Holidays in Hell: In Which Our Intrepid Reporter Travels to the World's Worst Places and Asks, "What's Funny About This" (26 page)

SEPTEMBER 1986

I always envied the fellows who went to Harvard. Wouldn't it be
swell to be on the Crimson gravy train? I'd probably be a government big shot by now, undermining U.S. foreign policy, or a CEO
running some industry into the ground. I'd have that wonderful
accent like I'd put the Fix-A-Dent on the wrong side of my partial
plate. And I'd have lots of high-brow Ivy League friends. We could
have drinks at the Harvard Club and show off our Ivy League
ability to get loud on one gin fizz. There, but for low high school
grades, middling SAT scores, a horrible disciplinary record and
parents with less than $100 in the bank, go I. How sad.

Or so I thought. I'm cured now. I just came back from
Harvard's monster gala 350th Anniversary Celebration, and thank
you, God, for making me born dumb. I went to a state college in
Ohio. Therefore, I will never have to listen to dozens of puff
buckets jaw for hours about how my alma mater is the first cause,
mother lode and prime mover of all deep thought in the U.S.A. I'm not saying the puff buckets are wrong. Harvard is the home of
American ideas; there have been several of these, and somebody
has to take the blame for them. But it ain't the likes of me. Us
yokels who majored in beer and getting the skirts off Tri-Delts bear
no responsibility for Thoreau's hippie jive or John Kenneth
Galbraith's nitwit economics or Henry Kissinger's brown-nosing the
Shah of Iran. None of us served as models for characters in that
greasy Love Story book. Our best and brightest stick to running
insurance agencies and don't go around cozening the nation into
Vietnam wars. It wasn't my school that laid the educational groundwork for FDR's demagoguery or JFK's Bay of Pigs slough-off or
even Teddy Roosevelt's fool decision to split the Republican Party
and let that buttinski Wilson get elected. You can't pin the rap on
us.

But I was still full of high, if slightly green-eyed, expectations
when I arrived at Harvard on Wednesday, September 3rd. I was just
in time for something the Official Program called "Harvard's Floating Birthday Party," though it took place on a patch of muddy grass
between Memorial Drive and the Charles River and didn't float at
all. According to the Program notes, there were to be "a 600 foot
illuminated rainbow, laser projections . . . appearances by the
Cambridge Harmonica Orchestra . . . The Yale Russian Chorus,
the clown Mme. Nose; the one-man riddle and rhyme show, `Electric Poetry,"' and other sophisticated delights.

The laser projections looked like Brownie Scouts at play with
flashlights and colored cellophane. The illuminated rainbow
looked like a McDonald's trademark. "Electric Poetry" turned out
to be one of those two-bit Radio Shack things where you can
program messages to crawl along rows of little light bulbs. It
flashed such verses as, "Be your best/Pass this test/Divest/Your
funds from South Africa." I searched in vain for the clown Mme.
Nose.

The Yale Russian Chorus, however, was performing or maybe
that was the Cambridge Harmonica Orchestra or perhaps the Oxford Nose Harp Ensemble. I listened, but I couldn't be sure. It was
raining, but this did not deter the spectators who arrived by the
hundreds to stand lax-jawed in bovine clusters, occasionally fingering their alumni badges. Here was America's power elite, all wet with no idea what they were doing. You can take it for a symbol if
you like. I couldn't take it at all and went to the nearest bar.

There was a modern-dance performance that night called
"Gym Transit"-part of Radcliffe College's contribution to the
350th festivities. The Program notes described it as "celebrating
the art of sport and dance." I admire phrases like this with a whole
bunch of concepts that, if you have a Harvard education, you can
just jumble together any old way. I'll bet "Gym Transit" could also
be described as "dancing the celebration of art and sport" or
"sporting the dance of celebration art" or "making an art of sport
dance celebration." It was hard to pass this up, but after six drinks
I managed.

