Gotham Diary:
Greek to Me
26 February 2014
Sitting in my chair at the Infusion Therapy Unit yesterday, I was so pleased and relieved just to be there that I wished to share my good news with all the world — the world of my Facebook friends, anyway. So I took a selfie, careful to show the infusion pump behind me, and the by then almost empty bag of Remicade behind it. Modified rapture.
I didn’t pay much attention to the photo when I posted it; only when I got home and saw it on a larger screen could I savor the unflattering nature of my self-portrait. There was the obvious incongruity of my eyeglasses, askew as they often are — sooner or later, something about the configuration of my head warps glasses so that they seem to list on my nose from a high on the left to a low on the right. I might have given them an adjusting tug, though, and achieved a less loopy look.
Beyond the weird spectacles, there was the woolly-mammoth aspect of the selfie. I was holding the phone where I usually hold it — to look at it. It seemed not to have crossed my mind that a photograph might require a different point of view — or that point of view was even involved. The angle exaggerated (if I may say so) the fact that I was a few days late — five or six — for a trim at the barber’s. Waves were beginning to form in my beard — although “rivulets on a mud flat” is what actually came to mind.
Finally, there was my overall facial expression. I could not complain about this. It proved me beyond question to be a man in need of some sort of medical treatment. In this regard, the entire photograph was a documentary triumph.
***
Today, I’m feeling pretty good, thanks. Much better than I expected to do. Although it was snowing this morning, lightly, I got dressed for the weather, putting on my bad-weather oxfords, always a pain to tie, and went to the barber shop. In Willy’s gleaming, well-lighted mirror, I looked even worse than I did in the selfie. Who was this person? Had he just been rescued from a desert island? It is true that my standards are high. Willy himself calls me “Capitán,” because (a) I remind him of Captain Smith in Titanic and (b) he hails from Lima. As a commanding officer of the White Star Line lookalike, I have a duty to keep tonsorially spruce. Arguments could be made that I had indeed been rescued from an iceberg: the weather here in Gotham, together with my wilting somatic condition, made for a life barely more comfortable.
Back at home, after several subsequent errands, I found myself so bursting with high spirits that I hadn’t an idea in my brain.
One of these days, I want to write more about Hannah Arendt on authority, but I knew that I just didn’t have, today, what it takes to sell that sort of piece. The very idea of authority was at odds with the elation of health restored. For lack of anything better to do, I went through a pile of mail and came across the current Atlantic, which in turn came to my rescue. The cover story was in tune with my playful spirits: “The Fraternity Problem: It’s Worse Than You Think,” by Caitlin Flanagan.
Now, I don’t know anything about fraternities first-hand. They didn’t, and I presume still don’t, exist at the University of Notre Dame, from which I hold both undergraduate and law degrees. That was a great relief to me at the time, because I’m sure that my mother would have pestered me to join, or whatever it is that one does, some prestigious Greek house. It’s an even greater relief to me now, for after reading Flanagan’s report, I’m sure that I should have fallen at some point from a great height. That’s apparently what lots of kids do: they fall out of windows and off of roofs. Or drainpipes. Such incidents are 2% more likely to lead to liability claims than hazing accidents. (That’s, at least, how I read, or possibly misread, the bar graph in Flanagan’s piece.) Looking back on my college years, I tremble at the sight of a sort of carnival in which tremendous intellectual excitement alternated with tremendously foolish high-jinks. High jinks like swimming across a small lake, under the influence of various intoxicants, on a March night when there was still snow on the ground. Mind you, this was all my own idea. I didn’t have to be put up to it; there may even have been an attempt to restrain me. The structural imprudence of a fraternity would have finished me off.
Back then, common wisdom held that fraternities, like golf, would disappear within a couple of years. Membership declined; chapters closed. Then came Animal House. John Belushi has a lot to answer for: as Flanagan points out, he was the one actor with enough “radical cred” to make Greek life look subversive. No longer was there a divide between those who got stoned and those who got drunk, those who flipped out on acid and those who drove cars into trees. Now, all the vices were on offer, together with battalions of young women who took it for granted that they would be safe in rooms full of drunk adolescent males. Women had certainly advanced, but the new fratmosphere was a catchment for men who hadn’t.
I’m unlikely to get worked up about fraternities, however, because, as regular readers know, I’ve altogether given up on American higher education. I do not believe that it can be salvaged; it can only be scrapped. I’m not preaching a replay of the Cultural Revolution in China; clearly, there must be institutions of higher learning. But we’ve got to build them from scratch. The buildings, actually, are the last thing that need replacement — although “student centers” and athletic facilities of all kinds ought to be sold off to entertainment providers. Nor need professors be lined up against the wall and shot. It’s the university administrators who have to go. Out with the presidents and the deans and the development officers and the duffers in alumni affairs — everything implicit in the pregnant phrase, “Larry Summers at Harvard.” Every effort ought to be made to reduce tuition to levels that pay teachers well and keep the lights on, period. The only gift acceptable from alumni, or from any outsiders for the matter of that, must be the endowed chair.
Most important, undergraduate life ought to begin where it currently ends, at the age of twenty-one or twenty-two. The final years of teenaged existence are probably the most uncongenial to academic learning that post-pre-K life has to offer.
But listen to me — I’m sounding like an authority!