Vapor, Wind, And Hot Air - The Blustering Of Old Blues In A Climate Of Violence As Yale Becomes Irrelevant

Henry Martin, Old Blue, faithful alumnus, proud graduate of Yale had been preparing for this reunion for months. He had cut his teeth on social justice with the Reverend Paisley Hammond, been beaten by Bull Connor's thugs and bitten by George Wallace's attack dogs until he had earned the ultimate red badge of courage.  A returning hero, Henry was cheered by the then few awakened students who saw the decline of America and the future of the black man. 

Henry had lost none of his passion in his later years. If anything, he had become more committed, more intensely tied to social reform, and when Donald Trump took his seat in the Oval Office, Henry became a whirling dervish, a man possessed who rededicated himself to justice, democracy, and progressive enlightenment. 

The reunion was to be one final joining of likeminded men, a happy confluence of intelligence, moral rectitude, and good breeding - the elements of a classical education and a storied New England aristocratic legacy. 

This reunion was particularly important because the university had radically changed since the October 7th Hamas terrorist attack on Israel.  In previous years it had become the institution that Henry had envisioned, a place of political advocacy, revolutionary passion, and unalloyed belief in progressivism.  Race, gender, ethnicity, identity, and climate had replaced Shakespeare, Kant, Aristotle, and Planck, a welcome demise of old white men in a heady refocus to the real issues of the day. 

Recently, it had become a place of howling pro-Palestinian protestors who trashed the Old Campus, graffitied up Harkness Library, uprooted the tulips on the cross-campus, and called for death to Israel and the extermination of the Jews.  Classes had been suspended, graduation exercises cancelled, and diplomas put on hold.  Yale was no different than Paris where Muslims from the northern suburbs filled the 7th and the 16th with shouts of Jewish genocide, final retribution, and the elimination of the infidel. 

So it was that Henry feeling at great risk of becoming supernumerary, an old, stale fart with no agency, currency, or value, ginned up all his energy for one last hurrah, the Reunion. 

Henry couldn't seem to help himself when it came to the climate.  Every shift in weather patterns set him off on a tirade about the ignoramuses in Washington, the fools in the heartland, and the indifference of his own kind - Yalies, Yale men, men of substance, career, and good judgment increasingly indifferent to the existential crisis, the big one, the defining issue of the day.  Here they were, tending to second homes in Rimini and Palm Beach, sailing, skiing, and acting as if the planet would survive forever. 

  

"Now, Henry", began his wife Vicki, herself a longstanding social justice warrior but a loving partner who, seeing the bolts on her husband's emotional chassis loosening, was concerned about his well-being. "You know you're doing all you can, dear", but he knew he wasn't and knew that relaxation leads to diffidence which leads to indifference on the smoothly paved road to hell. The grip on what mattered had to be kept white-knuckled. 

Vicki, however, had reached a turn in the road, and had begun to think more about a chaise lounge and sundowners than her particular hobby-horse, women's rights, a cause for which she had fought since a graduate student at Columbia where she sat in the President's chair during the occupation, marched on Washington, burned her bra, and got arrested in Connecticut for spending the night with homeless women.

Somehow the light had changed to yellow, twilight in suburbia was a little softer, and January in Winter Haven or St. Bart's had become more and more appealing.  She never before had winced at her husband's fury - righteous anger had always been part of his persona, and the energy generated had always fueled a commensurate response from his followers - but his exuberance had become more of a St. Vitus's Dance, a Tourette's barking and snapping. Not only were his bolts loose, he was becoming unhinged. 

 

The Reunion will either cure him or kill him, Vicki thought, being together with his old classmates, all now well into old age. They would calm his frazzled nerves, set him on the right and proper road to a final goodbye to a life which was but one of many, no more nor less. 

All started off on the wrong foot, however, as Henry's classmates began squabbling about who would present what at the poster sessions - women, gays, blacks, and climate change had been the offerings suggested; and there were simply too many eager candidates and too few places on the roster.  The website chat room was the place for discussion, and to the reunion organizer's surprise, it became as nasty as any on social media.  

