Quote of the Day (Dennis Lehane, on Boston Working-Class Humor)

“To this day… I've never met a comedian half as funny as at least five people I knew growing up. In Dorchester … my dad was part of a bar culture. He used to bring me into bars all the time and pretend, telling my mother we were at a farmers’ market so he could sneak in and have a drink on a Saturday. So I grew up listening to people talk and tell stories and they were always working-class stories. The point of any working-class story is ‘I got screwed,’ right? But [also] ‘I got a little bit of vengeance,’ like ‘I keyed his car,’ ‘I slept with his sister.’ It's a tragic story: ‘I got screwed.’ But it's got a little bit of levity in it…. I think in Irish culture, personally—and that's where Dorchester is, and Savin Hill, where I grew up— that's where we get our sense of humor, [from] the Irish. They believe that God is a prankster and we're the butt of the joke, you know.  That's something that just goes into my work.”—American crime novelist and screenwriter Dennis Lehane interviewed by Anna Kusmer for the “Say More” podcast, Boston Globe, Jan.8, 2026 episode

The image accompanying this post, showing Dennis Lehane at the 2010 Brooklyn Book Festival, was taken by David Shankbone.

Quote of the Day (Charles Peters, on Hillary Clinton’s ‘Smug Certainty of Her Own Virtue’)

“What scares me the most is Hillary’s smug certainty of her own virtue as she has become greedy and how typical that is of so many chic liberals who seem unaware of their own greed. They don’t really face the complicity of what’s happened to the world, how selfish we’ve become and the horrible damage of screwing the workers and causing this resentment that the Republicans found a way of tapping into.”—Former Washington Monthly editor Charles Peters quoted in Maureen Dowd, “Curtains for the Clintons,” The New York Times, Dec. 2, 2018

Charles Peters, let it be said right away, is no Trump supporter. But he’s in as good a position as anyone to understand why Hillary Clinton lost the support of the working class that had been a bulwark of the Democrats going back at least to the New Deal.

Now in his 90s, Peters was a county campaign chairman in his native West Virginia for John F. Kennedy in the 1960 Presidential election. Since 2000, he has watched in dismay and horror every four years as this once reliably Democratic state has given its wholehearted allegiance to the GOP.

Years from now, historians will be utterly perplexed over why Hillary Clinton, so obviously better qualified for the Presidency than her opponent—and part of an administration with a favorable record on the economic and national-security issues that matter to voters—could have lost to Donald Trump. Perplexed, that is, unless they understand the smugness that Peters correctly identifies as infuriating to the working class.

How could anyone question her good faith, Ms. Clinton wonders, even as she and her husband took in $240 million over a 15-year period speaking to all manner of industry groups and foreign countries who sensed—correctly—that she would be gearing up for a third Clinton term in the Oval Office. Her tone-deafness in making three speeches to Goldman Sachs totaling $675,000—and then refusing to divulge the transcripts of the addresses (which ended up out there anyway, courtesy of WikiLeaks)—is remarkable.

But then, it is hardly less remarkable than a Democratic Party that helped pass NAFTA under Clinton’s husband—an agreement that, it is plain to see now, did nowhere near enough to protect American workers from production jobs being moved to Mexico, not to mention lowering wages and benefits here at home, according to an analysis five years ago by the Economic Policy Institute.

In the 1936 election, even amid the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt fulminated against the “economic royalists” of Wall Street, and won in a landslide. In 2016, a more brazen “economic royalist” than FDR could ever have dreamed of won the Presidency, in no small part because of the very real faults that so many in the working class detected in Ms. Clinton.

Power is as addictive as any opioid, a condition demonstrated once again by Ms. Clinton’s unwillingness to disclaim any more attempts at the Oval Office. For Trump to be defeated in 2020—and Trumpism to be removed from the American body politic thereafter—Clinton needs to be repudiated by the Democrats, along with the corporate coziness that led the party to look away as the 1% put workers’ livelihoods and lives at risk, then escaped the jail time they so richly deserved for causing the Crash of ’08.