Anderson’s article troubled me with its use of “essay” and “personal statement” as synonymous terms for the 250 words, give or take, that high school seniors write in order to get into college. According to Anderson, college applicants now spend their summers in search of experiences that will yield “inspiration” for the only part of the application which permits the student to speak in her own voice. The more fascinating the experience, Anderson’s sources suggest, the better the essay; all the student has to do is describe the wonderfulness of, say, a summer in China, and the essay will be a success. (And by “success” I mean of course “successful at getting the student into college.”)

Anyone who appreciates the essay knows that the genre takes its name from the French verb essai, “to try.” I checked the Oxford English Dictionary to make sure I hadn’t missed any more appropriate contemporary definitions, but no; as far as Oxford is concerned, an essay is still an “attempt, endeavor,” a “first tentative effort.” I’m not merely nitpicking about semantics, here, but wondering what exactly the current incarnation of application “essays” say about the young people who write them and the schools that request them. These students do not seem to be writing about “trying” or “learning.” They are writing about succeeding, because they already have, and they expect to continue to do so. It bothered me that at no point in Anderson’s article did anyone – admissions staff, application counselors, the students, or the author – acknowledge that these cultural experiences might be more than “priceless fodder for the application process.” No one mentioned the opportunity to actually learn about another culture or Renaissance art; it was all about the essay, and the essay was all about the student.

I think it’s important to acknowledge that what these students are writing may be personal statements, but they are not essays. An essay transcends the personal: it uses evidence – experience, literary text, historical event, etc. – to reveal an idea with significance beyond the self. Montaigne, the genre’s early master, may have declared that “my sole aim is to reveal myself;” however, later in the same piece he said of learning, “the stomach has not performed its function if it has not changed the condition and character of what it was given to digest … Let (the student) be taught not so much the facts of history as how to judge them.” This distinction is at the heart of the current debate over what college should ask of and offer to its students. My freshman writing seminars are filled with young people too invested in success to risk failure by “digesting” something new. At the beginning of every semester, I ban the word “relatable,” which often robs them of their highest form of praise, because they judge a text not by the new ideas it offers, but by how it reflects or confirms their own experience. (This tendency may seem innocent enough when applied to an essay by Virginia Woolf; apply it to presidential candidates, however, and see how insidious it can be.)

This phenomenon speaks not to my students’ selfishness or lack of ability – they are for the most part talented, generous people. But they have been trained to see success and fulfillment as personal, as opposed to social, goals. The desire to distinguish themselves from their peers, fueled by the college application process and then fanned by the need to fill the new grid of the resume, often involves forgetting that individual achievement should not be the sole goal of higher education. Learning is useful and valid only to the extent that it changes us for the better and helps us change others, too; the same might be said of the essay. I wish college applicants were encouraged to use their rare experiences to write about what they hope to offer the world, instead of what they have already been offered by it.

Which is why, when I read Neal Gabler’s tersely elegant essay “The Elusive Big Idea” (8/13/2011), I wanted to punch somebody (not Gabler) in the head. From my position at the gateway between high school and college, there’s a clear connection between the standardized, rote-knowledge narcissism of the application process and the decline of big ideas, in the academy and beyond. Gabler describes this as “the retreat in universities from the real world;” he writes: “we know more than we have ever known, and we think about it less.” We can hardly blame this on high school students, but we can question intellectual communities that increasingly rely on and demand quantifiable results. Gabler’s essay – and yes, it is an essay – echoes Montaigne as it mourns a time when “we sought not just to apprehend the world but to truly comprehend it, which is the primary function of ideas. Great ideas explain the world and one another to us.” It boggles my mind that an institution as eminent as the Times can’t or won’t interrogate the connection between high school seniors who think that the rest of the world exists for the sole purpose of getting them into college,  and a society in which knowing has, in Gabler’s words, “more immediate value” than thinking.

