One of the top videos on YouTube today is a Web 2.0 masterpiece entitled Cat of a Thousand Faces, the first of a presumably 1000-part series in which various cats make various faces. Now, I’m not one of those people who anxiously reloads The Plank every five minutes, nor am I one who didn’t spend countless hundreds of hours on this websitein middle and high school (and yes, college too, jackasses). But for proof that that the Internet really is just an inextricable race to the bottom, I urge you to go to our sidebar, click on “IvyGate,” and wonder at this website’s pathetic existence.
As best I can tell (being the all-too frequent IvyGate reader than I am), IvyGate is one big backfired joke. At its best, it was (yes, was) a send-up of the self-hating, hyper-intelligent, hyper-loaded East Coast set, and a chance for Joe Ivy Leaguer to remind himself that he’s perfectly normal. It was self-therapy at the expense of others, particularly for those of us chilling out in the Ivy League’s bottom half–Columbia ain’t Yale, but it also doesn’t have flag-burners or pathological assholesof the Aleksey Vayner stripe. And Dartmouth ain’t Columbia, but at least its drinking problem puts ours to shame–and at least it didn’t have to put up with this guy, or these guys (or, in case you’ve forgotten about them, these guys).
In a sense, the IvyGate reader was (and I guess is) like the closet dittoheadstealing a few segments of Rush during his lunch break. Both thrive off of a shared sense of condescension, out of the kind of superiority complex that can only be spun from one’s deepest insecurities–not that Savage and company were quite up to Limbaugh’s level, but the Gate did offer the self-loathing Ivy Leaguer a much-needed chance to wallow in the intellectual gutter. Of course, now the joke’s gotten old, and the site’s trademark embitterment now says more about its producers than its consumers.
Yes, one recoils at O’Connor and Savage and their ilk–I can almost imagine them waking up in the morning, scanning the Ivy rags for some sophomore columnist to hurl shit at, and then going to work as if they weren’t spending hours every day obsessing over shower sexor Harvard student government or shower sex, salvaging whatever fleeting joy can be derived from flaming people four or five years younger than them. These people are such assholes that even Bwog is probably a little intimidated. Of course, Bwog is another organization that thrives off of a self-appointed sense of exceptionality, and, like IvyGate, it haughtily positions itself above the neurotic madness that its coverage has ironically come to typify. But while Bwog traffics in more or less substantive journalism, IvyGate does not. It traffics in public humiliation and little else.
So while this postdid save me the trouble of trashing Anthony Kelly’s article myself, the fact that IvyGate even caresabout this kind of thing speaks to everything I hate about the website. I care about what’s in today’s Crimson about as much as the Crimson’s opinion blog editor cares about what’s in today’s Spectator. Only when the editors of IvyGate feel like watching the sublimated bitterness of a few dozen disaffected Ivy Leaguers play itself out is the opinion page of a college paper a couple hundred miles away even distantly relevant to anyone or anything. Then again, the joke isn’t really on us anymore.
And then again, I’m no less loyal an IvyGate reader now than I was two days ago. Which is to say I probably read it a lot more than you do. Trust me.