George Washington University - Cherry Tree Yearbook (Washington, DC)

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by Kent Ashworth “The George Washington University.” Might sound prestigious to flag waving prospective immigrants from Lapland. Is it as good a school as Georgetown? Ask five thousand disgruntled former poli sci majors what they sincerely think. Five Thousand unemployables insist “damn right.” Special M.A. tuition payment plan: eight years indentured service to the Arlington Red Top Cab Co. Sell out high, and Building “C” that award winning monument to gravel, may someday be dedicated with your name tin-plated on its life-giving air ducts. Consider the inspired educational priorities: 1. Pepco Building (Pepco Hall?) 2. Parking Garage (A New Slant) 3. Library (The old one becomes a colony for tropical dwarfs) 4. Fieldhouse (With alumni bathing in the forecourt) 5. Medical School (The Two Tone Stone) 6. $92 per semester hour (Think of the starving children in India...) There are a lot of questions to be asked. With two glaring bare light bulbs like flames below it, a GW professor’s tongue once launched 653 virginal Bic pens. They (the pens) had never been strapped to Leo’s meat sheer or wired to the clanking elevator doors in Thurston Hall. They were untried Bics, proven not by leggy ice skaters, but by twangy Hugh Linus LeBlanc, their shiny clear plastic chewed filmy in the dark secrecy of Lisner Aud. Which really were the gut courses? Did eighty-four hundred dollars just buy license to attend free-beer mixers twice a year, in between Ezra Pound and Kierkegaard? How about all those uniformed radicals and helmeted cops — were they put on by the brainstorming American Civ Department? They tell us, someday, somplace, the idea only WE learned will be needed, and we’ll be able to nonchalantly spew the recorded spiel. It will come verbatim from a paper painstakingly hammered out during our third semester, and we will be vaguely grateful. Saturday night!! Flickering hashpipes in every window create a postcard scene. As in Star Trek, people beam themselves down to the Rathskeller, pausing to freak out someone else’s grandmother for fun on the way. The human-wigged GW computer ends another week of programming and eliminating inhibitions; often, the wrong people change. People dancing seem to clutch at invisible handholds and grasp them fearfully, nervously glancing at their audience. Waitresses bounce through scary clusters of mirrored people and learn their most valuable college lesson. ..how to assuage a wiseass drunk. [Continued on p. 11] Dowd

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The rat is like a church; trying to find some sense in it all with the other passionate observers, you congregate, wondering if your mutual intensity will pull you through the futile times. But seeing the pulpit and the orthodoxy for what it is, you suddenly aren’t healed by the weekend communions anymore and you stop going. The rat is orthodox. The regular congregation, full of enthusiasm for wailing but opportunistic fifty dollar bands, and sloshing beer, is a damnable clique. The classes at GW aren’t freshman-through-senior, they’re the loners who stick together. The friends who overlap circles and accidentally know eachother. They’re the Medical, Law, Lit, and Art students. The center residents; billiard room gang, music lounge stowaways, 4th floor organizational maniacs, dance and drama troupes. They’re the fraternities, the professors and students able to talk with eachother, the dorm floors, the employed, the athletes, the idealistic, the tired, the radical, the gay, the paradoxical minority — the People’s Union, and the others. GW society doesn’t have a high-to-low class gradation; all are either kingpin or doormat, depending on the observer’s perceptions. But they all know eachother, thanks to the silent bond: stereotyping. Rice Hall, itself a plum in GW’s mediocre fifties architectural fairyland, right-angles more concrete variations on a theme down G Street. Though one can daydream a “campus” here, that view is sharply switched off with a glance toward the streets ribboning the surface of the university. Washington’s here. Thick monoxide. Loud, frenzied rushhour robots which seem to be the real freaks when the stoplights offer them escape, block by block, from D.C. The bars. The bars’ prices. The incomparable family spirit of a ripped concert audience. The 14th street scene providing rehearsed grim frivolity. Black people and white monuments for thought, believing love happens in spring parks, the beautiful oily river. The jet screeches; Georgetown puberty rites; distinctive bums; vehemently scorning or totally favoring the system, the food, the people, the roommate, the intolerable eccentric, the Hatchet, the parking, and, once in a while, the entire high speed movie of an experience. [Continued on p. 12] Sommer 11