Mambu in Morgantown: Collegiate Violence and the Cargo Situation

Ted  Vehse




Socrates’ dictum, "the unexamined life is not worth living," has been challenged in our day by Saul Bellow who suggests that examining your life may make you wish you were dead. More recently, the humanistic geographer, Yi Fu Tuan, has turned back to Socrates with the counter proposal that self-examination presents at least the possibility that personal despair may become public spectacle. For myself, I welcome this Socratic redivivus, but I wonder if Bellow would not respond, "examining spectacle may make you and your neighbors wish you were all dead." Considering ancient images like the dance of death from plague-ridden, 14th-century Europe or the modern perversities of Nazi art, one could argue that there is no weaker a connection between public spectacle and apocalypse than there is between personal despair and the death-wish. If Tuan is right, what is it about spectacle that possibly could make us want to live?

As a historian of religions, the only way I am comfortable answering such questions is by reference to example. I would like to discuss a public spectacle with you today. This spectacle originates in my own community. It has all the elements of fascination and repugnance that attract our attention so irresistibly to spectacles. Above all, it has that element of seeming irrationality that makes them, well… spectacular. The example I wish to discuss is a form of violence. It is that form of collegiate violence that takes place after football games or other major sporting events. For convenience sake, I call it the post-game blow-out. This form of collegiate violence is one with which, I assume, most of you are familiar. If you have lived in a college or university community for more than a little while, it probably is something with which you are more familiar than you wish you had to be.

The post-game blow-out is an explosion of reckless, violent or destructive behavior often described as a riot. It takes place when students and other mostly young fans gather in sizable groups after football games to disobey laws, disassemble, smash, and burn things in public, often late at night and in conspicuous locations. It is neither planned nor organized activity. On the contrary, it appears to take place on the spur of the moment. What the student-fans destroy often is of use to them and even may be their very own. The post-game blow-out involves its participants in illegal activity with immediate and long-term material consequences for their own lives.

"They're crazy," is a common explanation by faculty for such repugnant student behavior. In the minds of an embarrassed and scandalized academia, events of this type—which arise out of its own midst!—make no sense. They represent the paroxysm of something fundamentally irrational, paying heed to which clothes it with a respectability it in no way deserves. Interestingly, however, this same activity would appear to be "rational" to the extent that it may be shown to follow a pattern. The post-game blow-out comes up now and again, though not after every football game. That its recurrence is patterned is suggested by the fact people often speculate whether such and such a game will occasion violent behavior, often with surprising accuracy. And if it is patterned, the existence of a pattern would seem to indicate that people take part in such consequential activity in connection with something as inconsequential as the outcome of any given sporting contest for a reason. Such a possibility may enable us to wrap our minds around the apparent absurdity of this one spectacle—perhaps, around spectacles in general?—as a material source of meaning in contemporary life.

Most of you probably know something about post-game blow-outs, if only anecdotally. Football, you certainly will be aware, has brought not benefit only to college communities. On occasion, it also has brought trouble. Permit me to cite an example. On Saturday, November 9, 1975 celebrating football fans in Morgantown, West Virginia swarmed out of their seats and down to the playing surface of (old) Mountaineer Field to tear down goal posts. They did so after the West Virginia Mountaineers unexpectedly defeated their geographically closest and, in many respects, most intense rival, the Pitt Panthers.

Calling it an "upset victory," Mickie Furfari, sports writer for the local paper, the Dominion Post, reported on the final play of the game:
 
 

McKenzie then kicked his field goal, and all hell broke loose… Teammates mobbed their hero in a wild celebration, and many of the 35,298 fans flocked onto the field to join in. It was as wild a victory party as anyone could recall. In the same edition, local commentator, Norm Julian, wrote:
 
  Between 500–1,000 persons, apparently expressing their exuberance over the WVU win, at press time were continuing demonstrating on University Avenue in the Sunnyside area.

Traffic was reported blocked and was being rerouted around the area. One accident was reported… City Police declined comment on the disturbance.

The disturbance reportedly was centered between Sunnyside Superette and the Stadium Bridge.

 One such event in the history of a city or a school might be an anomaly, a mere fluke. People feel good when their team wins. Perhaps this time the feelings got a little out of hand. The sports writer, Furfari, observed, after all, that it was the wildest victory "celebration" anyone at the time could remember.

