Did you hear? The Big Green beat Harvard 6-3 this weekend! Thank merciful Heaven for that!
You know, maybe it's the aphasia, but I simply don't remember this so-called "Harvard Weekend" from any other year. Quite frankly, I'd wager that no one from Harvard remembers it either. We may have cultivated an embittered, unyielding rivalry toward the Crimson Geeks, but the undersocialized men and women of Cambridge just don't think of us in the same way. No, every year they have their big Harvard-Yale game -- that's Yale, by the way, not Dartmouth, as in, "I go to an Ivy League school in New Haven called Yale," as opposed to, "I go to an Ivy League school not in New Haven but in Hanover called Dartmouth and not Yale." Anybody following this?
I asked around -- you know, some of the local flavor-- as to why so many Big Green pre-med khaki socialites would be so obsessed with Harvard, and the consensus was best expressed by a rather bright-eyed sorority acquaintance of mine: "They're all just bitter because Harvard is the school they couldn't get into, so they had to go to Dartmouth instead."
"But I didn't even apply to Harvard," I replied, which is actually true, by the way, unlike the rest of this conversation, which I basically invented for convenience's sake.
"Neither did I," she said.
Ah ha. Nevertheless, I think she had a point, even if we discount all of the people who applied to Dartmouth early. Bitterness may indeed be the underlying motivation for trekking down to Cambridge like some Eddie Bauer Phish groupie, and in principle I think that that's just swell. Bitterness is a fine emotion; there are far too many goofy-eyed Joker-esque automatons hopping around this campus like poster children for Xstasy as it is, as yesterday's editorial page of The D will attest.
However, I can't help but feel that this bitterness might engender a more fruitful rivalry if Harvard reciprocated it. But, alas, they do not. They seem to be caught up in their Yale fixation. So for now, the best solution my addled Dartmouth brain can offer up is for us to find some other school to hate unremittingly for no apparent reason.
Since these rivalries play themselves out in trivial athletic competitions so much of the time, our new rival would have to be selected from among our Ivy League brethren. Well, what about Princeton? Their admission policy is about as selective as Harvard's, meaning that all those angry undergrads nursing repressed feelings of rejection could easily switch their wrath to the bland stuffed shirts of New Jersey, they of the eating clubs and Brooke Shields.
But really, what is there to hate about a pretentious, self-important, self-inflated eating club? We already have C & G. Furthermore, a high school friend from Penn informs me that down in Philly they also have a chip on their shoulder, and the annual Penn-Princeton game is an occasion for a similarly pitiful celebration of wormwood. For that matter, we could decide to hate Penn, but that's too much like teasing the village idiot -- sure, it's entertaining for a while, but eventually you realize that you'd prefer an opponent intelligent enough to fight back.
Well, with Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Penn out of contention, we've only got three possibilities left (no, I'm not a Math major, but I play one in The D). We could, perhaps, shift our venom to Cornell. Big Red versus Big Green. Large school against small. One cold, depression-inducing climate against another. Prozac versus Zoloft. We could mock their School of Hotel Management, I suppose ... my pulse is already quickening.
Or how about Columbia? "Nice urban environment!" we could yell at the games. "Way to live in a city with a population greater than thirty! You must get pretty bored with hundreds of bars and clubs and restaurants to choose from!"
The final possibility remaining is our P.C. neighbor to the southeast, that avatar of alternative culture, Brown University. This rivalry could have problems. Too many people still perceive Dartmouth as being overly conservative, and relative to Brown, well, we are: we simply don't have enough tongue piercings per capita.
On the other hand, we don't get to take all of our classes pass/fail, and most of our student body does not design their own specious majors. As far as we know, nobody at Dartmouth has financed their education by working as a stripper.
Anyway, it's food for bitter thought.