And I can’t help but wonder why the Times continues to feed the hysteria surrounding the application process. They claim to be merely reporting on a culture that they actually helped create, one which rewards what students have already learned and done (often at great expense), and asks little or nothing about what they hope to learn and do. Obviously, the Times is not involved in admitting these kids to college, but I would argue that these very frequent pieces convince parents and students that a ludicrous (and ludicrously costly) circus of tutors and test prep and summer excursions is the key to higher learning. Never once have I seen an article or op-ed follow one of these privileged students through their first year to see how all that hoopla actually prepared them for the rigors of college work, nor have I seen an extensive profile of any of the many wonderful programs in this country that help kids for whom a summer in Nanjing is not an option, and whose personal statements must find significance in a very different set of experiences. (I’d appreciate evidence to the contrary; feel free to post it in the comments.) While the Times’ college application blog “The Choice” did feature an entry on students who work in the summer, and noted that “Southern Methodist University’s director of admissions, Stephanie Dupaul, provided the reassuring words that some of the best personal essays she’d read were the result of a summer working in fast food,” Anderson’s article featured an admissions official who “joked that they were witnessing ‘the complete disappearance of summer jobs.’” Could that perhaps be the result of, say, articles like this one? And why did the wildly popular piece touting summer travel not link to the far less visible blog post about summer jobs?

The Times needs to acknowledge its role in creating the very narrow definition of success that the college application process rewards, a definition which has next to nothing to do with an excellent education, but everything to do with the elusiveness of big ideas. High school may be about what you know, but higher education is – or should be – about how you use that knowledge in the world; colleges and universities should actively seek students who know the difference. An essay is not a Scantron sheet on which you list the right answers to earn a good grade; it is a space to show your reader what you think, why you think it, and why that thought matters, to you and to your reader – something we writing teachers like to call the “so what?” This summer, I taught a class called “An Introduction to College Writing” for motivated high school students, in which I hoped to show them that what they know won’t help them much if they have no idea why it’s important. To put it in literary terms, I had four weeks to transform a room full of Gradgrinds into Montaignes, and to convince them that this transformation would make them better learners and better candidates for college. As the course drew to a close, I exhorted them to write application essays in which they weren’t solo superstars, but motivated people eager to learn from and contribute to an academic community. It seems I did them a disservice; I should have just told them to go to Europe – or to read about themselves in The New York Times.

If you live in New York, you’ve probably seen the signs on the subway for a food delivery service that promises to bring you anything, at any time. If you want sushi, they will fetch it for you, even if they have to go to the ocean to do so. In fact, the advertisement shows a cartoon man chasing down a cartoon fish; the fish, seemingly aware of his fate, has a thought bubble above his head that reads “Shit!” Or rather, it says “S*#t,” because I guess they figured the actual word might offend people — probably parents with children who otherwise might gliby shout “Shit!” all the way home, because the subway sign said so.

So my question to the people in charge of subway advertising is this: do you really think I’m more disturbed by the chance that my kid might say “shit,” or the fact that my kids have had the shit scared out of them by posters advertising the apocalypse? Do we really live in a city where it’s ok to terrify young kids, as long as they don’t express their terror using a PG-rated word?

It boggles my mind that, as a nation, our support for free speech completely outweighs our acceptance of freedom. We are more concerned about our kids being exposed to bare boobs and cigarettes than we are about assholes telling them that they’re going to die tomorrow. We grown-ups can make all the funnies about post-rapture looting and job openings that we want to, but I bet many children will be lying awake tonight, wondering if there will be school on Monday, or if they’ll perish in flames. (Do the schools close for hellfire, or just snow? What about alternate-side parking? UPDATE: We have an answer on that one!) 

It makes me bananas that people in positions of power believe that gay people and single mothers are detrimental to the welfare of children, but evangelical lunatics with fat advertising budgets are permitted to spout terrifying jargon for everyone to see. Yes, I can and have explained to my children that this isn’t actually going to happen. I can also tell them not to smoke, but apparently the city doesn’t trust me to do that. Which is harder to explain, “Don’t smoke because it can cause cancer” (FACT), or “Don’t be afraid of the world ending, because it won’t; these people are crazy and wrong; just trust me” (COMPLEX CONCEPTUAL FACT I CAN’T ACTUALLY PROVE FOR 48 MORE HOURS)?

