… and that’s just the long and the short of it, mes petites. This blog, with help from readers like George, who recently sent UD this despairing piece from Indiana University, has I think decisively demonstrated that, qua behavioral category, fraternities are a catastrophe. Down south, more and more of the lads have guns that feature in haze-play. Drugs are a frat biggie, too, with the all-male secrecy/loyalty plus public-facing clean-cutness of Greek boys a perfect cover for large-scale distribution conspiracies. More commonly, on a daily basis, frats are about torturing teenagers desperate for acceptance, getting violently drunk, establishing more and more sophisticated ways of cheating through college, offering corrupt bigtime sports programs their most fanatic forms of support, and of course harassing women.
Because frats are supported by powerful rich organizations, and because party schools know they’d fold without them, nobody really does anything about the blood and guts. Dormouse deans sleep through the mad tea party, roused to irritable attention only when the little ones manage to kill a pledge. Unable to shut out the thudthudthudthud of a dead drunk falling hard down his final flight of stairs, the deans pull out the unacceptable intolerable unforgiveable appalling template and let fly until it blows over. They pull it back out when it happens again.
The situation is exactly like that of the camorra in Italy. Everyone knows that criminal violent enterprises are intrinsic to the setting, and no one does anything. I mean, as in this most recent shutdown of the entire system at Indiana (how long will it be suspended? couple of weeks), some teeny symbolic something will occasionally occur, and then it’s back to business.