Improving the Rabble Through Education

When I first moved back to my home town, I took a comfortable little apartment downtown. It satisfied what I loved about city living--I could walk to work, the grocery store and the bank--and added a little extra:  I finally had a balcony.

A balcony, more or less. In actuality, it was the roof where the first floor extended beyond the second. It allowed me to tickle the child inside by entering and exiting by way of my bedroom window and gave me a private place to smoke.

It had a perfect view into the courtyard of my town's most downscale bar. Charming, in its way. Always dark inside, it rented rooms to itinerants and was closed only when state law mandated it.

From my vantage point, above and unseen, I saw just what you'd expect to see. Drug deals, public sex, breakdowns and plenty of people sleeping it off.

One late morning I stepped outside for my breakfast smoke. The door to the courtyard flew open and a group of three came out. They were led by a middle-aged woman in a sweatshirt and what I know as sleep pants but are standard apparel here.

They were talking loudly but I couldn't make out what they were saying. The woman turned away from the door and dropped the back of her pants to just below her ass.

From her position and the way the two others gathered behind her, my first thought that she was getting some sort of shot. Diabetes or something. Out of instinct, I turned away, thinking that they had gone out back for privacy.

I heard a hissing, popping sound. I turned back, just in time to see a bottle rocket shoot out of the woman's ass crack.

They whooped it up and returned inside. Well, that's something, I thought.

A week or so later, I told the story to a young man that I knew, who found it plenty amusing. In time, the conversation turned to his upcoming entry to college. He was over twenty-one and this was his first go at higher education.

I gave him my standard advice. "Don't go until you know exactly what you want to accomplish there. You want to make sure that you get through as fast as you can and come out with a job."

I added my usual spiel about how college was overvalued. That got him to lay down the standard liberal line, "I think everyone should go to college."

"What about that woman who shot the bottle rocket out of her ass? What would she have gotten out of college?"

So, you can imagine my surprise when EducationRealist highlighted the first paragraph of Caitlin Flanagan's fraternity smear in The Atlantic:

One warm spring night in 2011, a young man named Travis Hughes stood on the back deck of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity house at Marshall University, in West Virginia, and was struck by what seemed to him—under the influence of powerful inebriants, not least among them the clear ether of youth itself—to be an excellent idea: he would shove a bottle rocket up his a** and blast it into the sweet night air. And perhaps it was an excellent idea. What was not an excellent idea, however, was to misjudge the relative tightness of a 20-year-old sphincter and the propulsive reliability of a 20-cent bottle rocket. What followed ignition was not the bright report of a successful blastoff, but the muffled thud of fire in the hole.

ER's students had the appropriate response:

“Why would she write about an idiot?” asked Dino, ever the challenger.

“How did someone so stupid get to college?” Bruce wanted to know.

Well, Bruce, that's what college is all about. At least, these days.