Sinners in the hand of an angry Rob

Oh, you are brilliant, aren’t you? No moderation for Duke students; nothing gradual, temperate, half-way about you. Nothing for you but the extremes; nothing but 80-hour work weeks, networking and recs for you on the one hand; nothing on the other hand but finger paint. Mechanized or infantilized.

And since so much has been written on the stress, to so little effect, let me speak to the equally foolish reaction, to de-stress and the destressors, to the proselytizing relaxants and finger-painters. If you’ve ever preached for whiffle-ball in these pages. If you’ve ever ridden the Slip-n-Slide down the quad. If you’ve ever worn pajamas to class or blown a condom-balloon or giggled at Dick Brodhead. If you’ve ever offered students candy as a reward for doing their civic duty, this is for you.

You know, of course, what you’re about. You’ve heard the noise briefly drop, you’ve put down your drink, and you’ve felt, under and behind everything, the quiet desperation, the dying animal to which you’re strapped, there and gone in a second. And the music goes back up, but now you’ve smelt it, your own especial stench of death, and you don’t forget the smell. And try as you can to scrape it off, to relax your way out of it, to suckle your way out of it, it seeps in deeper, the deeper into your skin for every day you pretend you’ve killed it.

Today we see you playing whiffle-ball on the quad, like children; tomorrow we see you pouring your pay into plastic surgery, into sports cars and trophy wives and shameless tourism, all in a series of increasingly futile attempts to deny your own mortality. We see a whole campus tied together by nothing so much as a calendar of flailing collegiate attempts to reclaim childhood. We see suffocation by nostalgia.

So what is to be done? It would be too much to ask someone to sing the praises of π over __, of adult dignity and decency, of the salutary heaviness of duty to state, community and family. It would be far too much to ask someone to suggest that the former were all possible without a single resume workshop, that seriousness could exist without soullessness. We must not ask any of this from The Chronicle, because none of it would ever be read, because you’d prefer another story about masturbation.

We would ask something very simple instead. Finger-painters—we would ask you simply to acknowledge your good fortune. Whiffle-ballers—only to humbly recognize that the gardens, the midnight movies, the 10 hours of class a week—the Duke lifestyle altogether—comprise an extraordinary island of privilege, one with few analogues in human history.

But even this is too much for you. “Privilege” is said by everyone and meant by no one; it’s exploited as an excuse for radical politics; it’s used as the manipulative punchline in any number of oh-isn’t-it-sad stories about recreational slumming; but never is it examined, never interrogated, never treated with much more than a shrug.

And yet even the most cursory dismissal of the idea of privilege surpasses your insouciance when you tell us to “relax.” You hold stress to be a moral failure. You would pass off the fruits of your parentally-funded Saturnalia as somehow worthy of commendation. You would turn luck into merit, like the worst Social Darwinist. You are worriless. You are free spirits. You are effortfully imperfect.