don Pesci: Self-interview of a Republican columnist in a deep Blue State

The Connecticut seal. By the way, there are some very good vineyards in what used to be called “The Land {State} of Steady Habits’’.

VERNON, Conn.

Q: Reading over your blog, “Connecticut Commentary: Red Note From A Blue State”, I don’t see many “I’s”.

A: Modesty.

Q: No really, why?

A: Political commentators fall into two categories: those who write about themselves, and those who write about others and ideas. This last group tends to dispense with “I’s”. 

Q: Well, we’ll see if we can remedy that lapse here. You have quoted Chris Powell, for many years both the managing editor and the editorial page editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn. on his motivation. You said to him once – correct me if I’m wrong – that he had been writing opinion pieces longer than you, and you have been working in the commentary vineyard for more than 40 years. You complimented him. His opinion pieces were perceptive, well written and necessary, a tonic for what ails the state, you said. Yet, politicians at the state Capitol who decide Connecticut’s destiny did not appear to be paying much attention. So, you asked, what keeps him going. He flashed a smile and said, “Spite.” Does spite keep you going?

A: I doubt Powell ever bought the notion that political behavior swings on the writings of political commentators. His primary motivation is plain on the face of his opinion pieces, both editorials and op-ed commentary. He wants to set hard truths before the general public, hoping that not every citizen is motivated by spite or enclosed within a Berlin Wall of invincible ignorance. Off camera, so to speak, Powell has a quiet, infectious sense of humor. And a sense of humor is a sense of right proportion. He was joking. It’s possible that joking in the 21st Century will be a capital offense punishable by exile, as were serious crimes against the state in Roman and Greek times. In modern times, burning down buildings, liberating high-toned stores of merchandise, throwing Molotov cocktails at police buildings, are all okay; but we draw the line at making jokes. The Greek tyrant Creon feared Aristophanes as much as an invading army. One day, one of Creon’s factotums met Aristophanes in the street and asked him in a fury, “Don’t you take anything seriously?” Aristophanes answered, “Yes, I take comedy seriously.” Mark Twain also took comedy seriously, and his long suffering wife, Olivia Langdon Clemens, worked tirelessly to protect him from a public whipping. In "The Chronicle of Young Satan, Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts,” Twain has Satan say, “Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand.” 

Q: So, you are not spiteful then? 

A: Spite, like humor, is salt, to be used always sparingly. I acknowledge that every sealed closet has some bones concealed in it. I can only say I don’t feel spiteful, though I do think spite can flower into gorgeous commentary. I’m thinking of Alexander Pope’s long poem, “The Dunciad”. We should love lovable things and hate hateful things. The record -- and it’s a long one; “Connecticut Commentary” contains to date about 3,141 separate pieces, nearly all submitted as columns to a host of Connecticut papers – I think will show that I’m interested in the public persona of politicians, the face they present to their constituents. I’m certainly not interested in delving into the private soul of, say, U.S. Sen. Dick Blumenthal, of this state, about whom I’ve written a great deal, much of it unpublished by Connecticut’s print media. It’s best to stay away from amateur psychology. Rummaging in private souls is very much like rummaging in attics – too many spider’s webs, hanks of hair, abandoned diaries, and moldy, old dolls.

Q: I’ve seen the Blumenthal cache. Much of it is well written, certainly publishable.  And you’ve said that nearly all of that cache had been sent out to various Connecticut newspapers. Much of it never saw print. Why not?

A: Thanks for your labor of love. It’s a good question. I suppose much of it may have rubbed editorial fur the wrong way. Part of this is business. Smaller newspapers, as you know, have been swallowed up by journalistic leviathans. The larger chains have a stable of dependable writers they may draw from. The whole of New England is a left-of-center political theater and has been for a long while. The General Assembly in the state has been dominated by left-of-center Democrats for a few decades; all the constitutional offices in the state are manned by Democrats; there are no Republicans in the state’s U.S. congressional delegation; virtually all the justices of the state’s Supreme Court have been placed on the bench by highly progressive former Gov. Dannel Malloy. Larger cities in the state – Bridgeport, New Haven and Hartford – have been, some would say, mismanaged by Democrats for about a half century. And it is not news that the media do political business mostly with incumbents. So, while it is not at all excessive hyperbole to say that most of the state’s current difficulties may be laid squarely at the feet of immoderate Democrats, incumbents are, mostly for business reasons, lightly leashed.

Q: Why lightly leashed?

A: You cannot get water from a rock, and you cannot get printable news from non-incumbents. If the political state is largely progressive, the state media will follow suit.

Q: Why “immoderate” Democrats? 

A: Because Connecticut Democrats are no longer moderate, no longer centrists, no longer “liberal” in the sense that President John Kennedy or justly celebrated Gov. Ella Grasso were liberal.

Q: You knew Grasso.

A: I did. She, her family and my father and his family, while occupying opposite ends of the political spectrum, were friends all their lives in the social and political petri-dish of Windsor Locks. During those times, friendship transcended politics. And politics itself was well mannered and soft spoken.

Q: Not now.

A: No longer.

Q: What changed?

A: Do you mean nationally or statewide?

Q: Both.

A: Nationally, the Huey-Long-like personality of President Trump has thrown the right-left national polarity into sharp relief, but this polarity preceded Trump by decades. When everyone, including the overarching, permanent political apparatus and a politicized media, has a dog in the fight, a permanent dog fight should surprise no one. Statewide, Connecticut has become, within a very short period of time, perhaps the most left-leaning state in the Northeast. The drift leftward here began long ago. It was “maverick” Republican Lowell Weicker who,  first as senator then governor, took the road not taken by pervious governors when he forced through the General Assembly Connecticut’s income tax, a levy that has resulted in improvident spending, outsized budgets, preening politicians and a poorer proletariat. 

Q: That was the turning point? 

A: It was a crossing of the Rubicon by a small-minded man who had contemplated for years the destruction of his own state Republican Party, which Weicker had betrayed numerous times, that finally gave him the heave-ho. Without turning over the molding psychological dolls in Weicker’s attic, I think it is proper to conclude that the man was motivated principally by unalloyed malice, what aphorist-philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche would have called resentment, an awful curse. “Whoever fights monsters,” Nietzsche warned, “should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.” I never heard Weicker toss off a laugh line that was not spiked with malice. I’m referring here only to the man’s public persona, you understand. In private, he may have been Henny Youngman, for all I know. In politics, it is the characters who determine the play. And in Connecticut, neatly all the characters who advance the play are progressives motivated chiefly by a rancid lust for power, very Nietzschean. Without will, you cannot secure your ends. But when the will becomes the end, it’s doomsday. Nietzsche never quite worked that into his calculations. But the great tyrants of the 20th century – Hitler, Stalin, Mao – did. Without God, Dostoyevsky said, “anything is possible” – even Weicker, the first of many of Connecticut’s “savior politicians.” The business of these savior politicians is to create the problems from which they pretend to save us.

Q: That seems a bit cynical.

A: Critical and descriptive, not cynical. The real cynics among us are those who believe positive knowledge is impossible. A perverse inability to see what lies right under your nose, George Orwell’s formulation, is the very definition of cynicism.

Q: Can you give us an example.

A: I think it is cynical to pretend not to notice the predictable effects of Gov. Ned Lamont’s shutdown of state businesses. Even a state legislator hiding under his bed, trembling in fear of Coronavirus, cannot fail to have noticed that a prolonged business shutdown would result in a diminution of state revenue; that the fatal failure of state government to provide adequate and targeted resources to nursing homes would result in needless deaths among people exposed to Coronavirus; that tax increases always transfer power and responsibility from citizens to the unelected administrative state, a descriptive rather than a cynical term; that a one-party state necessarily results in political oligarchy, which easily dispenses with representative government; that...

Q: Alright, alright, we don’t have all day here. Without being too cynical – excuse me, too descriptive – how do you see Connecticut’s future unfolding. 

A: What was it Yogi Berra said – the future ain’t what it used to be? In a representative republic, we used to rely on the common sense of voters to turn out politicians who pursued public policies inimical to representative government and the public good, one of the reasons Grasso agitated against an income tax. One of Grasso’s biographers is Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz, who argues that Grasso, a great governor, was wrong about the income tax.  Well, Grasso was right about the income tax, and she was right for the right reasons. Weicker was right about the income tax when he said, during his gubernatorial campaign that instituting an income tax in the midst of a recession would be like pouring gas on a fire, and he was wrong when, as governor, he poured income tax gas on Connecticut’s recession. The progress from Grasso to Bysiewicz, from Grasso to former Gov. Dannel Malloy and Ned Lamont is a fool’s journey in the wrong direction. The false solutions and the consequent havoc lie right under our noses. And it is long past time for Connecticut’s media to realize that the whole purpose of journalism is to describe accurately, in Orwell’s words, “the thing that lies right under our noses.” So, given our recent past history, our one party state, our wall-eyed media, our seemingly indifferent citizens, our representative-shy, inoperative General Assembly, which has just decided to surrender even more of its constitutional and legislative responsibilities to an incompetent governor, I would say Connecticut’s future looks bleak. 

Q: Just one more quibble before we go. You lament the want of common sense among voters. What made common sense a casualty of modern politics?

A: Both common sense and the conscience, an inseparable pair, have been surrounded and taken prisoner by wily politicians and a cowardly media. The founders of the republic feared, almost to a man that common sense – the moral imperative, the ethical genius that lies in all of us – could not survive immoral and ambitious politicians seeking to promote their own rather than the public good. We can only pray to God for the restoration of a moral order. God, Otto von Bismarck once said, favors drunkards, the poor and the United States of America. Pray he was right, because, except on their tongues, politicians in Connecticut, mostly pretending to be progressives, favor none of the above. And, once again, I am being descriptive here, not cynical.

