Viva Bexley

 

David Cantor

 

 

The scene is almost cartoon-like: Bexley Hall wraps around its courtyard, surrounding it like a fortress. In the middle are two giant oak trees that obscure the sunlight. The walkway that encircles the grounds mimics the Monopoly game board. Each cement slab represents a Monopoly property: most of the concrete square is a pale greyish blue, while the upper quarter is taken up by a solid rectangle, painted in Boardwalk blue or St. James Place orange. Walking around the perimeter, one feels like an animated game piece, expecting to be passed by a two-foot-tall silver thimble or old shoe at any moment.

 

The color-splashed Bexley courtyard is an aberration in the endless labyrinth of lifeless, concrete buildings that make up the MIT campus. Its uncharacteristic exterior is representative of the place that Bexley holds in the MIT culture and is just one example of the many quirks that are unique to Bexley.  While other houses fill their rush week with fine cuisine, fun activities, and compliments, Bexley Hall’s anti-rush has been known to include pornographic wailings from out of windows, Vaseline-coated handrails, dead rats hanging from above doorways, and homeless people paid to hang out in the courtyard. Bexley is known as the unfriendly dorm, a moniker that its residents embrace, although it is not totally accurate.

 

What makes Bexley Bexley, however, is that the building is a canvas upon which its residents express their thoughts and ideas. One is hard-pressed to find a four-square-foot area that lacks paint or marker. Walking through the dorm is reminiscent of the acid trip land depicted in Alice in Wonderland, a land of everyday objects of inappropriate size and color. The walls are covered by brilliant colors in giant swirls and spirals. Giant fire-breathing dragons seem to jump out of the walls in the second floor lounge.

 

The content varies from the artistic, to the expressive, to the bizarre, to the downright offensive. On the wall facing my door, for example, is a beautifully intricate recreation of Van Gogh’s Starry Night. Right next to it, however is an entire wall in homage to one word: F-U-C-K. Aptly named “the fuck wall,” it makes my mother cringe and my friends from other schools say “What is wrong with these people?” every time that they pass it. At one point last year, I heard that some of the residents were going to paint over “the fuck wall.” To my chagrin, “painting over” the fuck wall meant painting bigger “fucks” in brighter, more vivid colors, even fluorescent. Now I can see “fuck” even in complete darkness.

 

The “fuck wall” is one of the few controversial elements that still exists on the walls of Bexley. Racial epithets like “Die Crackers,” “Go Home Whitey,” and “Itchy, flaky scalp? Blame the Jews” used to be dispersed over the dorm but no longer adorn the Bexley interior landscape. These sayings were deemed too controversial and offensive by the administration, and they have been either sandblasted or painted over in the past year. While they made up only a small part of the graffiti art on the walls, these racially-charged maxims contributed a lot to the edginess, controversy, and intelligent wit that Bexley prides itself on.

 

In his essay “Marrakech,” George Orwell laments the undue and nonsensical hatred of Jews. His conversation with one of the locals went as follows:

“Yes, mon vieux, they took my job away from me and gave it to a Jew. The Jews! They’re the real rulers of this country, you know. They’ve got all the money. They control all the banks, finance—everything.”

“But,” I said, “isn’t it a fact that the average Jew is a labourer working for about a penny an hour?”

“Ah, that’s only for show! They’re all moneylenders really. They’re cunning, the Jews.”

 

“Itchy, flaky scalp? Blame the Jews.” This sentence, which once adorned the entrance to Bexley, brilliantly captures the essence of the conversation in Orwell’s piece in a handful words, yet no one has called for the ban of his “Marrakech” essay. The only difference is that the Bexley quote requires an active reading: the meaning is less accessible than Orwell’s. The call for their removal stems from either not attempting to or not being able to understand their meaning.

 

Art has gone through similar battles. There is a fine line between nude art and the obscene. The criteria for this decision have been defined as whether there is a scholarly intent in the use of the nudity. Should racism be any different? Cannot racism ever be satirical and undermine the stupidity of the sentiments that it represents? The intention of sayings such as “Go Home Whitey,” and “Die Crackers” is to do just that. The language is not comfortable, but that does not define the meaning. Even in the case of the “fuck wall,” the original shock of seeing the curse word 50 times in brilliant colors has turned to indifference; it is just a word after all. As the shock wore off, I began to that its point as well as that of the other offensive statements was not to affront people but to challenge the sensitivity and outrage we have been taught to feel by society. The “fuck wall” has faded into the background of my hallway, catching my attention more for its colors than its content.

