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.