Don Pesci is a columnist based in Vernon, Conn.

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Don Pesci: Our dogs: 'A piece of God's grace'

VERNON, Conn.

Mark Twain, who said pretty much everything worth saying, said about dogs: “The more I learn about people, the more I like my dog.”

Twain, one of those lucky few in whom the virtue of humor was fully grown, told a stretcher or two in his day, but his humor was the iron fist of truth, always difficult for those of us who are not saints to bear, wrapped in appetizing comic chocolate, and so made easier to swallow.

He liked dogs and often compared them to people: “If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man.”

A modern progressive, full of rancor and social justice, might want to pause over that one. One of Twain’s dogs was named “Prosper” and, unlike the fire breathing, eat-the-rich, modern progressive, Twain had no quarrel with prosperity.  A true child of the Gilded Age, which he named, Twain’s fervent hope for today was always that he would be prosperous tomorrow. Lucky for him, he lived, among other places, in Hartford, Connecticut, rather than, say, Nicolás Maduro’s Venezuela, an exploded post-Stalinist pipe dream.

But enough about politics.

Yesterday, we drove Titan, my wife Andrée’s Fidelco guide dog, to the Bolton Veterinary Hospital and had him “put down,” a modern locution intended to rob death of its sting. It does no such thing. Titan lived to be 13½ years old. Andree was deeply, deeply wounded, and grief silences the heart. You want to scream, and no sound issues from you; you want to weep, and your eyes are a parched desert. The choice was made for us by Titan’s afflictions: a condition in dogs very much like Lou Gehrig’s Disease in humans (degenerative myelopathy) and extreme vertigo (vestibular disease). Titan struggled with these disabilities for months, always bravely.

Titan came to us nearly 12½  ago where, bounding into the house, he met Jake, Andrée’s first guide dog, the handsomest black and tan German Shepherd in Connecticut, perhaps the world, full of years and happy to be retired.

Andrée: The world will become a true utopia when the tireless reformers so rearrange it that one is able to retire upon graduation from college.

Jake, like most German Shepherds, more or less prowled, always alert, head up, ears pointed, and ready to meet the bristling world on its own terms. Titan bounced, the perpetual youth, an irrepressible spring in his step. I wrote about Jake here. He is alive in our memories. Dogs, for reasons hinted above by Twain, are more easily remembered than people.

Andrée insists – and one can disagree with this imperishable truth only at the point of a sword – that Titan kept Jake in good order for two years, before he slipped from our grasp and went on his way to Heaven at age 14½. Twain again: “Heaven goes by favor. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in.”

I’ve lost many things during what folk now call my “life’s journey” – my youth, the spring in my own step, my hair, my reputation, my patience, occasionally my sense of humor – but I can tell you, none of these losses compare with the loss of a dog, because a dog, especially a guide dog, is not just a dog. He is a piece of God’s grace dropped like Holy Water into Hell.

None of us lucky sighted people can know how life presents itself, most often with bared teeth, to those like my wife of 53 years, who was legally blind from birth. It’s a daily struggle. To be won, the day must first be conquered, and the struggle is exhausting. This she has done with great courage and grace all her life. But when Jake first came into her life, she was, for the first time in her life, truly and fully liberated.

Then Titan put a bounce in her step. His fur was not coarse but silken; his eyes were brown amber gemstones; if he could smile, his smile would wrestle the world to the ground. Everywhere he went – and he never left her side for a moment -- he drew gasps from people. Men especially were drawn to him.

Me: Hey, Andrée, if I just step out of the way, I’m sure you could do much better with Titan at your side – maybe pick up one of those white or black privileged hedge fund millionaires down there in Fairfield County.

Born in Fairfield County, Connecticut’s Gold Coast, Andrée was familiar with the breed.

Andrée: Hmmm. Let me sleep on it.

My love, nothing that the creative hand of God has touched is lost forever to nothingness. Love is the greatest of God’s many gifts to us, the most precious of his wonder working mysteries. And because you loved Titan, and his love to you was retuned a thousand fold -- he lives.

Don Pesci is a columnist who lives in Vernon.

E-mail: donpesci@att.net

Don Pesci: The old, tired and reclusive Joe Biden

Waiting to talk politics

— Photo by Visitor7

“If ever a time should come, when vain and aspiring men shall possess the highest seats in Government, our country will stand in need of its experienced patriots to prevent its ruin”

— Samuel Adams (1722-1803), Massachusetts politician and a U.S. Founding Father

VERNON, Conn.

I’m sitting in the Midnight Café, only half full on orders of Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont, having breakfast. The place names and personal names throughout have been changed to protect innocent non-politicians. The usual waitress, Sami, of indeterminate age, sporting her usual braided ponytail, greets me, a steady customer, and the order is quickly put on the table.

The next few booths are filled with electricians brought into the state by Eversource to reconnected houses and businesses with mostly repaired power lines. They are, many of them, on their way back to their home states after a grueling stretch in Connecticut dealing with the damage wrought by Tropical Storm Isaias.

Sami calls out to them, “Have a safe trip back, guys,” and they wave beefy forearms in her direction.

“Sami, look at this picture, and tell me what you think.”

The photo, top of the fold, front page, shows Sen. Kamala Harris, whom former Vice President Joe Biden has picked as his vice-presidential candidate, standing at a podium  holding forth, while Biden, stone-faced, is seated in a chair that looks alarmingly like a kiddy highchair, legs wide open, his arms tightly clutching his stomach, his face masked in pretended interest.

Sami quickly assesses the photo and, never shy of sharing her opinion, smiles wickedly.

“Wonder if he had to use a stool to mount that chair?”

“Yeah, you noticed. If he were lying on the floor, he’d be in a fetal position.”

“Right. He’s hugging his tummy tightly.”

“Harris looks presidential though, doesn’t she?’’

“Very. I’m not sure that will help whatshisname,” (Same animated smile.)

It’s one of those pictures that are worth a thousand words.

The skinny on Biden, even among some Democrats, is that he has become a recluse, and not owing to Coronavirus. His early implication that he would choose as his vice president a Black woman had limited his range, but many Democrats feel that Harris might make a tolerable president when Biden, if elected, declines to run for a second term. Biden has not been able or inclined to answer successfully barely concealed imputations that he has become an in-the-closet presidential campaigner because he fears a public, mano a mano confrontation with President Trump.

It is thought by some that Biden's possible future foreign policy with respect to an aggressive and muscular China already has been compromised by Hunter Biden, his grasping son, who had been employed and monetarily rewarded by China because his daddy was Joe Biden, the Democrat’s Great White Hope in the November 2020 elections. And there is a suspicion that Biden has problems unspooling simple English sentences, that he will not be able to carry his weight in office, that he really has forgotten more than he knows, and on and on and on. Biden is 77 years old. His best days, many agreed, lie behind him.

The skinny on Trump is that he has been fatally damaged by repeated failed attempts to remove him from office, and a painfully protracted, failed attempt, lasting as long as his presidency, to find him guilty of collusion with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Some suppose that Trump will be easy campaign prey for a weakened Democrat presidential contender and his more vigorous, Black, female running mate candidate.

Under the hammer-blows of a Democrat opposition unalterably opposed to a Trump second term, it has been supposed that Connecticut Republicans, as happened in 2018, will tremulously withdraw in horror from a toxic president, thereby giving weight to Democratic assertions that even a damaged Biden-Harris administration would be preferable to four more years of an Trump regime.

In both law and politics, silence signifies assent; therefore, silence by Connecticut Republicans on two matters of importance to them – the re-election of a Republican president and the recapture of the U.S. House, as well as a stony silence on what is broadly called progressive social issues – can only be interpreted by state groups traditionally allied against Republicans as a permission to continue unimpeded many progressive programs that conservatives, libertarians, most Republicans and many unaffiliated voters consider repugnant and dangerous to the social fabric of the Republic.

In the new age now upon us, the center has not held, and The Second Coming, born in a dry desert, is slowly slouching toward Bethlehem. The media is now capitalizing “Black” in its reportage, as if “Black” were a race; it’s a color. “White” is also a color, not a race. Distinctions are not made between tolerable and even necessary mottos such as “Black Lives Matter” and political organizations and operations. George Orwell might well sweep all the rotgut Newsspeak away, but there are no Orwells among us.

And we have assented to the anarchic rule of windy and rootless politicians, never mindful of Ben Franklin’s answer when he was asked by a woman on the street, once the Continental Congress had finished its business, “Sir, what have you given us?”

“A republic, madam – IF YOU CAN KEEP IT.”

Don Pesci is a Vernon-based columnist.

Looking tired? Joe Biden in Henderson, Nev., last February

—Photo by Gage Skidmore

Don Pesci: Things should have been opened three months ago with current rules

A waitress at a local eatery, closed for four months by Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont’s ever changing executive orders, pops the question.

Her eatery is partially opened, but forbidden to serve more than half its regular clientele, many of whom will disappear if the eatery is not permitted to make a sustainable profit to pay the business’s overhead and its dwindling staff.

“If this place can be opened now, why couldn’t it have been opened” under the same severe regimen “three months ago?” the befuddled waitress asks.

