A discarded can of our College’s favorite drink. Photo by Quinn Anya. http://www.flickr.com/photos/53326337@N00/3262302956

If ever there were a case for pun making, the events of last week made it pretty convincingly. It was a Frat-zaster. The affront, the outrage, the carefully meted dialogue, mediation and reconciliation (whew, Winter Carnival, unhindered and affirmed)—there was a hint of twisted wonder in it, laying-bare of our values. If only the infamous Giaccone had been a sterner villain! A small spectacle would have become frenzied mobilization, an us-versus-them crusade of the first order.

Maybe that was the odd crux of it all, though. The fire burned out before it really got started, our forces too strong and our enemy a paper tiger. Pick any terrible array of metaphors you like, save, maybe, ones involving Phi Delt. They all fit.

Vagaries aside, last week was understandably and necessarily absurd, as though the story now needs retelling. First, Hanover Police chose an inexplicably irrational new policy towards drinking, introducing it at an inexplicably irrational time.
Second, students responded with indignant force to what seemed a strike at the heart of Dartmouth’s social world. And third, said students won, beating back discussion so quickly that it was reduced, by a Feb. 11th article in the D, to mealy-mouthed abstractions about future “transformation” and “harm reduction.”

Convincing, right? It may have been a hard battle, but hard, we can guess, in deed only. Barring some game-changing detail, the war for the frats was won well before the issue had even settled into campus consciousness. There was no “other side” to it, just a hapless police chief drowning in the horrified criticism of students, administrators, and alumni alike. Had this not happened, would Winter Carnival have been any more dangerous? The worst Pollyanna would struggle to say yes.

Whatever drove the Hanover police’s decision to craft such a strange new policy, we can guess, will yet be a fascinating story. Provided the tale isn’t ultimately monotonous, bureaucratic boilerplate (by now, we’ve heard the rumors about a threatened HPo looking to reassert itself in the face of budget cuts), there’s riveting detail yet to be uncovered here. Someone, somewhee—for some reason—must have thought that a decision to cripple the frats, one week pre-Winter Carnival, would be politically sustainable and therefore worthwhile. Whatever change in thought this marks, provided it wasn’t undertaken by a hopeless fool (which is unlikely, given Giaccone’s long tenure and President Kim’s institutional shrewdness), it will likely speak to some paradigm shift in institutional thinking that has yet to come to light.

But that’s a story for another, hopefully brighter, day. Instead, what stood out about last week’s outrage were two things, each reinforcing the other. The first: that HPo’s new policy, upon retreat, seemed to leave no meaningful imprint on campus alcohol policy, minus obligatory, conciliatory pleasantries. The second: that this change was deferred not only by the immediate strength of fraternities and sororities, but also by the unquestioned, leveling sway of their institutional logic. There is, in a crisis-unified Dartmouth imagination, no alternative to our social system as it now exists. More than anything else about this place or this school, it constitutes our identity, an identity that subjects itself neither to internal criticism nor serious debate when threatened.

This is the delicate point, it seems, that every implicit or explicit challenge to our frat system reaches, and where every attempt at genuine change falters. Assuming that the system needs to be changed (a big assumption, sure, but one deeply felt by many people), criticizing it alienates all too many students whose relationship to our campus mean very little outside of house affiliation. Sure, this monolith of Dartmouth life frustrates the unaffiliated, perhaps rightfully so, but that fact has so far proven counterproductive as a call to change on its own terms. Systemic overhaul will depend on consensus, a consensus that can’t be built when a majority as passionate as ours feels threatened. The implementation of any alternative to the fraternity system, whether that means its overhaul or its phasing into irrelevance, will depend on persuasion. Where that persuasion will come from, though, has yet to be seen.

So that’s the impasse we all reach when change, whether incremental (a la the Student Life Initiative) or severe (last week’s debacle), is hinted at. The Greek system’s acid logic persists, referring again and again to its inclusiveness, and its all-pervasiveness, as incorrigible and unquestionable defenses. Even whispers of reform threaten too many people—too many, too intimately involved. And this is what will doom our Greek system in the long term. As Matt Ritger pointed out so sagely earlier this year, our frats have long had a death sentence stamped squarely on their foreheads.

Sooner or later, they’re going to kill someone, or almost kill someone, or push the envelope just a bit too far just a few too many times. And when it happens, critics will ask, again, the questions that have been long been dismissed or cynically accommodated: Where are the alternatives? Where is the system’s progressive future? Why is the joyfully communal heart of this school, really, so inseparable from its drinking? The answers to these questions have long been just convincing enough, just evasive enough to maintain the status quo.

