* Strangling Speech Selectively at Yale, 2009

YaleSpeak Then and Now

NYTimes.com


THE REGION (New England)

Escapee Gives Up

Published: February 28, 1984
A convicted prostitute, believed to be suffering from AIDS, surrendered to a public defender here today, six days after she escaped from a drug treatment program.

The woman, Carlotta XXXXXXXX, 29 years old, was ordered held in $25,000 bond. She was arraigned in Superior Court in New Haven on charges of failing to appear in court, disorderly conduct, possession of drug paraphernalia and possession of narcotics.




Yale rebuked by
Foundation for Individual Rights
in Education (FIRE)
December, 2009


Adam Kissel (Harvard '94)
Director, Individual Rights Defense Program of
Foundation for Individual Rights in Education
has sent Yale President Richard Levin a "rebuke" according to a Yale Daily News article for allowing Dean Mary Miller to bully Yale freshmen council into withdrawing a T-shirt it had designed with a quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise: "I think of all Harvard men as sissies."

Well I don't know what Fitzgerald and Yale freshmen would think, but I think of all Yale administrators and faculty not as sissies but as Bullies.

It's Bully for Yale and to hell with the rest of the world-----starting at about Elm and Howe Street where the drug and prostitute section of New Haven begins, one block from the Yale Co-op and half a block from Payne Whitney Gym.

I know, I used to live there when I went to Yale Divinity School and I ate breakfast in Patricia's Restaurant almost every morning.

It was in that neighborhood that I discovered in 1983 the first woman known in America to have transmitted AIDS (to her own infant, in the womb), a prostitute and heroin addict, facts which Yale medical and academic faculty criticized me for revealing on "60 Minutes" at a time when heterosexual transmission of AIDS was unknown in America. (What was I to do? Let people DIE for my politically correct silence?)

No faculty member or administrator lifted a finger to help alert people that AIDS could be transmitted heterosexually. (Recall, AIDS was taboo at this time, more taboo than homosexuality ever was. Many claimed it was God's punishment for homosexuality.) No one dared touch this heterosexual hot potato with a ten foot pole.

With one courageous exception: The Chaplain, John Vannorsdall.

In fact, Woodbridge Hall (I was an alumnus by then) made the President's legal counsel available to me not to save human lives, but, only to keep me from embarrassing Yale by blundering into illegality.

President Giamatti did send me a one sentence note of thanks, but uncomplainingly allowed me to pay out of my own pocket for 5000 A.I.D.S.(AIDS Information Dissemination Service) pamphlets which were distributed to Yale students through Yale Station, warning students of explicit sexual acts which could transmit AIDS.

Pretty controversial (taboo even) for its day, 1984, before the now omni-present Viagra Generation was even conceived (pun intended).

As for Yale's neighbors a block away? Did Yale use its massive free-speech machinery to warn them of the mortal dangers?


Let them eat cake--or heroin.

It's only prostitutes and drug addicts. They won't affect our precious Ivy League clientele.

They live on the wrong side of the tracks anyway.

That was 25 years ago, and the tracks are getting even closer to Bully Old Blue today with the building of two new colleges in a location which makes Yale and the ghetto virtually contiguous.

Imagine the wall which will be erected. Will it be electrified? Or maybe buried? A human variation of Invisible Fence?

All Yale students and employees can wear collars (bulldog collars) which will permit them to pass through, bar coded to their ID's.

This minimal benchmark will ensure transparency and accountability in case the collars are lost or sold. (I'm in Obama-buzz-word heaven! Have you been lulled into complacency or boredom yet?)

Better still, Yale Health Services can implant bar coded devices under the skin, making loss or sale impossible. They can even charge a monthly rental fee (great way to raise revenue) and de-activate those collars( from an automated computer system) whose owners are in arrears. Marvelous idea.

But back to the present (2009/10) and the 'sissies' T-shirt.

By Dean Miller's standards, an infamous T-shirt which appeared after the Kent State shootings should also be banished from academia (in fact, it was---but what would you expect of a mid-western cow college?).

That T-shirt had a large bull's-eye on its chest with the words "Kent State student" under it. It can't even be found on Google Images today or e-Bay.

