Maybe, after all, it's not so bad going to Dartmouth.
For four years (or as many as eight years for some of us) we are pampered, patted on our respective backs, told zillions of time that we are "the best and brightest." Time passes, and many of us begin to believe the ego-stroking. Many of us believed it in high school -- it's what brought us to the Ivy League in the first place.
The best and brightest. We have free BlitzMail, Online Library, DCIS Navigator, Netscape, PUBLIC, NewsWatcher. Kiewit prints up our documents without charge. Career Services freely gives us useful advice concerning our futures. Professors hold office hours and offer us recommendations, pointers, even prestigious research and grant opportunities.
Only this for the best and brightest. We write theses, make penetrating intellectual arguments, both in the classroom and outside it. We haggle over profundities in the pages of "The Dartmouth" and "Disquisitions" and "Uncommon Threads" and elsewhere. We debate salient political issues at conferences and meetings and forums galore. We vote on referenda and take back nights.
Some of us join the Student Assembly, hoping for a chance to place ambitious mitts on the Dartmouth rudder, to steer us to common glories. Many of us join Executive Committees, Advisory Committees, even the Committee on Standards. We are UGAs and RAs, helping to mold nervous first-year students into well-rounded, well-adjusted Dartmouth adults.
And why? Because we're the best and brightest. Oh sure, sometimes we repeat ourselves, beat dead horses into dead-horse crumbs. We still can't even resolve the terms of our Greek houses debate, let alone what our next move should be. But give it time; we'll figure it out. We're the best and brightest.
Sure, our Student Assembly is barely able to repair computers, but look how many indignant letters they've written to The Dartmouth over the years! What a crew, I tell you -- intellectual stallions, every one of them. The best and brightest.
Last Thursday evening I attended the Senior Honors Dinner in Alumni Hall. While our new Dean of Faculty 'ummed' and 'uhhed' his way through a soporific speech about God-knows-what -- the reunification of the Sciences and Germany, I think -- I surveyed the room full of thesis-writers, Phi Beta Kappas and Senior Fellows. Vacuous stares sat like poached eggs on the faces of nearly everyone.
The best and brightest.
I've been writing for The Dartmouth for more than a year now. In that time approximately six thousand people have been misquoted in its pages. Meanwhile, The Review has spawned an embezzler and a psychotic. C and P broke up. "Bear Bones" almost created a controversy that was almost interesting. Something called "BLD" appeared, and once again I was grateful I'm graduating.
But these are the best and brightest. They're the frat boys who pick fights with each other to prove ... something. They're the enlightened highbrows yelling "fag" and "chink" and a host of other pleasantries outside houses, the ones who scrawl this same pith on people's doors. They're drunk, bigoted, arrogant, vacant quasi-macho idiots forcing themselves on women too drunk to stop them.
The best and brightest! Self-important pseudo-feminists with a lot of chalk and not a whole heck of a lot of imagination. Cherubic, eager profs fresh out of grad school spewing bullshi -- er, I mean, critical theory in classrooms all over campus. Over-the-hill hippies trying to inspire a generation just a wee bit too savvy to buy into naive delusions of "changing the world."
These are the best; they are the brightest. Supercilious "intellectuals" vomiting up pretentiousness by the bucketful, condemning the faceless masses who don't know what's good for them. Campus politicos riding high horses, presuming to speak for every disenfranchised group on campus, as if those groups were monoliths incapable of having their own autonomy. "Alternative" crowds dawdling naked on public porches to prove just how oh-so-liberated and laid back they are. Droves of indolent wastes sucking bong hits and renting movies and getting Parkhursted and pissing their parents' money away.
Trustees and administrative officials prevaricating out of one side of their mouths and raising prices and distributing fines out of the other.
Aw-shucks environmentalists setting up recycling bins in every corner of every building, thereby creating more environmental stress, more wasted energy, more useless garbage.
Business types and pre-lawyers and pre-doctors and scientific researchers preparing to join the omnipresent, everlasting Federation of American Deathmongers.
And, of course, a nihilist with a big mouth here and there, just to point it all out and not do a damn thing about it.
Don't let the scabs at Harvard or M.I.T. try and tell you it's any different anywhere else!
We are the best and brightest, friends.
Happy trails.
