BY FLETCHER WORTMANN

In print | November 30, 2006

It happened that, recently, I found myself thinking of the lamented Daily Jolt Swarthmore message board. It was in a moment of mild boredom last spring that I first accessed it. Due to my class schedule I had a good amount of free time last semester, and much of this was squandered fiddling about on my laptop; it was in doing so one day that I realized I had never actually visited the fabled Jolt. Golly, I cried in my innocence, that is a shame most certainly!! I do enjoy the occasional intertron, and I appreciate the bright, enthusiastic residents of Swarthmore College as well!! Combining the two? That’s like peanut butter and sunshine jelly!! I wondered what it would be like; given the usual proclivities of Swarthmore students I imagined academic debate, or discussion of weighty philosophical issues, or perhaps the publication and subsequent literary analysis of short narratives featuring popular fantasy-novel characters in erotic situations. Certain that I was headed for an online Atlantis of intelligence and wit, I plugged my nose, put on my metaphorical Internet-flippers and plunged headfirst into the void.

And I would wonder later how I could once have imagined such things. For I had stared long and hard into the hideous unspeakable maw of our Swarthmore College. “And when you gaze into the Abyss,” said some dead German fellow, “the Abyss gazes also into you.”

Imagine, if you will, the leering disembodied head of the average Swarthmore student, blemished and cadaverous. It snarls at you, and perhaps flares its nostrils and without benefit of arms makes several jabbing motions with its horny tongue in an attempt to adjust its tape-mended glasses. Now imagine the head vomiting, and imagine that its heavings produce not vomit but a second head, scaled to its head-mother, perfect in every obscene detail. Now imagine this process unceasing, replicating endlessly, like some ungodly Russian doll, a swirling acidic vortex of human head. Imagine, somehow, that this spectacle was converted into an online forum. This was the Daily Jolt. It was not communication, at least on any appreciable level. It was an abomination against all that is sane and good in this place.

The site, to be fair, offered some useful if limited supplementary information. Numbers for local restaurants were posted. The Jolt provided helpful, dictionary-style definitions of hilarious Swarthmore slang expressions such as “Walk of Shame,” “Dash for Cash” the “Director of Residential Life Myrt Westphal.” Though Swarthmore has a strong Career Services department, the Jolt could prove useful to students interested in the fields of textiles, dodgy clinical research and/or egg donation. The Jolt also provided links to reviews of recent hit films, although this feature could have benefited from greater quality control; titles listed as currently in theaters included “K-Pax” and “Corky Romano,” and among the user-submitted film favorites were “Casino Everestpokercom Gambling Holdem Online Poker Texas” and of course “Great New Site About Mature Mom.”

And then there were the forums themselves. To be fair, these were not without their uses. If one was involved in recent unpopular administrative decisions, or were simply physically unappealing, then the Jolt could provide ample material for a suicide note. Especially attractive first-year students might use the Jolt to find out exactly what deviant sex acts others imagine them performing. Overall, however, perusing the Jolt forums was the mental equivalent of chugging a handle of vodka and eating $40 worth of Taco Bell; though it had its pleasures, it probably wasn’t worth the medically proven health risks.

What interested me most about the Daily Jolt is the venom that the posters directed at those who could not meet their insane standards for physical beauty. This fascinates me because I believe that I can state with absolute certainty that, if you (a) attend Swarthmore College and (b) spend any length of time posting on Internet message boards, then you are probably quite ugly. Probably very, very ugly; intensely, transcendently, brain-damage-inducingly ugly. Indeed, any Swattie who complains about the attractiveness of the average Swarthmore student would be well advised to stop criticizing others and instead to look into a very literal mirror. Ask yourself now; are you unshaven? Is your hair greasy and unkempt? Are you so genetically unfortunate that your appearance borders on physical disfigurement? Are you, like the author of this column, all of these things? Then silence! For none of us has any right to complain about the repulsiveness of Swarthmore while we, ourselves, remain repulsive. Each of us possesses the power of sacrifice, and each of us may go without textbooks and meal plans and non-cardboard housing in order to afford reconstructive surgery. Ask not what hot Swarthmore can do for you; ask what you can do for hot Swarthmore.

But I digress. The halcyon days of the Jolt are gone; such discourses now lie in the institution’s mythic past. And some things that should not have been forgotten are lost. So God bless you, anonymous Jolt poster, with your skillful and incisive profanity. God bless you for making time between seeking out sexy elf-related fan fiction and loving yourself physically to enlighten us with your wisdom and your needless aggression. You were more than the shining intellectual beacon of our college community; you are our nameless illiterate paragon. You are your generation’s Steinbeck, its Austen, its Homer. More so than any of us, you truly encapsulated the spirit of our age.

Fletch is a sophomore. You can reach him at fwortma1@swarthmore.edu.

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