One More Time: The Backpage To End All Backpages

By: Ross Preston

Up until the events of Cunnilingus, I had assumed that I would be writing a reflective, “damn I'm graduating” type of Backpage for our final issue. While I'll still cling to that idea―because… damn, I'm graduating―I find it more or less impossible to write the only serious, non-satirical feature of our newspaper and not say something about the party, which is still the proverbial elephant in the room almost two weeks after it was held. So even though we're running a front-page news story, a news-in-brief, an infographic, and an editorial that specifically satirizes our very desire to keep talking about this, I find it unavoidable to do just that: keep talking about it.

I'll keep my comments as brief as I can, since I've noticed a collective tendency for people to “talk in circles” as we debate this party and its ramifications. While we might attribute this tendency to everyone (rightfully) wanting their voice to be heard, I also think it is emblematic of a deeper problem, which is that when something like this happens, it affects all of us. Perhaps this seems obvious, but I think this point becomes obscured when we construct the victim in the way the College's Hate Crime Policy demands we do. Maybe you disagree, but I do not think we will ever see a community without hate on this campus until we begin to consider these things not as isolated incidents committed by heinous individuals but rather as ugly manifestations of problems in which too many of us are complicit, to some degree or another. As a primary example in this situation, I agree with people who make the point that it should not take a ridiculous, unimaginably offensive party to get us to start talking about the fact that many athletes feel disconnected (or even, gulp, “marginalized”) on this campus. But such a disconnect is a fact of life for many athletes here, and to me, addressing that tension later than never seems a lot more fruitful than the numerous demands I've heard that we get rid of the football team altogether. I don't know how people that say progress can come out of this can really believe what they are saying if they would also not think twice about the removal of an entire group of people from our campus, a group which cannot be defined solely by the actions of certain individuals within it. I wonder, do we really buy into what the word “community” implies, or do we only do so when it is convenient for the argument that we want to make?

Anyways, thanks for hearing me out in this fairly closed forum of mine. I think I could go on about this issue for hours, but it is my last Backpage column, so I might as well repeat the fact that damn, I'm graduating, and devote the remaining space to a discussion of the time I spent editing this behemoth of a fake newspaper.

It was satire at first sight. I prospied here in September of 2005 (holy shit I'm old), and I picked up a copy of the B&S just as I headed out of town. Maybe I was just in an Onion phase at that point, but few things have seemed clearer to me than my silent conviction that I would write for the B&S if I went to Grinnell. You don't encounter things like that everyday, and at those moments when I've been here and Grinnell has taken a toll on me for one reason or another, I was always sorry for the B&S…that it should ever encounter me without that ecstatic enthusiasm I felt the day I first picked it up.

Being in charge the last two years has been an unbelievable experience. It may be the coolest thing I've done in my life. It was so rewarding to start getting (exponentially) more feedback than we ever received my first two years, and working with Matt, Adam, Jing, and Sophie has reinvigorated my hopes for the god-forsaken youth of this campus in upcoming years. You guys are all awesome and I'll miss working with you.

In short, it's been an honor, and if you ever think you'll see me sappier than this column, well, I'd be glad to hear what would cause that reaction in me. So far, I know of only one thing, and it's not even real.

It's just B and S.