The Anti-Yale

Thursday, November 26, 2009

* A Half Century-Plus of First Amendment Calisthenics

Wednesday, November 25, 2009

* Hubris Mirror: Benjamin Franklin's and Abraham Lincoln's Turkey Day

A Grace for Yale Divinity School, Thanksgiving, 1976

You can’t say grace
If you don’t feel gratitude.

And in this old land
“I paid for it, so I deserve it”
Is an on-going national attitude.

Sure, we mortals croon
‘Cause we walked on the moon
Minutely divining its latitude.

But till time comes to end
Or there’s no more to spend
There’ll be no real change in our habitude:

The trouble with Grace
Is that new time and space
Is perennially bloating our vanitude.

What we need right now
As we sit down to chow
Is a mirror: To check-out our finitude.

PK

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

* "Our long national nightmare . . ." Gerald R. Ford

Ghost of Thanksgiving Past : What We Went Through: 1963-1974

John F. Kennedy
Lee Harvey Oswald
Malcolm X
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Robert F. Kennedy
My Lai
Kent State
Jackson State
Watergate
Abandoned Presidency

President Nixon resigns, 1974.

Congressional Watergate Investigation, 1973/4

Two students killed, ten wounded by police at Jackson State College, 1970

Four students killed, nine wounded, by Ohio National Guardsmen at Kent State University, 1970

The slaughter of 500 civilians by U. S. troops at My Lai, Viet Nam, 1969

Senator Robert F. Kennedy is assassinated, 1968.

Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. is assassinated, 1968.

Malcolm X is murdered, 1964.

Alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald is murdered, 1963.

President John F. Kennedy is assassinated, Thanksgiving, 1963.

"Too much happens...Man performs, engenders, so much more than he can or should have to bear. That's how he finds that he can bear anything...That's what's so terrible."

William Faulkner
Light in August

"After the first death there is no other."

Dylan Thomas
A Refusal to Mourn the Death of a Child, by Fire, in London

Denial is the greatest and most salvific of all human faculties. Or, as a more prosaic pundit put it, "Human beings have a built-in forgetter."

Monday, November 23, 2009

* Death in Hanover and the Hippocratic Oath

Paulina Karpis reports tonight 11/23 the following sad story as an email bulletin in The Dartmouth, the student newspaper at Dartmouth College five miles from my home:

Henry Masters, a student in the master's of public health program at The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, passed away this weekend after testing positive for the H1N1 virus. Masters had a chronic autoimmune disorder that College President Jim Yong Kim said in a campus-wide e-mail Monday afternoon was the "underlying cause" of his death.

Whether or not President Kim had the family's permission to discuss the deceased student's health situation is not the question. And we extend our sincere condolences to that family as we perhaps follow in the same dubious footsteps with this very commentary.

What is the question is whether or not it was in good taste to enter into such a discussion, regardless of the urgency of keeping the Dartmouth community from panic in reaction to the H1N1 death.

President Kim is a medical doctor as I understand it, not just a Ph.D. Patient/doctor confidentiality--and its certainty -- is the axis on which all medical interactions rotate in America.

To raise even the possibility that the certainty of that confidentiality was worth sacrificing to the College's need to maintain its composure and its public image, is a sad commentary.

Has corporate health trumped the Hippocratic Oath here?

First, do no harm. Even to a patient who is deceased. And to the profession.

Would it be different if Dr. Kim was not a medical doctor?

Yes: Just another bumbling bureaucrat.

Sunday, November 22, 2009

* "History is bunk." Henry Ford

Saturday, November 21, 2009

* "Bastard" Etiquette B. L. M.

(My mother, Barbara Ward Keane, at 70 with her god-daughter)

"Bastard"

My mother never would have uttered the word "bastard". But she occasionally had to hand a senior citizen an official document with that word emblazoned in red across it.

B.L. M. (Before Liiberation Movements) she worked in the Town Clerk's office of a town ten miles from Yale near The Sleeping Giant mountain. She had as one of her duties searching for and presenting original birth certificates to their name bearers. In Puritan riddled New England, until the last few decades , births, and their certificates, without a certifiable father's name, were recorded "illegitimate," and before that simply with a red stamp reading "Bastard" emblazoned diagonally across the certificate.

Hard to believe.

Another Puritannical oddity which I marvel at from her Town Clerk's office days (which ended in 1978 with her retirement at 68)is the quandry my mother was in when she received a phone call while alone in the office one afternoon from another Town Clerk's office nearby; two men who had just been rejected for a marriage licence by the phone-caller, were on their way to my mother's office to secure a marriage licence (this was before 1978, mind you).

My mother was a lady, and a lady (like a gentleman) has as her highest code the axiom that one should never embarrass another person if it can be avoided. My mother's solution in this case, was to leave the office open, but unattended, and go to another office before the couple arrived, to work there until they left---thereby causing them no personal discomfort or embarrassment.

In the case of the "bastard" certificate, my mother's solution was easier. She merely handed the certificate to the person completely un-shielded by envelope or paper as if nothing unusual was occurring. Indeed, since she had to wait for the certificate to be returned, she would often engage the recipient in blithe chitchat.

Lady.

Friday, November 20, 2009

* Grand Oprah / Soap Oprah

Grand Oprah / Soap Oprah

Today, Oprah gave the world an 18 month teary eyed countdown to her disappearance from the daytime television slot she will have held for 25 years when that countdown comes to an end.

I do not want to talk about the trivial Tom Cruise Oprah; the celebrity interviewer; the perfume and toaster gift giver Oprah: the Soap Oprah.

It is the intellectual and philanthropic Oprah ; the Grand Oprah who deserves praise here: for making reading an exciting passtime again for millions; for bringing sexual abuse out of the closet; for interviewing those who have overcome health challenges and those who have done good in the midst of evil; for being a leader for women (Even Sarah Palin thanked Oprah on her show last week for setting an example for women as a woman who could do it all, when Palin was younger and assessing her own aspirational compass); and, for letting us know the truth of what we see before our very eyes every day: that the richest woman in the world is unhappy and drugs herself with food.

Money; fame; power; cosmetic youth: Dust in the wind.

Ask Liberace.

Who?