I’m a collector. I save hard-copy versions of all my columns. (What did you expect me to save? The insulting paycheck stubs?)
I’ve done postage stamps and chess sets and wine. But the most important asset is a collection of quotes; the kind that either makes the Earth stand still because they are so wise — or so dumb.
I actually cherish the bad stuff. It helps explain why the world is often so confused and awful — and it occasionally provides fodder for columns — of which, by the way, I have a complete collection.
For instance, when former Secretary of the State Susan Bysiewicz cranked out an email announcing that she was running for Joe Lieberman’s U.S. Senate seat, she suggested that Connecticut needs “a senator who is 100 percent focused on helping our state.”
Well, of course, that’s ridiculous. It’s even a bit irresponsible. Perhaps a U.S. representative could get away with suggesting that his or her only goal in life is to heave pork projects over the Potomac and back home to the voters — but even that’s not true. No, Susan, sometimes or, perhaps, most of the time, you’re involved in “providing for the national defense” and lots of other important stuff that may not have anything specifically to do with Connecticut. Nice try, though.
I’m not the only guy who collects dumb quotes. The futureofcapitalism.com blog picked up on a quote from Massachusetts U.S. Sen. John Kerry, who just introduced legislation to establish a federal infrastructure financing authority. “These are strictly loans — not grants — for commercially viable projects,” Kerry said. As the blog pointed out, if the projects are ‘commercially viable,’ why do taxpayers have to cough up loans or loan guarantees?
High on my list of collectibles was a comment from Connecticut’s new energy and environmental protection czar, Dan Esty, who told the Hartford Business Journal that “in the next decade, we will be what California was in the last decade,” in terms of environmental standards. That’s not one of those quotes you’re going to find highlighted in Connecticut economic development brochures. Ah, yes, yet another reason not to move any business to Connecticut that doesn’t involve mowing the lawns of rich people in Fairfield County who don’t care about energy costs.
And then there was the cancer-patient advocate who praised Medicare’s decision to pay for a $93,000 anti-prostate cancer therapy that might add about four months to the life of a patient. ‘It’s impossible to put a dollar figure on a human lifeˆ “ he explained. But, of course, the reality is that we do that every day. From trial lawyers to Workers’ Compensation administrators to government health bureaucrats, we do, in fact, put a price tag on lives. If we didn’t and someone as irreplaceable as Cohen the Columnist got sick, we could deplete the entire Treasury just taking care of him.
Gov. Dan Malloy’s kissy-face tap dance with the state’s state employee labor unions, trying to sound stern while winking and crossing his fingers behind his back, often leads to some interesting quotes. At that big union rally on the State Capitol grounds in February, he said, “we can work together; we can build up our middle class … ”
Great. The new and improved economic development experiment for Connecticut: we build our middle class by caving in to the middle-class employees who already are on the government payroll.
Of course, one of my own quotes is included in my collection. When the contractor working on my house started to install the wrong beam, I told him, “a house divided against itself cannot stand.” Pretty good, huh?
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