Unfortunately, fate has not been so kind. Events of this type have peppered the recent history of Morgantown. They have gone into local legend and become the cause of much headache for West Virginia University officials. Moreover, it is by no means clear that post-game blow-outs such as the one above described are the mere exaggeration of good feeling, at least the kind of good feeling associated with the average football win. It is true that in no instance has such behavior ever been recorded after a loss by the Mountaineers. (There is one exception I will discuss, time allowing.) However, it is equally true that post-game blow-outs do not take place after every win. Apparently, they are happenings ( often, though incorrectly in my view, simply called "celebrations") of a more particular kind.

Since 1975, the major occurrences have been several. In November, 1979, fans demonstrated again after the Pitt game, tearing down goal posts, gathering in the streets, confronting authorities in a student neighborhood, Sunnyside, and behaving generally outside usual norms. In September of 1982, victory over the University of Oklahoma produced near anarchic conditions. This win, described locally as a "shocker," literally lit up Sunnyside with fire, according to the Dominion Post. In October, 1983, yet another victory over Pitt produced predictable results: goal posts torn down, demonstrative student and fan behavior and, again, disturbances in Sunnyside. 1984 back-to-back victories over Boston College and traditional rival, Penn State, sent fans into the streets on two consecutive weekends. Four years later, in 1988, an October victory over Penn State resulted in what the Dominion Post called a "mob scene" at the stadium which required the president of West Virginia University officially to apologize to his counterpart at Penn State and to the head coach of the Penn State football team. Student demonstrations in the streets of Morgantown followed until the wee hours of the morning.

What is wrong in Morgantown? Why does this keep happening? How can it be that such widely separated events seem so much alike? More importantly, why does it seem that the behavior of those demonstrating appears momentarily spontaneous but has demonstrable historical predictability of a kind: torn-down goal posts, massing in streets of Sunnyside, confrontations with authorities? What inspires people—in this case largely, though not exclusively, students—not simply to disregard norms of behavior which, under normal circumstances, even they hold dear but blatantly and intentionally to violate them?

The best place to begin answering these questions, I submit, is with the simple facts, indeed with the plain sense of the simple facts. The plain sense of the post-game blow-out would seem to be the sense of bacchanalia, the sense of saturnalian role reversal. The post-game blow-out is not passive. It is, to borrow an expression from pop psychology, "pro-active." It is not about benign disregard of what is the same; it is about the intentional, the emphatic, enactment of difference. Perhaps, we ought to ask if this peculiarly American collegiate phenomenon is really so unique. Perhaps we need to seek something with which to compare it before we attempt to explain it. Where can we find another example of apparently spontaneous, demonstrative, even violent behavior, with a high degree of historical predictability?

One answer to this question is to be found beyond the boundaries of the Western world and beyond the confines of the present in Melanesia during the late 19th and early to mid 20th centuries. Specifically, it is to be located in the example of the Melanesian cargo cult. Cargo cults were spontaneous, often sudden outbreaks of demonstrative group behavior within the native population of the Melanesian archipelago. This behavior included such dramatic gestures as the publicly orchestrated, wholesale destruction of property belonging to the cult group. However, they also included more benign manifestations, such as that described by the famous anthropologist, Kenelm Burridge:
 
 

At about the same time… another series of rites were revealed in a dream to a man of Jumpitzir, a group of settlements bordering Tangu. Tangu participated.

The dreamer announced that if the villagers would build a large shed near the cemetery, and then followed his instructions, the shed would be filled with tinned meat, axes, knives, beads, soap, aspirins, cloth, and so on. Forthwith the villagers turned to and built the shed. The rites commenced with the adults of both sexes drawing water from the stream in bamboo barrels, heating the water, and then washing themselves. This done, the participants gathered at the cemetery in complete silence, neither dancing, nor singing, nor talking. Quite still. At a given signal, the women loosed their grass skirts, the men threw off their breech-clouts, and all engaged in promiscuous sexual intercourse.

Precisely how promiscuous, it was difficult to tell. No one who admitted to taking part in the rites would, or could be expected—if, indeed, they knew—to reveal the names of those with whom they had copulated. Nevertheless, one may presume a form of coitus interruptus, since the men's semen and the women's sexual secretions had to be collected, bottled, mixed together with water, and poured over the burial place.

 Cargo cults were instances of spectacle like behavior similar in striking—not merely libidinous—ways to the post-game blow-out. What about cargo cults helps us understand our spectacle as social action with meaning? Kenelm Burridge makes the following observations:
 
  the general conditions, the moral problems to which a Cargo cult could be seen as a response, have grown out of a series of events and circumstances which may be reasonably well defined. Many of the old customs, institutions, and modes of behavior which together constituted viable frameworks of traditional and trusted ways of life are either fast disappearing or have already died out. Those that remain seem not to be adequate to the environment in which the people concerned now find themselves, and fresh institutions must take the places of those that have gone… At any chosen moment, some institutions may be obsolescent, others in genesis. And since institutions contain and express series of moral notions, there can be little certainty that this institution expressing these sentiments will not soon be replaced by that institution expressing other ideas. The result is a general perplexity as to which doctrines should guide in particular circumstances, a many cornered fight between a variety of conservatisms on the one hand, and different kinds and orders of radicalism on the other.