Good question, but the common sense answer to the waitress's question will not be forthcoming from Governor Lamont or its waylaid legislative leaders, all Democrats, in the state’s seriously suspended General Assembly. The common sense answer to the question is simple and unambiguous. There is no reason why restaurants in the state should not have remained open during the pandemic four months ago. If social distancing, face masks, frequent disinfections of eating areas, and reducing by 50 percent a restaurant’s usual clientele, work now to prevent the spread of Coronavirus, the same measures would have produced the same result four months earlier.

An elementary school teacher asks this question: Why were elementary schools closed during the politically caused crisis?

Good question. We know – and have always known – that lethality among school children 14 years old and younger infected with Coronavirus has been hovering near zero. Why then were elementary schools in Connecticut shut down? The most frequent answer to this question is highly problematic. Children who are asymptomatic and who very likely had developed herd immunity, the historic prophylactic in viral contagions, can infect older adults. And these older adults are much more likely to die from the infestation than young children. Elementary-school closures are, in fact, a “save the elders” project.

Very good, how has Connecticut gone about saving the elders? In Connecticut and New York about 60 percent of those who died with – not of – Coronavirus were sequestered in nursing homes. We were protecting these elders by forbidding their relatives from eyeballing their care while, at the same time, failing to provide protective gear to the staff, heroes all, of nursing homes. And politicians in Connecticut knew – right from the beginning of the Wuhan infestation – that elders of a certain age, many of whom had medical preconditions that lethalized Coronavirus, were most susceptible to the Coronavirus grim reaper.

Well now, there is a bill before the gubernatorially suspended General Assembly right now that removes partial immunity from police officers across the state, all of whom will be susceptible to asset-swallowing suits filed by “defund the police” political agitators. Will partial immunity be removed from those politicians who are principally responsible for the carnage in Connecticut's nursing homes?

Never mind the oversight, we are told, the problem has now been corrected by Lamont, his political cohorts, and Dr. Close-The-Barn-Door-After-The-Horse-Has-Left. Not to worry; elder habitués of nursing homes who survived the political inattention of preening politicians are now, at long last, safe.

People wonder why the death count in Connecticut and New York are down, a cousin unable to attend the funeral of his uncle remarks – they removed the deadwood and are now taking their bows for having solved problems they themselves had created. They’re like the firefighter-arsonist who sets fires so that he can put them out and read about his courageous exploits in the morning paper.

It is perhaps unpragmatic at this point to hope that businessman Lamont and the Democrat leaders in the General Assembly will realize that Connecticut’s economy, artificially sustained by President Trump’s military- hardware acquisitions and the Wall Street casino, is weak at it core and will be further weakened by unnecessary shutdowns. Businesses lost to the Lamont shutdowns are irrecoverable, and there is yet another ten year recession grinning evilly at the state from the political wings.

Connecticut, now a beggar state, will attempt to squeeze money from the Washington, D.C., larder. Even now, Sen. Richard Blumenthal is hoping to wrest billions of dollars from the impeachable Trump administration, and there is not a journalist in sight who will summon up courage enough to ask him whether he would favor yet another Connecticut tax bump so that Democrats in the General Assembly will be spared the indignity of cutting union-labor costs.

When Connecticut –which has much more in common with dispensable nursing home patients than the state’s sleepy media realizes – finally disappears beneath the waves, who will be permitted to attend its funeral?  

Don Pesci is a Vernon, Conn.-based columnist.

Don Pesci: Deep historical ignorance fuels push to moth-ball Columbus statues

Statue of Christopher Columbus in Seaside Park, in Bridgeport, Conn.

VERNON, Conn.

Christopher Columbus statues across Connecticut are being mothballed, but politicians in the state’s larger cities desperately want Italians to understand, in the words of Don Corleone in Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, “It’s nothing personal.”

The pols in Connecticut, a state that has in it more Italians per square inch than most others, still need Italian votes. Will Italians, during the next elections, turn on anti-Columbus (and moth-balling supporters) such as Mayor Justin Elicker, of New Haven, and Mayor Luke Bronin, of Hartford? Italians, everyone knows from reading Puzo, like their revenge cooled in the fridge.

Both mayors have given Columbus statues the boot. Bronin said, “When the statue of Columbus was erected in Hartford a hundred years ago, it was meant to symbolize the fact that Italian-Americans, who had faced intense discrimination, had a place in the American story. But surely we can find a better way to honor the immense contributions of the Italian-American community in our country and in our community. I’ll also be working with our Italian-American community in Hartford and throughout the region to find an appropriate way to honor their incredibly important place in Hartford’s and our nation’s history.”

And Elicker concurred: “The Christopher Columbus statue for many Italians is a celebration of Italian heritage. But the statue of Christopher Columbus also represents a time of colonialism and atrocities committed. It is the right decision to remove the statue. After the statue is removed, I believe it is important that we, as a community, have a conversation about how to best honor the heritage of so many Italians who have made New Haven their home.”

Whomever these mayors have in mind for suitable stand-ins for Columbus – no names have been mentioned – none of the stand-ins will have been credited with opening the new continent to European exploration, the real irritant in the craws of Columbus haters.    

The assault on Columbus by "Black Lives  Matter" is particularly annoying because it is so wrong-headed. Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492, as we were taught to recite in schools long before it became fashionable to celebrate tribal differences in the United States under the rubric of diversity. We are quickly becoming “many out of one,” reversing the E Pluribus Unum motto on our increasingly worthless coinage.The first slaves were brought to what later became the United States – now the clannish dis-United States – in 1619, long after the death of Columbus. Certainly Columbus is less responsible for slavery and the oppression of African-Americans than, say, Thomas Dartmouth “Daddy” Rice, the original Jim Crow.

Jim Crow was a fictional character created by “Daddy” Rice, around 1830, a little more than three decades before the father of the Republican Party, President Abraham Lincoln, issued his Emancipation Proclamation abolishing slavery in the midst of a bloody, corpse filled Civil War waged, among other reasons, to end slavery.

Rice was a “black face,” white minstrel artist who introduced Jim Crow, a fictional stereotypical slave, into his act. As his show became more and more popular, the expression “Jim Crow” became a widely used designation for blacks, and later, around the time Republican President  Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard to facilitate the desegregation of public schools, the expression became a battle cry against racial discrimination in the south – not that the north was Simon-pure with respect to a poisonous tribalization of races that militated against E Pluribus Unum.

Hey, they don’t teach this sort of stuff anymore in Yale or Harvard; or, for that matter, in Hartford and New Haven high schools.

The whole business of discrimination still resonates with many Italians. The largest lynching in the United States occurred in 1891 -- 385 years after Columbus, certainly among the greatest navigators of his age and the man responsible for opening the Americas to a European discovery, died in obscurity, bleeding from his eyes at his home in Spain – when a New Orleans mob murdered 11 Italian-Americans following a trial of the Catholic “dagoes,” accused of murdering a police chief, that had produced six not-guilty verdicts and three mistrials. New Orleans was impatient for the justice of the rope, and so the innocent men were strung up.

Ah, well, stuff happens. Scripture tells us none of us are perfect, and history, we know, is pockmarked with imperfections. Democratic President Obama used to tell us that the details of history were less important than the arc of history. Modern historians and students -- engaged, like air-brusher Joseph Stalin, in the art of revising history through the murder of his political opponents – seem to think that the arc of history is less important than their own fictional version of the way things ought to have been during the days of Columbus.

The above named mayors of major cities in Connecticut have all claimed they are performing a public service by ridding public squares of Columbus statues to prevent vandalism, which is on a par with closing banks to prevent bank robberies or closing police stations to prevent arsonists from burning them down or tolerating the vandalization of the Lincoln Memorial by historical amnesiacs who have not, before despoiling the memorial, read the words of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address engraved on the north wall of the memorial. In merry old England a statue of Churchill – who, along with President Franklin Roosevelt, wiped the noses of real Fascists in the dust – has been vandalized, likely by European anti-fascist-fascists, brothers and sisters in arms with domestic terrorists such as ANTIFA here in the USA.

Are there no video cameras that might be deployed around Columbus statues to apprehend and arrest the vandals? Are we truly incapable of making proper distinctions between peaceful, lawful protesters and the thugs who shield themselves behind licit protests to liberate Louis Vuitton stores of bags that may be sold on the black market to finance, among other things, the toppling of Columbus statues in Connecticut?

An Italian from New Haven writes me, that he wishes someone would say something “to let the public know that not everyone is complicit” in what he and most Italians regard as the usual, time honored anti-Italian, anti-Catholic historical revisionism.

Done.

My correspondent tells me he plans to vote in the upcoming November elections – after cool, revengeful deliberation -- to strike a blow for historical lucidity, liberty under law and those few politicians in Connecticut who find distasteful the destruction of public monuments in the state’s urban cultural war-zones.   

Don Pesci is a Vernon, Conn.-based columnist.

Don Pesci: Conn.'s desperate restaurant owners wonder when...

How long?

VERNON, Conn.

On June 20, Connecticut will once again be open for business – sort of. The road to the grand opening has been a bumpy one full of false turns, sudden cul-de-sacs, and the driver of the bus headed towards a reopening of the state, now nursing a potential budget deficit of close to $1 billion,  appears to be navigating irresolutely.

Will restaurants in Connecticut be fully opened on the date set by Gov. Ned Lamont, June 20, or not? Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo, with whom Governor Lamont of has of late been having a Coronavirus shut-down bromance, already has turned the corner. Restaurants in Rhode Island, having got the jump on Connecticut, already are opened for business – sort of.

