All alone at the Grand Old Party: the Jim Gilmore story

Talk of the Quad: The mythological existence of Bowdoin squirrels

I’m surprised no one’s beaten me up the tree on this topic: the nature of the sciurine sensation. At Bowdoin, the Yik Yak feed is replete with references to the campus squirrels. Posts or entries on the localized forum allow students to comment on their Bowdoin experience; the campus squirrels are a recurring and important aspect of that experience. Something about the small mammals makes them a fine occasion for campus commentary. They are endlessly fascinating to Bowdoin students and an excellent source of critical comic material. The mythology of squirrels on this campus depends heavily on Yik Yak.
Bowdoin squirrels as they appear on Yik Yak of course are based on a “real life,” material, squirrel phenomenon. Squirrels are an important and unique element in the campus landscape. They are a consistent presence and a campus staple for students. Their role in the landscape is entirely different from that of stationary campus elements, such as buildings and trees. Besides people, dogs and other occasional animals, squirrels are the only constant, mobile and lively element of the campus landscape.
Trees may be their opposite; static and predictable, the arboreal installations seldom draw the active attention of students (except for when they’re lit with fall color for that one or two month window). Community members interact passively with the trees, and if they do actively observe trees, it is never witty, sarcastic, ironic or self-reflexive, which are all characteristic of observations on Yik Yak and especially of squirrel-centric posts.
Squirrels draw active observation because they are dynamic and proximate. The campus squirrels are comfortable in the close company of students—they seem to have an intrepid indifference to students and their activity. Active observation is important to understanding the squirrels, since they represent a Yik Yak dependent symbol and since Yik Yak depends on active observation. (Yik Yak relevant observation is always active.) Squirrels’ close proximity draws in what is often otherwise a tranced audience.
Students’ ability to observe depends on squirrels’ close proximity, but the activity behind the observation depends on their dynamicity. Squirrels exist in a landscape of mostly static, contained, polite and predictable elements—such as trees. They make themselves quite conspicuous as an exception in the landscape and, indeed, the lives of their observers. In this case, the passive is made active by an unsettling, or defying of expectations, or probably both. The squirrels’ close proximity and apparent comfort in that proximity can be unsettling, even scary in a benign sort of way to students, who generally do not expect “wild,” undomesticated animals to ever breach a certain physical sphere. This excitement begets some reflection or judgment from the observer that lends itself well to Yik Yak humor.
Even when they are not dictated or characterized by fear, squirrel-student interactions provide opportunities for comedic observation. There is something inherently funny to Bowdoin students about squirrel behavior; they look frantic, wired, determined and, in all this, cute (like your typical Bowdoin student?). Observers readily perceive that squirrels have their own world of interests, concerns and conflicts that is strikingly different from that of Bowdoin students. That two radically different worlds of experience can occur in a single physical space makes the squirrel-human dynamic especially noteworthy or funny. This is fundamentally why and how campus squirrels have made it into the realm of Yik Yak. It wasn’t until the campus squirrels came into contact with this established campus forum that they acquired the meaning and significance that we ascribe to them today.
Yik Yak is a well attended and hallowed non-physical space, with its own unique symbolic power. A number of campus symbols depend on Yik-yak. It has that effect as a discursive forum that rewards original commentary; it is a well-attended, fractured narrative where campus life is actively constructed and deconstructed. Students articulate and discuss campus elements in relation to other campus elements, as well as in relation to themselves. The physical elements behind the symbols, like the “real life” squirrels, are just a part of the signs’ histories—not the signs themselves. Campus squirrels would not mean what they do without this discursive tool and the squirrel discourse it has facilitated.
Yik Yak is a self-reflexive, highly self-referential system with a huge following. There is a sort of positive feedback loop for signs within Yik Yak. The Yik Yak discourse has the power to sever the symbol from its physical point of reference—to form self-sufficient signs. This is not so in the case for the campus squirrels sign, which depends on a give and take between the physical squirrels and the forum’s squirrel narrative. The squirrels themselves still (seem) to directly inspire many of the Yaks that reference them, while the Yik Yak squirrel discourse directly changes the way students observe the physical squirrels. The squirrels and the squirrel discourse according to Yik Yak work in tandem to shape a single sign. A change or variance in one necessarily changes the other, and the unified meaning abides by this give-and-take. A cultish student following drives the evolution of the symbol.
Eastern gray squirrels are sedentary in the zoological sense—that is, they stay put and do not migrate. The campus squirrels are always present on campus and relate to the same changes in outdoor physical environment (especially the weather) that students do. There’s a barometric quality to them. Sometimes this allows for squirrels, as the subject of yaks, to function as a means for students to comment—often ironically, with the wide trajectory of clever humor—on their own experiences of the Bowdoin campus. One of the most common “strategies” is to superimpose the Bowdoin students’ world onto the squirrels. For example: “I’m not for slut shaming but some of these squirrels must be having outrageous amounts of sex,” or “that squirrel is on so-pro” and countless more.
Though the squirrels appear as the object of the observations deployed on the anonymous forum, in many cases, they are but the means to students’ end of self-reflection (which may be the end of Yik Yak itself). The striking difference between the non-physical worlds of Bowdoin squirrels and Bowdoin students casts in relief many aspects of student life: their interests, concerns and self-proclaimed struggles. Incorporating squirrels into Yik Yak is a comedic way of exposing the world of Bowdoin students. You might say this world is eccentric or flighty—is there a word for that?