To those who participate in a Cargo cult the current situation appears wholly confused—altogether too much to comprehend in a sweep of imaginative thought.

 Cargo cults were responses to the difficulties brought about for native Melanesians by European colonialism. They were an attempt to deal with a moral situation which was neither here nor there, to circumstances which were somehow historically ambiguous. The case for which Burridge named his famous book, Mambu, is instructive. Mambu was a native Melanesian who was raised a Catholic. During the mid-thirties of the 20th century, he broke with the missionaries who had trained him to become a catechist, starting his own nativistic millennial movement. Mambu’s career was short-lived. He appears to have been active only from the end of 1937 to the summer of 1938. However, what Mambu did was more important than the fact that he was unable to do it for long. He altered the physical and mental landscapes which the initiates of his cult inhabited. He influenced certain of their behaviors and created new rituals.
 
  Mambu used to pray by the graves of the deceased, and he demanded payment for doing so. He introduced a form of baptism which, he said, would give full dispensation in the rights of the new days to come, etc. Mambu’s cult enacted difference as the postulate of an alternate reality. His cargo cult temporarily restored the moral order of the native Melanesian universe. It did so with singular, demonstrative actions which, among the participants at least, could not be misinterpreted. The historian of religions Jonathan Z. Smith has offered a theory of ritual in which cargo cults happen to play an important role. According to Smith, this type of cult tends to arise under ambiguous circumstances, a fundamental feature of what he calls "the cargo situation."
 
  A variety of means have been employed to meet this cargo situation. In … more desperate cargo cults, the natives have destroyed everything that they own, as if, by this dramatic gesture, to awaken the white man's moral sense of reciprocity. "See, we have now given away everything. What will you give in return?" Both of these "solutions" assume the validity of exchange and reciprocity and appeal to it.
  However, Smith notes an essential element of Cargo cult behavior which cuts to its heart as ritual:
 
  It is necessary to be quite insistent at this point. The problem of cargo is [that]… prophecy has been fulfilled but in an unexpected or "wrong" way. The ancestors have returned on a ship, they have brought cargo; but they have not distributed it properly in such a way as to achieve equilibrium… the cargo situation gives rise to myths and rituals concerned with rectification. The Cargo cult is not just any type of ritual. It is a ritual of rectification, a ritual attempt to set right that which has gone wrong. Or, more accurately, it is a ritual attempt to set right that which has gone technically right in the wrong way. It is carefully orchestrated behavior the intention of which, in part, is to test the adequacy and applicability of traditional patterns of behavior and categories of thought to unfamiliar or unexpected situations. The cargo cult, then, is not a historical movement for social justice but rather an enactment by an oppressed people of practical social intellection, what Smith describes as, "an act of native exegetical ingenuity."

The suggestion here is that cargo cults result in meaningful social thought even when they do not result in noticeable social change. But how might this model of Smith's assist us in understanding the unnerving dimensions of student-fan behavior during post-game blow-outs? Let us look once again and more closely at the evidence concerning these events as they have occurred in Morgantown.

The purpose of the sports contest is to win. Football is no exception. In general, one expects one's team to emerge victorious from the gridiron. If not, it is understood the alternative is to lose. There is little, if anything, unclear in these expectations. They go along with competitive sports.

However, in football as in all other forms of athletic competition, there is winning and there is winning. Not all victories look alike. Some victories carry with them excess baggage not happily associated with triumph. These victories are the "upsets" and the "close calls," the games one's team was not supposed to win and those it won, but just barely. This baggage is the contested right to victory, the vague feeling of partisans or, perhaps, even the blatant assertion by outside observers that the victor probably should not have walked away with the victory.

Interestingly, a survey of the history of collegiate violence in Morgantown suggests it is games of precisely these types which associate to the phenomenon of the post-game blow-out. The Mountaineer win over Pitt on November 9, 1975—the victory which produced the first recorded post-game blow-out—was a last-minute, come-from-behind win. The caption under the Dominion Post photo read: "last-second winning points" and "stunning victory." The outcome was a surprise. WVU did not achieve decisive victory. It was a matter of chance and time, factors which cast a shadow of doubt on its certainty.