In a June 3 story, Hearst news noted that Connecticut restaurant owners were clamoring for an earlier opening date for indoor dining: "Some 550 businesses signed a petition by the Restaurant Association calling for a return to indoor dining on June 10. They include companies operating nearly 40 restaurants in New Haven and 30 in Stamford, from chains such as Buffalo Wild Wings, with locations in Stamford, Danbury, Milford and North Haven, to local haunts like Galaxy Diner in Bridgeport and upscale options such as Mediterraneo in Norwalk and Greenwich.”

Executive director of the Connecticut Restaurant Association Scott Dolch wrote to Lamont, “This is not hyperbole. Just this week and only steps from the Capitol, Firebox Restaurant in Hartford closed after 13 years in operation. They simply could not hold out any longer. Right now, every day counts for our industry.”

 Tic Toc.

 And then, as an aside that in some fashion must have penetrated Lamont’s soft shell, “Dolch noted that Rhode Island has already resumed indoor dining service, and that Connecticut’s coronavirus case count is better than that of New York and Massachusetts.”

Well, Lamont drawled, “Everybody wants to get going yesterday — I appreciate that,” Lamont said. “I am going to be a little cautious in terms of what the next round is. ... Maybe we can accelerate that a little bit.”

And then, as an aside that in some fashion must have penetrated Lamont’s soft shell, “Dolch noted that Rhode Island has already resumed indoor dining service, and that Connecticut’s Coronavirus case count is better than that of New York and Massachusetts.”

 "’I've just seen tens of thousands of people protesting in New York City — thousands more in Boston. Neither of them have opened up any of their restaurants - they haven't even opened for outdoor dining that I know of as yet,’ Lamont said. ‘So I want to be very careful before we open our restaurants and invite people from the whole region here.’"

That’s a NO to Dolch and his 550 business petitioners.

Dolch and Connecticut restaurant owners really have nowhere else to turn for succor. In ordinary times, Dolch’s petitioners might have curried support among a dwindling number of legislators in the General Assembly who do not want Connecticut to be eating Rhode Island’s dust, but the General Assembly has put itself in suspended animation until it once again is called into service by the governor, and Lamont’s extraordinary autocratic powers do not lapse until September. Already – someone is keeping count – Lamont ranks fourth in the nation among governors who have issued the most executive orders, and he has three months to go before he runs out of autocratic gas.

Other problems may be looming on Connecticut’s dark horizon.

 On June 4, the Lamont administration sent a notice around to Connecticut’s media that his administration is establishing a program, called the Connecticut Municipal Coronavirus Relief Fund Program, in which the state will reimburse city and town governments for expenses related to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a story in The Day of New London.

The program, administered through the Connecticut Office of Policy and Management, is setting aside $75 million to be distributed to municipalities in Connecticut, “part of $1.4 billion in Coronavirus Relief Funds the state has gotten from the federal government.”

The Connecticut Conference of Municipalities, according to The Day’s story, “said it is appreciative of the announcement but noted that federal guidelines recommend that 45 percent of the total $1.4 billion in Coronavirus Relief Funds, which would be $630 million, be spent on municipalities with populations below 500,000.”

There is, a reader who has successfully passed fourth grade exams in basic math will notice, a considerable difference between the $630 million the Feds expect Connecticut to distribute to its towns in Coronavirus Relief Funds and the planned Lamont distribution of $75 million. Some sharp-eyed accountant in Washington, D.C., is likely to notice the disparity and – maybe – cut Coronavirus funding to the Connecticut proportionally.

The national government now has a debt of some $26 trillion, and every penny helps.

Don Pesci is a Vernon-based columnist.

Don Pesci: In the pandemic, separating science and political science

Treating a patient on a ventilator in a hospital’s intensive-care unit

VERNON, Conn.

How scientific is science in the matter of Coronavirus?

There’s science and there’s political science. The one thing we do not want in any confluence of the two is confusion and mass hysteria, which can best be avoided by observing this rule: Politicians should decide political matters and medical scientists should decide medical matters. Occasionally, politicians decide that mass fright can better able convince the general population than rational argument.  

The answer to the above question is simple: In the case of new viruses, science, as defined above, must be silent. There can be no “scientific” view of Coronavirus because it is a new phenomenon, the recent arrival of a stranger on the medical block. Concerning Coronavirus, there are, properly speaking, multiple views of different scientists, many of whom will disagree with each other on important points.

Does Coronavirus remain on surfaces for long periods? A couple of months ago, we were told by politicians, relaying the news from “science”, that hard surfaces were repositories of Coronavirus, and that contamination from hard surfaces was as likely as person-to-person contamination. That notion has withered on the vine now that we know Coronavirus is most often spread person to person.

Do adults spread Coronavirus to children, or are children the Bloody Marys? This is an important datum because if children, who are much less likely than adults to die or be seriously ill from Coronavirus, spread the virus to adults, the wholesale closing of schools might be a protective measure.

But if adults pass the virus to children, the current view of many scientists, remediation efforts would be far different.  We are told that love covers a multitude of sins including, Agatha Christie advises us, murder. The word “science” misapplied covers, we have seen, a multitude of political sins.If we can learn from our past mistakes, we need not carry our mistakes into the future.

If the question is, “Have politicians in the Northeast made a mistake in trusting to some scientists?” the question is wrongly put. It’s not quite as simple as that. It will always be better to take advice from the horse’s mouth rather than from the horse’s posterior. But in the process, politicians must not allow differing scientists to determine the political course of a state.

Politicians, in the face of a pandemic, should not stop being politicians. That is what we have seen in Northeast states, where Coronavirus has dug in its heels. Here legislative activity has been shut down, and Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont has been festooned with extraordinary – some would say unconstitutional -- powers.

Like his counterpart in New York, Andrew Cuomo, Lamont has resorted to state-wide business shutdowns and sequestration. But inducing a long-lived recession in Connecticut, sequestration and data collection are not curative, however “necessary” they seem to be to some politicians who are masters in the art of spreading fear.

A vaccine may cure Coronavirus. What is called herd-immunity may reduce infestation.  Certain people, in many cases younger people, catch the virus and develop a natural immunity, foreshortening the mass of people fatally exposed to the virus. We know that Coronavirus has spread like a wildfire in nursing homes, because clients in nursing homes are older and subject to other infirmities that in their cases have dramatically increased the fatality rate in Connecticut and New York.

“Science” – real science – warned us of this at the very beginning of the infestation. We knew of a certainty that older people with compromised systems were especially vulnerable. So, knowing this, why did not the governors of Connecticut and New York direct more of their resources to nursing homes? That is a question that must be answered by our “savior politicians.”

Home sequestration, we have been told, helps to flatten the Coronavirus curve. What can this mean if not that sequestration prolongs the time during which the sequestered may in the future be exposed to the virus? Flattening the curve is not curative. Ask any scientist.

The Coronavirus pandemic has been Hell, but it is very important that we should not return from Hell with empty hands.

In Connecticut more than 60 percent of deaths “associated with” Coronavirus occurred in nursing homes; the figure is similar in New York. Cuomo recently acknowledged he was surprised to discover that a sizable majority of people in New York infected with Coronavirus had been sequestered at home. His surprise is surprising.

We are told that business re-opening will occur in Connecticut in three stages, somewhat like a rocket on its way to the moon. But surely business opening should be determined with reference to sections of Connecticut that have been severely or mildly affected by Coronavirus, and the distribution of Coronavirus throughout the state has been mapped by Johns Hopkins University ever since the virus penetrated the United States from its point of origin, Wuhan, China.

These are political decisions that should have been codified in law by a quiescent General Assembly. Political science – yes, there is such a thing – would tell us that we no longer enjoy in Connecticut a republican, small “r”, constitutional government. Instead, Governor Lamont has become our homegrown Xi Jinping, China’s communist tyrant who has now provided Connecticut both with a deadly virus and PPEs, the means of thwarting some of its effects.

Don Pesci is a Vernon-based columnist.

Don Pesci: A hypochondriac uncle and credulous Nutmeggers

VERNON, Conn.

Every family should have at least one hypochondriac. Ours was an uncle who washed his hands multiple times before and after meals. He was fastidious about his silverware, examining it minutely for water stains and polishing it at table with his napkin, much to the annoyance of my mother, even thought the silverware was as spotless as a saint.

One Christmas, the dining room table crowded with family and friends, my mother, attempting to extract a roast from the oven, brushed her hand on the pan, yelped, and dropped the roast to the floor. It spun around like a top and came to a rest touching the radiator, which was not spotless. She shot me daggers and said in a pained whisper full of menace, “DON’T TELL ANYONE ABOUT THIS!”

I immediately fell in with her subterfuge. The roast was cleaned of a dust rat, purified, and bought to the table with no one the wiser. I remember wondering at the time how long the prohibition was to last, for I was yearning immediately to tell my brother and sister about the mishap, but only after the multitude had been fed. These things were meant to be shared with others. What a burden! I watched the uncle devour the meat and wondered whether he would drop dead at table or in the bathroom, after cleaning his hands for the fourth time.

The uncle died relatively young, despite the fact that most members of the family lived into deep codgerdom.

My grandfather on my mother’s side died at ninety-something, full of years, grappa and Toscano cigars, which he smoked Ammezzato. 

A few years before he passed on, he had sucker-punched a younger man in the pub he used to frequent because the ill-mannered stranger had insulted a Polish friend of his while the two were playing at cards. The local police brought the unconscious stranger to the border of the town and advised him, when he woke from his nap, that should he return to town – ever – he would be arrested .

When the hypochondriac uncle passed away, my mother whispered decorously to me, “Guess the germs finally got him,” adding, “DON’T TELL ANYONE I SAID THAT!”

