A Study of History

Too bad about Yale, psychologically speaking. We don't mean just the football team. We're talking about the ideal, the thing that's bigger than yourself, the reason you go on living. When you lose it, like Yale has, it's too bad. We're sorry to see it happen to a friend.

Yale, unfortunately, hasn't won a game worth winning all year long. You can understand what that's done to Yale's feelings, the way she looks at herself. We learn that the churches in New Haven have been jammed, remorse frothing from a thousand lips. Liquor sales soared as sullen undergraduates sat limp in their smokefilled digs, drowning the memory of a golden thing they once possessed. Need we mention the fourteen spectacular suicides (one symbolically, a sacrifice on the Bowl flag-pole)? Or the dingy homes of carnality in nearby Bridgeport, where scores of undergraduates sought shoddy release from a fate they found inscrutable? Or the television appeal by President Griswold, imploring alumni coast-to-coat to remain calm in their bungalows, bundled in warm blankets, crouched in dark corners?

A thousand tensions will sweep across the Yale stands today. What will my girl think of me? Will she cast her blue scarf aside? Can we grasp onto something new that will hold us together? Maybe snooker, or books, or walks in the country? Could we go away, she and I, go away to some place where no one knows us? But what about that job at the agency? I mean, won't they think Yale isn't the same any more? That Yale doesn't demand to win? That Yale will play even if she doesn't win?

Will anyone come to the alumni football movies any more? Will this mean I won't get to see Sam and Harry, especially Sam's wife with the golden fuzz on her arms? And what about that deal I was going to push through with George, my own class-mate? How can I reach him any more, what with no way to break the ice? And what about all the other contacts I planned on making?

Is it American, I mean, to lose? Doesn't this strike right at the roots of what made America great, that gave me confidence in a growing America? Isn't it against what our forefathers fought for, so valiantly? What our sons perished for, on five continents? What Harlow Curtice stressed in his speech at the AMA convention?

Why, losing is foreign, that's what it is, foreign! Almost Communist! The great Red hoard, plundering, smashing, raping, wrecking! Crimson jerseys everywhere--aaaaaah!