No bonfire is a blessing in disguise

When the football team lost to Harvard on Saturday, Princeton was mathematically eliminated from bonfire contention.

Don't even pretend the first thing that popped into your mind when you saw the final score at the bottom of your TV screen was, "Darn, that defeat now places us two games behind the league leaders in the Ivy League standings and dramatically diminishes our prospects for a conference title."

No. Everyone was thinking the same thing: "Balls. No bonfire."

(For the freshmen out there, if the football team beats Harvard and Yale in the same year, we hold a bonfire in Cannon Green. This happened last year.)

Well, I'm here to tell you that it's really not all that bad. The problem, clearly, is that the student body has been spoiled. We get one bonfire and assume it is our right every year thereafter.

That is definitely not the case. Bonfires are, historically, rarer than a blue moon — of which there are four between 2005 and 2010. Granted, there were seven bonfires over a 16-year period beginning in 1950, but that was in one of the last heydays of Princeton football. Since then, there have been only five, including last year's. That's an average of one bonfire every 8.4 years. So wait until 2015 before working yourself into a tizzy.

My point here, though, is that it might be a good thing that there won't be a bonfire this year. If we were to keep beating Harvard and Yale year after year, who knows if the tradition would be extinguished?

Smoking, after all, is a bad habit, and while I might not have been looking very closely last year at the bonfire, I don't think I noticed any means of egress that were clearly recognizable as such.

Remember, we're under an administration that recently declared War on Fun and Tradition. Someone from Nassau Hall might decide that four hours of celebration on a Friday across four years at Princeton is just too much. These quintiles aren't going to fill themselves.

And we can't have unlit candles in our rooms, but a 20-foot bonfire is supposed to be kosher? The Department of Fire Safety fines you $25 for any untreated bunting that they find in your dorm room. (Google image "holiday bunting.") How long will it take them to wise up to the fact that there is a humongous fire roaring near their most prized buildings? Do I smell smoke? Nope, that would be the stench of more fines. And remember, fines increase for repeat offenders. Next time you see your favorite football player, you can buy him a drink with your savings.

Then there's the effect of big bonfires on global warming. At a school that deifies Nobel Laureates, the "Inconvenient Truth" here is that to offset the CO2 emissions into the atmosphere from a typical bonfire — say 6' x 6' x 6' — 10 trees would have to be planted. That's right, 10.

It may not sound like that big of a deal, but these things add up.

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Just wait another 14 years, though. Memories are short. The campus dwellers, whether they be students or staff, would have long since changed and forgotten any downsides of bonfires past.

On the flip side, when the bonfire comes once every 14 years: a) the administration can't help but let it happen and b) it's actually still a novelty.

It would have been political suicide for the administrators to forbid last year's bonfire. That is especially true after we came so close to getting one the previous year only to have it ripped away in the last minutes against Yale, plus the fact that it hadn't happened in over a decade.

Not to disparage the football team and suggest it can't win the requisite two games next year, but let's briefly consider the remote, impossible, off-chance scenario that the bonfire doesn't happen for another 14 years.

The entire campus will again be in football fervor mode for its 2020 football team. I'm sure some chipper young Daily Princetonian sports writer enamored of the team will dig up some crazy facts about what the campus was like the last time there was a bonfire and print it in a column. It might even go something like this:

"The football team hasn't seen a season this successful in over a decade. To put this timescale in perspective, in the time between the last bonfire and the one scheduled for Friday night, the football team won eight straight Ivy League titles — with its only league losses coming against either Harvard or Yale, of course. Students, believe it or not, took their meals in the beautiful faculty homes lining Prospect Avenue. Recently indicted Senator Rob Biederman '08 was poised to become an alumnus we could proudly call our own and U.S. President Shirley Tilghman was only running a university."

As for our present cold, bonfire-free reality — any students who were here last year, be glad that you were here last year. You have a very rare feather to place in your Princeton Experience Cap.

Freshmen, blame your parents for copulating a year too late.