Band on the run

much-flamed-about incident

And so now let us talk about football - no, not football, we got pummeled - let us talk about what happened with the band on its jaunt through Charleston. The sophisticate's journey in the South is so familiar to us through our literature and through pop culture, and it has reached such a stereotyped or mythic status that it is perhaps fitting that what actually happened to the band at The Citadel is uncertain; let us agree that the band's experience with the Southern cadets ranked somewhere in between "Deliverance" and "Sweet Home Alabama". I hasten to add that I have never seen either of these movies because, as a pseudo-intellectual, I only watch film. Fellini, Rossellini, Donnie Darko: film.

But back to Charleston: the unpleasantness began when the Princeton "scramble band" (much less delicious than it sounds) marched through the Avenue of Remembrance, where it may or may not have performed immature, disrespectful acts at what it may or may not have known was a war memorial. I sincerely hope that all were ignorant of the Avenue's import; to have acted otherwise would deserve reproof and shame. Like my daddy always said, "If you burn down a nunnery, don't expect to get canonized." And you know what? He was right.

Anyway, feeling disrespected, a large group of Citadel cadets surrounded the band and threatened physical violence, later breaking a clarinet. And really, who can blame them? The use of force was necessary. The band would have attacked the cadets if the cadets hadn't attacked them first; it was pre-emptive! And what's more, based on their best intelligence available, the cadets had sufficient reason to believe that the clarinet was uranium-enriched. So they acted. You go to war with the information you have, not the information you want. Mission accomplished. Et cetera, et cetera, etc.

Some cadets whose bloodlust remained unfilled by the splitting of one clarinet believe that more should have been done. "It was awful," recalled one cadet, while (I can only assume) beating his chest. "They're lucky they didn't get killed." He then paused to consider the irony of muttering these words about an incident that occurred at the Avenue of Remembrance, and his head exploded.

The visceral horrors endured by Citadel cadets and fans alike did not end at the Avenue of Remembrance, however. One Citadel fan, sitting next to the Princeton band wrote in the sea of polite discourse that is The Daily Princetonian's online comment section, "I had to move my family, because I did not want to explain to my 4-year-old why two guys were rubbing up against one another (humping) and what all the simulated masturbation gestures meant." This parent would have told a little fib about the gestures to alleviate the situation, but, unfortunately, just that previous night, his son had blown out all the candles on his birthday cake while wishing that his daddy not be able lie for 24 hours.

Despite the Showdown on the Avenue, the band was allowed to perform during halftime, and perform it did: It performed [censored] on each other and simulated [censored] in front of children and then two band members flipped over a guy in a Santa Claus suit and [censored] him. Though some of the more self-righteous in the band claim that their halftime script was approved by Citadel officials, I have my doubts that this final specific act, which has become something of a buzzword for the whole incident, was explicated fully by the writer of said script, if at all. "The Eiffel Tower? Ah, what a lovely tribute to France!" these officials must have laughed with glee, pressing the paper with the green "APPROVED" stamp. "And Santa Claus! The children will love it."

And so the band's music was drowned out by boos. Quite frankly, this writer is a bit surprised that an academy that is the butt of all the other service schools' jokes, whose graduates are consistently lampooned and whose name's stressed syllable rhymes with the most common expletive in the English language - was not a smidgen more open to an attempt at humor, whether successful or failed; though I suppose, as a pseudo-intellectual, I learn something new every day.

Jason Gilbert is a politics major from Marietta, Ga. He can be reached at jogilber@princeton.edu.