Brown Ivy

I guess my title’s a bit misleading as Brown has received the distinction of being both the college with the happiest student population for 2010 (inching out Clemson), and now, according to GQ magazine, we are also the #1 douchiest college in America.

Call me old fashioned, but I don’t get how we won this award. Frankly, if GQ thinks that the hipster garbage that goes to Brown University is douchier than the popped collars at Harvard, Princeton, and Yale, the word douchie must means something different than I thought it did. But being as how we’ve been on a steady decline in the US News rankings, I suppose we brunonians take whatever positive news we can get.

TAKE DAT PRINCETON!

As Mr Unseth noted in his previous post, The Brown Spectator didn’t publish as many issues as was hoped in the previous year.  Four was the eventual tally, with Josh leading the effort to get the final issue out for Commencement.  This year, however, is already shaping up to be different.  So stay tuned and don’t think that the rightists have been put out to pasture.

BrownIvy, as well, will become a much more active institution.  Conservatives frequently receive the label of being Luddites of any given variety, and in a very real sense many true conservatives possess a disposition to trust past experiences over theoretical ideologies.  There are certain self-identifying conservatives who think cheap gas, unfettered trade in every single situation, and a militant foreign policy of expansion, are the true marks of the right; but for most of us who prefer the classical to the modern, culture and social harmony in fact matter.  Typically, that culture which especially matters to us is historical Christendom and the liberalism of Western civilisation as handed down over the centuries.

Yet ingeniously built into the conservative ethos is an ability to adapt, to reform, and to incorporate innovation.  Hence, even the most traditional of conservatives adore a free market which can release man’s potential in astonishingly delightful ways.  It is the contention of this conservative that the online web journal may be one such innovation that, if approached with the right attitude and moral outlook, can do a tremendous amount of good for a people and nation gravely malnourished in culture.

To that end, I’d like to use this venue to make a proposal to anyone in the Brown community — particularly the conservative Protestants — concerning the ultimate source of all culture; I mean religion.  For the past two years, I’ve been a reasonably frequent parishioner at S. Stephen’s Episcopal Church on George St (sstephens.org), right across from the Ratty and Wriston Quadrangle. Baptised and confirmed a Presbyterian (PCUSA), it was a little strange at first to attend this very High Anglo-Catholic church, but I quickly learnt to love its atmosphere of reverence and humility before God.  What I once condemned as rank Romanism, I now understand as simply respect for historical Christendom.  If ever I am arrogant, it is usually the case that my defiant Presbyterian upbringing is shining through.  We Presbyterians have always had issues with authority, no doubt reinforced by the doctrine of predestination and divine election.

Soon enough, I shall probably become an Anglican, but I am very much still in the discerning phase.  To that end, and to the end of taking an affirmative step to maintain Anglo-Protestant culture, I am making a firm commitment this year to attend the Solemn High Mass on every Sunday (10am) that I am at Brown.  I sincerely do hope that others will join me, if for no other reason than to keep me honest or to chastise my actions when they stray from the behaviours expected of a Christian man.  (Perhaps to share fellowship, too?)

Further, I am making a firm commitment to attend the Low Mass every day at 5.30pm (again, when I am at Brown).  The goal in doing so is to re-institute, in my own life at least, the chapel requirements of a more mannered age.  (It may surprise most Brown undergraduates of 2009, but even 50 years ago chapel attendance was required to obtain the A.B.)  Won’t you please accompany me?

Times have changed, as the weak and petulant trope goes.  But the Permanent Things, defended so skilfully in the 20th century by the likes of T.S. Eliot and Russell Kirk, never truly leave.  And it is our bounden duty, as heirs to the great Western tradition, not to neglect or diminish them.  The Old Order need not die if we be determined.

Ideally, we shall eat dinner and then imbibe a pint or two after the daily chapel, before heading off to our dormitories or the libraries.  Those Anglo-Saxons always did a few things correctly.

Project commences September 9th.

sbq

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So the Spectator hasn’t been very reliable this year. They only got 4 issues out this last year. So, we’ve published the last one as an online exclusive. If you want to see it go to the website. The lead article is by your’s truly. It’s an expose on sleeping Brown police officers. It was supposed to come out back in February, so it’s really late. But regardless, I think it’s really important that Brown students know that this has been going on for a long time.

Really? These aren’t even creative.

After raiding the Brown Corporation meeting a number of weeks ago, SDS’ punishment finally came down from on high. They called a gathering at 2pm to meet on the steps of University Hall. If the rulings were positive, they said they were going to celebrate; if the ruling were negative, they were going to march to the office of the President and demand that the rulings be overturned.

I showed up at 2pm at the steps of University Hall and waited for SDS to gather around. I had a camera in hand in order to document whatever happened, which they weren’t too happy about. After waiting for a critical mass, the entire group marched over to the office of student life. In the front lobby they stood, when down came a secretary with envelopes in hand. The room was thick with anticipation. But it was a false alarm. Misprints were blamed. Dean Ward came down a few minutes later, asked me to turn the camera off, and told the members of SDS that they would have to wait a few more minutes. As he left, a few SDSers made some snide remarks. Understandable, as they are under a fair amount of stress. A few minutes later, Dean Klawunn walked through the room. As she passed through the group, one member of SDS greeted her sarcastically.