At first the remarks were genteel and respectful - after all, these were classmates not anonymous trolls - but soon they descended into hostile anarchy. Stem cells battled with gender reassignment, Stephen Douglass with Donald Trump, and nuclear winter with climate Armageddon. 

"Break it up, guys", said the organizer, Class Secretary, and former CEO of a major corporate chain; but the sniping and backstabbing continued.  If he didn't put an end to it,  the bloody poster sessions would end up taking the entire three days of the reunion. 

Henry, the principal spokesmen for social justice, climate action, and government reform, took the floor, and the chat room quieted to listen; but in his recent febrile, agitated state, he made none of his usual sense and banged on about Judgment Day.  He ranted like a megachurch preacher, Bible in hand and turning to an unseen cross for divine guidance, yelled about the end of the world and its fiery conclusion.

The debate went on for weeks, until finally the organizer closed up shop, the agenda was set, and a predictable potpourri of issues was on the docket.  Given the age profile of the attendees, there were none of the post-modern topics familiar in academia.  'Tainted Pussy - Gender Reality In Queerdom' and 'Buggers, Balls, And Cunts - The Aftermath Of Historicism' were absent, and 'The Gender Divide - Virginia Woolf, Edward Albee, And Rosalind' took their place, old chestnuts about emergence, patriarchy, and equality.  

What should have been a grand old time, a final old geezer get-together to enjoy a few days in what for most would be their last decade on earth, was little more than seminar city - endless exchanges about the miserable state of the world.  We seasoned, experienced, thoughtful men are not intellectual supernumeraries, the class insisted.  Freedom Rides, Selma, Berkeley, and Chicago are seminal, historic events in the march to a progressive future and must be accounted for. 

Of course the poster sessions were little more than old men talking to each other.  How much more could possibly be said about the melting icecaps, the plight of the black man, and transgender reality? And besides that, who cares?  These are young peoples' issues, left to the new generation's idealists. Alte kockers should be thinking only about their own demise and preparing for it.  The idle gossip about secular, transparently temporal issues has nothing whatsoever to do with the end of one's own life cycle. 

However, the old guys simply could not get enough, and there was standing room only for most sessions.  Henry who was the headliner started off with a bang, reminding many of Vincent Scully, famous and well liked History of Art professor who was a wild man on stage, yelling about the priapic, thrusting peaks of Cnossos.  Henry raised the Devil with his talk about the coming end of the world, and everyone knew that he had finally gone 'round the bend into no-man's land, nutty as a fruit cake. 

The rest of the sessions could not match Henry's for bombast, but they were well attended. Classmates wanted to be sure they had missed nothing in their parsing of race, gender, ethnicity, and the climate. 

The Reunion ended on a bit of a sad note.  The alumni knew that with the election of Donald Trump progressive shibboleths would be toppled, and in a few short years the plight of the black man, transgenders, and the climate would be but postscripts; and with the new inchoate, fevered, hysterical anti-Semitic campus protests, the university itself might be thrown into obscurity. 

There were still a few Palestinian flags flying from dorm windows even though the school year was over.  The tulips had not yet been replanted, and the power-washing of the walls of the library had only succeeded to whiten the once nicely aged, hallowed building. 

The halcyon years were over.  The institution that had educated presidents, statesmen, financiers, and industrialists, men of particular brilliance, rock-ribbed moral certainty and undying fealty to a civilizing aristocratic heritage was gone, finished, disappeared. 

The reunion, when Henry in a calmer moment reflected upon it was indeed nothing but a vaporous, windy affair of absolutely no consequence; and the airy-fairy ideas so passionately held and discussed realized as hopelessly idealistic, unrealistic, myopic wet dreams. 

The perfect storm - the demise of the solid intellectualism and noblesse oblige of former years, the rejection of the heady progressive movement which followed, and the rise of the hysterical Nazi era communal hatred - had completely, irrevocably destroyed what had been a premier institution. 

'It's over', Henry said to his wife.