* "War with the World"

My Grandmother, Alice Nugent Ward, in her Rebekah gown. She lived in a third floor walk-up with no hot water at Elm and State Streets, two blocks from Yale and the New Haven Green, until 1960.














PK (right) and brother Chris, left, circa 1948.


















Orson Welles, 1938, creating a national panic wih his radio broadcast, "War of the Worlds" in which millions of listeners believed earth was being invaded by beings from outer space.














Columbia University, Harlem























Charles Dickens











"This Peter Keane and his war with the world."





I guess I started this blog last September, seven months ago --- long enough to make a baby (at least, this baby, since I was two months premature).

Somewhere along the line a Yale poster referred to me and The Anti-Yale as
"This Peter Keane and his war with the world". I think I replied: "Not the world, just elitiism, racism and sexism," ignoring the incorrect name.

Well, the Yale poster's hyperbole actually has some truth to it. It is rather tiring to have so many discontents weighing me down or irritating me up, all the time.

However, "all the time" is really inaccurate also.

It is only when they are triggered that they weigh on me; and, for some reason, the Yale Daily News seems to be a fist full of fingers on my trigger:

Perhaps because I was a born in New Haven;
perhaps because I went to the divinity school;
perhaps because I see the jewel of Yale held in a setting of decay and decadence and urban crime.

Harlem's Columbia couldn't be any worse.

And these sidewalks-- New Haven and Yale -- were the sidewalks my five year old feet trod at my grandmother's hand.

Today, sixty years later, Yale and New Haven seem a bit more like Dickens's London----- (privilege in a cesspool) ------ than they do like the dream of my childhood under the spell of my grandmother's silver white tresses which she wore regally, like Nature's crown, without a penny to her name.

Anyway, this is Paul Keane, not Peter Keane, signing off.

My "war" is tiring enough without expanding it to the world, so I'll just leave it on the pages of the Daily News.

If there.

Later.

(Perhaps).