The next morning was the great Foundation Day convocation,
which President Reagan wasn't addressing. You may remember the
press flap. Harvard wanted the president to give a 350th birthday
speech as Franklin Roosevelt had done at the 300th and Grover
Cleveland at the 250th. But Harvard didn't want to give the
president an honorary degree. I guess they felt Reagan was a nice
man and, no doubt, important in his way, but not quite Harvard
material. Once again they're right. Ron would have dozed off
during "Gym Transit" even quicker than I. So the president, God
bless him, told Harvard to piss up a rope. And Harvard had to go
shopping for someone else. I'm sure they were looking for a person
who embodied democratic spirit, intellectual excellence and the
American ethos, which is why they picked Prince Charles.

The Convocation opened with prayers by Chaplain of the Day
Rabbi Ben-Zion Gold, director of the campus B'nai B'rith Hillel
Foundation. Rabbi Gold graduated from Roosevelt University in
Chicago and sounded like Shecky Green, and running him first out
of the gate seemed a kind of cruel joke. The Ivy League has never
been famously hospitable to Jews. And Harvard has been almost as
important to the American Jewish community as the pork-sausage
industry. There followed eleven speakers and three anthems sung
mostly in foreign languages. The temptation to rattle on at length
was resisted by no one. I whiled away the time in the half-empty
press section by defending myself from a horde of yellow jackets
that had descended on Harvard Yard and by deciding which member of the Radcliffe Choral Society I would take with me to a desert island if I had to take one of them, and fortunately I do not. The
choral society looked like the Harvard football team with mops on
their heads. Indeed, since Harvard football is played as though the
team spends its practice sessions singing in a choir, this may have
been the case.

Every now and then I'd catch some fragment of a speech. I
remember the adenoidal-voiced professor of classical Greek, Emily
D.T. Vermeule, dumping on Homer. She quoted the Odyssey where
Homer had the minstrel Phemius, begging Odysseus to spare his
life, say, "I am self-taught. God planted all the paths of poetry in
my mind."

Professor Vermeule took a dim view of this. "He spoke in
pride," she said, "that only God was his tutor; in vanity, for his
original genius; in fear, that death might take his irreplaceable gift
of words. He was wrong. . . . Harvard," Professor Vermeule said,
`... is not self-taught, and is rightly proud of that." Poor Homer,
you see, probably couldn't even get into Yale.

By the time Prince Chuck got to the podium the show was
running almost an hour behind schedule. "The suspense of this
momentous occasion has been killing me," said the Prince. "It's
exquisite torture for the uninitiated. Fortunately, all my characterbuilding education has prepared me for this." Charles seemed as
confused as I was about what he was doing there. "I thought that in
Massachusetts they weren't too certain about the supposed benefits
of royalty," he said and noted that he hadn't "addressed such a
large gathering since I spoke to forty thousand Gujarato buffalo
farmers in India in 1980... "

The rest of the speech was a sweet little well-pronounced
thing about development of character being more important in
education than mastery of technology. The audience clapped at odd
moments, and it was a while before I figured out they were applauding anything that could be construed as a warning against atomic
energy and bombs and stuff.

The 350th Anniversary Celebration went on for four days and
included a mind-numbing and butt-wearying number of events.
There were two other convocations, eighty-three academic symposia, forty-three exhibitions and sixteen performing arts events,
plus heaps and piles of private lunches, cocktail parties, dinners and receptions. The symposia ranged from over-reach ("The Universe: The Beginning, Now and Henceforth") to under-reach
("Films as an Art Form") and included the dumb ("Feminist Criticism and the Study of Literature: What Difference Does Difference
Make?"), the very dumb ("Taking Charge of Your Life") and the
hopelessly oxymoronic ("The Role and Social Value of the Large
Law Firm"). One symposium was called "Beyond Deterrence:
Avoiding Nuclear War" and billed itself as "An examination of the
use of nuclear weapons." For doorstops? Another was titled "Homer at Harvard," so maybe they're claiming the old hexameterbasher as one of their own after all.

