Better Off Red: Dirty Little Words

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My sister hosted a German exchange student a few years ago. She was 15 or 16 when she came to the US, I think, and was interested in typical high school girl things: she wanted to attend the Homecoming Dance but was scheduled to leave before the event, so my sister hosted a mock-Homecoming in our basement for her. She developed a crush on this tall gangly kid I knew in high school and they might have kissed or something. You know, cultural magnetism.

The other thing she did was attend a Badger football game with my parents and another exchange student. They were moderately interested in the game, but were definitely intrigued by the antics of the student section, particularly a few select cheers tossed back and forth across the aisles. First they had to ask my parents what exactly the students were shouting, and that answer was met with giggles, I’m sure–after all, the first thing you do when you learn a new language in school is grab a dictionary and look up the swear words. But then a mild confusion swept across their faces, and another question was posed to my mom:

“Do they…not like each other?”

Seems like a logical question, now that I look at it. Those particular words shouted back and forth certainly don’t communicate overt respect or mutual admiration. Ask a teenager with little-to-no understanding of sarcasm in the English language why a bunch of people would shout obscenities at a bunch of other people and he’d reach the same conclusion–they must hate each others’ guts. While it’s true that Section O totally sucks, that conclusion would mostly just be wrong.

But if those chants (a better descriptor than “cheers”) aren’t intended to destroy the confidence and mental well-being of the folks standing across the aisle, what purpose do they serve?

No good one, if you ask Barry Alvarez or Bret Bielema. Such are the words those two shouted toward the student section when they sent a letter to all Wisconsin student season ticket holders asking them to cease-and-desist with all the vulgar yelling. Leading off the letter is an obligatory thank-you for all the support so far, although specifically pointing out the early student arrivals for the Nebraska game was a worthy mention. Most of the letter consists of comments (well, complaints) the Athletic Department has received from Badger football spectators expressing their displeasure with those chants. It’s not hard to believe there are plenty more where those come from.

The football program and athletic department in general have long been clear and vocal in their distaste for the vulgar chants, but as far as I know this is the first real organized effort to finally put an end to them. It evokes memories of the great Jump Around debacle back in 2003 when, without warning, the 4th quarter began unaccompanied by House of Pain. That absence was motivated by safety concerns–officials worried the vibrations would disturb construction of the skyboxes in Camp Randall–but was met with predictable outrage from the campus community. Madison students did what they so love to do: they protested. It paid off, as the school reassessed the danger, concluded it was negligible, and promptly announced the tradition would continue. Flawless victory.

This is a different matter with a different solution, if there can be one at all. Students shouting swear words at each other isn’t going to bring down thousands of pounds of steel and concrete, but that doesn’t mean it’s not an extremely visible problem. The students are the most convenient microcosm of Badger football fans week in and week out, and if they’re consistently associated with screaming curses at one another, it obviously reflects poorly on the program, school, and larger Wisconsin community.

To be fair, it reflects as poorly on those groups as “bad words” can. At the most basic level, we’re still talking about obscenity, free speech, and all the rest of those ever-present issues. I’ll step right in line with the chorus of students who play the First Amendment card in every case questioning what’s okay to say and what’s not. Words are just words, lent the power to harm only by a society that has agreed to deem them harmful. But in this case even I, a self-proclaimed Man of Principle, have to ask what we’re really protecting. The right to shout dirty words at each other during a football game? Freedom of Speech is great, maybe the most vital of all rights granted by our Constitution, but while this issue would be an open-and-shut case in a court of law, I can’t help but think brandishing that right in this case does nothing but trivialize it.

I shouted the stuff when I was a student. I caught on quick (they’re not complicated once you figure out which direction to yell) as a freshman and played along most of the year. Sophomore year I remained reasonably invested in doing my part to degrade those jerks two sections over, but by the time my junior and senior years rolled around I was really just tired of it. Maybe I was in the minority (it sure seemed like that in the moment) but by that point it was just background noise, something I had accepted and paid no real mind.

Ignorance isn’t really an option for officials within the football program, who have been dealing with these chants for years and are understandably fed up. I’d be pissed too if I poured all my time and energy into establishing Wisconsin football as an elite program on the national scene but was consistently saddled with the baggage of an offensive student section. You’re nuts if you think the University doesn’t take heat when those chants spill onto television broadcasts in this post wardrobe-malfunction world. You’re in denial if you think a significant (not majority, but significant) chunk of first-time spectators walk out of Camp Randall each week with a sour ringing in their ears and feathers as ruffled as a pompous grouse.

Not to suggest I don’t take issue with plenty of those complaints, most notably those lamenting the lack of “class” among Wisconsin students. What the heck is class these days anyway? How would a student section communicate its collective classiness? Cheese platters and wine? Leather trim? Are these folks suggesting a group of people who show up hammered to every football game would be perfectly classy if they didn’t yell swear words?

Despite those complaints being moderately laughable, I must admit that I agree with their sentiment. I think the chants are embarrassing and hollow. I think they persist only because everyone “knows” that’s just how it’s supposed to be, as if it’s every fan’s duty to keep those chants alive. Unfortunately, sending a not-very-harshly worded letter to the contrarian student body of the University of Wisconsin is exactly the kind of action that makes matters worse before making them better. Tell these students they can’t do something and you can be sure they’re going to redouble their efforts to do it. They draw power from the displeasure of authority, spurred on in their fury by anything resembling that kinda stuck-up attitude I sorta communicated three paragraphs ago.

I think the chant needs to go. It’s played, boring, and childish, detracting from a host of otherwise spectacular traditions (smartly highlighted in the letter) that are striking and unique. It drives me nuts that they mess up the rhythm when injected into “Swingtown” singalongs. There’s no reason parents should be apprehensive about bringing kids to Badger games because they’re going to hear bad words. There’s no reason fans should leave Camp Randall each weekend with anything on their mind other than the butt-whupping the Badgers just delivered, and maybe what bar they’re heading to that night.

I don’t see this letter solving the problem without serious help from a large vocal segment of the student population. It’ll still be an issue this weekend because at least one dude will decide he has to be the one who sticks it to the man. Maybe it’ll last for years beyond this one before the school tries again, gives up, or the chant dies out. A comment on the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s coverage of the issue suggested that if the issue doesn’t resolve itself, the school sell section J to the general public. If it persists, they do the same with section K, and so on. That’s awfully drastic for an issue that, again, boils down to young adults yelling bad words. But that realization points both ways, and I can only hope that the students who preserve this tradition ask themselves what they’re really defending from the vicious onslaught of “class”.

Whatever that means.