Don Pesci: Taking down Columbus and a mau-mauing in New Haven

Bronze statue of Christopher Columbus, formerly situated at Wooster Square, in New Haven. The statue was removed by the city Parks Commission on June 24, 2020.

A video published by the New Haven Independent showing New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker being mau-maued by Los Fidel, not his birth name, the day after a Columbus statue had been booted from Wooster Square Park may not be a vote-getter for Elicker during his next campaign.

Two days after the removal of the statue by the Park Commission, not the city’s elected Board of Alderman, tempers were still sparking.

“You should have been here,” Fidel told Elicker.

“Everyone makes mistakes, and I make mistakes,” Elicker responded. In retrospect, Elicker confessed, “he should have been in Wooster Square rather than in his office at City Hall on Wednesday.”

On the day of removal, Elicker had been at a safe distance from the park in his office attending to business. Two days later, he ventured out and met with about 30 protesters who had cheered as the offending statue had been carted off.

“Sitting on the grass in a circle with the group,” The New Haven Independent reported, “Elicker spent most of the first hour listening to Fidel tell his story, interspersed with critiques of the mayor. (Watch the full conversation in the video above.)”

The video captures Fidel hurling imprecations at the mayor. “F**k you!” critiqued Fidel at one point.

His manners exquisitely intact, Elicker responded, “That’s not respectful.”

Fidel’s story was poignant:

“I’m looking at the f**king white devil," Fidel said at another point. He then apologized for his manner, and wiped away tears as he recounted getting punched in the back of the head and having slurs shouted at him Wednesday.

Fidel spoke of the many times he has been arrested over the years, for charges including felony possession of a deadly weapon and driving under the influence. He said his first arrest came at 13, and that the deadly weapon charge had to do with fishing equipment and was exaggerated by police.

He expressed how he has felt traumatized by law enforcement growing up in Bridgeport and living in New Haven for over 15 years.

"I’m a felon. I’ve been arrested for things I didn’t do my whole life," Fidel said. He said law enforcement has falsely targeted him. "I stabbed somebody in self-defense." He said he was charged with operating a "drug factory," when in fact, he said, he had less than an ounce of marijuana at his place. (According to court records, he has been found guilty of second-degree assault, probation violation, larceny, and reckless endangerment, among other offenses.)

To be sure, life in the city under the glare of the hypercritical police is no walk in the park. But Elicker’s problem, purely political, is a bit different than Fidel’s. Will the whole affair surrounding the removal of a mute statue help or hurt Elicker politically? It may seem obscene to people who are not professional politicians, but politicians, as a general rule, have an eye cocked on political loss or gain when they engage in politics. And politicians are always on the job, so to speak, always politicking, whether they are hugging babies or, in the midst of a Coronavirus outbreak, not hugging babies.

Other protesters joined in the conversation after Fidel had recovered his manners. “Disband police officers that have lost their legitimacy because they are working as an occupying force and stealing wealth from African-American communities,” one recommended.

Elicker responded that he was “prioritizing moving along appointments and seating the police Civilian Review Board… ‘I think there are opportunities to civilianize the police force,’ Elicker said. He said he sees opportunities to have police officers show up to fewer calls, which can be diverted to other responders,” the cri de coeur of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement.

So it goes in New Haven, and much of this is “deja vu all over again,” in Yogi Bera’s memorable phrase,  for people familiar withThomas Wolfe’s still readable essays published in a book titled Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers.

Here is Wolfe carefully probing the difference between a confrontation and a demonstration in Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers:

A demonstration, like the civil-rights march on Washington in 1963, could frighten the white leadership, but it was a general fear, an external fear, like being afraid of a hurricane. But in a confrontation, in mau-mauing, the idea was to frighten white men personally, face to face. The idea was to separate the man from all the power and props of his office. Either he had enough heart to deal with the situation or he didn't. It was like to saying, "You--yes, you right there on the platform--we're not talking about the government, we're not talking about the Office of Economic Opportunity--we're talking about you, you up there with your hands shaking in your pile of papers ..."

Intimidation of this kind may not be “respectful” – but it works well enough in New Haven.

D0n Pesci is a columnist based in Vernon, Conn.

Chris Powell: Connecticut's toll trauma

Gov. Ned Lamont's plan for imposing tolls on Connecticut's highways has devolved over a few months from 50 tolling stations producing about $800 million a year to just 14 stations at bridges needing renovation, where a mere fraction of that $800 million would be raised.

So what happened to the plan? The governor, a Democrat, eventually calculated that while his party has comfortable majorities in both houses of the General Assembly, a majority can be built for tolls only on the smallest scale, since the Republicans are opposed and many Democrats are fearful of retaliation from their constituents.

Some of the governor's ideas for transportation improvements are compelling, like bringing more passenger service to Tweed New Haven Airport or a serious amount to Sikorsky Memorial Airport,. in Stratford, along with modernizing the Metro-North commuter railroad from New Haven to New York. But putting tolls all over the place would be far too visible to voters. It also would be a regressive form of taxation, falling mainly on the poor and middle class, whom the Democrats purport to represent. Meanwhile the state's ever-rising taxes are inducing people with higher incomes to leave the state, which continues to lose population relative to the rest of the country.