Consider other examples. The 1982 game in Oklahoma, the "shocker," was an upset over a heavily favored opponent. Again, the Dominion Post:
 
 

West Virginia's football team came, saw, and conquered Saturday on what many thought was Mission Impossible. It watched as ninth-ranked Oklahoma jumped out to a 14-0 lead in the first quarter, then left a record Owen Field crown of 75,008 in a state of shock. When the season's opener had ended, the Mountaineers were on top by 41-27 for one of the greatest victories in West Virginia's football history. The Pitt game of October 1, 1983, described by the Dominion Post as a "big win," was a slim 24-21 victory for the Mountaineers. Both the Boston College and Penn State games of October, 1984 were extremely close, with scores of 21-20 and 17-14 respectively. Finally, the 1988 victory over Penn State, while hardly close (the final score was WVU 51, Penn State 30), represented an unmistakable upset of a particular kind. WVU won decisively, but in the rivalry between the schools, the Mountaineers only defeated the Nitany Lions a handful of times dating all the way back to the 1950’s.

Upsets and close calls are ambiguous victories. These games create circumstances in which a win was achieved but not as it should have been. They create circumstances in which doubt exists as to whether the conqueror deserved the conquest. This ambiguity, I would argue, calls for a response from those who care about such things: the fans. It makes necessary the resolution of ambiguity by means of the accented assertion of the genuinely victorious quality of the contested victory. It engenders a perfectly typical Smithian "cargo situation."

The post-game blow-out, then, responds to a competitive sports situation much as the cargo cult responds to the cargo situation. It resolves the ambiguity of the contested victory—in theory—by enactment of difference between the day on which an ambiguous victory was achieved and any other day, particularly a day on which the unambiguous outcome of a sports contest was achieved: a clear win or loss. It does this by means of an exaggerated victory celebration.

The post-game blow-out has meaning, because it is an indicator of pure meaning. It is a flag. It is a marker. Its meaning is meaning. Like the cargo cult, it represents a form of native exegetical activity: the emphatic construal of an event so as to establish beyond the shadow of a doubt a benchmark for its subsequent interpretation. "We celebrated. You don't celebrate a loss. This was a true victory." The post-game blow-out is both an application and a test of the adequacy of the given competitive sports paradigm from the perspective of the fans under circumstances which seem to threaten the integrity of that paradigm. Hence, the post-game blow-out is a species of cargo cult. Or, what we perhaps should say is that both the post-game blow-out and the cargo cult are examples of the same social form: rituals of rectification. Both involve group behavior which is spontaneous. Both reflect a certain historically predictability. Both seek to formulate an admittedly tenuous, experimental social rationality in unambiguous practical terms. Both seek to disambiguate.

Under the circumstances, it seems reasonable to speculate that one very well might expect to meet Mambu in Morgantown, metaphorically speaking. The inclinations of Melanesian islanders and American student-fans to enact an ideal, to resolve ambiguity, to disambiguate are not so far apart. There is, however, a further striking similarity in the thought worlds of these two otherwise distantly separated peoples. The central motif of the cargo cult is a fetish: cargo. Participants in a cargo cult ascribe complex ideal qualities to simple material things. In the myths of the Melanesians, the arrival of cargo heralds the dawning of a new age. To possess cargo—or, more properly, to exchange it in balanced reciprocity—is to stand in possession of new moral qualities. It is to be what Burridge calls, "the New Man." In the world of the cargo cult, material things matter.

In the world of the post-game blow-out, apparently, material things matter in a particular way, too. According to Officer Price of the Morgantown Police department, an end was put to a particularly tense phase of the 1988, WVU-Penn State post-game blow-out by means of material exchange. Early in the morning, a large group of students carrying downed goal-posts from Mountaineer Field was intercepted near the central campus of WVU. The students wished to carry the goal posts into the business district of Morgantown against the better judgment of local authorities. Negotiations commenced between police officers and the informally designated leaders of the student group. A satisfactory result was achieved when the Police promised to bring in City equipment to chop the goal posts into pieces. They took names and addresses from all the students in attendance, promising to deliver to each one a piece of the victory "trophy." A confrontation was averted, and the students dispersed without further demonstration. Apparently, the participants were satisfied with this material indicator and momento of the occasion. There is, it would seem, a fetish quality to the post-game blow-out not unlike that of the cargo cult, suggesting further that the two phenomena are of a piece.