But where time continues to move forward, and while things on Webster Ave. remain the same, they won’t always be. Sure, Hanover Police made a stupid decision last week, but its defeat added one to what may yet be remembered, by what’s left of the Greeks, as a history of pyrrhic victories. Until then, hold on to your composites.

Timothy Geithner’s been showered with criticism in light of the economic meltdown, but does it deserve it all? Photograph by Fresh Conservative on flickr.com.

Enter Timothy Geithner, the man of the hour, just last week paraded through the House in a small populist ceremony, a rite of exfoliating outrage. Wasn’t he the perfect whipping boy? Calm, assertive, with a hint of Robert McNamara’s steely assurance—Geithner might have been every man’s wolf in sheep’s clothing as he faced a battery of accusations surrounding his involvement in AIG’s titanic bailout.

Geithner, the onetime President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, now Secretary of the Treasury, now stares down the barrel of a host of charges that would place him at the ever-tense nexus of Wall Street power and Main Street outrage.

The obvious and common argument is that Geithner is guilty by implication. As the story now seems to go, Geithner’s hands were simply too close to some sordid doings—in shortest form, the Fed’s recommendation to AIG that it not reveal information about overvalued, politically suspect “counterparty” payments to other major banks with holdings in the company—despite his having resigned from the Fed and recused himself from its future doings. Issues like these, it need not be said, do not lend themselves to nuanced reasoning. Today, finance finds its alternate definition in guilt­—an irredeemable stain on the record of any politician unlucky enough to be on the wrong side of popular rage. Where the economy continues to falter, and where Wall Street connections loom in the background, Geithner will be an object of derision and distrust.

This, you could say, is where the dialogue loses its momentum, and when the political sharks begin to circle. It’s here, too, that the narrative arc of Geithner’s story freezes between two poles that depend on one another for their dramatic tension. In one corner, there’s populist fire and brimstone; Geithner, here, is a conduit for the survival of moneyed interests within a system whose excess was its undoing rather than an agent of an outraged people—the herald, as it were, of a morally bankrupt and ever-powerful status quo’s endurance into the future. In the other corner is the image of Geithner as multi-billion-dollar bearer of necessary evil, an inside man whose position was less a measure of his corruption than it was of his ability to do the necessary thing, whether right or popular. Which side do we pick, and where do we—as citizens—choose (or not choose) to draw the battle lines?

We’re inclined to believe that the answer to this question lies in the answer to another, much simpler one. Did Geithner behave in a way that was morally and ethically suspect, or did he not? At the end of the day, there has to be some factual truth at the bottom of this inherently necessary inquiry, and we might guess that it lies somewhere in the middle—Geithner the public servant and Geithner the inside man worked in tandem, each bound by what must have seemed like, in a time of crisis, suffocating institutional logic on public and private ends of the equation. Yet that truth is well beyond the scope of this column, and we might guess that it’ll be well beyond the public imagination for some time to come as well. For it’s rarely, if ever, the nature of events like these to disclose themselves until well after the worst is over. What we instead get are stories for our time—stories whose utility lies not in factual resolution but instead in a kind of popular therapy.

Why, after all, has Geithner’s skewering unfolded without his ousting, or without some fundamental policy shifts within the Obama administration? Geithner’s ordeal has been, it would seem, a lukewarm crucifixion capable of sustaining itself indefinitely. And this is its brilliance as a narrative device—Geithner has become at once a lightening rod and sponge for angry catharsis, capable of enduring pundits’ wrath without pushing the boundaries of political acceptability too far afield. If Obama is a fundamentally pragmatic president, as has seemed (despite soaring rhetoric and enthusiasm) to be the case so far, his willingness to retain Geithner speaks to a keen understanding of tortured compromise as both policy and presentation. Without throwing his treasury secretary, and his policy, to the wolves, Obama navigated more severe calculations of public right and private wrong by placing authority in the hands of a morally gray technocrat. But where are we left when, frustrated, jobless, and frenzied with betrayal, we abstract our anger and thereby sap it of propulsive force?

