For Auld Lang Syne

The New Year, I pointed out to an acquaintance, has?GOT to be better than the old year in sad, old New England. His left eyebrow shot up, a near certain sign that I had crossed some forbidden threshold into absurdity.

“Why?” he asked.

“Because the future is built upon the past and generally has been an improvement,” I answered. “My great grandfather had the use of an outhouse, bitterly cold in the winter. But I have modern plumbing, television, Facebook, Twitter, all the modern conveniences, in addition to an all Democrat U.S. Congressional Delegation, a Democrat dominated General Assembly, a Democrat governor – who has become, with the blessings of the General Assembly, an autocrat far more powerful than the Borgias of the Florentine Republic -- all of which seems not to have alarmed Connecticut’s vigilant left of center media. Surely, if we were headed to the poor house, they would tell us so.”

The eyebrow spired up again, like the tower of a gothic cathedral. “Your son and daughter also have modern plumbing,” he said. “Good for them. But in an age in which there is an abundance of Harvard and Yale legal scholars and a shortage of students, male and female, taking plumbing in trade schools, we are likely to have plumbing problems in the future. And Rome, which was not built in a day, was irrecoverably destroyed in a day by the traditional enemies of Rome. There are moments in history in which barbarians clamoring at the gates have successfully destroyed entire cultures. The Roman household, remember, was far more culturally advanced than that of the Goths.

“Will Connecticut’s suppurating wounds – a sluggish economy, an enormous debt of some $59 billion hanging over the heads of our children and grandchildren, fixed and untouchable costs that cannot be reduced legislatively, a shrinking private sector and an expanding public employee sector – be healingly addressed in the New Year?” I asked.

“They will not.”

The last notable act of term-limited New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio before leaving office was the destruction of the city’s joyous, crowd pleasing, boozy New Year’s Eve celebration.

An order from de Blasio that all the celebrants must wear masks and show proof that they had been vaccinated was a joy-killer, somewhat like the arrival of the Red Death at Prospero’s castle in Edgar Allen Poe’s short story?The Masque of the Red Death. Most sensible New Yorkers not on the city payroll may be happy to see de Blasio go. His relationship with New York City police has been described as “tense .” The Mayor’s replacement, former?New?York?City police captain Eric Adams, has vowed to do something about mounting crime in the Big Apple and to restore sufficient funding to the New York City Police Department.

The departure of de Blasio was preceded by the departure of Governor Andrew Cuomo. We do not know who the next governor of New York might be, but all bets that it might be the former governor’s “journalist” brother, Chris Cuomo, are off. And if the fates smile on New York, it may not be de Blasio either.

At the dropping of the New Year’s Eve Ball in New York, the celebrants, many of whom had defiantly shed their mouth coverings, broke into a traditional song, “Auld Lang Syne”, a Robert Burns poem set to music most memorably by Bennie Goodman, but also Beethoven and Mozart.

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,

And never brought to mind,

Should Auld acquaintance be forgot,

And days o’ Auld lang syne…

… We’ll tak a cup o’kindness yet,

For auld lang syne…

It is a melancholy tune, and many who sing it will not likely know the reason for the melancholy or the brave history of Robert Burns, a Scottish gentleman farmer who wrote his poems at a time when Scotland itself, its language and its rich history, was being incorporated into the British Empire. Most of the poets in Scotland during Burns’ day wrote in the King’s English -- not so Burns. The literal meaning of “auld lang syne” is something like “old long-times-gone-by.” Burns, a collector of Scottish folk tales and a vigorous contrarian, was determined not to let the old long-times-gone-by, whimper lamely into the future. He wrote, as much as possible, in the Scottish dialect.

In the New Year, New Yorkers will have an opportunity to look backwards to a time when there were no Cuomos or de Blasios, and forward to a time, pregnant with hope, in which the old times will call beckoningly to them, beseeching them, “to tak a cup o’kindness yet/ For auld lang syne.”