Freedom of speech was deadly at Kent State in 1970; but it may be dead or in danger of dying at Yale in 2010.

And the killers?

(Not National Guardsmen)

Political Correctness Officers.

__________________________________

__________________________________

See October 2nd post this blog; "25th Anniversary of Heterosexual Transmisssion of AIDS Uncovered at Yale"

ATTENTION:
Move bar to 4 minutes 41 seconds to begin this video story.





(Move bar to 4 minutes 41 seconds.)


PROSTITUTE BELIEVED TO HAVE AIDS SURRENDERS, IS JAILED
The Miami Herald - Feb 28, 1984

* Titans and Pygmies: Living in he Interstitium

Have all the giants died at once? We seem to be living in a world of pygmies, both artistically and politically.

Perhaps Zaha Hadid is an exception: a new Frank Lloyd Wrong. But Artists? Musicians? Humanitarians?(Nelson Mandella?)World leaders?

Maybe they're just gestating: after a world exhasuted of Churchills,Eisenhowers,Schweitzers,Freuds, Darwins, Einsteins,Gandhis,Roosevelts, Horowitzs, Toscaninis,Andersons,Stravinskis, Picassos, Steins,Faulkners, Mother Teresa (no plural possible there),Salks,Fontaines and Lunts, Hopes and Crosbys,Astairs and Rogerses.

Maybe the world is just taking twenty or thirty years to grow a new crop of greats: An Age of Interstice. (Note: Jimmy Carter may be working himself into a mini-Schweitzer: Bill Gates? Maybe the Gates Foundation, but not the person. Decidedly not the person.)

Or maybe it takes a cataclysm (W.W. I) or two to produce titans?

Perhaps it will be AIDS wiping out a third of the world; or global warming turning Manhattan into an unwilling Venice with a gondola grid of 125 canals? Or terrorism?

Thornton Wilder had it wrong in The Skin of Our Teeth: a great glacier was slowly moving toward New Jersey in his 1942 play. Actually only half wrong: in 2010 (next week) it is a great MELTED glacier that is moving slowly toward New Jersey. NOW.

I'm surprised the GWP's (Global Warming Poeple) now known as the CCP's (Climate Change People) haven't latched on to that Wilder play as a premonitory clarion call to action.

With the liberties taken in theatre, I'll bet somebody could turn The Skin of Our Teeth into a Global Warming Soap Opera: Tom Cruise as Mr. Antrobus and Madonna as Sabina.

Why not you?

It's "a new world to make! ---think it over."
(Sabina, The Skin of Our Teeth, Act II)

* Rocking-horse winner, pass by!

Endlessly Rocking in the Teleological Tide. . .



Sitting across a restaurant table from Thornton Wilder in The Old Heidelburg in New Haven was like sitting across from Halley's Comet, chained to a chair. (see http://wilder1985.blogspot.com/)

And that was when he was 78, only months before his death in 1975. Imagine what he was like when he was young!

Now that I am pushing the years further and further and have looked death straight in the eye myself, I understand what Thornton Wilder was doing, not only for himself, but for those around him: He was defying oblivion, "out of the cradle endlessly rocking". (He once said, "It is the duty of the old to lie to the young.")

In case you have any doubt that the author of Our Town believed in personal -- indeed humanity's --oblivion, consider these words about his attraction (at 78) to the writing of Claude Levi-Strauss:words from The Enthusiast: A Life of Thornton Wilder by Gilbert Harrison:

". . . he continued writing hours each day, and with faltering eyesight reread Goethe's converstaions with Eckermann, Madame de Sevigne's letters, Trollope's Barchester Chronicles, Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle('spledid'), Boswell's London Journal ('a little Scotch puppy and how he grew') and, most stimulating, the social anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss whose thought in The Naked Man paralleled his own. "Man has to live and struggle,think, believe and above all preserve his courage,' wrote Levi-Strauss ' although he can never at any moment lose sight of the opposite certainty that he was not present on earth in former times, that he will not always be here in the future and that, with his inevitable disappearance from the surface of the planet which is itself doomed to die, his sorrows, his joys, his hopes, his works will be as if they never existed'" (Harrison, p.373)

Four years earlier, at age 74, Wilder had written an aging, ill friend:

"I -- and Goethe -- acknowledge a God but we don't anthropomorphize him. We call him die Natur and we know He, She, It embraces this vast process and has fashioned it with a million marvelous smaller processes which betray an intense concern for how the whole thing works --- a concern that much resembles love. All Nature strives to bring every detail to its truest expression of its function. All Nature is working for you. Rise above immediate things and feel that. Float in the teleological tide." (Harrison, p. 371)

How can the "teleological tide" be reconciled with the planet and humanity's "inevitable disappearance"?

