Bonfire of the Vanities… Burning Out

It’s been over a year, and a long and weird year it was, but today the lax charges were dropped in full. Hate-mail, as well as other expressions of “jubliance,” is still pouring in, mainly from outside the Duke community, or so I’m told. There are trolls still calling for Richard Brodhead’s, well, head. And so on.

This is a good day, though.
I’ve talked to a lot of people on this typical spring afternoon, with the Chapel etched into the canvas of a sweetly, naively cloudless sky, and I feel like campus can move on. Not only that, I feel like campus can evolve. I don’t think it will ever totally conform to a vision that any of the sides (and there are many more than two, I feel) in the ensuing debate have expressed, and I don’t think it’s realistic for anyone to expect that – but there are lessons to be learned regardless.

I haven’t got anything remotely witty to say, and it is, for once, a good feeling.

And for dessert we have… Drunken pseudo-intellectualism next door!

What happened last week was the sort of incident that made me hope, with every tiny atom of my physical being and with every little metaphysical building block of my immortal soul, to leave Durham, North Carolina very soon.

In a restaurant that serves good wine, it’s inevitable that some people should get a little tipsy and start speaking louder than average. I’ve done it. We all have. But it’s rare to witness the drunken babbling of people at the next table suddenly refer to you and certain things you care about. I am usually spared this sort of insight. But not last week.

Last week, there was a table of local “intellectuals” sitting next to us. I can give you the general outline: not-quite-baby-boomers, obvoiously well-off, possibly academics, very passionate and articulate, but in an obnoxious way. The sort of people who wear “Organic Integrity” t-shirts on the weekends and feel they can “relate” to the poor of Durham. Those people.

There was this man, I think he thought he was Byron on account of his ridiculous hair. The man was leaning back in his chair and screeching out opinions on some of the Arab states. He was literally half a foot behind me, and as I began to tune into the conversation, I heard this:

“… All slave-owners, that’s what it is. Slave-owners with first-world pretensions. They recruit white people from Duke to come to Qatar and Dubai and legitimize them. It’s disgusting… All the money-grubbing Dukies are perfect for it… And they built this island in the shape of a palm, like it means something, like it will get other people to…”

As a Dukie who’s interested in working in the Middle East, I was getting ready to snap my fork in two. I was looking across the table at my (Arab) boyfriend with a kind of helpless rage. And it wasn’t even about the things he was saying – it’s this entire atmosphere of saccharine liberal egotism piously masquerading as generous concern for the well-being of the poor that I can NO LONGER STAND.

Oh yes, you drink your bloody “fair trade” coffee and give five bucks to the homeless guy on the corner and point a well-manicured finger at “capitalist oppression” and quote some rhetoric you’ve managed to absorb from a Spivak essay and think you’re such a crusader. OH SHUT UP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

People like that say the want to change the world, and they haven’t a faintest idea how. They haven’t picked up an economics textbook in their lifetime, they don’t have patience for decent writing, and the only thing they’re good for is driving around town in their hybrids from posh eatery to yoga class.

I am tired and angry. I don’t want to change anyone’s mind. I just want to be spared from this one-dimensional social “activism.”

Why did I subject myself

To Cormac McCarthy’s The Road?

I could have been sticking needles under my nails.

I could have been snorting crushed glass.

I could have been eating a week-old ham-and-mayo sandwich that had been left out in the sun.

This is not to say that the book is not good. Quite the opposite actually – the book is so good, that most people will never write anything that should rival a single paragraph in its glorious despair.

However, the sadness it evokes translates into such incredible punishment that no single apocalyptic we-are-the-real-enemy zombie movie even comes close. Its a beautifully constructed text about some of the ugliest things imaginable: among the highlights are newborns being roasted, women committing suicide with sharp rocks, and half-dead burn victims with melted eyes crawling down ashen roads in what appears to be nuclear winter. The book is strewn with corpses – chief among them nature and civilization. Add the narrative is so real, so immediate – one naturally spends long hours at night pondering the possibility of such a scenario playing out within one’s own lifetime. The happy, tender moments in the book are in such stark contrast to the rest of it that they are almost more painful than the barbarity and gloom otherwise portrayed.

This is a book that needs to be taken in all at once, like a shot of particularly potent vodka, because you have to know, you must know: what happens to the little boy? Oh please, please. WHAT HAPPENS TO THE LITTLE BOY?!?!?!

I wanted to read this book for a while; then Oprah admitted it into the club, and I was reluctant for a while, seeing as I didn’t want to be “conformist.” That case of the stupids quickly passed, thank God.

Although now I am so sad that the green and living forest outside might as well be chrome, and cocaine seems like a sensible option.