The uncle was an expert fisherman, and for years I wondered how he could bear to hook worms on his line, until my father told me he only used dry flies, beautiful, fetching, hand-crafted flies. Even so, he had to unhook the fish and drop it into his often-washed wicker basket, which he wore on his waist, like a gunslinger.

This fastidious uncle would have survived in good order the grosser inconveniences of Coronavirus – no hugging, no handshakes, washing hands frequently after touching polluted surfaces, especially plastic, where the deadly virus remains in attack mode for nearly a day, conversing at a safe distance, avoiding crowds, wearing facemasks, telecommuning with a doctor every time the hairs on the back of his neck prick up in fright, usually after listening to some doomsday-physician on 24/7 Coronavirus coverage networks – because he regarded his immediate environment as a familiar septic system of fatal germs.

To wake each morning was to be alert, focused on the micro-microcosm, to be always on one’s guard, rubbing the plate off the silverware.

To a certain extent, Coronavirus has made cowards of us all – also, hypochondriacs of us all. Normalcy, and the economy, too, have fled the pandemic, screeching and screaming. It will not return, the experts tell us, until the dragon has been slain. And, like a cat, the dragon has nine lives. The choices that lie before many of us now appear to be poverty or death. And, as Yogi Berra might have said, “The future ain’t what it used to be.”

Will we survive? Of course we will. But sociability will have received a blow to the solar plexus, and all of us will be unduly cautious, if not afflicted with hypochondria. In our distress, important distinctions will be lost.

Connecticut has just purchased an entire warehouse of what are called personal protective equipment (PPEs) to protect medical workers from Coronavirus, from Chinese Communists who were principally responsible for transporting Coronavirus from Wuhan to Western Europe. No medical gear has yet been found to protect medical workers from politicians.

If China were Big Pharma some ranter on the left by now would have accused Chinese banking magnates of producing a plague so that they might sell medical gowns and facemasks to credulous Nutmeggers in Connecticut. Shrewd Yankees in Connecticut were called Nutmeggers because they used to put wooden nutmegs in with their produce to gain extra coin from their purchasers. Clever Yankees!

Time is a stream, and no one steps in the same stream twice. Things change. We used to be able to depend on our politicians to steer us in the direction of beneficial change. We are just now emerging – one prays -- from the very first intentionally caused national recession in U.S. history.

When the Coronavirus plague has subsided, the question to which we should demand an honest and unambiguous – i.e. non-political -- answer is this: Have our politicians, assisted by medical “experts” and data-manipulators, been selling us a load of wooden nutmegs? 

Don Pesci is Vernon-based columnist.

Automatic hand sanitizer

Don Pesci: Abby's Barbershop: A Parable

VERNON, Conn.

G.K. Chesterton somewhere writes that all barbers are would-be philosophers under the skin. The trade has changed over the years. Barbers used to be surgeons at a time before pharmacology and modern medicine branched off and began to produce physicians who knew a little more about human healing than the barbarous barbers who painted their poles red and white. In medieval Europe, barbers, not doctors, performed surgery, and the pole was a sign that indicated the blood and napkins used in their business, the barber’s most frequent customers being soldiers whose bodies had been shattered on the field of battle.

Barbers left off surgery, but not philosophizing.

The philosophizing is a result of customer immobility and peculiar circumstances familiar to every barber and dentist. If you have gone into a barber shop for a haircut and shave, you will understand how much like a confessional or a psychologist’s couch the barber chair is. And the best barbers tend to be on the loquacious side because they wish to keep their customers coming back. Experiencing a haircut and a shave without chatter is too much like waiting for the guillotine to drop. People who are immobilized with foam on their faces and a straight-edge razor glinting above them generally will be in the mood for calming small talk. The best philosophy is small talk writ large, and the good barber, like Socrates, will have had a good deal of experience in chatting up his customers.

So it is at Abby’s Barber Shop. The proprietor, Abby, is gentle, chatty on subjects that do not wound her clients and, above all, agreeable. It is chancy disputing on difficult subjects with someone wielding a scissors and a razor. The secret to success in barberology is to put all disputants at ease, disarming them and so leaving them helpless in the face of the barber’s superior weaponry. Accomplished barbers are practiced in the fine art of agreeing to disagree on disagreeable propositions. It also helps a good deal when the customer is satisfied with the barber’s work, and customer satisfaction generally involves, during the first few visits at least, a good deal of inquiry and negotiation.

Some of Abby’s older customers are abrupt and set in their ways. “What should I do if a customer is rude?” her assistant asked her.

“Put on your most agreeable tone and ask him to move his chin a little to the left. It will not hurt if he glimpses the razor or the scissors.”

After her father died, Abby inherited the barbershop from her brother, 20 years her senior, who had retired early and moved to Tennessee.

Other barbers, and I suppose dentists, sometimes take advantage of their victims' incapacitation.

John the Barber: You’re married right?

Victim: (A hot towel across his face in preparation for a straight-razor shave) Mufftt..

John: Thought so. You probably have children. I’d rather have warts myself. Kids are always a problem, right?

Victim: Mufftalm.

John: Ah, three! Triple trouble. Girls are better than boys, though they are expensive propositions when given away in marriage to loathsome sons-in-law. No decent father wants to give his girl up to such beasts.

This kind of friendly-hostile badinage would never have occurred in Abby's shop, which -- I say it to shame shameless politicians – will be closing before Connecticut’s politicians decide that the 75-year-old barbershop is a necessary pleasantry, even though barbers no longer perform surgery. For that matter, surgeons in Connecticut no longer may perform elective operations in the shutdown-state, because room must be made in hospitals to accommodate empty beds.

Customer: So, you’re closing shop. What a shame.

Abby: Yes, and moving too. But this is not a decision of ours. We have been forced to it by politicians who have never seen the inside of this shop. But that is the nature of politics in the state. When you grow old, the good book tells us, someone will tie a rope around your waist and take you where you do not wish to go.

Customer:  That shouldn’t happen.

Abby: No. Some of my customers, the older ones, believe that winter should not happen. But here we are, and the snow is falling outside.

Customer: Some of these people who make laws ….

Abby: We live in a state in which both political parties are divided by a common purpose: how to provide for the common good, and none of them understand that the common good is best served when they are no longer in command. But all that has come to a stop. The legislature, fearing the plague, has put itself into suspended animation, and now all the important decisions are being made behind closed doors by the governor.

Customer: A good man. All this mess was thrown into his lap….

Abby: Well, I certainly will miss our little chats (brandishing her razor). Could you turn your head a bit to the left please?  I want to get at your neck.

A subtle barber was Abby. She now has moved to Tennessee, where her brother has opened a barbershop, for the business of scraping necks with straight razors is a lifetime pursuit, full of secret pleasures.

Don Pesci (donpesci@att.net) is a Vernon-based columnist

The War Memorial Tower in Vernon

Don Pesci: Those gubernatorial Caligulas

Decisive executive: A marble bust of Caligula restored to its original colors, identified from particles trapped in the marble

VERNON, Conn.

Gore Vidal – deceased, but not from Coronavirus complications – was once asked whether he thought the Kennedy brood had exercised extraordinary sway over Massachusetts. He did. And what did he think of the seemingly unending reign of “Lion of the Senate” Edward Kennedy, who had spent almost 43 years in office?

Vidal said he didn’t mind, because every state should have in it at least one Caligula.

The half-mad Roman emperor Caligula, who reigned in 37-41 A.D., considered himself a god, and the senators of Rome generally deferred, on pain of displeasure, to His Royal Deity. Caligula certainly acted like a god. The tribunes of the people deferred to his borderless power, which he wielded like a whip. They deferred, and deferred, and deferred… .Over time, their republic slipped through their fingers like water. Scholars think Caligula may have been murdered by a palace guard he had insulted.

Here in the United States, we do not dispose of our godlike saviors in a like manner. At worse, we may promote them to a judgeship, or they may be recruited after public service by deep-pocket lobbyists or legal firms, or they may remain in office until, as in Edward Kennedy’s case, they have shucked off their mortal coil and trouble us no longer

.Coronavirus has produced a slew of Vidal Caligulas, all of them governors. In emergencies, when chief executives are festooned with extraordinary powers, the legislature is expected to defer to the executive, and the judiciary remains quiescent.

This deference to an all-powerful executive department is not uncommon in war, but even in war, the legislative and judiciary departments remain active and viral concerning their oversight constitutional responsibilities.The war on Coronavirus, however, is a war like no other. Here in Connecticut, the General Assembly remains in a state of suspended animation. Every so often, an annoying constitutional Cassandra will pop up to remind us that we are a constitutional republic, but constitutional antibodies in Connecticut are lacking. Our constitutions, federal and state, are still the law of the land, and even our homegrown Caligulas are not “above the law,” because we are “a nation of laws, not of men.”

These expressions are more than antiquated apothegms; they are flags of liberty that, most recently, have been waved under President Trump’s nose. However, in our present Coronavirus circumstances, no one pays much attention to constitutional Cassandras because --- do you want to die? Really, DO YOU WANT TO DIE?Every soldier who has ever entered the service of his country in a war has asked himself the very same question. And we are in a Coronavirus War, are we not? Pray it may not last as long as “The War on Drugs.” Drug dealers won that one, and Connecticut has long since entered into the  gambling racket; the marijuana racket looms in our future.

