A Half-Million Dollar Kegger in Chapel Hill

 

The last thing any university president should want is an apolitical campus.

--Michael S. Roth, president of Wesleyan College

I believe the last thing President Roth will get this fall is an apolitical campus. You need to be careful what you wish for. The confrontation between young people who see the state of Israel as murderous jingoists beating down people of color and others who blame every bad thing in the Middle East on the Palestinians themselves, whether they've taken up arms with Hamas or not -- that is an unwinnable pissing contest that has roiled many university campuses (to Virginia Foxx's great delight, since she's nothing if she's not an opportunist for easy targets).

The confrontation on UNC-Chapel Hill's campus on Tuesday, April 30th, between pro-Palestinian demonstrators who took down the American flag and mainly a group of frat boys trying to keep the flag up off the ground caused me to feel several things simultaneously. I resent the implication that patriotism is on the face of it genocidal or racist or anti-human or imperialistic. Granted, patriotism in the hands of an authoritarian despot can be twisted into all those adjectives, but taking down the American flag and replacing it with a Palestinian one is not a good look for a protest movement that wants to highlight the suffering of millions and push back against a militaristic government that knows no restraint. On the other hand, the elevation of a symbol over human beings strikes me as a peculiar kind of idolatry. Didn't the Golden Calf teach us anything? I don't much cotton to people turning my flag into a personal cult image covering a whole smorgasbord of cultural grievances.

The frat boys at Chapel Hill naturally got instantly famous with the Fox News universe and got themselves invited to and celebrated at the Republican National Convention for the patriotism that the Right insists is the only patriotism that counts, and if you don't agree you're clearly an enemy of the people. The frat boys received the blessing of Donald Trump. And soon after that, a conservative operative began a GoFundMe page for the frat boys, hoping to raise $15,000 for what the organizer called a reward for upstanding behavior, a beer party. Instead of $15,000, the GoFundMe site raised a half million dollars.

So yesterday they actually held that "rager" at the American Legion in Chapel Hill, an invitation only, beer-soaked "triumph of the bro-hemians" and a showcase for Lee Greenwood ("God Bless the USA," which established that Republicans owned patriotism and no one else need apply) and other mainly country musical acts. They called it "Flagstock 2024." Blowing that kind of money on Labor Day was a sufficient kind of desecration in itself.

"Invitation only." You heard that, right? 

All of the university’s fraternities and sororities, as well as the campus ROTC, were invited to the event, with 10 “core” fraternities that had members at the flagpole on April 30 invited to be VIP guests. A June update to the GoFundMe originally identified six fraternities as part of that group: Pi Kappa Phi, Alpha Epsilon Pi, Delta Upsilon, Delta Kappa Epsilon, Phi Gamma Delta and Zeta Beta Tau.

A dissenting voice came from Brendan Rosenblum, a member of Jewish fraternity Alpha Epsilon Pi, who was among the frat boys who held the flag up in April. Rosenblum, who did not attend "Flagstock 2024," told the News&Observer that he "views the event and the rhetoric that has surrounded it in a more somber way. While others may view the pro-Palestinian protesters as “a mob” ... Rosenblum sees them as his fellow students, and views the events of April 30 as a failure from multiple groups to foster civil discourse about the war in Gaza." “I think we were there that day to try to, you know, represent our beliefs,” Rosenblum said. “But also, everyone was there because they cared about an issue, and whether or not I agree with them, it doesn’t matter.”

Rosenblum captures what the spirit of a university education is supposed to embody, an attempt to inhabit other viewpoints with understanding and a modicum of sympathy. That is the sort of "politics" I think the Wesleyan president was talking about.