Maybe that’s a question we just don’t want to ask. Maybe the intimate details of some high-profile stories, for all our good intentions and furious energy, are sometimes condemned to history’s garbage pail, indefinitely obscured, psychologically and emotionally inaccessible. And maybe these details, the essential meat, the lifeblood, of political drama, are denied to us—lost as we are in the face of a system broken beyond our understanding—by our own willing. To expose them or to treat them too frankly would be, really, to take the taut, tortured entertainment out of those narratives necessary to sustain a country in need.

t’s a strange testament, maybe, to the progress made by advocates of LGBT rights in the last decade: as the movement’s mainstream pours its energies into an ongoing fight for same-sex marriage, longtime gay rights activist Nancy Polikoff has come to find herself in the unfamiliar position of arguing against something with which she has so long identified. As part of Dartmouth’s PRIDE week, Polikoff, an American University law professor, described her stance on the relationship between law, family structure, and the creeping obsolescence of marriage.

Marriage, according to Polikoff, does not deserve its privileged status under the law. Same-sex partnerships, different-sex partnerships, and co-dependent relationships between family members are best suited to assume the legal position now held by marriage. Same-sex marriage and heterosexual marriage are not the central issue here.

The problem: an archaic legal definition and system of social benefits surrounding the institution of marriage itself. It’s a position at once intuitive and strikingly forward, an instance in which history runs headlong into the necessity of change.

Polikoff’s logic draws its impetus from social conservatism and, more distantly, from an understanding of what ritualistic and regulatory function was once implicit in marriage. Historically speaking, the social upheaval of the’60s and 70s led some to view marriage as a problem rather than a solution.

On one hand, the change expanded our dialogue regarding nontraditional family structure, bringing the first tentative recognition to both same-sex couples and non-married different-sex couples. Unfortunately, it also produced a social backlash that, as Polikoff noted, quite disingenuously “appropriated the language of social science” in the defense of traditional marriage.

From this conservative reaction came the “marriage movement,” a force that has since infiltrated public debate and worked to characterize any nontraditional family formation as, to quote Polikoff, “social suicide.” Its proponents link the downfall of marriage to myriad social ills by way of questionable social science “research” (nearly all of it since invalidated), and have long constituted a buffer of pseudo legitimacy between the religious right and the political mainstream.

If figures like Polikoff seem almost viscerally disgusted by the mention of marriage, it is easy to understand why. They’ve been on the defensive, for the past several decades, against those who would poison the term by linking it to the most hostile of social agendas.

Arguably, then, “marriage” is too burdened by political and historical context to shoulder the burden placed on it by our modern legal system. Implicit in Polikoff’s rejection of the word is an argument for simply doing away with it—at least in a legal sense.

Yet this claim has so far held little sway with a frustrated LGBT rights movement, one that finds not only the legality but also (perhaps more importantly) the cultural connotation of marriage at the center of its battle for recognition. While civil unions may confer all the legal benefits of marriage, they nonetheless stand in a sort of separate-but-equal limbo relative to traditional marriage. For many in the queer community, marriage promises a deeply resonant form of social and cultural recognition.

Polikoff counters that we’ve been domesticated by the discourse surrounding marriage—manipulated, really, by a wedge issue. Both marriage and civil unions, she argues, have come to represent a form of imposition, one that necessarily discriminates against those who would otherwise choose not to pursue them but must do so out of legal necessity.

The reality of hospital visitation, legal privacy, the payment of work-related and survivor’s benefits, determinations of housing eligibility—a host of practices whose importance flows from human partnership rather than legal recognition—all revolve around a historical deadweight that gives marriage unnecessary practical weight. It’s an embarrassingly archaic legal model.

Perhaps most interestingly, Polikoff envisions the legal replacement of marriage altogether, bypassing both the gay marriage debate and its accompanying culture war, particularly in states that now have constitutional bans on any legal recognition of same-sex couples. Her approach, after all, is inclusive of homosexual relationships but it does not center the argument around them. To the extent that cultural conservatives may find the redefinition of marriage threatening, they will find poor recourse in arguments demonizing homosexuality.

It’s big news that 49 percent of Americans, according to a recent ABC News-Washington Post poll, support gay marriage. We might now predict that homosexuality, and by extension gay marriage, will follow the road traveled by miscegeny: once considered mortally taboo and so profoundly base, interracial relationships are now essentially interwoven with our conception of basic rights.

Yet whether a desperately needed redefinition of marriage will follow from the same point of origin remains to be seen. A shift in societal values, however practical, always seems to grind along oh so slowly—especially when it contends not only with internal division but also with a domestic state of affairs that is, ahem, in the toilet.

