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My Meeting with President Bennet

I was the bassist for The Bennet Youth. On October 5, I and the three other band members ran into Mocon wearing masks and played our song "Aramarked for Death" from the balcony. Lyrics sheets and patches had been passed out to members of the crowd there and, when we were done, we ran off as if we were being chased. The lyrics talked about Aramark s monopoly, the fact that there is a nuclear arsenal below Mocon, the idea that Mocon is secretly a spaceship that can fly, and that we would fight Aramark with TNT.

On October 5, I learned that Bennet had my name. A Public Safety Officer saw the silkscreen we used for our patches in Eclectic. The President of Eclectic was told Eclectic s program house status would be revoked if he didn t give the names of the Bennet Youth. We were also told that if we didn t reveal ourselves, the Middletown Police would be alerted and every Eclectic member would be interrogated. Then we would face criminal charges for our bomb threat. We were told we d scared the Mocon workers, that they believed we were terrorists planning to blow up Mocon. We gave our names and went to a meeting with Bennet and others to discuss what had happened.

We entered the room to find President Bennet, Dean Freddie Hill, and three other people we didn t recognize sitting around a table with clipboards and pens. There were packets spread over the table, each one with our lyrics sheet xeroxed on the front, marked with comments and highlighting.. We had no idea what could be in the rest of the packets. We also had no concept of whether we were to be punishmed for what we d done and how extreme this punishment might be.

Doug Bennet asked us about our majors, extra-curricular activities, and family histories. He asked if any of us were Jewish. I m Jewish.

Bennet then asked us why we played Mocon as the Bennet Youth. I was silent while the other band members made attempts to explain the social good of what we d done. Dean Freddie Hill told us that she believed that our fight against Aramark was really just a mask for our own arrogance and desire for attention. Her evidence was that we didn t use the regular
channels for affecting change provided by the university like the WSA. Then, Bennet asked us if we d ever heard of the Holocaust. We told him we had. He told us his marriage broke up because of his wife s difficulties dealing with the deaths of her relatives in the Holocaust. He told us his children have to live with this knowledge and that it s a horrible thing that we called our band The Bennet Youth, obviously a reference to the Hitler Youth. A band member explained that we hadn t even thought about this reference, that we d only thought of The Reagan Youth, an 80’s punk band.

At this, Justin Harmon, director of university communications, told us our intentions didn t matter. The reference was there whether we put it there intentionally or not. He explained that we were so arrogant that we couldn t see outside ourselves to how the real world thinks and takes things. He told us there was a great value to owning one s words. This means making a well thought out statement that won t be misinterpreted. If your statement is misinterpreted, it means you re not owning your words. This was my understanding of his argument. He told us anonymity cannot be part of owning one s words and that putting one s name on a statement often will cause the person the make the statement of a better quality. He referred to what we d done as the "Fuck You" type of communication he d seen in the QA chalkings. He said anonymously writing "Fuck You" on the ground is not an effective communication because the writer does not own his or her words. The writer does not specify to whom he or she is speaking or why he or she is saying "fuck you". We d pushed this kind of communication on the students out of nothing but our own arrogance.

Then, Bennet told us that he could see where we were coming from because he fought for change in the sixties. In the sixties, he headed a boycott of the barbers of Middletown because they wouldn t take black students. He told us that many years later he realized this fight hadn t just been about fighting for what was right, but that a good part of it was about the fact that he hated barbers. So, he could see how one s own personal motives can have a big effect on one s political battles.

I asked them if I could tell others about the meeting and what had been said and he told me I could.

He told us to write an apology this weekend for what we did.

I can t speak for all of The Bennett Youth so I ll apologize alone. I m sorry.

Leviton is a member of the class of 2002, a columnist in the Argus, and a member of the Bennet Youth.