It can't.

But as Bertrand Russell says (somewhere): Just because the human mind is structured to search for cause-and-effect, does not mean that the universe operates in cause-and-effect.

Just as Nature may make quantum leaps, so too may the human mind.

Wilder's, floating in the teleological tide as opposed to swimming with it
(Whitman's "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking"?) or against it (Thomas's "Do not go gentle into that good night") may actually be the ultimate religious adjustment to the certain uncertainty of extinction (to crudely reword Hamlet).


Cast a cold eye On life, on death. Rocking-horse winner, pass by!

* Empty Manger; Empty Tomb

Christmas Eve, 2009



I was named after my parents' youth minister, Douglas Clyde Macintosh*. My parents came from the "poor section" of New Haven, Connecticut. Macintosh was a professor in that city at Yale Divinity School for 40 years. One of his books (Social Religion) had a preposterous proposition: Even if the Jesus of history never existed, the validity of Christianity would remain intact.

Pretty radical: Christianity without Jesus; Christmas without a manger; Easter without a cross; death without a Resurrection.

My own average citizen interpretation of this is, that if you susbstituted the word Forgiveness with a capital "F" for the word Christ, the religion would mean exactly the same: Forgiveness is my personal Savior(saves me from the hell of Self); Forgiveness promises me victory over death (saves me from fear of Eternal Judgment; because every time I refuse to judge --indeed I forgive --others, I build faith in a judgement-free Eternity); Forgiveness cleanses my soul (where resentment and fear were, there shall serenity be).

Admittedly, this is a psychoanalytic interpretation of Christianity; but, then, I believe all religion is an imagistic, metaphoric form of primitive psychiatry emerging from the collective unconscious.

Our difficulty as inheritors of this primitive psychiatry is that we have turned the images and metaphors ( Father, virgin, manger, savior, king, crucifixion, resurrection, eternal life, eternal damnation, etc.) into literalities instead of the cathartic symbols they are intended to be. We have made them ends, rather than means (or meanings).

Would living a life of forgiveness and sacrifice without a historical Jesus bullying us to do so, bring life everlasting, i.e. life undeterred, life uninterrupted ("EVER-lasting") by anxiety, fear,and the burden of self?

Is that all there is?

No Emerald City in the Sky?

Just, Peace?

Just?


Paul D.M. Keane
M.Div.'80
Yale Divinity School

* See September 11 post: "Macintosh Chalice donated to Yale Law School"

* "People were meant to go through life two by two."

So, what are we going to do about the problem of Thornton Wilder's sexuality?

Nothing.

It's his business, not ours. And besides, he's dead.

He can't comment and nothing anyone else says can be verified.

The one thing we can say for sure is that he once asked the actress Ruth Gordon to marry him. At least that's what she said in her eulogy for Thornton Wilder at Yale's Battell Chapel in 1976. She had been spurned by a suitor, she revealed, and Wilder felt so bad for her that he asked her to marry him instead. She said, "Thornton thought somebody ought to marry me," if I recall the text correctly.

Thornton Wilder and his sister Isabel never married. They were lifelong companions and housemates. He died at 78 in 1975; she at 95 in 1995. In fact, one Yale Ph.D. in literature, John D. Ogden, told me that "Not since Dorothy and William Wordsworth has there been a brother /sister literary team like Isabel and Thornton Wilder."

For a man who never went through a wedding ceremony, he choreographed a wedding which may have been staged a million times over the last 71 years, if you count high school performances of Our Town. And since Thornton Wilder often took the Stagemanager part himself (and therefore the minister's part) he has performed hundreds, maybe thousands, of wedding ceremonies too.

I am interested in Wilder's technique of 'elevating to the universal' as I call it, in Our Town.