Sometimes all we can do is cross our fingers.

ometimes what we say and what we do are mutually exclusive. In many ways, this adage is appropriate for last Thursday’s performance at the Hop commemorating Blue Note Records’ 70th anniversary. In fewer words: there was something about this ostensibly celebratory show that seemed, in a way, elegiac.

The night’s cast was, by all definitions, an all-star one: pianist Bill Charlap, joined by saxophonists Steve Wilson and Ravi Coltrane (yes, John Coltrane’s son), trumpeter Nicholas Payton and guitarist Peter Bernstein, alongside drummer Lewis Nash and bassist Peter Washington. To discuss the discography of each musician would be to recount a fair slice of jazz’s history over the past two decades; to describe this performance as anything but masterful would be disingenuous.

Per the occasion, the group played a selection of compositions originally written by some of Blue Note Records’ most historically prominent musicians: Thelonius Monk, Dexter Gordon, Kenny Dorham, and Freddie Hubbard, among others. Almost all were active during the’60s and 70s, Blue Note’s heyday and the time during which its signature (and best-selling) hard bop sound was developed. Characteristic of this music was the insistence and complexity of bebop, paired with a harder-driving, more model, and oftentimes more overtly blues-oriented sound. Save for romps through two Monk tunes, the group deviated little from this aesthetic, and, if anything, erred on the side of faithfulness to history.

Blue Note Records is, simply put, really, really famous in the jazz world. Over the last 70 years, it has issued albums not only by well-known figures like John Coltrane and Bud Powell, but also by scores of innovative musicians who’ve fallen, and continue to fall, below the radar of mainstream taste. Paternalism — really, though, “maternalism” may be the better word — seems to flow through the label’s veins. Not only have figures in the company, like label co-founder Alfred Lion and the legendary sound engineer Rudy Van Gelder, had a strikingly prescient ear for talent, but they’ve also exuded a sweetness that makes Blue Note history the stuff of legends. Lion, it’s said, used to drive musicians to and from his New Jersey studio, and, according to the label’s CEO, buy “food and liquor” for them in times of need.

All of this wouldn’t mean much to the performance, obviously, had it not been preceded by a forum on jazz and class (part of an ongoing Hop discussion series devoted to the latter). After all, jazz is a music that arose from the margins of society, a Horatio Alger story in its purest form. For the African-American musicians who constructed their music by virtue of raw creativity, achievement was a form of empowerment and defiance. As critic Howard Mandel pointed out at the event, jazz has long offered a kind of meritocratic haven not only to blacks in a pre-Civil Rights America, but to all who sought to dip their toes in the medium.

Times have changed, though, and so has the source from which jazz once culled so much of its vitality. Blue Note may still draw music, and musicians, from the margins of artistic culture, but no longer does it draw them from the margins of society. That’s what lent Thursday night’s performance such a strange quality, something pristine and almost museum-like that spoke to the music’s increasing distance from tradition.

As one of the ensemble’s saxophonists, Steve Wilson, pointed out in a discussion with Mandel, the music’s culture is something separate from what it once was. Jazz has moved from neighborhood to university, and ninety-five percent of the students now studying it are white and, presumably, middle to upper-middle class. It bears a striking resemblance to the study of classical music.

Sure, this isn’t an altogether bad thing. It’s in large part responsible for the level of artistry, virtuosity, and complexity that’s now standard to the genre. Nor is it fair to ignore the accessibility and the democratization that comes with systematized education. Yet the nostalgia on display at Thursday’s concert underscored a striking tension in the music’s history.

Sure, the performance was wonderful in so many ways: the playing stellar, the songs engaging, the crowd engaged. But the night’s flaws were instead flaws of omission, flaws of suggestion. The music was historically static. If the concert really was a Blue Note retrospective, where was a nod to less widely known but similarly titanic label-sponsored artists like Andrew Hill and Ornette Coleman? Where was a composition by one of the group’s own members, or by a young, progressive musician like Greg Osby or Aaron Parks? Where was a model of group interplay that focused less on themes and solos and more on compositional depth? Where was a more progressive understanding of tradition and history?

If only out of respect, it’s worth repeating that the concert was great: inscrutable, really, on a number of levels. But it was not forward-looking, and it was not vital in the way jazz must be if it’s to remain relevant – and therefore capable of engaging people who are not old, white, and educated. The music is in historical limbo. It faces death by abstraction, something modern classical music has long struggled with. And it’s threatened by such ritual adherence to, and idealization of, tradition.

Posted in UncategorizedComments (0)