Some of you Aussies etc. might enjoy this. I was an undergraduate at
Yale at the same time as W. ("Dubya"). I didn't know him personally but
- and I say this as empirically as possible - I knew the type. The year
before I entered Yale, the composition of the freshman class was 60%
prep school, 40% public high school graduates (like me). In my year the
proportions were suddenly reversed. The administration had noticed that
however much money the preppies came from - some of us called them
"Thirds," because so many of them had III or even IV after their names -
they were often not very bright, and that as alumni they performed
neither brilliantly nor (more to the point) lucratively. In 1963,
however, they remained the most coherent, identifiable group; the rest
of us came from all over the country and were culturally and politically
tentative. (One result was that in the election of '64, most of the Old
Campus - the freshman dorms - polled for Goldwater.) Gradually the
differences became more pronounced and conscious. One fact that became
blatant was that many of these guys had no idea how to treat women.
They had come from entirely male boarding schools - Choate,
Lawrenceville, Andover - and Yale at the time was all male. (It remained
so until 1968.) Presumably during the summers, back in Greenwich or
Tuxedo Park, they engaged in arcane and highly formalized rituals with
debutantes, but during the school year - and with females of other
social classes - they hadn't a clue. On weekends in fall and winter
girls would come down on buses from Smith, Holyoke, Vassar etc. for
dances ("mixers"). They would walk across the quads of the various
residential colleges to the cloakrooms and thence up to the dining
halls. (I must stress that this "meat rack" procedure produced maximal
strain and self-consciousness in the watching boys as well as in the
girls.) The preppie response - of course, not universal - was as
follows. They would start drinking some time Thursday afternoon, cut
all their classes Friday, and continue drinking into the evening. Then -
invariably - one or more of them would stagger onto the quad, into the
path of the oncoming Vassar etc. contingent, and either throw up, pass
out, or both. I won't even go into their behavior on the dance floor or
its wallflower perimeter. The net effect was that guys like me,
heretofore insecure with women, realized we weren't THAT insecure, and
did quite well. We looked competent, or at least gentlemanly, in
comparison. Hell, we WERE gentlemen!
So, I have one (and only one) positive fantasy re the coming Bush
administration. If - per impossibile - I find myself in a receiving
line at the White House, I'll be able to shake his hand and say, "Mr.
President. The last time I saw you you were vomiting on my shoes at the
Vassar mixer." (Of course I can't say for sure that he was the one who
did it. But, given W's past, I doubt if he can say for sure he wasn't.)
More seriously, I grieve for my country. As an unreconstructed Marxist
I can't allow myself to admit shock, but I still grieve. The
transparent bias of that clerico-authoritarian Scalia and his famulus
Thomas, the Christian Right waiting to claim its dues for lying low
during the campaign, the further destruction of the social safety-net
(for which Clinton and Gore bear part of the blame), the impending
regression on the environment, the ever-widening inequality ... we are
in for a rough time - and therefore, of course, so are you. Given the
50-50 split in the Senate we may be in for no more than gridlock (and
severe recession, of which there are already clear signs). One thing I
am sure of is that American poetry - divided among prissy formalists,
academic pseudo-experimentalists, and the usual navelgazers - will be
hard put to deal with these funkily somber times.
|