Talk of the Quad: Straight to the roots

I’d estimate that roughly 40 percent of my college friends know that I’m Jewish. Well, half-Jewish, I guess. I’ve always wondered how obvious it is from the outside. My religious background doesn’t come up in conversation that often, and besides, I have fond memories of Christmas mornings I reference during the holiday season. My mom never figured out a way to explain to my older sister and me why Santa wouldn’t come down our chimney but left presents under the tree for every other kid from our country day school. My mother grew up as the archetypical uniform-wearing Catholic schoolgirl, converted into a righty by a nun who’d continually slap her left wrist with a ruler because “life is made for right-handed people.” She attended church twice a week for nearly 30 years. Her father was even born on Christmas day. When she fell in love with a Jewish man, her faith became a deal-breaker, so she left it at the (mezuzah-ed) door and converted to Judaism in order to marry my father. And although “biologically” speaking, that makes me as much Irish Catholic as I am Jewish, there are times when the former seems like nothing more than a muted recessive gene.
**** When I was a little girl, I earned a reputation in my family as being a little too independent. “I Can Do It Myself,” I’d say when someone tried to pack my lunch box or tie my shoes. My nickname soon became the acronym for my personal mantra: ICDIM. It was during the ICDIM era that I began doing my own hair. I picked a hairstyle I liked and stuck with it—day and night—for seven years. The braid. One single braid, straight down the back of my head. In the beginning, it was cute. I latched onto the hairstyle because I loved it when people told me I looked like my mother, and all the pictures I saw of her as a child showed her wearing the same singular braid. But as the years passed, it grew increasingly less cute. I wound my hair so tightly that the top layer began to break off where the braid began. A “frizz halo,” as my volleyball coach called it, started to form. You can probably estimate in what year a photo was taken based on the circumference of the halo. Despite how unattractive that look became, I felt almost incapacitated to change it. Part of me wonders if this was a residual fear of one of the more scarring moments of my youth: the day I unwove the cornrows I had gotten while on a vacation to the Caribbean. I cried when I looked in the mirror because I was so terrified of the self I saw stare back at me. My hair had expanded so much it had become more like the mane of a lion than the locks of my hair that, for most of my life, had been pin straight. That moment commenced a sort of Pavlonian conditioning in my mind: if I undo the braid, my hair becomes unbearably puffy. Each day I made a choice between which image I disliked less, and so each day I voluntarily bound my hair so that no one—especially not I—could see what it really looked like. ****
I learned the slang word “Jewfro” in high school when I became friends with another girl who shared in my hair troubles. Her definition matched what remains on Urban Dictionary today: “the Jewish form of an Afro,” or “a curly mop of hair with lots of volume.” I began using the term around the house, in reference to myself, when my hair was being particularly unmanageable or when looking at old photographs of my dad in college. One day, my father had enough. I used the term in a snarky line, and he got so angry that he grounded me. I never really felt connected to Jewish culture, so I guess that’s why I never considered the term to be anything offensive. At our temple, which was over half an hour away from where I lived, I was an outcast. I attended Hebrew school only on the days my pediatrician swore I didn’t have strep throat. The experience felt wholly unauthentic. Every Sunday and Monday, when my mom—who to this day hides statuettes of saints among her bookcases—drove me to temple, I wondered why we were not instead travelling to the church down our street. I harbored a lot of resentment toward my father, a man of science who openly argued about the irrationality of believing in God, yet demanded that his kids be raised Jewish. Since Catholicism had played such a strong role in my mother’s life, I always thought that my sister and I should have been raised Irish Catholic or at least been formally exposed to both faiths. But what I really wanted, in typical ICDIM fashion, was to choose for myself what to believe instead of having the decision made for me. ****
