Vic and Jerry and “Frat Boys Need Not Apply”

            Vic and I were the political equivalent of what one of my fraternity brothers had years before called “bundling-board buddies”: associates on the anti-War Left in the late 1960s and 1970 at the U of Illinois (Urbana) and that far “in bed together,” but/so we would not fuck each other (over), but neither would we act out any love. 

            At best, Vic and I were polite to each other, so it’s unlikely I arranged for him to speak at the fraternity where I was an alumni brother, but appropriate for me to be there to hear his pitch. Anyway, speak Vic did, and very well, and his argument against US fighting in Vietnam was cogent enough that he got some volunteers for “The Movement” and an indication that the chapter as a unit would support resistance to the War.

            And then he got a kind of question from one of the house officers, the immediate past president if I remember right: Jerry. Jerry told how after a fairly formal appointment he’d gone over to an ad hoc Movement HQ to volunteer. “And I was wearing my blazer and slacks from the meeting I’d been at”; and he’d been sent off with some sneers about the Movement not wanting his type. And Jerry politely asked what I’ll crudely put, «What the fuck was that about?!» And Vic chuckled and said, more or less “Hey, we’ve got prejudiced people on the Left same as everywhere else,” people who’d judge others by their clothes and living arrangements — and Jerry should go over again and tell them he was going to resist the War and they should just tell him what work he could do.

            Vic was smart and an effective politician, and Jerry in his own way was a good organizer and would help the cause. 

            One other guy from the house was ex-Marine ROTC  (there is such a thing), who helped me with “marshalling” at a couple peace marches and provided the backup muscle to stop our possibly Government-Issued Anarchist and Potential Provocateur from starting a fight with the Champaign-Urbana contingent of the FBI and other armed and nervous agents of Law’n’Order. Another house officer — the current president, I believe — provided one of the great images from the Student Strike of 1970 on the U of I Urbana Campus. He marched around the very large Engineering Quadrangle, alone, with a picket sign proclaiming, “ENGINEERING SCHOOL ON STRIKE!” 

            There weren’t many, but my former fraternity chapter was one of the “radical houses” among the U of I Greeks, and a high point of the strike was when Pan Hellenic endorsed it, and the president thereof, from a balcony of the Illini Union announced to the crowd below, with a slight pause, that “Illinois student aren’t going to stand for this … shit anymore!” (quoting from memory).

            Times change, and student cultures change; but there were “radical houses” during The Troubles of 1970 or so at the University of Illinois, and there is nothing intrinsic in fraternities or sororities to prevent that, although most of the fraternities were conservative, and at Cornell about that time one could see at least one militantly conservative fraternity in action on racial issues. 

            The key variable we noted at the U of I (Urbana) at that time was less living unit than age: older students tended to be more militant. Part of that was being closer to graduation and the draft for guys and for women with bothers and friends and lovers who could be drafted. Part was just being older and knowing more: most 18-year-olds probably should be pretty conservative until they know enough to be knowledgeable activists. Anyway, the leadership and hard-core of the activists tended to be older students: juniors and seniors and graduate students.

            “Effective politics is coalition politics,” and for the US Left ca. 2018 this means, I think, mostly getting the secular and religious Left together. On a much lower level of importance, though, is getting across the general principle of excluding no one unnecessarily. If people on the Left can look at the Right and think, “Goll dang and thank God, those guys can act dumb with their bigotry: they’re missing out on a lot of conservative Blacks and Latinos!” — and other groups. Even so, the academic Left may be missing out on a few or more “Jerrys” in just dismissing “frat boys.” 

            The correct terms I believe are still “frat rats” and “dorm rats” (cf. “gym rats” and “lab rats”); and the rule is still to take recruits where you find them, wherever they live. 

            If you believe fraternities are essentially pernicious, okay, work against fraternities. But they’ll be around for a while, and it might be better to work against bad behavior and systemic problems, without snarky and lazy personal attacks like casual use of “frat boy.” 

"Mad" and "Mindless" Terrorism

            The most important thing I learned my freshman year in college was in American Military History. Artillery officers during World War I, the MilSci 101 textbook said, were given charts for rolling barrages that told them the rates at which to elevate the tubes of their weapons to shoot ordnance to advancing coordinates in a manner that would maximize enemy casualties and — by killing the enemy and suppressing enemy fire — minimize casualties among one's own troops. Built into the tables was a percentage of one's own who would be killed (wounded, maimed) by "friendly fire": one's own shells.

            The tables were clearly the products of rational behavior: "rational," from the Latin ratio, meaning "reckoning, calculation"; and they epitomized for me the scary recognition that the "MilSci" label for the discipline was meaningful; "Military Science and Tactics," and the "science" part was serious.

            War, the intentional killing, wounding, and maiming of people in large numbers; the intentional destruction of property, the product of human toil and often ingenious or brilliant labor — war was rational.

            In the first hour, "perhaps the first minutes" of the Battle of the Somme, 21,000 British soldiers were killed, mostly by massed musketry as they would have said in earlier wars, and machine guns, and artillery. The Battle of the Somme on the British side was stupid and a crime against humanity and against the British Expeditionary Force — and it was carefully planned and had a theory behind it and was by-Heaven rational: reckoned, calculated, just calculated wrong.

            I've been thinking about this after hearing some respectable leaders and more politicians and pundits talking about the attacks on Brussels, Belgium, on 22 March 2016 using clichés about "mad and mindless terrorism."

            Terrorism is always and necessarily vicious and criminal and evil; it is rarely mindless, or mad outside of fanatical devotion to a goal (an "end") that justifies killing and maiming people as a means.

            Terrorism is "propaganda by the deed," and it's obviously effective when, for a while, the murders in Brussels got more coverage than President Obama's diplomacy — or even Donald Trump.

            Terrorism shows that people with minimal military capacity can effectively attack at least "soft" targets in well-established and well-armed States and alliances, undermining confidence in those States and causing them to devote significant resources to preventing further attacks.

            "Evil" is a dangerous concept, but one we need. It is evil to kill, wound, maim, and/or terrorize people to impose one's will on them. It may sometimes be the least of several evils: they're rare, but there can be just wars. The evil of terrorism is almost always merely evil and beyond any justification; it can still be a sane and rational evil choice as a tactic, and God knows it's been around for over two millennia.