Instead of having Mrs. Gibbs consent to George and Emily's marriage by saying, Yes . . . people are meant to go through life as husband and wife" Wilder has her say "Yes . . . people are meant to go through life two by two" (Act II) and later instead of having the minister aver the sanctity of the heterosexual couplet he has him echo Mrs. Gibbs again after establishing his credentials (and doubts):

"In this wedding I play the minister. That gives me the right to say a few more things about it. Y'see, some churches say that marriage is a sacrament . I don't quite know what that means but I can guess [heretical uncertainty for sure]. Like Mrs. Gibbs said a few minutes ago: People were made to live two by two." (Act II)

In other words, Wilder elevates marriage from the realm of gender identity (male/female; husband/wife) to the universal realm of "couples".

It could be ANY couples.

It is decidedly ambiguous. And my guess is that ambiguity is for a reason----and that reason AIN'T to validate gay marriage, a word and a concept unthought of in 1938 when Wilder wrote Our Town.

Let us for a moment violate our own opening declaration that Wilder's sexuality is none of our business, and assume that Gilbert Harrison is correct in his biography The Enthusiaist: A Life of Thornton Wilder that Wilder was homosexual but that his liaisons were brief and uncomfortable. Let us even assume further that as the child of strict 19th century parents and the brother of a Harvard theologian, Wilder felt it impossible to to discuss 'the love that dare not speak its name.' And let us also assume that Wilder's answer to his sister, Isabel, about her doubts about never having married, is true for himself: "It is good enough to be human."

Now, if we also assume regrettably the fashionable belief that Wilder was a secret or repressed homosexual, his elevation of marriage from a male/female realtionship to a "two by two" relationship becomes not only a subversive, egalitarian validation of all couplehood (including his own lifelong friendship and creative literary partnership with his sister) but a way for a man whose romantic interests might be those that "dare not" be spoken, to fully participate in the human drama.

Thus Wilder's theatrical needs and his human needs might both be satisfied by this elevation to the universal.

This interpretation will not satisfy the radical politically correct idealogues of our time who want to "out" the closet gay celebrities, including (they contend) Thornton Wilder.

Ironically, in their blind intolerance of Wilder's desire (need?) for the privacy of his own thoughts, the idealogues have overlooked the tremendous opportunity his line "two by two" has given them. In this genderless axiom is nothing less than a validation of all marriage, regardless of gender affinities.

Pity the radicals among the PC's.

They can't see their opportunity for their opportunism.

* Bart's Homeys

"All literature is about getting home" A. Bartlett Giamatti is reputed to have said, either as President of Yale, which he quit for a jock-job, or ,then, as Baseball Commissioner, which he died doing.

I supppose, if "home" means a "psychological state of ease (as opposed to dis-ease)", or "the void from which we emanated" he's right. Otherwise, Miller's Death of a Salesman and Whitman's "Oh Captain! My Captain!" are not about getting home. Well, maybe parts of them are and aren't simultaneously: a neat literary technique called paradox.

What about Emerson's Address to the Harvard Divinity Students or his American Scholar? Both are about rejecting the "home" of tradition and the past (Hebraic/Christian and the European influences) and creating a home anew. This isn't "getting" home, it is about "losing" home in order to find it: a premonitory Freudian theme.

And Jean Genet's Our Lady of the Flowers, 200 pages of drug induced, masturbatory imagery? That's more about "getting off" than "getting home", unless "home" means relief from reality by self induced hedonistic ecstacy.

I don't know. It's a nice phrase Bart, and it fits your baseball cap swell, but it ain't accurate.

It's more precise to say "All literature is about losing home," and that would fit baseball too, Bart. And maybe that's what you really meant: "All literature is about NOT getting home."

Oh lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.


PS: And oh, by the way: Your prediction about the "athletization of life" has come true and is about to be institutionalized in our schools by the Jock of all Jocks, Arne Duncan, U.S. Commissioner of Education, who has decided that all U.S. schools should compete in a "race to the top". This is very interesting from a man who in a recent speech televised on C-Span, was unable to distingusih between "infer" and "imply", a distinction I learned in 11th grade. See post "The 4T's: Ignoring Yale Presidents and Savaging American Childhood" October 31st, this blog.

