A GOOD MAN IS HARD TO FIND

(a note to readers: Catherine, the Great, the latest addition to our family, arrived last week. Hence, I’ve been 1% more conscious amidst burping, changing diapers, and sleepless nights.)

Well, it’s official: Oedipus Lieberman’s narcissistic personality disorder has swung into yet another new chapter, “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” In a pathetic effort to direct voters to look for his name at the ballot’s bottom—an appropriate place indeed, although I’d prefer his name off the ballot entirely, Oedipus et al are running an advertisement campaign to make sure the voters find him. How ironic!

Perhaps Oedipus Lieberman should find himself, since we now know that he’s really not a “true” Democrat even though he still clamors to be one. It’s also blatantly obvious that he’s not a “real” independent either. Being financed by every special interest group and corporation known to man, Oedipus Lieberman should be going public any day now. That Oedipus Lieberman has now sought the backers of former CT Governor and convict John Rowland shows the depths that Joe will go. And since Halloween has come and gone, some Republicans might be getting the hint that while Joe has temporarily aligned with them, his relentless masking and unmasking as any political entity financiers and their bases want reveals an individual who will do anything to retain power. Folks, he’s not a Republican either. Put simply, he’s Oedipus Lieberman, a man so myopic that what matters to him most is his own self-interest.

In a twisted way, I’m fascinated by this new chapter, “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” for two reasons: one, the blatant irony; and two, for those of us familiar with the great Flannery O’Connor, her famous short story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find.”

Let’s start with the irony here: who is really good in this senate showdown? Is it Joe, an establishment, self-serving politician who believes he owns a senate seat and who is more patently concerned with special interest groups than with his own constituents? Hell, I’ve received more mail from Joe and his “friends” in the past two weeks than in the past eighteen years he’s been in the senate. Too bad the mailings are about Ned Lamont and not about explicating Lieberman’s positions on Iraq, especially since there were approximately 100 American deaths in Iraq last month compounded by the fact that military leaders have been calling for Rumsfeld’s resignation. Too bad the mailings didn’t set the record straight on Joe’s position, or let’s say positions, on Social Security. Joe’s done more triangulating on this one than Billary and Billary put together. Too bad these mailings were swifter than a response by Joe’s office to me and countless others for not filibustering the confirmation of Samuel Alito. Too bad these mailings were quicker than the responses to the many constituents who discovered that they no longer could count on Joe even though they once agreed that Joe actually did serve Connecticut, an element of this political narrative that the media has conveniently overlooked.

Is Ned Lamont the good one in this campaign? Granted Lamont is a political neophyte. Undoubtedly, he’s rather unpolished; he’s not as smooth as Joe, or as quick witted as Lucky Hands Al, who, let’s face it: talks a great game but comes up short in more ways than one. Just talk to people who live in the Derby area, and you may find out that they don’t think Al’s funny at all.

Willing to take a risk, Lamont is a father of three teenagers and a former Lieberman supporter, who, like many of us, views this prolonged, ill-conceived and mismanaged war very differently and has grown increasingly fed up with obdurate Oedipus. Unlike many of us, though, Ned has the money, influence and wherewithal to do something about it. Say what you will: Yes, Lamont is basically financing his own campaign. Yes, he has little political experience. But at least we know that Ned has paid for his campaign and dares to offer new ideas and bold criticism whereas Lieberman has been bankrolled by Wall Street backers and hackers, neoconservative loons, and special interest groups who are more concerned with…staying the course. By the way, folks, it’s a known fact that ol’ whining Joe has surpassed Lamont with campaign contributions.

Who’s good? You decide. But what does Flannery O’Connor have to do with this? O’Connor’s dark, twisted, comedic story “A Good Man is Hard to Find” focuses on this old, southern grandmother who remains stuck in her ways and resists change while the whole world around her, including her family, breaks from the past to move toward the future. On a family trip to another southern destination, the grandmother and her family learn that there’s a serial killer on the loose. Because of the grandmother’s insistence on visiting a plantation along the way, one she once went to long ago, the family literally crashes into this lunatic and his posse. Yes, they all meet their fate because of her, because of her stubbornness, because of her unwillingness to change, because of her unbending reverence for the past. One by one, the serial killer and his men start to kill off the family, saving ol’ granny for last. She tries to reason with him, and strangely enough, begins to believe that because he’s a good, Christian man, she can convince him not to KILL her. The hell with her family, who is already dead. By the time that the serial killer kills ol’ granny, the reader—and obviously, the author—are glad to see her dead. She’s that unforgiving.

So what’s your point? What does this have to do with the CT senate race? Are you outrageously implying that Joe is allegorically…that awful grandmother? Are you asserting that the serial killer and his posse are the deranged neocons who’ve bulldozed the Bush administration and engineered the Iraq fiasco? Is the car and the family in the car the electorate of Connecticut?

Perhaps you’ll have to read “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” Who’s good? You decide.