The question this analysis raises is: what does our comparison reveal? What do we learn about ourselves from the post-game blow-out that we might not learn from another type of behavior, and what does it tell us about spectacle? Apparently, we live in a world still populated by homo sapiens sapiens ritualis. We are, to put it bluntly, the "ritual ape." Whether explicitly religious or not, our formal rituals and informally ritualistic behaviors convey meaning. Real meaning. Perhaps disconcerting meaning but important meaning, nevertheless. We run the risk of abandoning ourselves to unreason, a very dangerous thing, if we regard them only with a dismissive shrug. The highest and most difficult calling of humanity is self-understanding, but we must recognize that the quest for self-knowledge will not always end with comforting discoveries. We are as likely to uncover discomfiting truths about ourselves as we are to find those which are edifying. We are as likely to discover a cargo cult in our midst as we are to explore some new frontier of spiritual growth.

In view of this fact, it seem advisable to recall that reverence may be a religious value, but it is not necessarily an intellectual virtue. A less reverential and universalistic, earthier and more particularistic approach to the problems of violence and modalities for its reduction may lead to a more favorable result in the long run. Unfortunately, it also may lead to a result we find somehow distasteful. In that case, it seems worth bearing in mind that when good taste conflicts with good conscience, the demands of conscience ought to prevail. If today we or people in our environs behave in ways we consider primal, it may be that they… that we actually are and that we ought to know this about ourselves. Or, it may be that we and those we arbitrarily designate "primitives" are only human, after all. I see little to be gained from any attempt to isolate what is "ours" from what is "theirs." We will not have told the truth. We will not have deepened human (self-)understanding.

If the post-game blow-out tells us anything, it tells us that people today still derive personal meaning from a public process which socializes private despair, which brings it out into the open. Apparently, people even derive personal meaning from private despair as prosaic as the malaise surrounding a contested football win. A process of self-examination, it seems to me, lies at the heart of this spectacle. It tends to confirm that Yi Fu Tuan is right and, through him, Socrates. Spectacle is self-examination in social context, because spectacle is ritual, and ritual is precisely such a thing. It is a testing of our common ideas about what is, in conscious tension with what we think ought to be. It is the laboratory in which we examine our moral imperatives to see what we are telling ourselves we ought to do at any given moment.
 
 

Violence Reduction

Violence reduction in the case here described, it seems to me, is a matter… (This section at the live presentation.)
 
 

[The "Exception":

It is at this point that it becomes necessary to discuss the one exception noted before. There was an occasion in Morgantown upon which a post-game blow-out seems to have taken place under patently unambiguous circumstances. This case would seem not simply to overthrow the particular interpretation of events proposed so far but to challenge the accuracy of the present description of post-game blow-outs as a historical phenomenon. Not only did this instance of unruly student behavior and collegiate violence take place after a football game with a plainly unambiguous outcome, it took place after a loss. The example is the case of the decisive Mountaineer defeat at the hands of the Pitt Panthers in 1979.

On Saturday, November 11, 1979 students demonstrated following this football game, which the Mountaineers lost by a score of 24 to 17. There were disturbances in Sunnyside, including blocked traffic, small bonfires, and the destruction of property. There was also an unusual amount of unruly, destructive behavior immediately following the game inside the stadium. Goal posts, of course, were torn down, and student-fans mobbed the field. However, there were other, unprecedented forms of demonstrative behavior. Some students attempted what seemed like the wholesale removal of parts of Mountaineer Field. This activity resulted in structural damage, especially to the seating. Large pieces of wooden bleachers were removed from the stadium and used as kindling for bonfires in Sunnyside.

Recall that one of the methodological assumptions of this study is that the meaning of the post-game blow-out is to be discovered in the particular circumstances surrounding its occurrences. This assumption helps resolve the present case. It is precisely the unruly behavior surrounding parts of the stadium that is the key to understanding this event. It is not, in fact, a post-game blow-out in the same sense as the others, though it shares certain characteristics with them. This game was the final game ever played in the old Mountaineer Field. In 1980, the WVU football squad moved to quarters in a new stadium facility. Though the unruly student behavior at the end of the 1979 football season still represented an indicator of significance, it would seem that the significance was of a different variety. It was not an attempt to deal with the ambiguity of one contested sports victory. It was not an attempt to deal with any aspect of the sports contest with which it was associated at all. (In retrospect, the game was largely irrelevant.) It was, rather, an attempt to "mark" a significant historical occasion, a transitional moment and the end of an era. Old Mountaineer Field was to be torn down, and new Mountaineer Field was to become the home of the football team. The unique aspects of the unruly student behavior, in particular the dismantling and burning of the wooden bleachers, was a fetishistic attempt to commemorate the occasion. Students tried literally to walk away with a piece of history. Hence, this seeming contradictory case actually supports the theory. It is not an exception but rather an elegant demonstration of the rule.]
 

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