Then too, in the long run, we are all dead. Even “lions of the Senate” die. The whole point of life is to live honorably. And this rather high-falutin notion of honor means what your mama said it meant: don’t cheat; don’t lie; treat others as you expect them to treat you. Bathe every day and night in modesty, and remember – as astonishing as it may seem -- sometimes your moral enemy may be right. Put on your best manners in company. “The problem with bad manners,” William F. Buckley Jr. once said, “is that they sometimes lead to murder.” Caligula forgot that admonition.

Once Coronavirus has passed, we will be able honestly and forthrightly to examine closely the following propositions, many of which seem to be supported by what little, obscure data we now have at our disposal: that death projections have been wildly exaggerated; that reports of overwhelmed hospitals were exaggerated; that death counts were likely inflated; that the real death rate is magnitudes lower than it appears; that there have been under-serviced at-risk groups affected by Coronavirus; that it  is not entirely clear how well isolation works; that ventilators in some cases could be causing deaths.  These are open questions because insufficient data at our disposal at the moment does not permit a “scientific” answer to the questions that torment all of us.

At some point, a vaccine will be produced that will help to quiet our sometimes irrational fears, but vaccine production lies months ahead. The question before us now is: what is more dangerous, the wolf or the lion? New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, and allied governors in his Northeast compact, cannot pinpoint a date to end their destructive business shutdown because of insufficient data. According to some reports, Cuomo has hired China-connected McKinsey & Company to produce “models on testing, infections and other key data points that will underpin decisions on how and when to reopen the region’s economy.”

If the economy in Connecticut collapses because Gov. Ned Lamont accedes to the demands of those in his newly formed consortium of Northeast governors that business destroying restrictions should remain in place for months until a vaccine is widely distributed, the effects of the resulting economic implosion will certainly be more severe than a waning Coronavirus infestation. After Connecticut has reached the apex of the Coronavirus bell curve, it is altogether possible that a continuation of the cure – a severe business shutdown occasioned by policies rooted in insufficient data – will be far worse than the disease it purports to cure.

Don Pesci is a Vernon-based columnist.

Don Pesci: Sanders may press his campaign for socialism to the convention

Bernie Sanders last month

VERNON, Conn.

The last word, or the next to the last word, on Vermont socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders’ ill-fated run for the presidency may be that of communist evangelist Karl Marx. In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte Marx writes, “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.”

This is the second time that Sanders has run for president, succumbing the first time to Barack Obama’s former secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, and this time to former Vice President Joe Biden. This, his second and one suspects last run for the presidency – Sanders is getting on in years -- may be a tragedy to the youth of the nation, who hung on his every word, but it is a farce for most grownups.

Sanders announced that he was leaving the Democrat primary race on April 8, but his announcement only meant that Sanders was out, not down. In Connecticut, he may remain on the ballot because under state law, according to a story in CTMirror, “Secretary of the State Denise Merrill cannot cancel a primary without the written permission of candidates who have qualified for the ballot.” Merrill is yet awaiting permission from Sanders to suspend the costly Democrat presidential primary.

Even though Sanders has thrown in the sponge, the socialist millionaire (in assets) still wants to amass a minor fortune in Democrat delegates. Sanders is determined to use his delegates to the Democratic Convention to bend his party toward a glorious socialist future, and some within the party of Jefferson, Jackson and the late Connecticut Democratic leader John Bailey are now wondering whether the man ever wanted to be president. There are two broad reasons why men and women of good will enter the Democratic primary presidential lists: 1) to become president and, 2) to make a point.  Sanders has now conceded for the second time that he has not enough delegate votes to deny his presidential primary opponent the nomination. Presumably, after the nominating convention, Sanders will throw his support to Biden, as previously he had done with Clinton.

But there is a thorn in the rose bouquet, or the shadow of a thorn. It’s obvious that Sanders wants to be a commanding presence at the Democrat nominating convention. Will he withhold an endorsement of Biden if the Sanders gang is not adequately represented in the nominating convention plank?  If Democrats move to the traditional Democratic center in hopes of retaining votes in the general election, will Sanders open a campaign as an independent, socialist candidate for the presidency?

Though these questions have not been asked of Sanders, they begged to be answered, largely because of the manner in which Sanders has conceded a primary win to Biden. Sanders is running to score ideological points – and, more importantly, to move his sluggish party to a socialist position from which it cannot easily withdraw. Unlike Eugene Debs, for instance, Sanders is not now, and perhaps has never been, interested in running the country as socialist president.

Sanders’s thumbprint on his party have caused some agita in Connecticut’s Democratic Party, which has been trending progressive/socialist for many years. Merrill notes that Sanders has ceded the nomination to Biden. “That for me,” she has said, “effectively ends the justification for holding a primary in Connecticut. Now, the results are predetermined. Then comes the announcement he [Sanders] will remain on the ballot, which hopefully he will reconsider.”

But acknowledging that he has not enough delegates to win the nomination does not mean that Sanders has pledged his delegates to Biden. That could happen at the Democratic convention – if the Democrat platform incorporates Biden’s ideological predispositions. And if not – well, there’s the thorn in the rose. It’s altogether possible that Sanders might flee the convention with his deluges in hand and challenge Biden as an independent candidate for president in the general election. Progressive ex-president Teddy Roosevelt did just that when the Republican nominating convention in 1912 gave its presidential endorsement to William Howard Taft. Roosevelt’s defection from the Republican Party marked a major step for progressivism in the United States.

If Sanders is a serious socialist, why should he not follow the same course?

Merrill, a faithful Democrat in arms, is justifiably concerned with the cost to her party of what she regards as an unnecessary Democratic presidential primary in Connecticut.

Don Pesci is a Vernon, Conn.-based columnist.  

Don Pesci: Time to cut the regulatory kudzu

VERNON, Conn.

Kudzu, everyone knows, is a perennial vine native to much of eastern Asia that destroys growth by wrapping itself around native plants and trees and shadowing them so that they do not receive the proper sunlight to grow and flourish. Unnecessary regulatory schemes are to the economy what Kudzu is to vegetation. The operative political rule should be – less is better.

At some time in the future COVID-19 will have petered out. We know this not from any assurances of politicians, their brows moist with concern. COVID-19 will be whipped when the United States can be shown on a bell curve marking the progress of COVID-19 to have reached past the top of the curve in a descending mode. People who measure epidemics and pandemics call this process the flattening of the curve. Just as surely as the sun rises in the morning and sets in the evening, pandemics have their ups and downs – always, without exception.

But pandemics leave in their wake medical and economic disruptions that last far beyond the flattening of bell curves. And they leave behind as well gaping holes in the hearts of people whose lives have been torn apart by death and sorrow. For these reasons it would be best for politicians to adopt as a working moral presumption an instruction found in Hippocrates’s work Of the Epidemics – “First, do no harm.”

Looking towards the future, the Yankee Institute, one of the most thoughtful think tanks in Connecticut, has proposed meeting the long-term effects of COVID-19 by cutting the kudzu. After thanking Gov. Ned Lamont for his efforts in battling the virus, Yankee notes, “The collapse of the financial markets and the closure of businesses and schools are certain to cause long-term economic problems for the country and, in particular, Connecticut.” Voices proclaiming that much of the data underlying the measures taken by politicians thus far is, at best, unreliable are few and unnoticed. 

So, what can we do additionally to allow the sun to bring forth new economic growth to the state while, at the same time, avoiding harm?

Yankee praises the governor for having issued “executive orders waiving certain occupational regulations for pharmacists, face-to-face interview requirements, expanding telemedicine coverage for Medicaid recipients and [allowing] the Department of Economic and Community Development to defer loan payments for 800 or so small businesses that have loans from the state,” all positive measures that will breathe new life into an economy racked by COVID-19. Some of these measure surely should be adopted permanently.

In addition, the state should issue a temporary “hold harmless” provision to small businesses -- restaurants, gyms, child-care facilities and numerous others -- that have been forced to lay off employees due to the COVID-19 virus. In the normal course of business, layoffs expose such businesses to a more costly state unemployment insurance tax. Temporarily, wave the higher taxes. “Gov. Lamont,” Yankee notes, “has already eliminated the requirement that an individual receiving unemployment benefits demonstrate they are searching for a job. A similar waiver or exemption of the unemployment tax on affected small businesses should be considered as well.” Why not grant tax deferrals to freelance or other self-employed individuals impacted by temporary government business shutdowns? The U.S. Treasury already is offering such deferrals without interest or penalty to individuals and small businesses affected by a government-enforced slowdown.

Occupational-licensing requirements and filing fees should be waved for an extended range of services. Colorado allows immediate licensing for medical professionals licensed in other states. Gov.  Jared Polis, Yankee notes, has “expedited the licensing process for those seeking medical licenses, reducing the amount of time and requirements it takes for qualified individuals seeking to practice medicine to join in the response to fight the virus.” Additionally, he has “expanded the ability of people to administer the virus test to include retired, semi-retired or professionals whose license has lapsed to be reactivated easily and efficiently so that testing can be conducted on a larger scale.”

Why haven’t Connecticut’s leaders suspended for one year the state’s increase in the minimum wage? Shouldn’t we remove all regulatory impediments to “distance learning” for school children ordered by the state not to attend school?

First, do no harm. But if harm there must be, the state that has caused the harm should offer reasonable mitigations. After the war on COVID-19 has been concluded -- and all the shelves have been restocked with toilet paper – Connecticut’s politicians must bind up the wounds they have caused. And the binding can start right now.

Don Pesci is a writer who lives in Vernon, Conn.