Another fact? Kids are afraid of death. They worry about losing a parent, losing a pet, and eventually, inexplicably, losing themselves. Usually, circumstances permitting, parents can mitigate these fears. But it’s a hell of a lot harder to do so when they have to spend half an hour on the F train staring at a sign about a world-ending earthquake. I’d rather sit across from a sign that said “FUCK!” in big block letters. But who’s gonna hang up a sign like that? IT’S OFFENSIVE!

Sex is not scary. Gay people are not scary. Bad words are not scary. An announcement that the earth will soon be consumed in flames? That’s scary. And my kids and I shouldn’t have to pay $2.50 apiece to look at it.

Photo by PetroleumJelliffe

The grinning and the bearing are made considerably more difficult in the event of a direct Al Qaeda threat against the airline on which I am flying, as was the case on New Year’s Eve, 2003, when my family and I were due in London for my brother’s wedding. Had it not been such a momentous event, I would have stayed home. I certainly wouldn’t have flown with my daughter. But I did. I spent seven hours whiteknuckled with terror as Em, hopped up on airline sugar, sang through the soundtracks of several Disney movies. Because she was there, I couldn’t even take advantage of the ocean-crossing open bar and get hideously drunk. I just kind of sort of waited to die, and then waited again on the way back, five days later, after watching my dad explain to a BBC news team that he was boarding yet another threatened plane because he was sure it was “perfectly safe.” I thought no such thing, but I got on anyway, because what else was there to do?

I’ve thought long and hard about what it will might be like, to die that way. Given the choice, I’d prefer an explosion with no advance notification. My worst nightmare is of course a long, possibly perpendicular descent during which one has plenty of time to think about what’s coming, in between bouts of screaming/having one’s head smashed by a flying beverage cart. Which is why, had I been on this flight, I’m pretty sure they would have had to sedate me in the aftermath of what must have been the least funny misplayed message of all time, something to the effect of “Sorry, folks, but we’re about to crash into the sea.” While I don’t have the exact quote, no version I’ve seen makes mention of “attempted water landing” or any sort of mitigating technical language; the passengers were basically told — by RECORDED message, mind you — to prepare to die.

Makes you wonder what other prerecorded messages they have quequed up, doesn’t it? Someone should ask Steve Slater.

The plane did not crash. Instead, attendants assured the passengers that there had been a mistake, and that the flight would continue “as normal,” which it did, basically. Still, I’m pretty sure that  ”normal” does not describe the emotions those people endured for the rest of their time in the air, and may still be enduring. To be misinformed that you’re going to die a grisly death and then walk away unscathed is a backhanded blessing at best. While I’ve spent countless hours in the air wondering what it feels like, I can state emphatically that, regardless of the outcome, I don’t really ever want to know.

Photo by lrargerich

But the internet didn’t forget. My sad little site drifted in and out of Google searches with eerie unpredictability. Sometimes it appeared right at the top; other times, idly curious, I had to search around. Due to one of many programming errors, the title of the site was a mangled fragment of code – “homesite” — instead of comprehensible text, and I never knew which page of the design would appear on my screen. The only part I was proud of (the “money shot,” as I referred to it in a presentation to visiting Ivy League dignitaries, unaware of that term’s highly un-Ivied origins) was a floor plan a bit like the game board for Clue, with the different room names linking to chapters of my dissertation. I visited the site every so often to admire my incomprehensible handiwork, and marveled that it was still out there, unmaintained, inaccessible – to me at least – the intangible ghost of a project I never saw through, in more ways than one. (I ultimately completed a very different dissertation.) What I might have done haunted me “phantom-wise,” as Carroll once wrote of Alice, hanging in the ether of what Jeffrey Rosen recently described as “a digital world that never forgets.”

But a project is not a person. It is far less disconcerting to me to revisit the Ghost of Dissertation Past than to have Facebook suggest I “reconnect” with a friend I know is no longer alive. I’m not the only one who feels this way; last week, Jenna Wortham pondered the problem of Facebook ghosts. What role, she asked, should the site play in the monitoring and possible cancellation of profiles of the dead ? She concludes, unsurprisingly, that “death, of course, is unavoidable, and Facebook must find a way to integrate it into the social experience online.”  But what happens when we die to the other simulacra of ourselves that exist on the web: in blogs, online communities, even Etsy, for chrissake?

