Can you stand the excitement? This coming Thursday, April 13, is Tap Day at Yale! That’s the day when Yale’s secret societies, including Skull & Bones, choose the next ruling class! A thrilling glimpse of the preparatory activities is offered in today’s edition of the Yale Daily News–complete with color photograph of a bunch of hooded seniors wearing creepy masks–by Daily News reporter Bret Ladine. Apparently some of the rituals are somewhat tackier than what’s shown in The Brotherhood of the Bell and its disappointing successor, The Skulls. (To read Chatterbox’s leisurely synopsis of Brotherhood of the Bell, click here. To read Chatterbox’s leisurely synopsis of The Skulls, click here.) Ladine describes “a scantily-clad woman on Broadway soliciting senior citizens to play the ‘penis and vagina game.’” This would suggest that the once-warring credos of Deke and Bones, which caused George W. Bush to undergo a mild identity crisis in college, have converged, mostly in Deke’s direction.
Indeed, Franklin Foer argues in the current New Republic that today’s Bones is mainly a venue for multiculti identity politics:
Tapping next year’s class often degenerates into an elaborate quota system in which students jostle to make sure they have successors who look like them. Take, for instance, the story of the Korean-American student in Wolf’s Head who considered it his obligation to hand over his slot to another Korean. When the group proposed choosing a student of another Asian American extraction, he threw a tantrum. His slot had to go to a Korean. He became so impassioned that he broke down in tears, storming out of a meeting. Soon after, a Chicano in Wolf’s Head announced that he felt strongly that the Chicano perspective must always be represented in the group. His spot couldn’t go to a Puerto Rican or Salvadoran, he insisted. He too threw a tantrum.
Most disappointing of all, Foer passes along that reporters who’ve sifted through Bones garbage discovered that “Snapple is the drink of choice.” Time to find a new locus for the WASP conspiracy. There’s always cotillion …
