previous

The Great Unwashed
June 05, 2004 - 10:59 a.m.

next

I'm an old curmudgeon...I know this. I was born a little old man and a little old man I have remained. So I am aware of that fact.

But I still don't like wild, rowdy groups of college kids (or just-post-college kids) bellowing and screeching through my neighbourhood at night.

Milwaukee hosts a downtown weekend party, Riversplash. It's a very nice concept, with stages set up on Water St. and events all up and down the Riverwalk. Vendors and merchants set up stalls, bands play, there are (of course) fireworks and people have a good time.

People other than me. Riversplash started o.k., but increasingly it has changed from a nice, friendly sort of event into your typical summer booze-fest.

I'd like it if the crowd wasn't so involved in beer. I don't understand the notion that any event has to be beer-soaked and end with men puking in flowerbeds and women relieving themselves in dark doorways...yes, I did walk past and no, I didn't realize what they were doing until I saw it trickling across the sidewalk...I did have the good sense to step over the stream.

The random, percussive shouts of drunken college boys, like so many silverbacks thumping their chests, is perhaps the most disruptive thing a neighbourhood can experience. That or the squeal of besotted schoolgirls, screaming some obscenity at the top of their lungs...you think they're being raped until you go to the window and see that, no, they're just being stupid.

Have we, as a society, lost all sense of respect? It's not just the drinking - that only makes worse what's already there. Loud, belligerent, aggressive, bullish, boorish...it seems as if anything even slightly refined is anathema to Milwaukee's Water St. hordes. We've elevated the mythical "common man" to the point that it is a high mark of pride to be ignorant and base.

Baron Edward George Earle Bulwer-Lytton coined the term, "the great unwashed." While he was ungenerously referring to London as a whole, I can certainly imagine the sort of individuals who must have inspired the term. They were vomiting outside my window last night.


Bulwer-Lytton, by the way, also gave us the phrase "the pen is mightier than the sword" and the stock opening line, "It was a dark and stormy night." He had a penchant for grand, sweeping language and a disdain for linguistic economy...he is my hero.

|