Have no fear, Silicon Valley is on the case. Thursday May 20th was the first annual Digital Death Day. Sponsored by DataInherit (“Should anything happen to you, your important digital data and passwords are preserved and can be accessed by authorized family members, partners, or trusted friends!”), Digital Death Day convened around the question: “What does death of the physical self mean for the digital self?” (The which now? ) To put it in pop terms, now that we’ve all taken the red pill, who mops up the Matrix when we bite it IRL? The answer? Lots of people! Write your digital will today! Or don’t, because it’s morbid and scares the hell out of you! But you CAN!

It’s significant, I think, that the materials for Digital Death Day carefully avoid the term “real.” With all due respect to Plato, when it comes to the internet, we’re no longer in the cave or out of the cave; the door is open, and we circulate freely between the shadows and the sun (or most of us do, anyway). Your World of Warcraft avatar may not be real, but your Paypal account sure is, and someone has to deal with it after you’re gone.  And what about your blogs? Your Twitter? And, again, your Facebook? My friend S. recounted the unsettling experience of having an old friend she reconnected with after many years die just two weeks later; wall posts turned from updates on his life to grief about his death without missing a beat. Another spoke of the consolation that FB provided after her uncle committed suicide, due to the site’s efficiency for communicating information about services as well as memories. But L. raised another, less comforting issue … when the funeral is over and the sadness has been shared, should we pull the plug? Or do we let the page remain as an online memorial, until … forever?

The shadow/light dichotomy of “The Allegory of the Cave” may be too simple an analogy for the current complex interweaving of our online and offline selves. Perhaps more useful, if disturbing, is Socrates’ assertion in The Phaedo that, after death, “the foolishness of the body will be cleared away and we shall be pure and hold converse with other pure souls, and know of ourselves the clear light everywhere.” For Plato, the body wasn’t merely disposable after death, as in Christian theology; it was actually an impediment to the insight the freed soul might otherwise receive. (Granted, there was an order of hemlock on its way to Socrates’ table at the time, so he may have been more inclined to bet on jettisoning the body.) Cyberpunk hero William Gibson updated Plato in a 1998 episode of The X-Files called “Kill Switch,” in which a beautiful young hacker named Invisigoth transfers her consciousness into an online Artificial Intelligence, where (when? how?) her dead lover already resides.

“Kill Switch” looks forward and back, simultaneously: back, to the days when the web seemed to some to be the last possible utopia, and forward, to a time – now – when a digital self outlasts (in more ways than one) the body that created it. Rosen’s essay focused on the internet’s endless memory as a liability to our reputations. I can’t help but wonder, though, what it means for our thinking selves, our consciousness — our souls.

Photo by mattwi1s0n

Ronnie Lee Gardner is Shot by Firing Squad

I was gearing up to post about phenomenology and real estate, but then Utah had to go and shoot some guy for shooting some other guys, so “Bachelard Goes to Brooklyn” will have to wait.

First things first: any religious death penalty supporters out there willing to explain to me how you folks weasel your way out of obeying the Fifth/Sixth (depending on denomination) Commandment? Because while I think an omnipotent god probably has better things to do than worry about coveting, false witness, and graven images, I also feel he was really on to something with that one. I suppose the semantics of “kill” vs. “murder” provide what some see as a nice, noose-sized loophole, but if I was worried about the fate of my eternal soul, I wouldn’t take any chances on nuance.

The hypocrisy is only one of many disturbing elements of the dead-dog-and-pony-show of a public execution. Check out this slideshow at the Times, for instance. Whip past the nightmare-inducing pictures of a grinning Gary Gilmore, and focus instead on the Inquisition-esque chair the hooded victim sits on. Admire the pretty pillow on which the marksmen rest their guns. Nod wisely at the knowledge that one of the five was shooting blanks, so no one knows for sure who killed Ronnie Lee Gardner, because then they might feel bad, because killing is wrong, except when it isn’t! Got it?

