The Frat Attack Follies
Wall Street Journal, February 26, 1999
By CHRIS MILLER
When I read recently that Dartmouth is planning to get
rid of its single-sex
fraternities and sororities, I felt a little responsible. Dartmouth is
of course a
great school with a great tradition of learning, but it has always been
a
place, too, where young scholars learned how to blow off steam. The
1978 movie "Animal House," loosely based on my very own Alpha
Delta
Phi fraternity at Dartmouth, brought a certain amount of notoriety to
the
school that its administrators undoubtedly did not welcome.
Let's travel back to a fine fall night in 1962. Some of
my fraternity brothers
were hanging out at our basement bar, drinking off a quarter keg and
listening to James Brown on the jukebox.
In walked . . . let's call him Hyena. Since it was Halloween,
he'd brought a grinning jack-o'-lantern. After a couple of hours and a
number of beers, Hyena was struck by inspiration. He tossed away the hat
and candle of the jack-o'-lantern, sliced it down the back and carved
out the bottom. He then proceeded
to remove every stitch of his clothing.
He now wrapped the pumpkin around his waist like a bath towel. A strange new nose emerged through the front of the jack-o's face. This bit of performance art was greeted by approving grins and finger poppings by the brothers, one of whom -- it may have been Ogre -- suggested that Hyena should go trick or treating.
So we trooped behind Hyena to the well-behaved fraternity next door, which we found all lit up. As the rest of us hid behind bushes, Hyena pounded on the door. "Trick or treat!" he cried gaily.
Mindless Depravity?
The several brothers that had opened the door stared at
Hyena in horror.
For our neighbors, as it turned out, were having the dean of the college
to
dinner that night, and that august gentleman and his wife had just arrived
and were standing right there, within sight of the door.
Luckily, their backs were turned, and we were able to whisk
Hyena away
before he was seen. I cannot swear to what happened next, but legend has
it that Hyena, undeterred, visited a number of homes that night, greatly
startling the good people of Hanover, N.H.
Mindless depravity? Indecent exposure? Or just a little harmless fun?
Well, perhaps a bit of each. But, in the end, where was
the harm? Hard as
I try, I cannot think of anything actually wrong with what Hyena did.
Or
with what happened in a thousand and one other bawdy stories from those
long ago days, some of which were tapped by my co-writers and I 15
years later when we wrote "National Lampoon's Animal House."
That
movie quickly entered our culture in ways those of us who made it could
never have dreamed. On campuses exhausted by the Vietnam years, it
triggered a return of good old-fashioned frat-house fun. Beer, togas and
road trips were back, big time.
Now another 20 years have passed. Needless to say, the
exponents of
today's political correctness are not amused by the likes of Hyena and
his
pumpkin, or by beer or, in most cases, by the very existence of fraternity
houses themselves.
It is not surprising that college deans and presidents
and trustees feel this
way. They tend to be too old to remember or sympathize with the
exuberance of being young. And their jobs are made more difficult by the
existence of frat-house craziness. At Dartmouth, fraternities have been
a
thorn in the side of school administrators since before the Civil War.
The
cries to abolish the Greek System have been heard repeatedly over the
years. Yet, somehow, against all odds, fraternities have hung in there.
And I, for one, am glad. Life is tough, and during most
of it there are
people sitting on you, trying to limit your behavior. Many college students
have grown up in polite middle-class homes with parents who kept things
very much under control. After college, the demands of career and family
don't allow for much mooning, chugging or recreational vomiting. College
days are your one window for the expression of the rebellious,
uncontrolled and, yes, animalistic side of your nature.
If memory serves, such historical figures as St. Augustine
and the Buddha
lived it up pretty good before turning serious and changing the world.
Back
in the 1960s, a noted psychiatrist and writer was much esteemed by the
youth of that time for advocating the freeing of our natural instincts:
He
believed their repression to be dangerous, harmful to the human spirit.
In
other words, if we all spend our lives being good little boys and girls
who
conform and obey authority, who play bit parts in other peoples' movies
instead of starring in our own, we have missed something vitally important
to a well-rounded life and could well turn out to be humorless bureaucrats
and authoritarians like "Animal House's" Dean Wormer and Mayor
DePasto. Recall Dean Wormer's command: "No more fun of any kind!"
What an impoverished life those words conjure up.
Containing the Craziness
By the way, let's be clear what I am not talking about.
Even while
partaking in so-called "Animal House" anarchy, there are lines
we do not
cross. Sacking, looting and sexual assault, and generally behaving as
the
Japanese did after the fall of Nanking, will receive no approval here.
The
dispensing of violence and pain -- whacking your pledges with paddles
--
is for morons and proto-Nazis. My hazing and hell-night experiences, while
a bit scary and messy, were about the sharing of fun rather than the
infliction of hurt.
In recent years, sad to say, there have been a number of
highly publicized
deaths during hazings here and there throughout the country. But does
this
spring from something essential about fraternity life, or from the same
unfortunate complex of causes that, over the past couple of decades, have
coarsened life in America, bringing about the decline in civility and
compassion with which we are all too painfully familiar? Probably the
latter, I'd say.
And anyway, even if all the deans and trustees finally
got their way and
every fraternity and sorority in America were to disappear tomorrow,
unruly college behavior would continue, only it would happen in
dormitories, or in off-campus apartments, or in nearby towns from which
drunken 19-year-olds would have to drive home at two in the morning. At
least with fraternities, the craziness can be somewhat contained.
As for the brothers of my own fraternity, what happened
to them? Well, no
one became a murderer or pervert. No one currently resides in an asylum
or jail. In fact, the guys with whom I threw beer kegs through windows
are
today your doctors, attorneys, corporate bigwigs, bankers and even
ministers.
So I say: Let the fun flow unimpeded, but let's be smart
and recognize
some limits. That's how it was in the "Animal House" days and
it can be
that way today. We'll have a better, happier country if we allow our youth
to have their periods as Prince Hal before having to grow up and become
Henry V.
Mr. Miller, on whom the character of Pinto was
based in "Animal House,"
lives in Sherman Oaks, Calif.