Sic Transit Gloria Eli

Earlier this year, The Crimson wondered if Yale had finally entered a period of renaissance. Three of the four major-party candidates for president and vice president hailed from (or, in Dick Cheney's case, attended for a brief period of time) the New Haven eyesore.

Unfortunately, as the election stumbles onward, it has become ever more clear that Yale's strong showing on the ballots, at least those not marked for Pat Buchanan, is a freakish departure from the school's decidedly subpar norms. Rather than entering a new period of enlightenment and detoxification, Yale is slipping back into its long-accustomed Dark Ages. The iron gates in front of its dormitories can barely withstand the Viking onslaughts and stray bullets, and Yale's brief moment in the sun is revealed as an Indian summer before the long, howling winter of Eli discontent.

We congratulate Yale on its past few months of undeserved notoriety: a Yalie now stands at the door of the greatest position in the land, ready at any moment to stumble ungracefully over the lintel. His performance this year has proven that a Yale education offers all the virtues necessary to office--the sophistication to deal with foreign peoples like the Grecians, the audacity to make Social Security a federal program and the philosophical wisdom to realize that "Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream."

Indeed, the all-Yale ticket bears a number of resemblances to its alma mater. Cheney's company has maintained separate bathrooms for foreign employees; Yale has maintained a separate admissions program for foreign students. Texas Gov. George W. Bush is hesitant to put lives at risk in military interventions in far-off lands; Yale students are hesitant to put their lives at risk in brief excursions through the streets of New Haven. Both candidates have emphasized the need for better cleanup of toxic brownfields; New Haven happens to be a toxic brownfield.

It must therefore be especially frustrating to Yale to see its chance at political glory delayed by recounts. Yalies have never been much good at counting (frequently losing track in compiling their crime statistics), and the process frightens them. At least Yalies will have to face fewer numbers, fuzzy or otherwise, regarding their shrunken entering first-year class, and blessed are they who will now never get the chance to take their first breath of New Haven's fresh, carcinogenic air.

This contracting population serves as further evidence of Yale's descent into a medieval state. Evidence of the school's sad decay is ubiquitous: Yale's Gothic spires mark centuries of cultural decline; its students venerate the relics of Handsome Dan, the bulldog mascot whose decaying corpse is still on display in Yale's Peabody Museum; its cults adopt the archaic nomenclature of Spizzwinks, Wiffenpoofs and the Skull and Bones. (W., leave the room now.)

And, worst of all, its scrawny "athletes" tilt at windmills and utter vain challenges to those of greater skill.