Fredrich and Michel's high school reunion

It was the summer of '07 when their spirits returned to the world. Time had passed, and the world had changed so much as to become completely unrecognizable. A sea of strange and intoxicated orange-suited men and their trophy wives were toasting each other amid a bewildering maze of wooden fences.

"Where are we?" whispered Friedrich, his whiskers beginning to droop in the rancid, fetid air that stank of stale champagne.

"Princeton, apparently," Michel said. "One of the best universities in the world, no doubt."

"Wherefore these strange men?" growled Friedrich. "And wherefore such hideous clothes made from the loincloths of gypsies?"

A crowd of strange men had begun to approach them. They were clearly inebriated and smelled bad. The lines on their faces indicated that they were men of the world. Their huge expensive cars, parked along Nassau Street, indicated that they were the great industrialists of the world.

"Who are you guys?" snarled one of them. His name was Bill Summers.

"I'm M. Foucault, and this is my friend Herr Nietzsche," said Michel.

"Neetschee is dead," cackled one of them, thinking that comment to be rather witty, and the entire group of men began laughing and thumping each other on the back, just like the good old days in the summer of '68 when the livin' was easy, the fish were jumpin', the cotton was high, the daddies rich and the mamas good lookin'.

"It's pronounced Nietzsche, really, and that little quip you doubtlessly pulled out of a septic tank is rather stupid. I mean, really, if I had a vereinsthaler for every time I've heard — "

"No," replied the men. "Nietzsche and Foucault are shit."

"Really," cried the duo, rather astonished. Had history, in a remarkable turn of events, not vindicated them? Was the world still not quite yet their posthumous oyster?

"I believe we are regarded as great intellectuals these days," said Michel icily. "Didn't we play a distinctly important role in postmodern critical theory?"

Get the best of the ‘Prince’ delivered straight to your inbox. Subscribe now »

"Pooh pooh," someone mocked. "Pooh pooh pooh pooh."

"Postmodernism is rubbish," said Summers, a little more intelligently. "Everyone knows that it's all just pretentious rubbish wrapped up in ... rubbish."

"Well, have you even read any of my work carefully?" asked Friedrich.

"No, but I mean everyone knows it's shit. My philosophy preceptor told me so. And really, who the hell reads Foucault? Or that nasty Derrida nonsense? Only weirdo Europeans who pick their noses."

"That's not being very intellectually honest," Teddy's tiny voice piped up through the hustle and flow. A little bespectacled boy, his hair unkempt and messy, stood out in this crowd. Teddy was working Reunions in this day and age when the daddies weren't all rich and the mommies good-looking. "You haven't even bothered to read these authors. You try to elevate yourselves and pretend to be knowledgeable by dissing things you have no real understanding of and no real capacity for, ideas that you can't grasp due to your lack of intellectual imagination. For you there is no possibility of grasping anything beyond a simplistic and reductive approach. Intellectual knowledge is virgin terrain upon which your paternalistic modes of thought are imposed, so that everything may be colonized and conquered. Everything is a match of wits and aphorisms."

"Who's this kid?" snapped one of the men superciliously.

"The type of student at Princeton these days," said another. "He's not, like, from a good family or anything. And I think he's some strange racial mix. Halfbreed vigor, or something like that. Good thing there are still a couple of reliable old chaps at this club. Isn't your son here, Bill? That's what I thought. I don't really mind the nouveau riche so much, it's the social climbers that get on my nerves."

"How is that even relevant?" said tiny Teddy of the proletariat. "I'm smart, and I deserve to be here."

"Ingrate," growled the men menacingly. "Ungrateful brat."

"All right, folks." Summers said. "Let's finish quickly."

The men had stones already. Teddy was in the center of a cleared space by now, and he held his hands out desperately as the men moved in on him.

"It isn't fair, it isn't right," Teddy screamed, and then they were upon him. Johann Loh is a sophomore from Singapore. He can be reached at loh@princeton.edu.