The Nightmare Coalition

I know there have always been costume parties, but I really don't think there's a more immersive way to celebrate Halloween than working in a haunted house. That opportunity reemerged for me this year, and ever since I'd spent the entire October of '03 frightening strangers in closed spaces, I always lament having to turn it down.

When I was a freshman in college, I joined a theatrical haunted house to distract myself from the fact that I didn't have a job. The production was called Dante's Inferno, and was loosely based on the eponymous Hell-treading epic poem. I say loosely unless I missed the part where Virgil led Dante through a hillbilly toolshed. The house's creators took liberties with some of the rooms, but the tour still followed the gist of book by progressing through the 9 circles of increasingly punishable sins. A gaggle of actors/actresses played the tour guide, Virgil, and the multitude of sinners and minions.

I had my own corner of Hell: I was the denizen known on the cast list as "Cell Phone Guy" (and I think you have to flip to, oh, Canto XXIV in the book to find him...). My haunt was a dark, stuffy office meant to epitomize a workaholic's nightmare. Taking the guise of a zombiefied desk jockey with a black Nokia lodged in my mouth, I was originally instructed to, every time tourgoers entered my office, play a CD track of ringing cell phones and then vomit out the phone. People just kinda stared. I had to start adding some scarier gimmicks or else the whole experience would be torturous -- ironically enough -- for me.

Here's the simplified version of the eventually complete schtick. As tourgoers stepped inside my office, I'd secretly play the recording of cacophonous ringtones ringing in unison, and then I would slowly wheel around in the office chair as if I were a dummy being dragged by an invisible noose. I'd then start violently slamming into the dingy file cabinets on either side of me, and then slowly roll toward the victims. The trick was to appear eerily fake and cultivate that false sense of security in the onlookers... up until I horfed out the cell phone and screamed at them in agony. At that point, I'd hammer my forehead into the desk over and over until I "lost consciousness" (I used my unseen knee to bang upward on the desk drawer, timing the noise with every downstroke of my skull. I never actually hit my head on the desk save for a couple instances that grew remarkable lumps). Then I'd sprawl motionless on the desk, and tourgoers would turn their backs and move on to the next room -- at which point I'd rear up and slam a file drawer shut with a rusty kabang.

As the routine became more practiced, I drew more and more screams from the girls and thumbs-up (and screams) from the guys. The whole exercise became a powertrip. Rarely does a 145-pound theatre geek know what it is to inspire fear in others, and I was now gorging on those emotions, feeding a stomach that had never before been fed.

I called my three best buddies from high school drama and got them in on this new addiction, and we eventually dubbed ourselves, in the style of some professional wrestling stable, "The Nightmare Coalition". We collaborated on scares and held meetings in my offices to generate new terror-inducing strategies. One of these comrades, Jaeson, found his niche in the "Couch Room", a dark, garbage-laden living room in which he would suddenly burst from under the couch cushions, and then proceed to crawl after his victims like a gila monster.

The Couch Room immediately followed my office, so Jaeson and I not only worked together on scares, but we were in competition with each other. Eventually our respecive schticks sharpened to the point that we began scaring items off people, and he and I compared spoils during lulls in the tours.

My winnings included a chapstick and a BIC pen, but Jaeson had me beat: among his victims' personal affects was a silver bracelet. I believe it was later returned to its owner, but in this situation it's not about whether or not you can pawn the thing, but that you acquired it in the first place.

We weren't paid for any of this, and only on occasion did were we bestowed so much as a bottle of water from the haunt's directors and producers. But we kept coming back like crows to a puddle. I spent five hours a night jumping out to go "Boo", and tonight I'm sitting at my computer, thinking about how I will ever set aside enough time to have another Halloween that good.

Is Our College Students Learning?

Because yet another fresh wave of research results has come in saying that they... well, isn't.

The Intercollegiate Studies Institute distributed a multiple choice test on American History and Civics, quizzing college freshmen and seniors on basic tenets of the Constitution and important U.S. events.

As expected, this exposed a problem, and not just that both groups failed the test on average, but that the seniors averaged only slightly higher than the freshmen -- and those were the more positive cases. In fact, of the 50 colleges ranked in the survey, "seniors at 16 institutions, including Cornell, Brown, Yale and Georgetown, scored lower than freshmen did at their school." Makes one wish that we were drawing more of our nation's political leaders from, say, DeVry.

But that wouldn't change the fact that 28 percent of college seniors will leave their institutions believing that the battle that ended the American Revolution was Gettysburg. Or the fact that more than half of graduates won't know that the Bill of Rights clearly prohibits a state religion.

So why the dearth of knowledge in this area among young scholars, and why do some institutions, statistically speaking, appear to be sucking it from their brains?

The first explanation that comes to my mind is that the curricula on American History and government are usually only required in high school, and they are easily avoidable thereafter. Even liberal arts undergrads can bypass all courses in those subjects on their way to a degree in Philosophy, Ethnic Studies, Economics, etc. As a result, those 10th-grade civics classes fall out of their heads by the time someone hands them the degree. Unless, of course, the students pursue that sort of wisdom on their own time, but the test failures indicate that students by-and-large lack this interest to begin with.

