A Journal of Humor and Verbal Anarchy

 

the ugly cornellian

Ithaca is a state of mind. It's a banana republic, colonized by 40,000 transients. Our own Cecil Rhodes, codenamed The Founder, was a guy from Westschester who, within a few years of landing in Ithaca, started redesigning the local landscape with the use of blasting powder. Yeah, thank, Ezra Cornell, for making Ithaca more 'gorges.' Ez walked into Ithaca, spotted the rolling woodlands on East Hill and said to himself, I'm going to own all that one day. He was true to his word. A man of destiny.

Manifest destiny. The americanism for grab all you can - in short, imperialism. Decades before Ezra Cornell showed up in town, General Sullivan's army wiped out all the natives. Cayuga Lake doesn't belong to the red man anymore. It belongs to Big Red. The university sucks the placid waters up with a big straw to cool the gym. Ultimate ecological imperialism.

EC tinkered around wirth ways to make money , first building water powered mills, then laying telegraph wires, moved into creating telegraph companies. He was instrumental in hobbling the behemoth Western Union together from smaller startups and made himself a cool $2 million. Big bucks back in those days. Ezra laid out a half million to bribe the state legislature to locate the land grant college which later bore his name to Ithaca. He bought up all the scrip for 60 cents on the dollar and sold it all off at an enormous profit to seed his own personal educational fiefdom. It was a rather complicated transaction, notwithstanding the Jay Gould robber baron shenanigans of the era. Ez was not adverse to using a lot of creative accounting. Folks complained about smelling a skunk in the woodpile for years. Little good it did . Ezra was, at one point, a member of the state legislature.

The Founder teamed up with his millionaire lumber buddies, Henry Sage and John McGraw to throw up some Gothic style outhouses up on the future campus. Now, when you cut down a tree and you've sold it for plywood, it's gone. When you build a university, you get a fresh crop every four years The boys knew they were on to something big. Today the university functions in that grey area between being a corporation and a public institution. You need an army of lawyers to keep the waters murky enough to withstand scrutiny so that's why they came up with the idea of starting a Law School too. And a Vet school to keep the cash cow healthy. All under one rubric. Big Red.

If you think of Ithaca as a big airport, you're closer to understanding the place better. The students don't give a fuck about the city of Ithaca. Most of them couldn't locate Dryden or Newfield on a map. They've got their sights set on bigger places. They are out to rule the world. There are people graduating now who are ready to move into the Norwegian White House. The European Community is full of Cornell alumni. A graduate of Cornell is the head honcho in Taiwan. Yeah, we're talking Taiwan. The place where they make all those plain brown boxes stamped Made in Taiwan.

But, if you live in Ithaca year round, you start to understand the scope of Ezra Cornell's vision. He saw Ithaca as a self-perpetuating, self-sustaining colony out in the middle of the boonies. He knew that naked self-interest and greed would kick in and motivate the locals to keep the latrines clean, to mow the grass, to make the students comfortable once they got here. Ezra C foresaw correctly that there would always be entrepreneurs who would find ways to grow the colony by bits and pieces. Buying up land for apartment complexes, charging exorbitant rents, opening restaurants, building hotels and parking lots. He saw that, out in the middle of nowhere, 4 hours now by car, at that time weeks by foot, you didn't need to build industry like in factories, workshops etc. - you needed to create a whole new kind of industry. A place for intellectual tourists. A temporary zone feeding constantly on its own sense of transience. A place where no one would want to stay unless they were somehow plugged in to his big cash register on the hill. Ezra had the master plan for everything that would follow in his wake. If scholars culled his papers, they'd probably find rough sketches for a prototype of the ATM machine. Ez was a true visionary.

So, if you happened to notice all the proud families of Cornell graduates milling around the boutiques and restaurants downtown this weekend, behaving like the ultimate tourists with their cameras, cell phones, loaded SUV's, not having left home with their American Express, looking down with disdain at us homeboys and girls, and all the merchants with all their little identical signs in the shop windows, all the extra wait staff and dishwashers at Simeon's and the Mahogany Grill, the big banners outside the wineries, if you've been brutalized by that withering tourist stare looking right through you, that sense of not having an reason for existing on this planet outside to swell the ranks of coolie class, well, take your hat off to Ezra Cornell. He made it all possible.
Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 7:43 AM