Hair straightening was the only “Jewish” (and I put that in quotes because I know that it is not culturally unique) ritual I understood innately. It is so widespread that it is almost customary for a Jewish girl with kinky hair to flat iron or chemically treat her hair until she convinces herself that it’s as smooth and shiny as the paradigm of beauty she constructed in her mind. It was my older sister—my polar opposite in almost every way—who taught me this. When she got a keratin treatment during my freshman year of high school, I saw what I believed to be an ideal solution to the braid that was exacerbating my hair damage. Only a couple of months passed before I, too, was sitting in the hair salon for hours, getting chemicals pasted onto my hair with a slimy paintbrush, just like she had. The tedium of the process—and the woes of post-treatment upkeep—suddenly became a shared experience, a way for my sister and I to connect despite our distance. As different hair straightening treatments hit the market, we tested them all and shared our thoughts on each. Keratin grew out too quickly. Chemical relaxer wasn’t strong enough. Brazilian Blowouts contained carcinogenic chemicals. After a couple years of experimentation, I settled with the keratin, but my sister went for the next-level stuff: thermal reconditioning. In exchange for a hefty investment of time and money, the process makes hair stick straight, puff-less and free of frizz for six months—the longest lasting treatment, but also the most difficult to grow out. Its permanence staved me off, but I watched with a glimmer of jealousy when day after day, my sister rolled out of bed and ran a comb through her hair without it inflating. Eventually, I caved. **** It is not uncommon for me to notice people staring at my roots sometimes. When my friends ask, “How come your hair is curly at the top, but the rest of it is straight?” I have no problem explaining to them that it’s because it’s chemically treated and growing out, although I’m aware of how alien that may sound. Most people don’t understand, and some have even yelled at me for voluntarily “damaging” my “perfectly fine” hair, but their comments never bothered me enough to change my mind. Recently, I was sitting in my friend’s living room when he told me he thinks I should stop getting my hair treated. “Why don’t you just let it be natural?” he asked. Since I was a tween, I’ve been putting on my scalp the same chemicals that morticians use to embalm dead people. I wish that I could look at my friend and tell him that, you know what, I think I am going to stop. But it’s not as easy as it sounds like it should be. Upon immigrating to the United States, my great-grandfather changed our surname from Rabinowitz—meaning “son of the rabbi”—to the less-Jewish-sounding Robbins to avoid persecution. Almost a century later, my hair treatments have become my modern-day tactic of hiding my Jewish identity, an identity to which I never genuinely related, and at times even resented. They have also come to represent the strongest tie I feel to a Jewish tradition, which, as flawed as this may be, is a ritual of suppression. I mistook hair straightening as a solution to the braid I wore in my childhood, when really it was a metamorphosed continuation. Both allowed me to displace my frustration over my inability to be Catholic onto the most visible aspect of my Jewishness: the Jewfro. I thought that confining my hair in a braid or trying to change its physical structure would take care of the larger crisis I couldn’t tangibly wrestle. Without my “Jewfro,” people don’t ask me if I’m Jewish, and I don’t have to sound foolish when I struggle to put a label on my spirituality. I don’t trigger frustration and confusion about being raised as part of a faith that neither of my parents wholeheartedly believe in as I stare in the mirror while just trying to brush my teeth. And when my “Jewish hair” starts to grow in again and the label’s in limbo, I start to think: being unattached to both Judaism and Catholicism has let me invent a spirituality of my own, one that feels more authentic to my beliefs than that of either of my parents’. Lacking the rigidity of one religion hasn’t prevented me from believing in God. But now, when my friends ask me what my natural hair looks like and if they’ll ever see it, even I wonder if I’ll ever stop hiding my roots. Besides, it only takes a few hours in the sun and a blistering red burn to remind me just how Irish I am too.

