Tulane University - Jambalaya Yearbook (New Orleans, LA)

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the rat of the tale of tales PAGE 24

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Dirty old storefronts. So peacefully quiet inside. A welcome rest From the continuous traffic and screaming children. Dusty bottles and rotting furniture Echo the age of the street. Storekeepers ' faces express Their most frequent complaint: Business is slow. It all seems so useless. The irony, of course. Magazine Street Is essential to New Orleans. — Tom Lee PACE 23

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v , tales by jim dalfares illustrations by rusty Josephs In recent years. Tulane has been most adept at at- tracting certain students who seenned to have formed definite campus cliques. It is not our desire here to in- form the world of the characters Tulane seems to be currently plagued with: on the other hand, they cannot simply be ignored. We imagine that the preemment success Tulane has had in this regard is a simple case of build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door. And you might catch a few mice while you ' re at it. For despite rumors about rats deserting a sinking ship. it is known that several species of rats are currently still attending the University. No immediate cause for alarm. but we think we should perhaps pause now and reflect on who plagued the universities of Europe in 1349 with their mysterious black death . (Sounds like the title of a Flash Gordon thriller, doesn ' t it?) It is now. of course, de rigueur to attack such a clas- sification of campus types. After all. isn ' t everyone now doing his own thing, and doesn ' t doing your own thing preclude doing it like everyone else? We think not. though we admit we might well be forced to defend our essay with all the fierceness and tenancity of a cor- nered rat. The world-renowned scholar Arthur Koestler. in his book The Ghost in the Machine, attacks what he calls the philosophy of ratomorphism ' . In previous times. man committed the error of anthropomorphism — or at- tributing to animals and objects human qualities. With the present emphasis of psychology and behavioralism however. Koestler feels that the opposite fallacy is coming to the foreground — ratomorphism. or at- tributing to humans only animal characteristics. Thus. Koestler deplores the fact that Pavlov counted the drops salivating from a dog ' s mouth, and from this, dis- tilled a philosophy of mankind. Certainly we would deny a desire to support a belief in such a Kafkaesque metamorphosis. In a true sense however, all Tulane students are caged rats in an ex- periment, and it is not by any means unpredictable that so many will turn out to be neurotic, to have behavior pattern fixations. They have perhaps been constantly conditioned to act so. having no more real freedom than a citizen in 1984. And Winston Smith in that novel perhaps realized, in his absolute horror of being placed in a cage full of rats, that he was no more free than they. So. on we persevere in our attempt to depict several easily recognized campus species, knowing all the while how easily we might be proved guilty of not being completely serious in our endeavor. At the same time, we hope only that our voices are not as completely quiet and meaningless as wind in dry grass or rats ' feet over broken glass in our dry cellar ' . P. GE 25