By Bradford J. Senning
Arizona Daily Wildcat
April 24, 1998

Clubbing at the UA

It is that time of year again. Clubs are initiating their new inductees. Mortar

Board members are eating chocolate cake at 6 a.m. Bobcats, historically an all-male honorary, is having its new members urinate on trees. Ah. Time-honored traditions.

I don't begrudge the leadership of our intrepid UA organizations for asking new members to compromise themselves in creative ways. After all, word has it some fraternities have proven that fine, upstanding members are formed by first requiring them to roll around in manure.

Excrement is one of those things that brings people together.

A friend of mine was a pledge at Alpha Tau Omega. When he got done cleaning the toilets with his fellow pledges, an active produced a slice of bread. He said that he was going to do a wipe test. If anything was on the piece of bread when he returned from the bathroom the pledges would have to eat the slice. When he came back the bread had brown streaks on it, the consistency of wet poo.

It was chocolate, you see, like the Mortar Board cake. But the point is that fecal humor is just the trick to get members feeling like they belong.

Initiations don't have to abide by excretory standards in order to effectively indoctrinate new members. Some clubs advocate the use of alcohol. It is the Oprah Winfrey of ice-breakers.

I got a club together when I was a business student. It was called the Arizona Social Society, or ASS for short. Besides our efforts at defeating social injustices we drank Goldschlager straight from the bottle and beer straight from the keg, sometimes upside-down. We initiated ourselves into the club over and over again, because initiation was the best part. It was impossible for us to comprehend why other clubs only did it once.

Our meetings in between initiations were held at Dirtbags. And all we could talk about was what so-and-so did while he was drunk at the last initiation and how funny it was that he did not remember any of it.

While initiating rituals are dehumanizing and often injurious to either one's ego or one's liver, it is a great evening factor. It is a way of implementing a collective consciousness among individuals who otherwise may have nothing in common.

Sure, this is an elaborate justification for what a layman would say is merely getting hammered or pissing on a tree. But too many people are dismissive of the actions of others and voice their opinions as if ejaculating, spontaneously, for their own pleasure, not yours.

People are tremendously dissimilar. With some people I can only talk about the weather. There is nothing we have in common besides living in the same atmosphere. I attended a banquet put on by the Honors Center for people who won research grants. Since I am an English major I felt more comfortable finding a table where there was another English major. Perhaps we could argue about our favorite Shakespeare plays. Instead, I learned that her concentration was in linguistics and our only common bond was that we were both confused by words.

Then there are people who have gone through a James Joyce initiation like I did. When I meet them I find that we have as much to relate about the process of reading Joyce - the room we sat in, the number of cigarettes we smoked in a row - as the literature itself. It is like we all live with the same post-Ulysses hangover. We group ourselves at dim cafe tables with each other and whisper.

We all exist in a modern Babylon. Each student at this University is receiving an education in a specialized field, which makes it difficult to communicate about topics other than, say, "The Simpsons." Yet we need people like us. This may justify syndicated re-runs or, at the college level, a common curriculum. But we are creative beings and can come up with a variety of methods to make us less disparate, more alike. With initiation rituals, clubs and commercial television we can devise for ourselves, in the words of Jesse Jackson, a "common ground." It is a ground we have to even out, because it doesn't happen naturally.

Brad Senning is a senior majoring in American literature and creative writing.