Talk of the Quad

All alone at the Grand Old Party: the Jim Gilmore story

This piece represents the opinion of the author:

Joe Sherlock

Orient Staff

December 3, 2015

New Hampshire holds its presidential primary “first in the nation,” which means candidates spend more time in the Granite State than they would otherwise. I watch U.S. politics closely, so I was shocked when I saw a name that I had never seen before on a list of candidates. “Who the hell is that,” I thought, “and why is he speaking at the same event as Carly Fiorina?” I was convinced I knew every candidate in this election, Republican or Democrat. A web search revealed that the man exists, and is indeed running for President. Former Virginia Governor Jim Gilmore has been routinely garnering between 0 and less than 1 percent in every poll. In most polls, he's not even mentioned.

I obsessed over the idea. Who runs for president while consistently polling at 0 percent? Given a margin of error, my roommates could poll higher in the U.S. presidential election than him. Why would someone choose to subject himself to this? This is a man who was an intelligence officer in the military, an attorney general, the governor of Virginia, the chair of the Republican National Committee—and yet the Orient has more Twitter followers than he does. I had to meet him.

Dover, New Hampshire is about 90 minutes away from Brunswick and frequently hosts presidential candidates. Jeb Bush, Hillary Clinton and anyone else who is waging a halfway-decent campaign has rallied there and probably will again before the February primary. Carly Fiorina was headlining the free pasta dinner event, followed by former New York Governor George Pataki—who I at least knew was running—and then Governor Gilmore was scheduled to speak last, because, well, of course he was.

It was an intimate soiree—some 200 people gathered in the function hall for the “Red Rally,” where the lights, dinner tables, balloons, chocolates, clothing, and even pasta was themed Republican red. I stood off in a corner, by the autographed books of Anne Coulter and Ted Cruz, Googling “Jim Gilmore” on my phone so I could remember what he looked like. I spotted him near the back of the room sitting next to who looked to be his campaign manager.

She got up and walked over near me, frantic and nervous. She grasped the pens next to the autographed books, looked at them, and then guiltily put them back, saying she needed a pen but felt bad stealing. “You didn’t bring a pen?” I asked the presumed campaign head. “No…,” she said, embarrassed.

I bargained to lend my pen to his state campaign director in exchange for an interview with the governor. She eagerly agreed, snapped up my pen, and scurried back to her seat with the governor. Their table had four Fiorina supporters and four elderly and seemingly disinterested people wearing Gilmore stickers. He had only been the star of a few stories over the past months, mostly about his indignation over his exclusion from debates, and, ironically, about his lack of coverage.

Fiorina was introduced as the “next president of the United States.” She gave a lengthy speech, mostly drawing from lines I’d see her use in debates and interviews, and was so popular that the event hosts asked her to come back up and talk about her similarities with Margaret Thatcher. Fiorina was the clear reason for the night—everyone else was supplementary. I stood near the governor’s table, eating my plate of genuinely decent ziti alla vodka, when I was approached by a New Hampshire television reporter.

She asked if I were with the Gilmore campaign, or if I were a member of the New Hampshire Young Republicans. I explained I was neither. She slumped her shoulders, disheartened, and then whispered her question to me.

