Cheap Motels and a Hot Plate

[This was originally published as "Fear and Loathing at St. Vincent College" at http://www.counterpunch.org/yates12252009.html]  I attended St. Vincent College in Latrobe, Pennsylvania (hometown of legendary golfer Arnold Palmer and once the home of Rolling Rock beer).  When I was there, 1963-1967, it was a decent liberal arts college, about as liberal as a Catholic school could be.  Keynes ruled the economics department.  When the monk who taught Anthropology decided to abandon the priesthood and marry a Mormon woman with six children, one of my Theology instructors performed the marriage ceremony.  Father Roman, the Art Professor, was a huge fan of avant-garde film-maker, Jonas Mekas.  We invited antiwar activists, historian and Communist Party member Herbert Aptheker, and radical singer Pete Seeger to campus.  A friend of mine and I snuck a monk out of the monastery one Friday and went to the racetrack in Chester, West Virginia.  The good father flirted mightily with a waitress, telling us beforehand to call him Bill.  He assured us that we could order meat without worrying about sin.  Not long after I graduated, a champion of the poor, Rembert Weakland, became Archabbot.  Weakland was later named Archbishop of Milwaukee and was the chief author of a famous Bishops’ pastoral letter condemning a society that left so many people destitute.  That old swine—and Catholic—former Treasury Secretary William Simon was nonplused by this paean to greater equality.  Read More

We drove back to Boulder from Moab on Thanskgiving. It already feels like we have been back for a month. Boulder has its good points, but when it is cold and the view outside our window is the same one we have been looking at for a year now, well, we get bored beyond words. People are out shopping for things they don’t much need and dining in second-rate restaurants that everyone raves about, going to stupid jobs, panhandling for change to buy drink and drugs. The whole thing seems so absurd. When you add to this the idiotic speech Obama gave at West Point, trying to justify murder and mayhem in Afghanistan as necessary for the good of the country, while workers can’t find employment, while the bogus healthcare bill is hailed as a legislative revolution, while the talking heads on television babble on and on, while the grossest corruption is now the coin of the realm, well Jesus H. Christ, let me out of here! Read More