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Joey expects nothing less than total cultural conversion by any student born west of the Hudson, the well-known boundary between civilization and ‘flyover territory.’
BROCKLESBY
THE WISE FOOL
15 September 2000
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3 November 2000
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4 May 2001
Even scarier might be the concept of pronouncing all the consonants in the famous sentence ‘park the car in Harvard Yard.’
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COMMENTS ON THE PASSING PARADE
West of the Hudson
By Michael J. Ballway
CRUSADER FEATURES STAFF
W
ith a national election a scant five weeks away, it's no surprise that the essence of bad politics -- intolerance, bigotry, even xenophobia -- has found its way onto our beloved Hill. Everywhere we look these days, the self-appointed "mainstream" sits in judgement of minorities, imposing its own tastes and wills upon groups whose only sin is being different. Intolerance can take many forms, often masquerading as innocent joking and sometimes infecting the discourse of otherwise open-minded people. People, for example, such as my pal Joey Brocklesby, an aught-three who is Livin' la Vida Loyola -- quite an adjustment for a former Hanselmaniac. "I'm neither lower campus nor upper campus," he complained to me a few days ago over a Kimball lunch. "I have to walk up a couple flights of stairs to get to Hogan -- especially with the construction blocking off the staircases behind Fenwick -- and yet I still have to walk down stairs, or an incline at least, to get here, to Kimball. There's no path of no resistance." Pondering this for a moment, I realized that he was right. In those halcyon days of Hanselman residency, all he had to do was walk out onto Easy Street and negotiate the slimmest of inclines. In his new Vida Loyola, however, every sortie from his dorm forces him to ascend the Hill on the go or on the return. "That's not the least of it," he responded. "Just yesterday, I was walking up to Hart -- what a hike that is now! -- and I was minding my own business, and all of a sudden this guy starts walking toward me. And he's wearing a Sox cap!" Pause. "Not a Red Sox cap, I mean, a White Sox cap." And then what? A guy walks by you wearing a baseball cap - so what? "Well, isn't that strange? I mean, this is Massachusetts, right?" I was beginning to see where Joey was going with this. I had heard this story before, told by more than a dozen confirmed Northeast-chauvinists who refused to acknowledge the existence of life west of the Hudson River. "I mean, where does this guy think he is? And it's not just him. In the last few weeks, I've noticed a marked increase in all kinds of Western baseball paraphernalia -- White Sox, Tigers, Cubs, Indians -- I even saw a Cardinals hat the other day! And then just yesterday, this girl in my class starts talking to me, and I notice she's having trouble pronouncing the language correctly, and it turns out she's from Milwaukee. I tell you, this school is becoming overrun with Westerners." Westerners -- the ultimate pejorative in Joey's vocabulary. At this prestigious East Coast school ("East Coast," even though the salt water's nowhere to be seen), Joey expects nothing less than total cultural conversion by any student born west of the Hudson River, the well-known boundary between civilization and "flyover territory." This is not the first time that I had noticed this New England provinciality in my lunchtime companion. It was only a few days after I met him that he felt obliged to inform me of the cruel facts of life on the Hill: the prevailing notions at Holy Cross hold that water fountains are "bubblers" and pop is called "soda" (note to out-of-State Freshmen: don't ever, ever, try to argue this with your Yankee classmates. They will defend the word "soda" to their deaths, and will heap scorn upon you for daring to question it). And the criticism escalated from there. At first, an easygoing person such as myself (full disclosure: your intrepid columnist is himself from a Midwestern city on Interstate 90) would take mild offense at anti-Westerner sentiments, but I realize now that it's better simply to let him rant and get it out of his system. When he gets bothered and righteous, he responds very poorly to reason: repeated attempts to convince him that Indiana (for example) is actually located in the eastern portion of the nation, or that certain words such as "heart" and "tarp" contain the letter "r," are always rebuffed with a dirty look. Yet as more Midwesterners -- excuse me, that should be Westerners -- come to Holy Cross with each successive Freshman class, we must remain on constant lookout to prevent paranoia and hate crimes against them. In order to do this, we must learn the motives of the Northeast-chauvinists: why do they say the things they say? Perhaps the animosity grows out of fear of the unknown. The prospect of a vast area with no Friendly's restaurants, no traffic rotaries, no 5¢ deposit, no "thickly settled" highway signs, and none of the other trappings of Northeastern sophistication can be scary -- even to someone such as your faithful correspondent, who grew up in such a town. Even scarier might be the concept of pronouncing all the consonants in the famous sentence "Park the car in Harvard Yard" (which as a concept is nearly impossible during most of the day, but that's another issue altogether). Or maybe it's a way of disguising an admiration for entire States where university students can walk from building to building with nary a step nor a mound to slow their progress. This columnist thinks it's a vast right-wing conspiracy against Midwesterners, aimed at making life miserable for us, for reasons unknown -- perhaps for no reason at all. Then again, our poster child for this conspiracy -- former Illinoisan Hillary Clinton -- is running for Senate this November in, of all places, New York. Perhaps she knows something that we don't. This article ran in the 29 September 2000 edition of The Crusader, on page 11 (front page of Features section), along with a nifty graphic of Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska and Kansas. Half of which, I hasten to point out, are east of the Mississippi. |