The men of Dartmouth are gone. In their place, the College has been gradually filled with an entirely new population of males -- a population that nonchalantly drinks soy milk and orders egg white breakfast wraps; a population that religiously watches TV shows like "The OC;" a population that spends whole evenings updating their thefacebook.com profiles; a population that admits to having emotions. What, ask I, has gone wrong?
Last weekend, I found myself watching the romantic comedy "Something's Gotta Give" with five brothers in my fraternity. We had a remote, and there were plenty of fast-paced action movies on the other channels. But for some reason, the playful banter of Diane Keaton and Jack Nicholson was too much to resist. When the movie ended, I was left with a bad taste in my mouth. It wasn't the EBAs, so I did the only thing I could do and headed toward the one final bastion of manliness on the Dartmouth campus: the new construction sites.
I was mesmerized by these laborers hard at work in their dump trucks, excavators and cranes. All of them were doing something so difficult to do at Dartmouth: getting in touch with their masculine sides. Some of them were even scratching their masculine sides.
As I stood there, though, I realized two things. First, Dartmouth has very few outlets for students to release their pent-up inner masculine desires. Second, almost every other guy walking by the site was just as captivated as I was.
But where does this yearning to watch heavy machinery come from? It has to be genetic. Nature has simply preprogrammed a special survival instinct within us that, in times of danger, causes us to flex in the mirror when we get out of the shower.
During boyhood, we are given an innate impulse to make lifelike shifting sounds when driving matchbox cars and realistic machine gun sounds when fighting with G.I. Joes. This natural reflex evolves as we get older, taking the form of potato guns, wrestling and lighting stuff on fire. However, the culture of college life has seriously impeded the expression of these masculine impulses.
Some of us revert to sports to try to satisfy this psychological need, but they fall well short, and we end up bottling up this impulse. Eventually, though, it becomes too much, and there are sudden outbursts that often result in the violent destruction of SA bicycles.
A more effective solution
The answer to the lack of manliness at Dartmouth is quite simple. Just stop all work on the new buildings on campus, send the workers home and leave a student-run construction site. Problem solved.
Just think, between history and economics, you could run down to the work site and pour some four-foot by three-foot concrete foundation anchors, backed with double reinforced steel rebar scaffolding.
The highlight of any weekend would be playing a couple of games of pong and then heading over to lift up some 600-pound iron I-beams with a 50-foot crane. We'd all have to wear hard hats at all times, of course. The SA could even throw in some miscellaneous items to lift up and move around with the crane. Maybe some old cars, a few old couches, some cattle
I did a little research about this and found out that such an idea actually once existed at Dartmouth. For a couple years during the late 1880s, the BEMA was used as a location for students to take out their deep masculine yearnings. Then, clearly, BEMA stood for the Big Empty Masculine Area.
In those days, the only tools that had been developed were the shovel and the wheelbarrow, and so the activities consisted of merely digging deep holes in the ground and then refilling them -- with freshmen. It was a much simpler time.
And while today's politically correct world will probably not allow the men of Dartmouth to place first-years in 20-foot-deep excavator holes, we wouldn't need to. We'd have the cattle for this.
I realize this may seem like an outlandish solution, but the fact is that manliness at Dartmouth is in serious jeopardy. What do the men of Dartmouth do these days?
We drink frappuccinos, eat salads and walk around sporting pink dress shirts for no apparent reason. The old timers would be rolling in their graves -- some of which are located at the BEMA -- at the thought of this.
To be fair, it is not just Dartmouth, but our entire society, that is responsible for this problem. Instead of giving their son a BB gun or a Swiss Army knife and sending him outside like they did back in the day, parents give their kids Pokemon cards and Ritalin.
Are kids in Zimbabwe playing with Pokemon all day long? No, they're hunting gazelles.
Think kids in Russia are playing PlayStation to pass the time? No, they're drinking vodka and playing games of hide-the-old-nuclear-warhead.
Think kids in Canada are playing with Justin Timberlake action figures? Well maybe, but only in between periods of a hockey game while daddy is off getting more beer (for them).
I'm scared for our next generation. It's up to Dartmouth to lead the way in restoring manliness to our society. At the very least, Dartmouth should designate a student-run construction area. Until then I'll be up at the BEMA with a shovel and some '08s.