E-mail: donpesci@att.net

Don Pesci: 2 pro-abortion-rights senators seem to see no limits

Even the universe has borders and limits, both perhaps undiscoverable; so we are told by science. The big bang theory has not only a beginning but an end.

Charles Schumer, of New York, and Richard Blumenthal, of Connecticut, are two U.S. senators who fervently believe that abortion should be borderless, not hemmed in by reasonable regulations, such as those that they believe should govern the exercise of the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Laws are limits to human behavior that, we deduce from bank robberies, rapes and murders, may be overridden in some ungovernable people. The law is a red line saying thus far you may go but no further -- without risking some painful sanction.

Blumenthal knows, perhaps better than most, that one way to set limits to the sometimes audacious behavior of businesses is through the establishment of regulations. As attorney general of Connecticut for more than 20 years, Blumenthal earned his political spurs by applying a legal birch switch to the backsides of Connecticut businesses and others.

When Blumenthal vacated his sinecure to make a successful run for the U.S. Senate, he left behind more than 200 unsettled cases quickly dismissed by the next attorney general, George Jepsen. Blumenthal’s victims, hung out to dry on hooks in the attorney general’s offices for many years, were now free to resume pursuing the American dream if – big “if” – they had not been driven into penury by some of Blumenthal’s punishing tactics, the most successful of which was to encumber a business’s assets until the business compliantly acceded to terms dictated by Blumenthal.

Blumenthal is well known in Connecticut for his unyielding opposition to abortion regulation and two Trump appointed justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. But Blumenthal, the “Senator from Planned Parenthood” has now been trumped by Schumer. Hectoring a crowd of abortion advocates on the steps of the U.S Supreme Court, and sounding a bit like Huey Long at his boisterous worst, Schumer said this: “I want to tell you, Gorsuch; I want to tell you, Kavanaugh. You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.”

Schumer’s harangue was intended as a threat; it was directed as a threat to two specific Supreme Court Justices; and it was received as a threat by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who responded with great temperance in a written statement, “Justices know that criticism comes with the territory, but threatening statements of this sort from the highest levels of government are not only inappropriate, they are dangerous. All Members of the Court will continue to do their job, without fear or favor, from whatever quarter.”

Schumer later blamed his threat to the court justices on Brooklyn, according to the New York Post, – “Sen. Schumer cites his NYC roots in non-apology over Supreme Court squabble: 'We speak in strong language’”.

Speaking from the floor of the U.S. Senate, Schumer offered, “I should not have used the words I used yesterday. They didn’t come out the way I intended them to. I’m from Brooklyn. We speak in strong language. I shouldn’t have used the words I did, but in no way was I making a threat. I never — never — would do such a thing.”

Schumer accused Republicans of “manufacturing outrage” over his own threats to Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh. That fish won’t fly.

In an opinion piece in the New York Post, George Conway III, a lawyer and adviser to the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump super PAC, wrote “Schumer’s words, however, were unmistakably intimidating: ‘I want to tell you, Gorsuch.’ ‘I want to tell you, Kavanaugh.’ ‘You (emphasis original) will pay the price.’ ‘You won’t know what hit you if …’ The emphasis is mine, but the meaning is clear: If you don’t do as we say, something bad will happen to you….”

There is some talk of censure in the air. Would Blumenthal support the censure of a fellow senator who has threatened two Supreme Court justices -- not of course with body harm, but with political repercussions -- if the high court failed to decide a pending case related to abortion in a way that did not satisfy abortion-rights extremists?If Blumenthal has been asked the question, his answer to it has not appeared anywhere in Connecticut’s media. Perhaps the media feels it might be indelicate to put such a question to Blumenthal who so far has resisted every effort, however reasonable, to regulate Big Abortion. Blumenthal spearheaded the effort to deny the Supreme Court placement of both Gorsuch and Kavanaugh. Schumer’s threatening remarks, it may be argued, simply carries the Blumenthal effort a logical step forward.

Don Pesci is a Vernon, Conn.-based columnist.

Don Pesci: Using Conn. tolls as an escape hatch

Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont threw up his hands in a gesture of surrender and took a pause in his ceaseless efforts to rig Connecticut with a new revenue source – tolls – so that his comrades in the General Assembly would not have to apply themselves diligently during the next decade to balancing chronic deficits through spending cuts. A new revenue source would buy progressives in the legislature about ten years of business-as-usual slothfulness. It is their real hedge against spending reductions.

“I think it’s time,” Lamont said at a hastily called news conference, “to take a pause” and -- he did not say -- to resume our tireless efforts next year, after the November 2020 elections have been put to bed. The specter always hanging over the struggle for and against tolls always has been the upcoming elections, when all the members of Connecticut’s General Assembly will come face to face with the voter’s wrath. The prime directive in state politics is to get elected and stay elected, without which all ideas, hopes, dreams, and the vain strutting of one’s hour upon the political stage, are evanescent puffs of smoke.

“Gov. drops tolls plan” ran the front page, above the fold headline in a Hartford paper, underscored with a sub-headline, “Democratic Senate leaders are still open to a vote on controversial legislation.” The word “controversial” in that headline is a massive understatement. The best laid toll plans of Lamont and leading Democrats in the General Assembly were torn asunder by a volcanic eruption of disgust and dismay that Speaker of the House Joe Arsimowicz and President of the Senate Martin Looney seem convinced will disappear within the following year. Their experts no doubt have counseled them that the lifespan of political memories in Connecticut is exceedingly short; by November, all the Sturm und Drang over tolls will have been dumped onto the ash heap of ancient history.

No one will recall these bitter fighting words from Lamont, “If these guys [Lamont’s Democrat co-conspirators who had been giving him assurances that there were enough votes in the General Assembly to pass his re-worked toll plan] aren’t willing to vote and step up, I’m going to solve this problem. Right now, we’re going to go back to the way we’ve done it for years in this state when we kept kicking the can down the road."

By the expression “kicking the can down the road” Lamont meant to indicate that the Democratic-dominated legislature and preceding governors had not, unlike him, attacked transportation issues, not to mention massively dislocative state workers’ pension obligations, with energy and dispatch. We are back to borrowing money to pay for transportation and road repair because – Lamont did not say – his Democrat comrades in the General Assembly had in the past raided dedicated funds, transportation funds among them, in order to move from laughably insecure “lockboxes” to the General Slush Fund monies necessary to patch massive holes in budget appropriations and expenditures caused by inordinate spending.

The real political division in Connecticut is not, and perhaps never has been, between Democrats and Republicans. The dissevering line runs between progressive politicians who, victims of their own past successes, are not discomforted by ever-increasing taxes and spending – which go together, like the proverbial horse and carriage – and those who are beginning to suspect that the usual political bromides only sink the state further in a mire of political corruption and anti-democratic but successful political verbiage that makes no sense when examined closely. In the post income tax period, Connecticut entered into a perilous and fatally repetitious Groundhog Day, and those who might have opened the eyes of the public, reporters and commentators, were fast asleep.

Tolls are, in fact, an escape hatch for politicians who want to deceive their real employers, voters, into swallowing the fiction that less money for the masses and more for the politicians will usher in a progressive Eden, whereas inordinate revenue infusions only relieve politicians of the brutal necessity for spending cuts.

The general perception among all groups opposed to tolls and other revenue boosters appears to be: not one cent more in net revenue. For the benefit of the real state, not Connecticut’s administrative apparatus, the General Assembly must show in an indisputable and public manner that it intends to inaugurate real, lasting, spending reforms. The General Assembly is making a serious political mistake if it assumes that all the ruckus of the past year surrounding tolls is only about tolls. It is about the General Assembly and present and past governors who have closed their eyes and ears to the havoc they have caused and the wounds and injuries they have visited upon our beloved state.

Don Pesci is a Vernon, Conn.-based columnist.

Don Pesci: The state of Lamont's state

Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont delivered his second State of the State address on Feb. 5 to a General Assembly bulging with eupeptic progressives. Democrats have been in charge of the budget-writing General Assembly for the last few decades. It is true in Connecticut, as elsewhere in the nation, that the governor proposes budgets to the legislature, but it is the legislature that disposes of budgets, usually in close consultation with governors of the same party.

Lamont’s State of the State address was launched two days after President Trump delivered before a bitterly divided Congress his State of the Union address. Trump failed to shake House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s proffered hand at the beginning of the hostilities, and Nancy Pelosi ripped up the presidentially signed address at the end of the hostilities, which show no sign of abating.

The handshake has an interesting history. It developed in 5th Century Greece as a means of indicating non-hostile relations. An empty, outstretched hand offered in greeting showed that the greeter was unarmed. In the Middle Ages, a vigorous handshake was deployed to shake from loose clothing any concealed weaponry.

Pelosi’s quickly withdrawn outstretched hand concealed no dagger because the downward thrust of the Democrat’s impeachment bill was still to be deflected by Republicans. It is uncertain that the end of the process, a dismissal of the bill of impeachment by the Republican controlled Senate, will end attempts by Democrats to force Trump from office and so symbolically repeal the president’s 2016 election victory over an aggrieved Hillary Clinton. Pretty much everyone, including Trump, thinks the Democrats will be back at the same corner, should Trump win re-election, hawking the same impeachment elixir.

In Connecticut, there is no such deadly animosity between Democrats and Republicans, possibly because Democrats have been ruling the roost in the General Assembly for a good long while, longer than the young college age progressives in the state, many of whom are working feverishly to elevate to the White House the nation’s first socialist president, have been alive. Familiarity with the run of things does not breed contempt among Connecticut Republicans; it breeds familiarity. Over long periods, the creaking and worn back benches begin to feel like plush divans. Republicans in the state have never known how to campaign. Elections in the northeast are won on social rather than economic issues.