Democratic legislators are usually willing to raise taxes, so their reluctance with tolls indicates a change in political atmosphere. Such a change was also indicated by the most notable result of this year's municipal election campaigns -- the defeat of New Haven Mayor Toni Harp by Justin Elicker in the Democratic primary and then again in last week's election, where Harp ran as the candidate of the government employee union-dominated Working Families Party. Harp had just raised New Haven's property taxes by 11 percent and her administration lately was full of costly incompetence.

Since Democratic legislators fear tolls and since even overwhelmingly Democratic New Haven seems sick of taxes, people here slowly may be wising up. So the government class may be vulnerable if Connecticut ever has an opposition party not led by President Trump.

In any case, tolls are not really for transportation purposes. Rather they are for allowing the state's Democratic regime to avoid economizing in the rest of government in favor of transportation.

Tolls will let state government continue to overlook its mistaken and expensive policies with education, welfare, and government employees, where ever more spending fails to improve learning, worsens the dependence of the unskilled, and makes public administration less efficient and accountable.

Connecticut needs profound reform in these respects, and enacting tolls will only reduce the pressure on elected officials to choose the public interest over special interests.

The state's most fearsome special interest, the Connecticut Education Association, the teachers union, inadvertently illustrated one of those choices the other day. The union issued a report about “sick” schools -- schools that, because of deferred maintenance and lack of improvements, suffer from mold, excessive heat, and such.

But school maintenance and improvements are neglected in large part because state law requires binding arbitration of teacher union contracts, thereby giving teacher compensation priority in budgeting. There's no binding arbitration for “sick” schools, so maintenance and improvements are often deferred in favor of raising teacher pay.

What's really sick here is the law, since it serves only the special interest, letting it cannibalize the rest of government.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.

Chris Powell: Prosecute kids for wearing blackface? Perpetual poverty in New Haven

Promotional poster for Spike Lee’s 2000 film Bamboozled, about a disgruntled black television executive who reintroduces the old blackface style in a series concept to try to get himself fired, and is instead horrified by its success.

Kids can be horrible -- stupid, cruel, hateful, sadistic, reckless, and worse. But in spite of the indignation lately contrived by the Connecticut chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, wearing blackface is not high on the scale of youthful offenses.

The other week, at a press conference outside a middle school in Shelton, Conn., one of whose white students recently posted on the Internet a photo of herself wearing blackface, the NAACP suggested that kids deserve to be shot for that kind of thing or at least criminally prosecuted for a "hate crime."

On top of that, according to the Valley Independent Sentinel, the NAACP demanded that Shelton authorities account to the organization for the progress of the "investigation" of the incident and include the organization in a mandatory discussion with students and school staff about racial diversity.

Make wearing blackface a "hate crime"? That's fascism. For no matter how offensive the blackface-wearing student was, and no matter what she meant, if anything, she did it on her own time to her own looks in her own life. A school can disapprove of certain things that rise to public attention, and of course a school always should be teaching decent behavior, but First Amendment freedom of expression in one's personal life is and must remain inviolate. The government has no authority to punish it.

In peacefully protesting racial oppression in the segregationist South, the civil rights advocates of a half century ago struggled and even died for freedom of expression. The NAACP was part of that struggle. Now the organization wants 12-year-olds prosecuted for putting on makeup and making faces.

But it's even more ironic. Lately the NAACP has supported Connecticut's new laws increasing leniency for juveniles who commit crimes like car theft. So now in Connecticut juveniles can get caught stealing cars twice before a court can impose any punishment on them. Many of those juveniles are black. But the NAACP thinks wearing blackface is worse than car theft.

Most kids grow up. The premier of Canada wore blackface when he was young. So did the governor of Virginia. They lately were caught through old photos and repented. Blackface is not who they are now. Most of the kids in Connecticut who lately have advertised themselves wearing blackface have been reprimanded and likely will grow up too. With luck many of Connecticut's young and coddled car thieves will not only grow up but stay out of prison.

The NAACP should grow up as well. There are far more serious things to be indignant about.

* * *

WHY THE PERPETUAL POVERTY? Fresh from his victory in New Haven's Democratic primary for mayor, Justin Elicker has urged Yale University students to devote some time to civic life in the city. According to the Yale Daily News, one student snarked back, "We're a university, not a soup kitchen."

Elicker replied that some city residents "can't put food on the table" while Yalies enjoy an all-you-can-eat dining hall.

But despite that snarky student, Yale is not quite the bastion of privilege it once was. Now about half Yale's students receive the university's own scholarships under "need-blind" admissions policy so that even kids who grew up dining at soup kitchens and don't have much money can get into the university.

Also the other week CTNewsJunkie reported that Connecticut is the only state in which poverty recently increased. So Yale students and Elicker himself might perform a great civic service if they could ever determine why poverty and urban policies are failing so badly.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.