* Thornton Wilder's Empty Stage : Bye, Bye, American Pie[ty]

It is worth noting that I once asked Arthur Miller at a talk at Yale (circa 1979) "Why are the writings of Thornton Wilder ignored on college reading lists?" Miller thought for a moment and replied, "I think it is because in Wilder there is an insufficient sense of the tragic." That may have more to do with the projective needs of audiences than with Wilder , who admittedly, has been universally saccharinized (nutri-sweeted). Ironically, Wilder himself called for the American stage to celebrate "window-breaking ideas."














It intrigues me that literary critics and audiences ignore the heretical implications of a single line in the most performed play in the American theatre: "And what's left when memory 's gone and your identity, Mrs Smith?"

No--this is not a question about Altzheimer's disease posed kindly and reassuringly by her doctor to a newly diagnosed Mrs. Smith.

Mrs. Smith should be read: "average church-goer," or "average believer." And the questioner is not a kindly internist, but the Stagemanager in Our Town in the guise of the minister who has just delivered his long, eloquent discourse on "There's something way down deep that's eternal in every human being" with a crescendo of aint's: "It ain't" this and "it ain't" that -----until there's almost nothing left to be "ain'ted."

Now, when Hal Holbrook as the Stagemanager in the televised version of Our Town delivers the final line( "And what's left when memory's gone and your identity, Mrs. Smith") the medium of television permits him to make an actor's choice which would be totally lost on stage: Holbrook lifts his right eyebrow and stares into the camera in a moment of pregnant silence. Then, true to Wilder's concern that nothing in the cemetery scene be lugubrious, Holbrook smiles knowingly, even reassuringly, and moves on to introduce us to some "living people" at the Grover's Corners cemetery.

What is the import of that single line and single raised Holbrookian eyebrow?

Nothing less than a smiling recognition that Wilder is about to make the audience unwittingly swallow the biggest fish in the American theatre without even realizing they have been hooked: Emily is living in the afterlife (how reassuring to those of us who have been taught that afterlife means "survival of the personality"!) and is about to learn that her destiny in the afterlife is to be purged of her her-ness, her Mrs. Smith-ness, while she waits "for the eternal part in her to come out clear."

In other words, Emily is about to begin to be eradicated of identity--to become a Form like Plato's famous "Chair", a Form perhaps evoked by the folding chairs Wilder has directed in the current scene must serve as tombstones on stage.

This sweet little moment, staged now hundreds of thousands of times in the last 71 years, is thus nothing less than an assault on the notion of pie-in-the-sky afterlife, where angels reunite with loved ones and share old recollections of a geographical autobiography, located in a "person" who once lived in a "place" on a "planet ", perhaps a deceased Jane Crofut of "The Crofut Farm; Grover's Corners; Sutton County; New Hampshire;United States of America; . . .Continent of North America; Western Hemisphere;the Earth the Solar System;the Universe; the Mind of God".

That speck in the universe identified (and located) on the envelope addressed to Jane Crofut which Rebecca describes to her brother George Gibbs at end the of Act One of Our Town; that speck of personhood,whether living or dead, is ultimately in the Mind of God, not the mind of its own personality i.e. all of that chronologically accumulated artfice and claptrap which burns away until "the eternal part comes out clear".

Has not Thornton Wilder (himself the brother of a Harvard theologian), just pulled the rug out from under popular piety and left us all---actors and audience alike ---gazing at an empty stage?

The empty stage of the 20th Century in which "God is dead" (at least the anthropomorphic, omniscient,omnipotent, interventionist, score-keeper, God of the previous centuries)?

Or perhaps the empty stage of human existence itself (now that that michaelangeloic Deity reigning over a triple-decker-universe has been killed off by science)?

Oh no! Wilder is telling us how wonderful the afterlife is going to be!

Cut me a large slice of Denial Pie[ty], please.


Paul D. Keane






NB: Note too the final line of Wilder's novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey: "There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning."

" The ONLY survival [my emphasis]" can, similarly, certainly be read as nothing less than rejection of pie-in-the-skyism's 'survival of the personality'./em>>

FOR MORE on "survival of the personality" see December 12 post "Heavenly HTML..."

see also http://wilder1985.blogspot.com/