A standing offer to Dickinson College: cash me ousside, how bow dah

Bhad Bhabie is inevitably a civic improvement over *MY OLD SCHOOL.* How could she not be? The young lady cherishes her freedom. She knows that Dr. Phil and his audience are officious authoritarian creeps who resent her for her refusal to submit to their authority, and she knows that, unlike, say, juvenile probation and the police, their authority ends cold at the studio door, the Threshold of Ousside. Beyond that point, out in the streets, they’re just creeps chasing a vicarious thrill by pestering a minor they’ve never met. What are they gonna do? Street-fight her and risk criminal charges? She’s the juvenile, after all.

Yes, she’s a Florida Woman. What the fuck else would Bhad Bhabie be? Compared to anybody reputable she’s a disgrace. But we aren’t talking about the reputable here. We’re talking about Dickinson Fucking College, and Dr. Phil, which is only marginally worse. Her deal is to challenge repressed wine moms to meet her out front and put their money where their loud mouths are if they’re so upset about her not particularly impressive juvenile delinquency. Sure, you’re amped up to talk shit about me in here, but any of you cunts wanna go out and rumble with my jailbait ass in front of the Hollywood Division? Ousside Melrose, and Olympic Division can get in on the action, too. How bow dah. I didn’t know that myself until just now, when I actually did the requisite Google-fu, because there’s something wrong with me that isn’t wrong with the Bregoli girl. She gets the gist of it, though. She can tell that witch hunt fantasy land is an indoor space, and that if any of them follow her outside they’ll be on much less favorable turf, where even a reviled juvenile delinquent has rights.

*Anthony Rollins rolling through the yard, in a Different Sunburned Country* Stop talking about “Outside,” you condescending asshole. Don’t know the reason, he stays there all seasons. Actually, I do: serial rape. The Bulger fellow retired to Tucson, too. I wouldn’t want to bunk with him, but like Muhammad Ali and the VC, no skull-cracking Boston shanty mick with rat statuary in his apartment ever tried to brainwash me with yuppie talking points about the incalculable value of a fancy college education and then badgered me for money. Forcible Northern Exposure never did a thing like that to me, either.

By now, something’s gotta go wrong with this story, ’cause I’m feeling just too damn good about how little #CanadianContent there is in this All-American clusterfuck, but one does not rundel in every jungle. Surely that came as quite a shock. What else will I fish out by the time we’re done here? Honestly, it’s harder to write these things without Fish Friend and the Fibbing Foursome memes. That requires editing and shit.

It’s 3:00 am, I must be living in an unfathomable underworld of the mind, but look, if the sergeant on public information duty at your local detachment has a side gig selling freebase to the interior BC home bake crowd, that’s because there’s a market for that shit that goes far beyond Rob Ford and isn’t all like, okay, buddy, I only did that because I was blind drunk. One of the nice things about drug dealers is that they go hustle someone else once they realize that they’re dealing with someone who isn’t looking for any damn drugs. This is absolutely not the case for cult bagmen whose targets are not interested in giving tithes and offerings to a fucking cult. There’s no sense that, you know, this guy thinks were a bunch of assholes for bothering him, so maybe we should stop calling after the third or fourth time he tells one of our phone bank cold callers to stuff it and hangs up. There’s no discernment that it might be a good idea to stop sending junk mail to someone who hasn’t given a dime in over a decade and has nothing but hatefully bad things to say about the development office.

These are nice ideas, but we’re dealing with a cult. These people do not give a goddamn. Any alum who has a problem with them is the unreasonable one. If their incessant whines for alms offend anyone, it isn’t on them. It’s obviously the audience’s fault for being bitter and, say, warm homeless. Hey there. This is another thing that’s worth an explicit recapitulation: the Distinctively Dickinson Education or whatever the hell the marketeers are calling it these days is inherently so goddamned enriching and enlightening and edifying that no one receiving it can possibly fail to graduate with a skill set enabling the singlehanded conquest of the whole wide world, but if, say, no fewer than two 2006 graduates have ended up homeless in the subsequent decade, and I’m apparently the more fortunate of us, or if we have some kind of problem finding work, that’s because we, as individual graduates, have been doing it all wrong. No way did a school that chronically and obnoxiously oversells itself for fundraising purposes do anything not fully deserving of our annual first fruits. No one in charge of that joint thinks, gee, if we promised them the world and they’ve degenerated into hobos with sporadic employment prospects, maybe we failed them.