No, neither do I. What sort of fucked up society serves up Surf and Turf to someone they’re about to torture? Who distributes medallions to murderers? Yes, I know that Ronnie Lee Gardner chose the firing squad over lethal injection. He also chose to murder two people — that’s why we’re killing him, remember? David Dow over at The Daily Beast sees the death penalty as voyeuristic ritual. I see it as an absurd dance of aggression and compensation, authority and fear, righteousness and hypocrisy. All the pillows and vigils and lobsters and blanks won’t change one simple fact: if murder is the worst thing humans can do, then we shouldn’t do it.

Photo: Ronnie Lee Gardner

This morning, my carefully-constructed blockade was breached by a friend’s Facebook link to these  pictures. There it was: the sight I’d tried to hard to avoid, and from which I needed ten minutes hugging my confused but willing dog to recover. Now I can’t help wondering why it is that I (and many others) find ourselves entranced by pictures of dying people, but break like Dylan’s little girls when we see animals in pain. Why do I dismiss the visual rhetoric of anti-abortion protesters, but become a politically-motivated puddle when faced with the image of a polar bear swimming to nowhere?

The really sad thing? I’m not alone. The powerful stories of fishermen and other coastal workers who have lost their livelihoods will fade in the face of wordless narratives like this one (beware — it’s heartbreaking). Some may argue that the end justifies the means; it’s more important to act than to judge our inspirations for doing so. There’s a great moment in one of my favorite films (Whit Stillman, where ARE you?) in which a character explains that the environmental movement was a response to Disney’s Bambi, which positioned huntin’, shootin’, fire-startin’ Man as the Bad Guy and Nature as Damsel in Distress. Now it’s Tony Hayward vs. dying herons (see above). What the hell is wrong with us, that we need to see Sweet Creature Snuff Films to convince us to change our ways?

But the truth is that all the suffering birds and deer mommies in the world could get together and perform a Vocal Adrenaline-style musical number called “Please Don’t Kill Us, Nice People” and we’d watch and cry and clap and forget, just like we forgot Exxon Valdez. Check out this blessedly Palin-free site commemorating the 20th anniversary of that spill, and chronicling its lingering effects. LINGERING EFFECTS, PEOPLE! TWENTY YEARS LATER!  And this one isn’t even over yet! DO YOU HEAR ME?

You probably don’t.  Hollis Robbins co-authored “Network News Coverage of Environmental Risk: The Exxon Valdez Oil Spill” with former EPA expert Lisa Lubick while a graduate student at Harvard’s Kennedy School; they argued that media coverage of the spill focused on “oily animals” because “it was too hard to tell stories about the facts of environmental risk — risks we ignore at our peril.” Today, watching the same scenarios unfold, Robbins wrote to me: “I think oily birds do more harm than good. Just as we don’t want to use products made by oppressed labor, real action should involve not just emotionally watching Al Gore movies but also really looking rationally at the production stream of every tank of gas and every bag of arugula.”

So while you’re busy looking at unnaturally glossy waterfowl, and confusing compassion for political action, I’ll be over here, not looking at pictures, wondering who’s with me for a march on Washington.

Image by Fuseman

I’ve been reading the coverage for nearly a week now – the Times, the Telegram, and the South China Morning Post – yet the stories remain hard to decipher. One account claimed that Wu Huanming, the latest attacker, was diabetic and afraid of witchcraft; another that he had been recently circumcised. (Um … what?) The more logical consensus seems to be that Wu, a landlord who rented space to the kindergarten, wanted his tenants out. But when you’re talking about killing kindergarteners, does logic really matter?

It doesn’t seem to matter to Malcolm Moore, the Telegraph’s Shanghai correspondent, who describes Wu as “a prosperous merchant … soft-spoken and gentle.” Yet five paragraphs later, he compares Wu to Travis Bickle, a “middle-aged man, left on the fringes of society, whose alienation and loneliness manifests itself in extreme violence.” Travis Bickle was not a merchant, a landlord, or a father — he was a FUCKING TAXI DRIVER. But Moore wants to make a case that “just as the American Dream turned sour in the 1970s and 80s, the same thing could be happening now in China.” (Again … what? WHAT?) Two big problems with that analogy, Malcolm: there were no American kindergarten massacres, and there is no “Chinese Dream.”