Democratic leader of the Senate Martin Looney liked the tone of the State of the State address – upbeat. And Democrat leader in the House Joe Arisimowicz thrilled to Lamont’s optimism. “I loved the idea of being the champions of Connecticut,” he said. “At some level, we all raise our hand and take an oath of office and we’re going to not only observe the Constitution but we’re going to act in the taxpayers’ behalf. And every time that you say that you can’t trust government, that’s a direct slap at the people’s trust in the government. We need to be out there and start talking positively about Connecticut.”

If majority Democrats were to board a CTFasttrack bus to Hell, the trip down would be considerably relieved with Lamont as the Devil’s co-pilot. He has a way of triumphing through shear exuberance over the most depressing news by inflating himself with gobs of optimism. Three years ago, Lamont noted, the Wall Street Journal was asking, “What’s the matter with Connecticut?” But today, after Lamont jaw-jawed the opinion editors of the Journal, the paper had changed its tone – “The state has dug a deep hole--maybe it has now stopped digging.”

Lamont’s enthusiasm, we are told by CTMirror, “was briefly rewarded with a bipartisan standing ovation. “The rest of the country is looking at our state in a new light — so should you. Optimism is contagious!” Lamont intoned.

But the hole cannot be conjured away through eupeptic incantations. The way UP is the same as the way DOWN – only in reverse. And there is no indication in Lamont’s directional map that the drivers, at long last, have got the message. If high taxes, burdensome regulations and the renting out to unelected commissions of the constitutional getting and spending obligations of the greatest deliberative body in the state point downwards, then way up is plain. Reverse everything – control runaway spending, moderate destructive ambitions, withdraw the crushing tentacles of state management from a creative and independent marketplace, discontinue investing in failed processes and invest in successful governance -- and Connecticut will begin to revive. It will stop digging its own grave.

Don Pesci is a Vernon, Conn.-based columnist.

Don Pesci: My 1957 Christmas

The author and his Boy Scout Christmas tree

VERNON, Conn.

The snow seemed deeper in those days because you had to shovel it in preparation for Christmas, when the guests would be coming. The Pertusi boys, John and Anthony, generally arrived early, full of smiles and hellos, and the winter of '57-’58 was obliging in our town of Windsor Locks, Conn. We hadn’t had much snow prior to Christmas.

There was always lots of glad-handing and, if I may say so, just plain glad-handling within our family because we were Italians, and Italians never really know a thing until they have handled it. Well, think of it: When you hug a person, you’re drawing him or her into your open heart. Now, this never presented a problem if the two huggers were male, though some people frown on that sort of thing. And for us, there was no problem hugging or bussing an aunt on the cheek, provided you were really happy to see her, which was nearly all the time. But we drew a line with female cousins. I won’t say we were stand-offish – not at all. But we were cautious.

In 1957, we were a dozen years on the other side of World War II, marching steadfastly towards prosperity. My twin sister and I were 14, she feeling like 18, that mystical age in which suddenly you became a grown-up and could do pretty much whatever you like, provided your dad approved. There was never a question of keeping secrets from him.

Christmas began with the arrival of the Pertusis by train, which deposited them at the old station on Main Street, shortly after my father bought a tree from the Boy Scouts, who always set up at the bottom of the intersection of South Main and Suffield Streets, a hop, skip and a jump from our house.

My twin sister, Donna, insists to this day that the Scouts sold the worst trees ever, perhaps a sleight exaggeration. Somehow I was under the impression that my father was averse to having strange trees and strangers in the house – plumbers particularly -- and his choice of trees may have been a way of grudgingly satisfying the wants of my mother, who was a stickler for tradition and propriety. In any case, our Christmas tree, even after it had been decorated, always seemed to want fullness.

Many years later, when I was as shorn of branches as those bygone trees, Donna circulated a picture of me embracing a Boy Scout tree before hauling it up the short incline to our house, painted at the time a forest green to compliment the two giant blue spruce trees that fronted 1 Suffield St. in Windsor Locks.

My mother, Rose, a practical woman, admired those spruce trees, which provided a barrier from prying eyes when we all gathered on the Pesci porch on spring and summer evenings, just as the sun was kissing the horizon.

Our house and porch was the Grand Central Station of our family. The back door -- the front door being reserved for less frequent visitors -- was a turnstile that admitted nearly every close and distant relative in town, as well as near and distant acquaintances of my father, such as the superintendent of the town dump. On occasion, the family, most especially my uncles Tommy and Charlie, went dump-picking, dragging home items, such as the shutters that still adorn the Suffield Street homestead, unappreciated by the owners who had deposited them in the dump, people who, as Oscar Wilde once said of the unsentimental cynics of his day, knew the price of everything and the value of nothing.

We should try to remember the people we love in their beauty and strength.

My mother’s kitchen was the site of many an evening poker gathering of raucous uncles and aunts. Getting the kids out of the way was an art rather than a science, and this always required a certain amount of misdirection. Poker days were scheduled for the weekends, usually on a Friday late at night when Don, Donna and Jim were abed.

My bedroom, shared with brother Jim until he was married and moved out of the house, was near enough to the kitchen so that, pressing my ear to the wall, I could hear, though never distinctly, the shouts of triumph and moans of despair piercing the slats and plaster as the poker game proceeded. To say the truth, Rose and Aunt Nellie, married to my uncle John, were better poker players than any of my uncles – Tommy, Charlie or John. A fourth uncle, Ray, was already tucked away in Long Island, New York, living the good life, along with his wife, Leatrice, who was partial to fox-fur, mink and Cadillacs.

The Christmas of 1957 was mild by New England standards. It was cold and gray, but the snow, a paltry 7 inches in December-January, was easily managed. We were used to the train hooting at night, when all our senses were alive to the surrounding sounds: cars, headed in the direction of Hartford or Springfield, passing on the main thoroughfare, Mr. Curtie’s mutt longing for the lost sun and barking in the distance, laughter coming from the kitchen, someone asking someone else “Pass the butter,” the someone else replying curtly, “Get it yourself.” On the table was a large pot of steamers, small dishes of melted butter, ashtrays filling with butt ends, and family familiars – the boys, Tommy, Johnnie and Charlie, and the girls, Rose, Dottie, Mary and Nellie – laughing, boasting, telling stories, cracking jokes, gleefully spreading doubtful rumors, all of them refusing to pass the butter, concentrating fiercely on their cards and trying to read in human faces who among them might win the hand.

My father had gone to bed early after having left near the table an alarm clock set at twelve PM, at the ringing of which everyone at table would be expected to go poof, like Cinderella at the stroke of midnight. The festivities usually concluded at one or two.

It was Friday the 20th, and Christmas Day was twinkling in all eyes. The kitchen was suffused with the odors of Christmas: traditional turkey with all the fixings, stuffing, cranberries, gravy the color of my father’s Sunday shoes, potatoes and turnips, greens and salad, wine red and white, fresh bread from the Italian bakery in Agawam or Hartford, Ann Bollea’s apple and mince pies. The small living room was bursting with laughter and conversations whispered and shouted. Such family gatherings were not rare, and everyone was there gathered around the table, elbow to elbow, but for the children, who were settled in the kitchen where we usually took our supper.

The turkey arrived, hefted by my father, who had left his alarm clock in his bedroom. When everyone had their fill, my mother, who had been watching the proceedings with the attention of a master sergeant, asked this or that feaster why they had not had seconds or, in the case of the gluttons, thirds.

My mother’s earlier injunction, “Now, there will be no talk of politics or religion at this table, at this time,” was generally widely disregarded.

Dwight Eisenhower had ascended to the presidency in 1953 and held that office until 1961. Pasting “I Like Ike” political posters over the bridge near Stony Brook was my introduction to politics. I believe my father had the first framed picture of Barry Goldwater in Connecticut. Barry and I shared a bedroom together, most likely because my mother – who grievously disappointed my father by voting for Senator Jack Kennedy over Richard Nixon for president in the 1960 – didn’t want a stranger glaring down on her in her bedroom. My father was a Republican in a town that was blanketed with Democrats, and these included many of my uncles, as well as Buzzy Bollea, my brother’s father-in-law. Quicksand, my mother knew, was everywhere. But the family managed to get along despite sharp political differences. Buzzy was a molecular Democrat, my father a molecular Republican, yet they were lifelong friends who admired each other for the best of reasons.

On the religious front, there were no atheists in the town and few publicly professed agnostics. My father and mother sent their children to St. Mary’s parochial school within shouting distance of our house. The Sisters of Saint Joseph were the teaching order that pulled us from first to eighth grade. My grandfather’s depreciation of the nuns was legendary. Whenever he saw a cluster of them proceeding from the school down Center Street during their frequent peregrinations, he would dive for cover into his house. But he was a man in whose brain superstition wrestled with rationality. One of those sisters taught me how to draw, and I will be forever grateful for her attentions.

Following the Christmas meal, the women floated into the kitchen, the table was cleaned, and the men, loosening their belts, retired to the living room to continue their confabulations. Someone was sure to fall asleep. Turkey has that effect on people. Somewhere around 11:00, nearly all the relatives departed to their own homes under a starless, cold, December sky. In the bedroom, the alarm clock would go off. Another Christmas had been tucked into bed.

In the morning, Mrs. Bianchi’s cock would crow and set off a riff of barking from Mr. Curtie’s old, nearly hairless, blond mutt.

Don Pesci is a Vernon-based columnist.