Update

Still in New Haven, tormenting the Humorists of Tomorrow, eating my body weight in hamburgers at Louis' Lunch...and enduring what my wife called "the oppressive sullenness" of everybody here who's not affiliated with Yale.



I'll be the first to own up: Yalies can be annoying, and sharing a city with them must be a trial; but the crackle of dislike is incredible. I'm not talking New York standoffishness--which, btw, can nearly always be melted with a genuine smile--but something more constant, queerly impersonal and at the same time very personal. They don't like you BECAUSE you're here. Even when you're buying stuff from them. Perhaps especially because you're buying stuff from them, hence have money to spend. It's puzzling, and uncomfortable, and encourages Yale's moat-and-padlock mindset.



Fewer and fewer Yalies are simply members of the Lucky Sperm Club--hi, W!--and more and more of them, in fact, are members of the same economic class as the guy working at the Dunkin Donuts on Chapel Street. Yet when somebody works their ass off to get a real chance to move on up, George Jefferson style, this cuts them no slack. I'm certainly not blaming anybody in this; it's too prevalent not to be the fruit of large forces nobody is controlling. But it's a freaking shame. A recent article described our current Clintonism vs. Neocon battle as beginning at Yale in the late Sixties, and I wouldn't be surprised if the unrelenting negativity in New Haven didn't help polarize that from the beginning. If you're rich and perceive people hating you for it, then you become dead to any sense of larger responsibility. If you're not rich and perceive people hating you anyway, you become desperate to prove what a man/woman of the people you are, whether that's a false pose or not. Sounds like a description of both sides to me.



Surprisingly, no sign of labor difficulties--no strikes, no picketing, nothing. Yale is in the middle of one of its periodic, hyper-nasty labor disputes--which may be some of the reason for said sullenness. Anyway, I hope they work it out soon; as always the people in the middle--the students and the strikers--are suffering while the bigwigs palaver.