The writing on the wall.

I will not say that there is a particular artistry involved in the brief phrases one finds scrawled on the walls of a bathroom stall, but there is a peculiar type of mental acuity that I do not posess. The haiku I find etched with a knife or crack-pipe are like the cave paintings found in France or the unusual etchings found on long-lost gravestones. With the notable exception that they usually involve racial and/or sexual descrimination. There is a certain creativity that comes to light when a bigot has ample time to fully articulate their feelings of hate for another human being. I choose to look beyond the fact that people bring knives to the toilet and instead I ponder if the thought process in carving one's hatred for Jews follows the same course as a great poet finding the perfect coupling for the word "velvet." I highly doubt it. In fact, I think the opposite. I think normally these people don't hate Jews enough to carve it onto things. What they should instead be carving is "I hate hemorrhoids" or "I hate Mexican food." The real source of their anger is not the great and beautiful Jewish people, but rather their own dietary habits. Instead, they simply carve "I hate Mexicans" or "Hemos are gay."

This is not so at Whitman College. As I was residing in the fortress of solitude that is the Olin Hall bathroom stalls, I found another type of bigotry. An intellectual bigotry. There was no hatred of race, sexuality, or religious affiliation carved into the walls, but a hatred of literature and philosophy. "W.B. Yeats sucks dick" read one. "The point of life is to die" read another. Overall, it would seem that while the real world stall-carvers hate very run-of-the-mill things like other people, Whitman Students hate authors and embrace a defeatist outlook on life.