After a few minutes, an office worker from the OSL came out telling the members of SDS that their noise was making it hard to function as an office. She asked SDS to move to a conference room. SDS members resisted. “We’re students too,” said Mike DaCruz. “Other students can’t function? What about us, we’re students and we can’t function until we know what’s going to happen to us,” said another member of SDS. But in true democratic fashion, most SDSers agreed that it was a reasonable request, and they moved into the room. Three students stood in front of me, making sure that I couldn’t get into the room, and they closed the door. So, I can’t really say what was discussed. Only that after a long while, the SDS students who were accused went upstairs where they were to demand to see the verdict.

After receiving the verdict, one of the accused text messaged someone in the conference room. All the members of SDS poured out into the OSL lounge where they waited upon tenterhook for their comrades to come downstairs and announce their fates. Suspension and even expulsion were on the table, so anything short of that was good enough news it seemed. And sure enough, as the accused students emerged, hugs were given all around. No one was expelled. But they were all put on probation (basically meaning protest restriction), some were given an additional 3-ish hours of “community service” (which means working for Brown), and others are being required to write papers.

That’s the scoop, my opinion to follow.

To Josh — I wrote this on Facebook, in response to a blog post that Horowitz had made about this topic:

‘The Constitution, the ultimate arbiter of this jurisdiction, is clear on the matter — foreign-born people are ineligible to be President. Think that it is an out-of-date rule? Then seek an Amendment, or begin a rebellion to overthrow the Government. Those are your two options. Defiling the Constitution by re-interpretations not at all connected with the original understanding is unacceptable.

Now, I am an Hamiltonian, so I understand elasticity in understanding very well, and deem it just in many scenarios. But complete, deliberate neglect of specific Constitutional rules is unconscionable. Hamilton would agree — Hell, he even thought that the Federal government would require an Amendment to construct inter-state highways. Looks like the statist Eisenhower missed out on that one.’

Moreover, I remarked that ’since he [Obama] has not even been elected yet — the Electoral College, the constitutionally-mandated elector of the President, has not met — he cannot be unseated’.  Of course, in all likelihood, the Electoral College (which is to decide tomorrow on the next President) will elect Obama, but the critical idea that one must understand is that the United States is not a democracy.

And on your claim that conservatives should support Obama, I emphatically reject it.  Almost every President since Wilson has governed unConstitutionally and tyrannically, so a full-fledged armed rebellion is long overdue.  But, since ‘all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed’, the conservative may feel as though greater good can come from a prudent political rebellion.

Now, living according to such prudence does not require that the conservative actually support the current leader — conservative Protestant Whigs (and even some Tories) expelled the tyrannical Roman Catholic despot, James II, in the 1688-9 Bloodless/Glorious Revolution.  They did so because of patriotism, love for the fatherland, and a desire to maintain the liberty guaranteed by the ancient Anglo-Saxon constitution, which the government at the time was openly violating.

As conservatives, we are obliged to be patriots, true to the Constitution and to the liberalism handed down for centuries; but we may also be obliged to be seditious.  However, if a method other than a prudent political rebellion (or an armed rebellion that shall be the last resort) – an explicitly Constitutional method, such as the enforcement of the native-born clause – can be used to invalidate the accession of a leader bound to be tyrannical, then lovers of liberty should seize on that method.

Using the method of invalidating his accession by enforcing the native-born clause, though, mandates that Obama was born abroad.  Because facts matter, this method fails if he were actually born in Hawaii.  But other options remain.

sbq

According to a recent article, President Bush’s spokesman, Dana Perino, admitted that the Bush Administration was planning to bail out the GM and Chrysler auto companies, violating the critical liberal free-market concept that bad management will naturally be punished, and good management rewarded. She said that ‘given the current weakened state of the U.S. economy, we will consider other options if necessary – including use of the TARP program – to prevent a collapse of troubled automakers’.

Now, government is certainly a necessary precondition for an effective free market — it broadly guarantees the protection of private property, the enforcement of contracts, the regulation of certain types of interaction (health, safety, and morals), and the power to go to War to protect the national interest — but it should not determine which ideas and companies shall succeed, and which shall fail. Corporatism is inherently unjust.

I swear, if the Congress and Bush had been around 200,000 years ago, Homo erectus would have been bailed out, and Homo sapiens condemned for his success.

sbq

Recently the Brown Daily Herald published the results of a campus poll in an article entitled “Students getting busy less often than their peers think.”  The astounding results:  most students are not sexually involved with a large number of partners.  Even more astounding: these results still seem to surprise people. 

Maybe I am the only one who has noticed, but the BDH publishes articles with this same topic at least once a semester.  Guess what?  The results are the same every time.  Students have less sex than they tell you.  No wonder Brown University is dropping in the national rankings – look at the students getting in.  The BDH writers cannot find anything better to put in their newspaper than the same poll about sex time and time again, and the readers though seeing the same outcome a few months earlier, still are intrigued that their classmates are not the equivalent of James Bond in bed.

Maybe Brown could use these polls as a reason to cut back on all the excessive sexual counselors, intercourse info sessions, condoms, and other products offered at every corner of the school.  And just for the fun of it, I am going to go out on a limb…I predict that next semester’s BDH poll will show that Brown students are less sexually active than the general perception.