There is, however, Chinese Rage. It seems like, after decades of mining disasters and badly-built schools and that Tiananmen unpleasantness, the Chinese people are finally fed up with the corruption and inefficiencies of their notoriously bureaucratic government, which has somehow managed to bundle the worst aspects of every political system of the twentieth century into one big dysfunctional dumpling. As the wildly popular Chinese blogger/racecar driver Han Han put it: “By blocking off information and the hospital, controlling the media, prohibiting visits, and changing the subject, the Taizhou government has successfully diverted our anger from the killer onto themselves.”A government that allows families only one child apiece should do its best to protect those children; between the earthquake and these latest attacks, they have failed, visibly and tragically.

The strange thing about Chinese Rage, however, is how often critiques of the ruling party sound like a party line. Check out this headline from the South China Morning Post: “Chinese Kindergarten Massacre Seen as Symptom of Progress.” Not a single word of that sentence makes sense. Or this interview with Hu Xingdou, a Beijing-based professor and commentator: ‘They are eating the vile fruits of the undermining of humanism and justification of violence in class struggles, because they shape the mindsets of many people.’” (Did this guy get through the censors because no one can understand what the fuck he means?) What looked like the Chinese equivalent of a soccer mom seemed to be speaking in Marxist tongues: “The deep social conflict has been reflected into real life. The gap between the rich and poor is too wide, so there may be people who have developed an anti-social personality. This kind of person cannot be controlled by security measures.” Even Chinese anti-government rhetoric sounds like, well, rhetoric. Nothing concrete: no statistics or examples, just concepts and clichés. Keep in mind that the clichés may well be true; however, there’s a false feel to it, Mad Libs meets Dialectical Materialism.

What’s really missing, for better or for worse, is the most ubiquitous word in contemporary American media: “I.” In China, all problems are rooted in the body politic instead of the individual brain. So there’s no meaningful mention of mental illness; in fact, most mentions merely mention that it’s not being mentioned, as it wasn’t mentioned yesterday by China’s premier, Wen Jiabao, in the first public government statement on the killings.  The country obviously has a lot of work to do negotiating the balance between “I” the person and “We” the people; the lives of children and teachers should not be the price Chinese people pay for that process. A commenter named Ralph in West China responded to Moore’s post: “these episodes have been discussed in just about every foreign paper. It does not mean China is a super mad, bad and dangerous society. More happy news please.”

Here’s hoping, Ralph.

Photo credit: AP

How soon they forget. A high school jock who gradually left three athletic fields behind for grass of a different kind, I am living – mirabile dictu – proof that sports do nothing of the sort. (Ice hockey lasted longest; in those days, women’s games moved pretty slowly, and playing high was part of the fun.) I’m not sorry. College sports take up a ton of time, and in their place I accumulated a range of friends and experiences I might not have encountered as a serious athlete; I even managed a magna cum laude. All that’s left to me from my glory days are a good arm and complete disdain for walking as a form of exercise.

So why, twenty years later, do I find myself in Dick’s Sporting Goods, purchasing pink cleats and a tiny mitt? Em wants to be a manga artist and El wants to go to rock camp. Why subject them to the treadmill of tryout and practice and game and icepack and injury and JV and varsity and home and away – and myself to thousands of dollars in registration fees and equipment – only to have them figure out at the end of their freshman year that they’d rather paint, or sing, or do bonghits and read Mysteries of Udolpho ten times? What’s the point?

I remembered the point when I read this essay about how an exceptional field hockey team from a small liberal arts college rallied after the tragic death of a leading player to win two national championships. These young women used their sport to turn a senseless loss into a win, on several levels: a narrative of accomplishment, memory, and transcendence. This type of story has become all too rare in sports, where the focus is usually on misbehavior ranging from the fatal kegger to lockers full of guns. Is it a coincidence that the vast majority of these incidents involve men?

My ice hockey coach at that same college once told the team that we – meaning women – played the game as it was meant to be played, with an emphasis on grace and finesse, as opposed to speed and violence. I would argue that women play most sports this way. (OK, not ALL women, but most.) When the crowds are small, the press almost nonexistent and the professional possibilities beyond the WNBA are nil, there’s nothing left to glory in but the game itself. You never hear jokes about how much ass a field hockey MVP is going to get, or that time the women’s softball team assaulted a male stripper, because they don’t exist. All too often, it seems, the simple ideals of “mens sana in corpore sano,” camaraderie, and achievement for its own sake, are forgotten, drowned out by stories of boys gone wild, entitlement and exceptionalism: “If you are great at playing this game, other rules don’t apply to you.”

