Isaiah Wilner

• Share
• Tweet
• Discuss (1)
• Email
• Print

It was 2002 when people began to call one another “douchebags.” In other words, it was right around the same time as America geared up for the invasion of Iraq. I didn’t like the sound of the word. It seemed sexist, most of all, but also too coarse for common use. Yet somehow it was right for the times, and as the decade maundered on, the term flushed its way into every orifice of American culture. We didn’t know it at the time, but we had entered the Decade of Douchebaggery.

A douchebag, in physical fact, is a useless device designed to project power over other peoples’ lives by imagining a pestilence where none had existed and positing its own use as self-perpetuating antidote. It’s preemptive warfare on the vagina. Through advance intervention, it guarantees a permanent presence against an enemy impossible to eradicate or even see. In short, a douchebag acts in a private space much in the manner of George W. Bush ’68 and his band of “gentlemen-rankers”[1] when they went on their global spree.[2]

I belong to a small cohort of people toxic-shocked by douchebaggery. For the generation now 30, born amid oil spikes and Earth Days, raised in the checked flannels of grunge, life was supposed to be about protests and sit-ins, Rage Against the Machine and Kurt Cobain. We were bringing back the ’60s, but politely so, holding gentle discussions about diversity until the crazies came in with their Lewinsky banner, cutting off the presidential commission on race by manipulating the fear of vagina dentata.

Right around that time, the old world found me in the person of my predecessor at the Yale Daily News, William F. Buckley. We came to each other’s awareness when I wrote an article for the paper entitled, “Yalies Find Strange Sites for Campus Sex.”[3] Buckley lampooned my story in a syndicated newspaper column about a group of Orthodox Jewish students protesting the mixing of men and women in Yale dorms. Under the title “Sex and Man at Yale,” he coined a nickname for me that persists to this day: “manifestly not an Orthodox Jew.”

Buckley had edited the News 50 years before I took the helm. Just before the start of his reunion year, I invited him to deliver the address at our annual celebration. Ever affable, Buckley said he would love to come, on the single condition that I join him for a sailing trip through Long Island Sound. We met in May of 1999 at the Stamford dock and sailed for a few hours, dropping anchor amid the twinkling lights of fellow yachtsmen. Below deck, armed with a 10-ounce glass of gin — no brine or vermouth, just a twist of lemon — Buckley failed to drink me under the table, but he succeeded in parrying me back to my berth of his 30-foot schooner, where I slept soundly. We had fenced for several hours about politics — he immensely enjoying it, I noticing that his tongue flicked and rolled as he talked, appearing visibly marbleized, like that of a parakeet.

Safely docked at Stamford the following morning, Buckley invited me to flap about in the pellucid waters of his indoor bathing pool. My attitude about these sorts of endeavors has always been, “When in Rome.” Buckley jumped in nude and so did I. He was clever and courteous. I could not have imagined, as he deluged his gray head with an elephantine shower nozzle, that so much would change in the ensuing decade to alter my perceptions of the class he led and their ambitions for global douchebaggery.

By the end of his life, Buckley found himself out of step and regretful of the gang of conservatives he had issued into being.[4] Here at Yale, there was less nattering about ideas in the abstract and more about assuming global leadership. It seemed, at times, that we had reverted to the teens, when Briton Hadden and Henry Luce campaigned for Yale to shut down and send its boys to France before founding the patriotic Time magazine.

As the Editor in Chief of the News, an inaugural member of Yale’s Grand Strategy program, a biographer of so-called great men, and now a two-time Yalie, I feel an allegiance to this circle of self-proclaimed leaders, even if I never joined the Lizzie Club to be rocketed out to the Middle East as the next Henry Kissinger in Keffiyah.[5]

What’s the alternative? “Apparatchik Studies,” “Bureaucratic Maneuvers” and “Decision Points in Note-Taking” cannot form a core curriculum, and we hardly need lessons in following anyway. Name me a Rhodes scholar engaged in curing disease or advancing microloans to undernourished countries and I’ll show you 10 sorority girls lining up to be the next tasty morsel at Toad’s, a key initiation into the rites of drudgery at Goldman.

I just think we need to slow down and listen to what the other guy or girl thinks. Let’s get back to our metaphor: For most women, an unusually moist vagina causes no problem at all. Wet women turn men on. The flood of pheromones may even help in attracting a proper mate. Such are the pleasures of human diversity. It’s the remedy that causes the problem: the desire for uniformity in all things, whether vaginas, people or politics.

Note to the scene eds: you asked for it. But you also asked for memories of what went right. Crown Street, for one, part of the New Haven renaissance that shows no signs of abatement. Second: the rise, fall and renaissance of dance music. I remember ringing in the new millennium at a random club in central New Jersey with a crowd of happy ravers in wide pants and wider smiles, bounding across the room and chanting, “Happy New Year!” Here at Yale, I see hope for change (as the saying goes in the Age of O) in groups like the Movement for Beauty & Justice — optimistic, yes, but that’s the point of college. We need more projects like this, dedicated to finding out what the people on the ground actually want for themselves before we concoct our ivory-tower visions.

In any case, I’m glad the decade earned a name. We had worried about this because we felt obliterated when the Twin Towers fell. I can remember one New York dinner party just after 9/11 when everyone — every single person — came dressed in black. We mourned then, but it was also like we had gone beyond to a colorless future. You had to go back to the Depression, when journalists paid homage to the frothy Jazz Age by reviving the concept of the decade to find a set of years so badly in need of a stamp.

The linguistic solution we settled on, The Oughts, was going to be like the Jetsons with laptops. But history has a way of defying intention, and words have a way of catching on when they describe something everyone feels. All in all, it was a douchey decade. But we learned from it, and we’re better off for having lived through it. That’s why, when this New Year rings, I’ll bawl a lusty cheer to the 10 years past. They were memorable.

[1] I refer to the Kipling line upon which the Whiffenpoofs lyric is based: “Gentlemen-rankers out on the spree, Damned from here to eternity, God ha’ mercy on such as we, Baa! Yah! Bah!” The poem, of course, is about empire.

[2] The connection drawn here — between private moral codes and what we do in the public light — might not sound explicit in any more than a linguistic sense. But some have seen it in decades past, especially those who work on the front lines of warfare or medicine. One who commented upon both was the French doctor and professional libertine Louis-Ferdinand Céline, who wrote a novel, Journey to the End of the Night, about the first modern case of global douchebaggery, the First World War. “Indeed,” he remarked, “there are always, at all times, discoveries to be made in the vagina.”

[3] At that time, the greatest coup for any News editor was to have sex on the boardroom table.

[4] Still, it must be admitted that many men in their declining years feel this way about their sons, especially if they are Yale Daily News comedians with a wicked sense of humor and an ability to defy all logic from Christian ethics to the speed of a corporate printing press. See Christopher Buckley’s delightful and sad memoir of his parents, Losing Mum and Pup (New York: Twelve, 2009), which came out only a year after his father’s death.

[5] Perhaps it’s a personal bias, but I happen to believe the douchiest brainiac of all is a Harvard man, Larry Summers, who lost that school quite a sum of money before trundling off to Washington to try to fix the American economy.

Isaiah Wilner ’00 GRD ’15 was the Editor in Chief for the News board of 2000.