Drinking and Penn's sense of entitlement

I love drinking. I always have. When I was a kid, I used to drink non-alcoholic beer. I'm serious. I did this from the age of like 10 until I could convince my folks to give me real booze at home. I started young and never looked back; I would say drinking is one of my most serious hobbies.

So, needless to say, I've been having a difficult time trying to figure out why Penn students who drink piss me off so much.

Maybe it's a question of excess. I've done plenty of stupid things that were alcohol-related, but my exploits pale in comparison to those of the general student body. I've found vomit in my building every Saturday for the last month. At least the kids have the decency to mix it up -- sometimes it's in the elevator, sometimes it's in the stairwell. What fun. I've even gotten good at figuring out what induced the vomit -- for example, Friday night's vomit was from beer, probably of the Natty Light variety, while Saturday someone coughed up about a gallon of jungle juice and ripped down part of the elevator ceiling.

We all have in us the impulse to destroy, and it rises as our level of sobriety falls. I'm no Kevin Brown, but some walls have, from time to time, felt the wrath of my clenched fist (the walls usually won). But incidents like that were few and far between, and after each time, I felt like an ass. I thought, "Man, that was stupid." I hoped that not that many people had noticed. I didn't, at any point, think that it was acceptable behavior, college student or no.

The way many of us behave when we're drinking represents a larger view of the world: that, hey, it belongs to us so why shouldn't we trash it? Why shouldn't we scream and yell and break things at two in the morning if we feel like it? If you ever wonder why native Philadelphians who live outside of our little compound here roll their eyes at the very mention of the words "Penn student," well, wonder no more.

They think a lot of us are obnoxious and arrogant, and you know what? They're right. Penn may do a lot for this city, and Penn students who get involved during their academic years and even (gasp) stick around afterwards are to be commended. But that doesn't mean that the people of Philadelphia should worship us just for attending a university in their city. That doesn't make up for the guy that has to clean up our vomit (fortunately, if you live in Hamilton Court, no one cleans up the vomit, so you can watch it fester for weeks).

A recent issue of Sports Illustrated called Denver a drinking town with a college problem. We may not be up to the state school level of drunken debauchery, but we're doing our best. Workers at the Hospital of University of Pennsylvania have an acronym for us: DPS, or Drunken Penn Student. They're not much for giving us statistics, but I'd wager that Penn students get hospitalized for drinking on a pretty regular schedule. It's one thing to make yourself sick while you're feeling out your boundaries for alcohol tolerance, but come on -- what were you doing in high school? By regularly drinking ourselves sick, we are engaging in Roman levels of excess.

Make no mistake -- education has replaced the final vestiges of class-consciousness in this country, and that makes us the new aristocracy. We may dress casually, but it is that very casualness that defines us -- it's easier to not think about the fact that someone else cleans up our vomit, someone else cleans up our broken bottles and trash. Someone else prepares our food and serves it.

It's good to be the king, right?

I'd like to think that the benches strewn around the high rises this weekend were knocked over by the wind, that the broken bottles on the street simply fell out of shopping bags. But I don't think that's the case. And you know what's funny? Our little Halloween weekend temper-tantrum received two thumbs up from the University powers that be. "This was a very busy, but fairly typical, Halloween weekend," University spokeswoman Lori Doyle said. The general consensus was that this weekend was pretty tame compared to last year. What a relief.

Then again, can I really blame Penn students for a sense of entitlement, given the example that is set for us? We have a U.S. president who treats the world as his toy, who believes he was ordained by God to enforce democracy at the barrel of a gun, to bring civilization to the uncivilized. Who doesn't get the message, no matter how many kids die, that maybe they're not wanting democracy so much at this point. Heaven forbid we recognize the fact that the reason we're not winning is because there's nothing to win. Instead, we'll just let death beget more death until, 10 years later, we'll wake up and realize there wasn't a point, and write history textbooks about how foolish we were to get involved in a land war in Asia. Again.

Dammit. Now I need a drink.

Eliot Sherman is a senior English major from Philadelphia and editorial page editor of The Daily Pennsylvanian. Diary of a Madman normally appears on Thursdays.

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