About a month ago, I went to see a jazz show with a friend (and a friend of said friend) down on Hudson Street, below Houston. On our way out, we ran into two kids I had never met before who had both also gone to Yale, a year behind us. Of the two, one seemed like a pretty decent person, for someone who didn't like GESO, anyway - (although he was fairly open-minded and willing to engage in conversation about graduate student-employee unionism at 2 in the morning, so I give him some props.) The other guy, whose name I forget, not so much.

He told us he was living in New Haven for the summer, then finishing his undergraduate work the following semester (and over the summer.) Hearing this, I became enthused, because New Haven in the summer is pretty awesome. I recommended that he find a place way far away from Yale and live there and have ridiculous amounts of fun. At this point, relations soured. He cringed, informed me that he didn't want to live in New Haven, but "in Yale," and confided in me that in his apartment last year "all the way out" on Dwight and Elm, he heard gunshots all the time. The next year, rather than moving off campus, he'd be relocating to the toney Eli, the new luxury apartment building on Church and Wall across from the Chase Bank.

Tactless idiot that I am, I nevertheless somehow managed to avoid a loud and obstreporous response to his remarks. I even supressed a chortle when he later asked what it meant to be pompous in:re the individual formerly known as MPM. But after reading this, it seems as good a time as any to ponder the origins and implications of this particular and particularly Yaleic discourse about New Haven as a space simultaneously accesible/to be exploited & enjoyed and one which is to be feared, avoided, excluded, simultaneously a designer drug, a virus, and a quaint atavism, striving to be worthy of its ten thousand Yalies. And yet theirs is the life of Zagat, structured on difference profound, and, in their formulation, unbridgeable. It's good practice for later migration to New York, but don't get too attatched. At home s/he feels like a tourist. Dink Stover as wealthy Greenwichian mallgoer.

This ideological formation has attained at least a partial hegemony among Yale undergraduates, however frayed and contested that hegemony may be -- this remains the default, perhaps peppered with a yen for liberal electoralism and a burning desire for a cushy internship, whether on the Hill (Capitol, i mean) or with Bruce Alexander himself. Future attempts to organize large numbers of undergraduates without the aid of a fast-approaching strike will clearly continue to struggle with what we can no longer rightfully term "apathy."

Of course, this hegemony frays somewhat along the lineaments of class, sexuality, race and gender, as constructed within the nexus of Yale's imperial relationship with its host city, though Stuart Hall, grappling with the sucess of Thatcherism and racism, long ago warned us that there is no simple correspondence between class and ideology, and the constant negotiations of privilege and deprivation suggest both a greater complexity and possible points at which organizing might intercede and find opportunity to maneuver. (The success of financial aid organizing by undergraduates last year exemplifies such a possibility.)

I want to historicize this formation though. I want to figure out where it comes from and how we all swallowed it, and too what extent we all actually did. And then i wanna shove it down the throat of the nearest university president/bruce A. analogue.

(Which is to say that i would love to write more here, but it's very late and i have a somewhat busy day tomorrow.)