The list of exhibits looked worse yet, for instance, "Artifacts of
Education" at the Gutman Library, which I assume was old pen
nibs and gum under seats. I actually saw only one exhibit, a
massive display on "A New Approach to the Treatment of Advance
Periodontal Disease," complete with color photographs, which I
had to walk by to get to the free press lunch.

I felt I should go to at least one symposium too. I picked "The
International Negotiation Process: Can We Improve It?" figuring
this was as likely a place as any for eggheads to go wrong. But, in
its ability to disappoint, as in all other fields, Harvard excels. The
eggheads didn't go wrong. They didn't go anywhere. They yammered for two hours about US.-Soviet treaty bargaining, saying
nothing about negotiation I couldn't have learned from a Kansas
City divorce lawyer.

The moderator, Professor of Law emeritus Louis Sohn, had an
accent so thick I could understand almost nothing he said. The gist
of that almost nothing was that there are three kinds of negotiation:
one-on-one, mediation by a third party and submission of dispute
to an international tribunal. Professor Sohn said one of these
doesn't work very well with the Soviets and the other two don't work
at all.

The first panelist, Arthur Hartman, U. S. ambassador to the
Soviet Union, pointed out that Russians are very Russian. He also
pointed out that communism is totalitarian and we can't count on
Pravda investigative reporters to catch the Soviets cheating on
arms agreements. And he railed briefly against congressional tendency to legislate the negotiating process instead of letting the
executive branch screw things up on its own.

The second panelist was former Attorney General Elliot
Richardson. Richardson is one of those fixtures of the political
scene that nobody knows quite what to do with. A job negotiating
the boring International Law of the Sea Treaty was fobbed off on
him a few years back. It must have made a big impression.
Richardson brought the discussion around to sea law at every
opportunity. Among his many insights (each illustrated with a lawof-the-sea example): The Soviets act in their own self-interest; the
Soviets get peeved when reminded that they're not really a superpower but a sort of overgrown Bulgaria; and "If we are to succeed in
negotiating, we must understand their position ... and we'd better
understand our position, too."

The third panelist was Howard Raiffa, a professor at the
Harvard Business School and an expert on decision analysis and
negotiation. He said a number of things, or I assume he did. I had
temporarily dozed off.

Batting clean-up was Roger Fisher, another Harvard Law
School prof and author of the best-selling Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreements Without Giving In. Professor Fisher was cute and
glib and quotable, saying things like, "Asking who's winning a
negotiation is like asking who's winning a marriage," and, "When
it comes to arms negotiations, we can be equally insecure for less
money." Fisher could probably get a job in the real world if he
tried.

A question-and-answer period followed. I asked myself the
question, "What am I doing here?" and left.

That night I went to Boston and got hammered and missed the
only interesting thing that happened during the anniversary. A
weedy group of sixty or eighty anti-apartheid protestors had been
popping up here and there all through the ceremonies, squeaking,
"Divest Now" and waving placards saying "There's blood on your
portfolio." Being a veteran of the pressing issues and real riots of
the 1960s, I had paid them no mind. But on Thursday night the do-
gooders nerved themselves and blocked the entrances to the 350th
Anniversary Dinner, a $20,000 black-tie fete for several hundred
of the university's most influential alums. There was a good deal of
shouting and even some pushing and wrassling between alumni and
protestors. According to the Harvard Crimson student newspaper,
"Hugh Calkins '45 . . . led a small contingent of alumni who tried to make their way through the blockade in front of one door. The
activists physically repelled them . . . . At another entrance .. .
an alumnus successfully climbed through several rows of armlinked protestors who attempted to push him down the steps. As he
physically struggled against the activists, the alumnus called them
`assholes ..."

Mercifully for the protestors, this wasn't Georgia Tech. Cambridge police officers reportedly said they were ready to arrest the
protestors and only had "to be given the word." President of
Harvard, Derek C. Bok, cancelled the dinner instead. I was unable
to determine the whereabouts, during these events, of Professor
Fisher and his Negotiating Agreements Without Giving In.