Always Second Best

In 1701, Yale College was founded on a small patch of besieged inner-countryside land, thus launching a tradition of proud inferiority that has thrived for nearly 300 years. Tomorrow, on the playing fields of the Yale Bowl, sad Yale College will once again affirm that tradition by treating the assembled crowds to a well-orchestrated display of athletic incompetence. We here at Harvard would like to take this moment to pay tribute to our amiable friends to the south, who for so long, have graciously accepted their status as a lesser University.

Yale is part of a great family of second-bests--of institutions that almost tasted the fruits of glory but came up just short. Yale is the Salieri to our Mozart, the American Basketball Association to our National Basketball Association, the Betamax to our VHS. Yale is much like the now deceased Soviet Union--a place that had lots of tanks and other superficial signs of strength, but that, on the inside, was really a rotting carcass of mediocrity.

Yale's faculty can boast many luminaries. It can also boast at least one pedophile. Yale's residential college system, modeled after 16th century sanitariums, provides insecure, anxious students with a sense of community from the moment they first arrive on campus. It also provides them an excuse to strip naked at public sporting events, thus exposing their frail, pasty forms to the eyes of others for the first time since their mothers bathed them.

Yale is located in beautiful New Haven, Connecticut, ranked number one by Money Magazine as the most dangerous place in America to bring actual currency. The atmosphere in New Haven--which Joseph Conrad attempted to capture in his famous work Heart of Darkness--is fertile ground for the development of young intellects. Jedidiah S. Purdy '97 attended Harvard, but not until arriving at Yale Law School did he recognize that Seinfeld was a show built around an ironic sensibility. Purdy wrote a book about this observation, which made quite a stir at Yale where most people have had their televisions stolen.

Yale has produced many of the great leaders of the 20th century. George W. Bush spent his formative years at Yale, where he joined the Skull & Bones society, a sort of make-believe club for college students. There George made-believe that the United States was an aristocracy where the idiot sons of the privileged could rule with the consent of the populace. Now George's fantasy is coming true and Yale alumni all over the world are swelling with pride.

It takes a certain sort of grace to endure a never-ending parade of humiliations and if anyone has exhibited that grace, the fine folks of Yale certainly have. Thank you Yale, for demonstrating to the world the difference between the 98th and 99th percentile on standardized tests, and for proudly carrying the banner of inferiority all these years. Good luck tomorrow--there's no question you'll need it.