*Posting Bond

Yale or jail; Park Avenue or park bench; my posting is dedicated to egalitarianism, not elitism.

Whatever bond I had with The Yale Daily News posting board after two full years and the beginning of this third academic year of posts, ended suddenly with the last word of my final post: EXORCISM (9/21/10).

It's as if writing the word itself put a final incantation on the spell and the Yale/New Haven demons were gone ---- at least from MY life.

My first year, I posted anonymously, contriving an insoucient name for each post.  I can't even recall what drew me to the YDN in the first place, or what names I used.

The second year--when news coverage seemed to have gravely serious and inflammatory topics (such as Yale Press's cowardly collapse under the pressures of terrorism by censoring all of the controversial Muhammed cartoons in a book it published on that very cartoon controversy over images of Islam's Prophet ), I decided it was cowardly to hide behind anonymous posts and started using my name and that of this, then newly founded, blog, The Anti-Yale.

With the murder of Ms. Le on campus during the fortieth anniversary (academic) year of my own witnessing of four murders on an Ohio campus, I felt eerily drawn to stay with the YDN, even though it brought up many PTSS memories.

So too with the subsequent drug-overdose death and then the suicide of promising Yale undergraduates.  At one or two points I even felt as if my comments might have been useful to the community. ("Tragedy" is too trite a word here for any or all these events.)

But the exorcism is over.

My abilities are better utilized elsewhere.

I may have stopped following  The Yale Daily News, but I wish Yale, Yale students, and New Haven well.

I  continue posting on this blog, The Anti-Yale, although, after more than 250 posts in sixteen months, one wonders how much longer the Muse will choose to extend her (could be "his") visit.

Paul. D. Keane (M. Div. '80)
The Anti-Yale