When you tarry with the negative, the negative tarries with you.

I spent last year's graduation day on campus working through Dale Snow's book on Schelling. It was the fifth consecutive year I had successfully avoided having to put on the monkey suit and suffer through the interminable ceremony*. I was pretty happy.

Moreover, it's fun to walk around campus during the day, just because the outpouring of joy is so infectious. All these parents are there to honor their kids' accomplishments. You can hear laughter rising up from all these different groups of people distributed all across campus.

But as the day goes on and all of the parents (and most of the students) have left, the tone of the laughter beings to shift into something a little uglier, as if it is now at someone else's expense. It becomes less dispersed, centralizing at parties around campus, in some cases devolving into the kind of primal hooting that is perhaps the purest expression of unoriginal macho energy in all of its depraved imbecility.

And of course when riding home in front of the fraternity houses early that evening I was confronted with the source of most of the yelling, a group of drunk young men doing what groups of drunk young men in this country** do best, being jackasses.*** I felt like a different species. This might have been amplified by my ridiculously unflattering ginormous helmet and bright yellow safety jacket. I've been called "nerd" (usually affectionately) by students on more than one occasion while sauntering around in this getup. That's O.K. As the song goes, I don't mind dying, but I hate to seem my children crying.

In any case, I sensed the kind of hostility this kind of student often brings to bear on professors, heightened by the drunkenness. That is, some people are extraordinarily rude and condescending to restaurant waitstaff. This kind of person sees their role qua student as a customer purchasing a certification. But professors are then just incompetent waitstaff.

I'd been obsessively reading Schelling in preparation for the Pittsburgh summer school, and everything had started to seem dialectical in various ways. You just couldn't have anything without that same thing giving rise to or somehow presupposing its very opposite. Would humor as a social practice exist in a world without sadistic bullying? Humor is so often a defensive reaction to sadistic bullying as well as a part of the sadistic bully's schtick. Is grace really inseperable from depravity? Health from sickness?****

What if joy and jackassery are in some kind of complicated dialectical relationship, where the complete repression of jackassery would also extinguish all joy? I don't know.

In any case, nobody threw a beer bottle at my head, though the helmet would have kept me safe if one of them had.

[Notes:

*Those things freak me out. Justifiably, I think. Topic for another post.

**French teenagers can, on the whole, hold their wine and still converse like civilized people. It's an extraordinarily humbling thing for Americans to behold.

***Not to be confused with the television show of the same name, which is poetry.

****Schelling started understanding evil in terms of sickness while devasted by Caroline's passing. It's powerful and sad stuff.]