These separate strands of sports mentality collided violently in the death of Yeardley Love at, possibly in, the hands of her former boyfriend, fellow University of Virginia lacrosse star George Huguely. Love was a first class athlete at a first class school, and, until May 3rd, 2010, I’m sure that her parents, like mine, believed that sports had enriched their daughter’s life, had helped her become the person teammates and coaches described as “a good soul” and “an angel.” They could not have predicted that her skill might place her in the path of Huguely, who was once tasered for resisting arrest for public intoxication, after hurling racial and sexual epithets at the black female officer who apprehended him. According to the Charlottesville, VA police, 22% of Huguely’s teammates had been charged with alcohol-related offenses at some point during their college careers.

What percent of the women’s team were similarly charged? I’m guessing … oh …  zero.

In the words of UVA president John Casteen, Love “deserved the bright future she earned growing up, studying here, and developing her talents as a lacrosse player.” To a non-athlete, ball-handling skills might seem out of place in an obituary. Just weeks away from graduation, Love had only a few games left in her lacrosse career. Equally bizarre is the suggestion in the ACC Insider that men’s coach Craig Littlepage should “pull the plug on the season.” Ending the hopes of the 78% of the team who have done nothing wrong – that we know of – won’t bring Love back. (As of now, both the men’s and women’s teams plan to play their championship games as scheduled.) This complete intertwining of life and sport, individual and team, may be incomprehensible to those on the sidelines. But for better or for worse, sports dictated how these young people lived – and, perhaps, why one of them died.

Dave and Toph Eggers, young men headed west, firm in their conviction that, after the ridiculously proximate, graphically painful deaths of both their parents, the universe owes them smooth sailing at the least and delirious happiness at the most. The Eggers family – what was left of it – were hardly the first to head west to cash in on the American coupon; one could argue that they had a good case. When you’ve lost a third of your family in a matter of months, it seems that the stars should cough up some kindness.

Others, it seems, feel equally entitled, even if they haven’t accumulated the karma-cash to cover their assumptions. Like the Eggerses, Dr. Amy Bishop lost a family member in grisly fashion; problem is, she shot him herself. Dr. Bishop firmly believed that she was owed promotions, tenure, and, apparently, the last booster seat in a Massachusetts IHOP. When none of the above were offered, she resorted to violence, or the threat of it, again and again, until she was arrested on February 12th for shooting six fellow faculty members at the University of Alabama, three of whom died. Maybe Bishop, who looks disturbingly like a grownup Gashlycrumb Tiny, used up her good luck when she got off scot-free after blowing a hole in her brother in 1986; still, her words and actions all point toward a person who felt that she was due great things, if the rest of us assholes would just get out of her way.

For Andrew Joseph Stack III, it wasn’t so much what he was owed, as what he felt he shouldn’t owe – about $15K to the federal government, after he and his wife failed to make the case that they should be exempt for religious reasons. Apparently, Stack found this debt so crushing that it drove him to set his own house on fire and then fly his plane into a local IRS office, killing Vernon Hunter, 67, and injuring 2 others. It is safe to assume that Stack had hoped to rack up more collateral damage; his wife and daughter were safely in a hotel when he torched their home, but the IRS building was full of people. Coincidentally, $15K is also the lowest price for which one can obtain a Piper Cherokee airplane like Stack’s, according to Aircraft Shopper Online. Why did Stack choose to use his plane as a weapon instead of simply selling it, paying his debt, and moving on with his life? According to his manifesto, “Violence not only is the answer, it is the only answer.” Amy Bishop apparently agreed.

