Editorials

Long ago my mother-in-law had a handyman who called himself, in those pre-PC days, a hillbilly. He was a snaggle-toothed fellow who chewed tobacco and was not shy about telling you he’d done time “Inside.” We knew him only as Chester. 

Chester was a fountain of information on the folklore of the belly-up-to-the-bar culture. Surprisingly, he was a firm opponent of handguns. Rifles, strapped to the back of your pickup cab, yes. Handguns, no. Why? Well, he said, with a pistol it’s hard to change your mind.  

He did have a buck knife on his belt. Knives, he said, were the weapon of choice for the sophisticated barroom brawler. He explained that experienced knife fighters knew how to grasp the middle of the knife blade when you stabbed the other guy so that the knife only went in part way: enough to scare him off, not enough to kill him.  

It’s too bad that the kid who stabbed the other kid in Saturday night’s fraternity row standoff didn’t have Chester to advise him. Hot-headed hoodlums don’t need barrooms to fight in anymore, with alcohol flowing freely at campus parties and readily available within easy walking distance of downtown even for the car-free.  

A musician who had a gig at the Julia Morgan Theater on Friday night told us about seeing young men wheeling keg after keg of beer away from stores in that campus area. The buyers were probably of legal age, but the drinkers probably weren’t, and any way, what difference would it have made? It’s a well-known equation: alcohol plus testosterone equals trouble. Even if the drinkers are barely legal.  

Someone at the Los Angeles Times with an overactive imagination wrote in the lead paragraph of their story of Saturday morning’s death of a UC student: “The incident laid bare the two faces of this college town on San Francisco Bay—the world-class university and multimillion-dollar hillside homes with sweeping views versus the poor and working-class bungalows and apartments of the flatlands.” Well, no, not exactly. 

The drama that played out to a tragic conclusion was an old, old story. Those who commented on various online accounts referenced some classic versions: Montagues and Capulets, said one, Westside Story, said another. For reasons probably biologically based but certainly culturally ancient, young men have always been prone to organize themselves into US vs. THEM and slug it out. It doesn’t have to be a class stuggle, as the Times writer imagined, and in fact the worst fights are often within a group. 

Papers these days are full of stories about gang battles between groups of young people who look virtually identical to outsiders. They seem to just choose up sides and go at it. Sometimes capitalism, in the form of drug sales, is part of the picture, but not always. 

To outsiders, fraternities look an awful lot like gangs. There are the same artificial barriers of name and place set up between insiders and outsiders. Even the association with drug sales is there: Witness the recent bust of three fraternities at San Diego State (one a “professional business fraternity”) for that very crime. 

Early stories of the saintly character of the UC stabbing victim have given way to a more realistic picture of a young man (probably, granted, originally a good Christian boy from a nice middle class family) caught up in the thug culture which surrounded him on fraternity row. One of his blog entries which has been widely circulated described his participation in a similar mass brawl a couple of years ago.  

In a graphic obscenity-laced account he describes how a large group of fraternity “bros” surrounded an interloper perceived as being guilty of “disrepecting” them. He tells how a member of his group undertakes to “grind his face into the coarse pavement of the sidewalk while several of [us] are taking turns on his ribs and dome. By now, about 10-12 bro’s are outside and there are only 3 opponents so my bro’s decide to try and break shit up but if you know josh (or myself as I have discovered this weekend), then you know that we get an intense adrenaline rush and calming us down is not very easy.”  

If that scene was replicated early Saturday morning on fraternity row, it’s not surprising that an outnumbered individual pulled a knife and used it inexpertly to defend himself. Was it stupid to be carrying a knife in the first place? Probably. Should the stabber have run away instead of using it? Yes. Was the outcome tragic? Of course. But nothing in the incident should be surprising to anyone who watches television or even reads the papers. 

And many similar clashes never make the papers. This one got the big headlines not because it was hills versus flats, but because both participants were white. Young men of color die every week in pointless fights like this, and their passing is seldom given more that a couple of paragraphs on a back page. If there’s a shooting where no one dies, it seldom gets mentioned in the press at all. 

Of course, it’s like pulling teeth to get information out of the police. We happened to drive past the corner of Oregon and Sacramento on Friday night when one such shooting victim was being taken away in an ambulance, and it’s taken the better part of a week for our reporter to find out who he was and what happened. If a family friend hadn’t contacted the paper, we might never have known. 

It was another young man caught up in an Us vs. Them melodrama. Like the fraternity boy who was killed, he was believed by family and friends to be basically a good kid, and at some level he probably was. But someone else thought they’d been disrespected, and they owned a gun, an even quicker tool for making a bad mistake than a folding knife. 

It’s tempting to say that the culture of violence which produced the recent campus death is a recent invention, but it’s not. The fascination of relatively privileged young men with the macho survival culture of the streets, obvious in the language and imagery of the stabbing victim’s blog, is nothing new, and this isn’t the first time it has had bloody consequences.  

Violent behavior between opposing humans has been part of the history of the race as far back as Cain and Abel. Perhaps they don’t teach the Trojan War in the engineering school of the modern multi-versity, but the ancient Greeks were just as prone to get into senseless fights as the modern students who use their name.  

And it’s not exactly fair to blame this all on testosterone. Brutality is now an equal opportunity employer: Witness the young women sucked into the sadistic activities at Abu Ghraib. Some modern female leaders have tried to out-compete men in warlike behavior: Remember Margaret Thatcher crowing over the pointless Falklands war. Even Hillary Clinton last week gleefully promised to “obliterate” Iran with nuclear weapons, though no one but Bob Scheer seems to have noticed.  

We’re not easily going to get rid of the Us vs. Them mentality. But U.C. officials can do away with its ugly manifestations on fraternity row with the stroke of a pen, though they can’t close down the Bloods and the Crips.  

The boy who was killed on Saturday morning was only the most recent victim of a Greek system which functions to amplify differences and disputes rather than reconcile them. Fraternities have been toxic in the half-century since I was an undergraduate, and they still are. Some enlightened schools have recognized fraternities as the thinly-camouflaged rat packs which they are and banned them. It’s time for the University of California at Berkeley to do the same.