This isn’t just a judgment-free zone (TM); it’s an accountability-free zone. Dickinson operates in the fashion of Tammany Hall, usually implicitly, although sometimes implicitly, as in the case of a young lady nicknamed Emily Bailout, whose parents were said by senior student government officials (sorry for not providing a barf warning; okay, not sorry at all) to have purchased her an entry-level administrative sinecure for an even fifty grand. Imagine how admirable these sleazy crooks would make Whitey Bulger look if he’d just bribed his way through life instead of doing business by having everyone whacked. The thing about traditional mob and machine politics is that the organizations rewarded their supporters by directly delivering the fucking goods. They knew that no one with the patience to put up with their corruption had the time to wait for some bullshit neoliberal self-actualization scheme that they were peddling to bear fruit in their lives. They needed the damn street repaved, and, plus or minus some delays to accommodate ethnically or clan-tinged factional juju, they dispatched a crew to repave the damn street.

Imagine Old Man Daley condescendingly charging three or four years’ median household income for some seminars on how to shovel hot patch into a pothole and then blaming the deplorable fuck-ups who took the classes for not adequately applying themselves. That’s the first time the thought ever crossed your mind because that never fucking happened. Sure, Boss Tweed’s got a suitcase full of cash here and a suitcase there, the Who-Dat Jefferson fellow keeps his in the freezer so he won’t forget where it is, and the Daley boy does his old man proud by secretly having his dozer goons wreck Meigs Field at a quarter to daybreak, but at least when they’re going into their secret places to collect their graft and/or have a mad about the city council not taking theoretical waterfront aviation terrorism seriously enough, they lose the bootstrap horseshit.

Fuck, I just started remembering the rough contours of Wee Dicky D’s neoliberal redevelopment scamming, so it wasn’t all broad shoulders and plain dealers when the constituents came knocking. Still, old-school ward bosses don’t have that college boy attitude problem. They get that the regular folk won’t want a thing to do with them if they’re always looking down their noses at them with a haughty sneer. More than a few of them, I imagine, take pride in delivering the goods for constituents who would otherwise be languishing, and feel vicariously happy for those they’ve helped. They have enough respect for their constituents not to openly make fun of them, at least, and certainly to refrain from blaming them for being dissatisfied with city services that they keep failing to provide. Some of the time, anyway, they recognize that they have a duty to their constituents to actually get shit done. Maybe I’m romanticizing a bunch of unwashed thugs, but it sure seems that they don’t go around blaming their less successful constituents for being unemployable in one breath and haranguing them for joyful love offerings in the next.

As we’ve discussed before, the Dunkin’ Doorman doesn’t care about my feelings for him as long as I give him some coffee money. He’ll probably spend the money on coffee, or maybe on hashbrowns or donuts: to wit, Friends of Coffee. Dickinson has millions of dollars’ worth of annual administrative salaries and frivolous fringe expenses to fund before it gets around to forthrightly feeding anyone, and keep in mind that it hoses its parents for a dedicated stream of food service gibs to cover its regular cafeteria expenses. For stewardship, there’s no contest: it’s the Dunkin’ Doorman all the way. The nice thing about Atlantic City, but not Carlisle, is that once I get sick of giving his whiny ass money or, to be more accurate, listening to him whine at me for not giving him money, NJ Transit offers an excellent style of ride straight back to Philadelphia for, like, eight or ten bucks, although not as fine a style of ride as Amtrak does by converting the same cars into California Clippers. These outfits provide me with passenger rail service in exchange for my fare money, and they don’t bitch at me about how I haven’t been spending enough time on the train.