“Okay, well do you know what this Jim Gilmore guy looks like, and where he might be in this room?”

Gilmore is only campaigning in New Hampshire. His press relations were more dismal than I could’ve expected. The newscaster was holding his campaign literature, some of which was on black and white printer paper, hand cut with scissors. Not to mention his staff lacked basic office supplies and stole my pen, a campaign donation I have not disclosed to the Federal Election Commission.

I halfheartedly pointed out Gilmore to her and plodded back to the media circle to see the other camera crews packing up. Half the room had left now that Fiorina was done and Pataki was speaking. I sat next to a national cable news cameraman and asked about how they cover candidates. “Sure, we care about all the candidates...but for what it’s worth, I’m leaving now,” he said.

I brooded alone in the now-emptied media circle, eating more Republican-themed pasta as Strafford County Republicans and local party hacks traded the microphone around. Three hours into the event, he was given the most irreverent, underwhelming possible introduction: “Jim Gilmore, why don’t you come up and say hi?” It sounded like he was running for Dover dogcatcher.

But once he took the microphone, I quickly began to understand why Gilmore has had such an illustrious career. He’s everything the Republican Party should want. He’s a plain-spoken governor with a southern drawl—a military veteran with a background in executive leadership and national security. He wants lower taxes. He talks about character, principle, devotion to country, and looking people in the eye.

Gilmore is clearly no amateur, but it’s not easy to try to climb up after a decade-long fall from relevance. He harped on the “establishment press in combination with the big deals in Washington DC,” who had denied him a spot on the most recent debate stage, again. He’s the kind of guy who never uses abbreviations or acronyms, always speaking with intensity.

The people that remained came to life as he talked about his military experience, the national security crisis, his support of veterans and contempt for regulation. He vowed to veto gun control “faster than Hillary Clinton can delete an email.” The crowd quietly roared in crescendo.

He finished his speech with unwavering passion and humbly asked for votes. Gilmore sat back down, pestering his state director for how long he’d spoken and how that compared to Pataki and Fiorina. She mumbled inaudibly and he looked frustrated. The event ended, and I now had my time to speak with him.

He came over after taking a few pictures, looking dismayed that I, an uncredentialed college kid in a cheap tweed jacket, was his media coverage. He sat like he hadn’t sat in days, crashing his fists on the red-clothed table full of half-empty wine glasses and dirty dinner plates.

Gilmore conceded that the election has been hard and will be an uphill battle, to say the least. I was jarred by the fact that he has to frame sentences with “when I’m president,” because it felt like I was breaking the news to him that his campaign wasn’t exactly gripping the nation.

He was quick to reiterate what he believes are his strengths: his qualifications and experience. I pointed out that Scott Walker and Lincoln Chafee dropped out already and they had more of everything—dollars, staffers, percentage points in polls, pens. He pointed to his lack of name recognition as just making him the candidate with the most room to grow, which to me sounded like saying “I’m not short, I just have the most height to achieve.”

He counted his entire campaign staff on two hands; it took an elongated “uhh” to get from the seventh staffer to the eighth. He leaned in real close when he was being serious. He pointed his finger at me when making important points. He told me when to write things down.

It’s been three weeks since I met Gilmore. And despite the recent emphasis on national security giving his experience its best shot at being considered important, little has changed, though he did poll around 2 percent in one poll, one time. While the primary is a few months away, I feel confident predicting that Jim Gilmore will not be the next President of the United States.

I’m not a Republican, and I disagree with Gilmore on pretty much every issue other than our mutual belief that the Trump campaign exemplifies “fascist talk,” but something about his campaign is wonderfully quixotic and beautifully tragic. What motivates someone to run for president when they have absolutely no chance, when no one will even listen? I had to ask.

“Because I’m the best person to be the president. I’ve always loved my country and served my country so now we’ve arrived at 2015 and we’re in a lot of trouble,” Gilmore explained. “I have the experience and the credentials to help my country, what do you want me to do? Go home and sit? Pray?”

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