 

As Mark Slouka says in his essay “Listening for Silence,” “The enforced quiet of censorship and propaganda, of burning pages and jammed frequencies, is different from the gun to the temple only in degree, not in kind.” In America, too much power is given to those who are offended. One has lost the right to be offensive. Often the people who are offended are more vindictive than those whom they are reacting against, and it is often at the cost of the rationality. In the wake of the September 11^th attacks, America has become especially sensitive. Bill Maher, an outspoken and politically-charged comedian, debated on his show Politically Incorrect the claims by a number of United States politicians that the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were “cowardly.” Maher asserted, and some on the four-person panel agreed, that the acts of these men sacrificing their own lives in the name of a cause that they believed in was not cowardly, but that hurling missiles from thousands of miles away to blow up targets. This calling into question of the United States government’s policies was too much to handle for some Americans. Almost immediately, citizens and organizations around the country began calling for Bill Maher’s head. How dare he doubt the brave resolve of the United States?

 

Bill Maher almost did lose his show. While the controversy was swirling, the show was not the same. Maher, normally an arrogant and aloof man who spoke, and often shouted, his mind no matter the opinion of his audience, was reduced to a soft-spoken, apologetic observer to the debate of his panel. His eyes half-filled with tears, he was reduced to an apologetic mute, silently nodding as his guests tried to vindicate him, telling stories of how much Bill loved and supported his country and the military. It was a sad sight to see such a great personality be stifled by over-sensitivity and ignorance.

 

The full-out assault on Bill Maher was founded on the principle that Bill Maher’s comments were as un-American as the attacks themselves. The people making these claims were the same that define America as being synonymous with freedom. Isn’t allowing Bill Maher to speak his views no matter whether they are supportive or critical of the American government the very essence of freedom? If America were to adopt this principle of free speech as long as it is does not call into question the government’s actions, it would sound eerily like a fascist society: the enemy of democracy, and the rallying cry in much of the propaganda in the wars that America has fought. It is ironic that in one of the most patriotic times that this country has ever seen, many of the most vocal of those who wave the flag do not even know what it represents.

 

Similar hypocrisy is seen in the many organizations that have sprouted in the past to enforce “the proper morals” for this country. Tipper Gore, wife of former Vice President Al Gore, has been one of the leading figures in this moral crusade. Her major contribution was to get Congress to pass a bill that mandated that music with objectionable language would be labeled with a parental advisory warning; minors could not purchase the music without being accompanied by adults. Also on Mrs. Gore’s agenda was the issue that violence on TV and in video games begets violence in society. Yet when Mrs. Gore visited her daughter at Harvard, she played James Bond 007 with some of my friends. James Bond 007 is one of the most violent video games on the market; in any given game, a player will kill at least 200 enemies. There is even a game mode where one can chase one’s own friends over the game board, trying to shoot and kill them.

 

These groups and actions represent a movement to shift responsibility and blame onto other people for one’s own problems and shortcomings. Why does Tipper feel that it is fine for her to play one of the games that she condemns for kids to play? Obviously she feels that she is not a threat to the rest of the world and that she can handle playing the game; therefore, the problem is not inherent in the game but the person playing the game. Who is responsible for letting the kids know that the violence in these games is not appropriate in society? The parents are. In the groups that these parents form against objectionable material, they are basically conceding that their influence as parents on their children cannot compete with that of today’s media. This is a sad commentary, but even if they don’t feel they can teach morals to their kids and have to resort to censorship, they can still control what their children see on television without entirely getting rid of what they deem objectionable. These concerned parents and those who were enraged by Bill Maher’s comments forget that they have the ultimate power in not allowing the sex, violence, and Bill Maher to pervade their homes: they can change the channel.

 

Most of these people’s intentions are good, yet they are allowing their hearts to control their heads. Maybe it is unrealistic to expect all of America to get past the offensive nature of some material and look at the intent and meaning behind it. One would not expect such mental sloth at an institution like MIT, however. To echo Slouka, MIT puts a gun to the temple of its students with the censorship of Bexley Hall, an ironic image at a school whose motto is mens et manus. Every day as I pass the “fuck wall” on my way to classes, I appreciate its bright colors that brighten my hallway and my morning on an otherwise mundane trip, and I am thankful that it is not just another blank white wall... at least for now.