There’s a reason why I gratuitously admire refurbished commuter rail rolling stock in these pages. If I didn’t, I’d have to focus unwaveringly on unspeakably disgusting subjects, like American higher education. If we’re talking about how much money Dickinson needs per enrolled student in order to facilitate whatever the fuck it’s supposedly doing on the student body’s behalf, it has something like $164,000 per capita currently available JUST IN ENDOWMENT PRINCIPAL. I doubt the Dunkin’ Doorman has a $164,000 interest-bearing savings account that needs to be supplemented with petty cash requests all morning to fund his cuppa. Go figure that he has the much less offensive attitude. I still do quite fine without him, but as robber barons and moral busybodies go, he’s a petty robber baron. He isn’t the one sending me mail every month or two on the assumption that I admire his fine fundraising institution and that there’s something wrong with me if I don’t. He isn’t the one trying to run a decades-long brainwashing operation on me.

Neither is College of the Redwoods. CR isn’t run by grandiosities who assume that the education their school provides is fucking magical and that anyone who disagrees is scandalously uncouth. No one who isn’t self-marginalizing gets upset if an alumnus complains that CR turned out to be worth jack shit. On top of that, CR seeks its funding from the State of California, which hasn’t been scavenging deposit bottles for pocket change and something to do, and not from me, its alumnus, who has. That’s an institutional affiliation that I’m proud to have. It doesn’t provoke me to repeatedly assert that I never wanted a thing to do with pushy yuppie cult shitheads and their nonexistent boundaries and can only revile the institution that has formed them into such noxious trash because they donate to fundraising drives more readily that way.

It doesn’t inspire half-serious thoughts of reaching back out to that socially climbing fuckjob from the alumni council to tell him that it took me all of ten seconds’ research to discover that he graduated from Parkway South High School. Nobody at College of the Redwoods ever catfished me as some kind of J. D. Vance of Outer Branson and then turned out to be from St. Louis. This fucker’s attitude wouldn’t bother me if it made him stick out like a sore thumb in a community that was otherwise grounded and reputable. Instead, it’s just a particularly galling and provably misleading version of the same goddamn song and dance everyone who shows up for alumni events keeps performing. These people can’t or won’t stop lying, dissembling, and saying unscrupulous things that the faintest, most optional relationship to the observable truth, all in service to a pat, ragingly bogus narrative of excellence and prestige. Just realizing that it takes extra mental energy to process and discard their torrent of happy horseshit is an exhausting mindfuck. Not wanting to slide into a state that even feels like psychosis, I insist on keeping myself oriented in the real world whenever they construct for themselves a more self-aggrandizing parallel alternate reality and try to force me to inhabit it with them. They can go to hell if they think this makes ME the abnormal one.

Besides, it’s rare that any of these in-your-face assholes could provide for themselves or anyone else in the real world. I’m the one who’s taken up agricultural trades while a bunch of mostly useless eaters who studied borderline liberal arts quasihumanities like international relations and economics (without learning anything about the actual economy, inevitably) badger me for not being more enthusiastic about our alma mater and all the excellence it shits out upon the near and far corners of the earth, when they aren’t making fun of me for being a marginally employable fuckup.

This is why, like Bhad Bhabie, I relish the thought of luring these little snots out for a reeducation with people who don’t give a shit about their precious degrees and expect them to demonstrate that they’re worth having around based on some kind of actual merit: productive skills, sound judgment, intellectual capacity that doesn’t reflexively refer back to their pedigrees for an instant assertion of superiority, not being preppy assholes who must have stood Chappaquiddick Cool Change up on a seaside date. The mash, that’s pat of the sea, too, you bastid.

These pricks could use a trip beyond, far beyond, the limestone walls, to engage a world that is definitively not theirs. Ousside, bish. Cash midriff?

That looks pretty Outside to me, AM I RIGHT, ROLLINS? The owner of this humble abode has been exposed to a lot more than just the Anchorage Police Department. So, to a lesser extent, have I. This is how Megan McArdle would be living in a genuine neoliberal meritocracy, although a University of Chicago umbrella would work, too. At long last we have someone who recognizes what college is worth. GO DIPLOMATS!

The steam grate, though, that’s socialism. As they say up north, but not all that far up north, look at this photograph. Every time I do, I realize that Amtrak is one of our better shelter providers, and that Dickinson College never gave me any damn reward points.