The study found that universities that required American History courses did in fact outscore those that didn't, but this doesn't make it an easy remedy to apply to other universities, or mine, I at least know. Should UCCS mandate these courses for non-History degrees, I see the announcement being met with flaming torches and pitchforks. The chancellors and deans shall bear the wrath of students in Engineering, Bio/Chem, Business, and Nursing who will shake fists against any additional chore in their college experience that they can't reasonably include on a resume. It's part of the collective mentality of students at UCCS (and surely at many colleges elsewhere) that if it can't get you a job, it's not worth the tuition fees. The "broad education" concept just doesn't fly here, and when a university tries to implement a new graduation requirement based on that concept, the school's paying customers tend to rumble with opposition.

So American History courses aren't typically sought after by non-History majors, but neither are they by most History majors, for that matter. To the average History student, the topic of America's foundation usually isn't "interesting" enough, and s/he would more likely fill a seat in a Chinese history course or one on the politics of the nineteenth-century unification of Germany.
My friend, Patrick, who's a History grad student and teaching assistant at UCCS, sees about a 2:3 ratio of "Americanists" to students specializing in other regions, and that divide is imagineably much wider in schools with greater student diversity than ours (of which there are quite many). Some students consider it ethnocentric to focus on our own nation's origins, he says, and many of them prefer to branch out and study other cultures. As a result, the more exotic, specialized areas of history are in greater demand among its scholars, regardless of what the field itself supplies in paying careers. Needless to say, this doesn't bode well for said scholars' financial prospects, yet I'll admit the origin of the Jin Dynasty is interesting.

So there are those students to whom the applicability of their study isn't an issue, and even they feel that a shot of U.S. History in their academic coffee is something they can do without. Still, there's the problem -- this knowledge is not in demand, and it's sorely lacking as a result.

To make U.S. History classes a requirement in more colleges is an effective solution in theory. Trouble is, they would meet plenty of resistence from the students, themselves. So what, then, does that say about how much (or little) we value this collective self-knowledge that other nations in the world find so fundamental?

Bailey and Lancaster

Bob Allen, a clerk at a bookstore in the Amish country tourist town of Intercourse, said residents see the area as being safe and the Amish as peaceful people. "It just goes to show there's no safe place. There's really no such thing," he said.(Yahoo! News, 10/2)

Last week it was a school tucked into the mountains that was empty of any security personnel that day; today, it was an Amish community.

Yes, it would seem that there is no safe place, and if these these two school hostage crises indicate anything, it's that the "safest", most "peaceful" locations are the most vulnerable, and hence the most appealing targets to a murderous pustule of a human being who would carry out such a shooting. Excuse me for a moment while I play amateur criminologist on incomplete information, but I don't think either killer was seeking any kind of glory or even a sick legacy. When someone like this is merely looking to maliciously punish some section of humankind for some unrelated transgression, don't be surprised that he follows the path of least resistance. Besides, what morally shriveled coward on God's Green Earth would attack schoolchildren in an Old Order Amish community? The same kind who would line the girls up in front of the chalkboard and execute them, doing Lord knows what in between. When we're dealing with that level of human indecency, no one is too innocent so to be "safe".

Perhaps the most frightening and infuriating aspects about the Bailey and Lancaster school shootings are the suicides. The killers escape our corporeal grasp, and thus we must leave it up to God or some other force if we are to seek comfort in the concept of justice. Oh, the things we would have done to them had the bastards lived. It simply leaves us feeling helpless.

I was also shaken to find that these were men with almost no connections to the schools they struck. At least our society's post-Columbine adjustments led us to more successfully recognize and prevent possible threats from violent students within the school system. What do we have for some random man whose choice of school seemingly has no motive? It used to be that we only scrutinized the students, themselves, but now we are reminded that the threat is much wider.

It especially hurts to see that we maybe haven't come that far in seven years. Now, it wouldn't make sense for an Amish community to apply any post-Columbine measures, but this was the most prevelant issue-- with the Bailey crisis last week. Platte Canyon High was originally blueprinted with anti-Columbine measures in mind, which authorities said kept the killer in one room throughout the ordeal. But even something as proactive as that design served not as prevention, of course, but as damage control. But that can be said for most safety measures in school that still manage to leave the comfortable learning environment intact. Little can be done to keep a school shooting from ever taking place if the perpetrator makes any preparations to speak of.

Lastly, the shootings beg the recurring question: if suicidal individuals wish to carry out some vile fantasy of theirs before leaving this earth, what's to stop them? Clearly, divine punishment is something they neither believe in or concern themselves with, so it theoretically makes no difference to them if they take a few innocents.

So without any practical means of making it even tricky for an armed man to walk into a classroom, what are we left with? The persisting faith that someone will not strike us where we are most vulnerable -- where that someone can knowingly succeed in wrecking us. But we're always living in just that condition (if we are truly living at all), and schools have always been vulnerable. I don't think an ordeal like this indicates some societal shift: it simply shakes what remnant faith in human decency some people may have had.