If violence is the only answer, what’s the only question? “Why can’t I have everything I want?” “Why do I have to obey the law like everyone else?” It’s too easy to write Bishop and Stack off as insane. Tea Partiers have already claimed Stack as their own, while others have labeled Bishop a “left-wing extremist.” In this case, however, to focus on politics is to miss the point. Bishop and Stack weren’t skinhead separatists; they were upper-middle-class Americans who apparently felt that the world owed them way more than a living. When the world didn’t deliver, they acted according to a logic that wasn’t, something along the lines of “an eye for a life,” or “a gun in the hand is worth three votes for tenure.” The extent of their selfishness is unreal.

Hey Amy and Joseph! Guess what: you weren’t owed. Not one damn thing. But a whole lot of people paid anyway. Hope you suffer miserably during your stays on the back side of the moon.

A: I read them because Lisa Birnbach told me to.

According to my sixth grade scripture, The Preppy Handbook, The Catcher in the Rye and Love Story were both recommended reading in a course of study that would lead to perfect preppiness. (As was Louis Auchincloss, too, but I’m ashamed to say I haven’t read him.) They were easily located on my parents’ bookshelves, and I studied them intently. Although both books ostensibly reject the trappings of preppy life – Holden goes AWOL, Oliver marries an Italian-American – both also confirmed my sneaking suspicion that preppiness was about more than alligators. It was about class, a word I heard for the first time from Fat Albert (not Prep) in a joke about school in the summer, and the second time from my mother.

The Preppy Handbook may have been written with tongue in cheek, but it was bought with heart in mouth by people very much like me and my parents, who in the early 1980s found themselves with far more money than their parents had had, and no real road map for what to do with it. My parents grew up in New York City apartments, so a house in the suburbs was the first step, but what then? Of course, thankfully, no one in my family took the Handbook nearly as seriously as I did, but Birnbach’s timing was perfect. In the next few years, we acquired varieties of car, dog, and summer home, all of which passed muster in those pages. Coincidence? God, I hope so, but maybe not, as this 2005 essay by one of the Handbook’s authors attests.

Back to that conversation with my mother, who tried to help me navigate the minefield of summer resort social relations by explaining, “Not everyone with money has class; it’s not what you have, but how you act.” To my mom, the daughter of the Democratic district leader for the Upper West Side, class was a code of behavior, not a birthright. But my reading – Segal, Salinger, The New Girls by Beth Gutcheon – told me otherwise. From what I gathered, if you were really upper-class, you could fuck up to beat the band, and nobody could touch you. If you weren’t, all the Topsiders in the world weren’t going to walk you back in the door – if you’d ever crossed the threshold in the first place.

I marvel today that I managed to get the wrong message from all of these stories. I wanted Holden to go back to Pencey. I thought Jenny Cavilleri was a wiseass. Ever read Edie: An American Biography? I looked at her picture at uber-preppy St. Tim’s and thought, “You’re pretty, rich, and your family has its own graveyard. How the hell did you screw that up?” And that’s the heart of the illusion, right there. It’s not about money, or connection, or prestige. It’s about safety, or rather, what looks like safety to those of us on the outside. The sort of safety Fitzgerald told us 85 years ago could be found only in nostalgia, but we were too busy throwing Gatsby parties to listen (or to make it to the end of The House of Mirth).

So where are we now? It’s safe to say that the Tea Partiers have proved this whole “post-racial” thing a flop, but are we post-Prep? The success of Curtis Sittenfeld’s 2005 book suggests otherwise. There’s still something we want from that world, although I would argue that it’s not a perfectly battered barn jacket, or any other item of regalia. We want the comfort. We want the consistency. We want the knowledge that we are like our parents, and our children will be like us – ergo, our children will be like our parents, and they will marry people who are like our parents, and like us, and everyone will have something to talk about around the fire at Christmas. As opposed to my family, and I imagine most families, where someone is trying to explain her doctoral thesis to someone who really hopes to see CATS before it closes on Broadway, and there is no fire, unless someone bumps into the centerpiece with a cigarette.

Those of us who caught boats way later than the Mayflower – or didn’t actually choose to come here at all – will never “catch up” to our fake forefathers. Howard Zinn was right. We’re not all the same, and we know it. We’re not safe, and we know it. And so, we’ll never really be Preppies. But don’t expect any apologies from the Preppies That Be for this culture/class wild goose chase. Like love, Prep means not ever having to say you’re sorry.