YALE'S RUBBER CHICKEN

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

An incident which happened to me during my visit to New Haven to attend the Yale-Harvard game on November 22 has convinced me that the country's incipient mood of fascism has arrived in the Ivy League. That day was so different from the gentleness of the multitudes of persons who attended the Moratorium in Washington on November 15 as to leave no doubt that those Americans who back the Administration's policies are far from "silent."

The omens for the occurrences about to be related were evident on the morning of our arrival at the Bowle. A well dressed alumni wife, spying the Moratorium buttons worn by my date and I, shouting to her fellow pre-noon cocktail party imbibers, "Oh, not another one this week": tow short-haired mid-fortyish couples in the station wagon next to my car, upon seeing my comb my beard. remarking, "Take a look at that creep, will you."

But the worst was to come after the game, Stuck in traffic. trying to exit from the parking lot. we noticed a group of quite drunken merry-makers of the 1948 clubbie vintage. One of them was marching around the lot sounding a rand-held air raid siren in car windows. Another passed from car to car with a rubber chicken in a pot. Suddenly one of the revelers ripped a peace sticker from my bumper and pasted it across my front windshield. A take-off on the jingoism of "love it or leave it," the sticker read "America-save it or screw it." I got out of my car to talk with the prankster and a crowd formed. One over-thirtyish girl said, "Look at his granny glasses" and her companion said, "I'd like to pull every hair on your chin."

I attempted to explain to the man who had torn the sticker that he was engaging in the exact form of tyranny that he allegedly opposed. When my date got a second sticker from the car to replace the torn one, a post-debutante told us that there was no freedom to express "obscenity." I remarked upon the fact that she was holding the rubber chicken, which was naked. She berated my date (a teacher in Ocean Hill Brownsville) as to how much more good she, the post debutante, was doing by volunteer teaching in a ghetto one night a week. Another member of the crowd obviously fearing that I was a student, asked if my Daddy had bought that fancy English car (innuendoes of xenophobia). One woman, who identified her husband as Yale '42, did come over to apologize for the way in which "members of my generation be have."

Still stuck in traffic, the denouement soon came. The girl who had remarked upon my glasses got out of a car and tore the second sticker off. As her car pulled alongside. a gray-haired man yelled "she was right and you better not try to do anything about it." Further dialogue ensued with this man. including a suggestion that I leave by helicopter and that five cars were going to follow me out of the parking lot.

Finally, the man got out of his car, broke my car window with his hands and tried to drag me out of the car. A man who announced that I had insulted his wife, the post-debutante, by my remark about the naked chicken, threw a full glass of Scotch in my face and said, "What do we have to do to make you get out and fight?"

My date got the license number of the car and we tried to get the cop directing traffic to come, but he would not leave his post. We went to the West Haven police station to report the incident. The officers were very sympathetic ("I'm sure they didn't go to Yale; probably didn't even go to high school"). A teletype to Hartford revealed that the car was registered in the name of an auto-leasing agency, which was closed. We returned to New York with the knowledge that the perpetrators of this deed would probably never be caught and might at the moment be drinking still more whiskey and bragging to their friends about the incident. But if any of them happen to read this letter, I would only like to ask them, now that they are sober, if this is their idea of "freedom," of "law and order," and of "protection of private property." If so, an American version of Kristallnacht cannot be far away.