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- No Joke
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- Those who trashed the White House were vicious vandals, not merry pranksters.
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- BY TUNKU VARADARAJAN
- Monday, January 29, 2001 12:01 a.m. EST
- The Wall Street Journal
-
- What is a "prank"? And when does a prank take on a darker hue and
- merit, instead, a less indulgent label--such as "delinquency," or
- "vandalism"?
-
- These questions, whose answers are rooted in common sense, culture and
- civilization, were raised last week by revelations first detailed on the
- Internet by Matt Drudge, for whose insolent, frontiersman's approach to
- newsgathering we continue to be grateful. He's not always right, and
- he's not always elegant, but he bawls his tales from the rafters when
- others, more timorous and more conventional, would only mince their
- words, or whisper.
-
- Although the mainstream press echoed the story only reluctantly, and
- sought to draw its sting by downgrading it to the status of rumor, the
- contents of the Drudge report seemed to be unquestionably consonant with
- the tone, the oh-so-jarring tone, struck, in their departure from the
- White House, by the Clinton cohorts--from the strutting
- self-congratulation of the ex-president at Andrews Air Force Base (like
- a weed, he'd taken root, and like a weed he called to be ripped from the
- soil beneath him), to the stripping bare of the former Air Force One by
- the ex-presidential locusts.
-
- According to reports, outgoing Clinton-Gore staffers at the White House
- performed a range of "pranks," including the prizing out from many White
- House computer keyboards of the W (Dubya) key, the gluing shut of
- drawers on office desks, the infecting of computers with viruses, the
- recording of offensive reception messages on the answering machines, the
- slashing (yes, slashing) of telephone lines, the loading of pornographic
- images on printers and computers, offensive graffiti on corridors and
- bathroom walls, the turning upside down of desks, and, as a valedictory
- signature, the leaving of a trail of trash across the West Wing.
-
- Mr. Drudge, the only one to quantify the damage publicly, has put the
- monetary estimate--in terms of its cost to the taxpayer--at $200,000.
- There is some speculation that this is a conservative estimate. Peggy
- Noonan writes: "You just know when you read about it that it's worse
- than anyone is saying--the Bush people being discreet because they don't
- want to start out with complaints and finger pointing, the Clinton-Gore
- people because it is in their obvious interests to play it down."
-
- These actions have been characterized as "pranks" in the press, although
- the Washington Post did, in a giveaway line, suggest that there was more
- to the story than high jinks. Quoting Clinton(ian) sources, the paper
- said:
- "The Democratic officials said the actions were meant to be funny, or in
- some cases were an outlet for frustration by soon-to-be-unemployed
- staffers."
-
-
-
- Were these actions "pranks"? Let's parse the situation, and start by
- returning to my original question: What is a prank? I think most people
- would agree that a prank is an impish action, intended by the prankster
- to make the "prankee" feel momentarily sheepish, but not shell-shocked
- or outraged. Classic pranks are intended to provoke a prankish payback,
- not heated antagonism, or contempt. In other words, the prankster's
- motivation lies in a sense of irreverent one-upmanship--in mischief, not
- malice. The mental state, or mens rea, of the perpetrator is as central
- to the definition of prank as it is to murder or assault.
-
- To give you an example: In my days at Oxford, I was witness to a healthy
- rivalry between my college, Trinity, and our insufferable neighbors,
- Balliol.
- Pranks were the currency in which this rivalry was traded. On one
- occasion, some chaps from Balliol uprooted the rugby posts from the
- Trinity grounds (some four miles away), brought them in a hired lorry to
- college, and set them up on the lawns in front of the Trinity chapel.
- They chuckled, and, yes, we chuckled too. In reprisal, a handful of
- hearties from Trinity stole into Balliol in the pitch of night and
- unleashed a sheep in the college library there, the stench of whose
- droppings caused the Balliol librarian nearly to faint the next
- morning. Again, we chuckled, and they chuckled back. These were
- pranks, part of a sequential, good-natured rivalry. There was no malice
- aforethought, only a juvenile sense of caper.
-
- The other distinction between a prank and an act that exceeds a prank's
- bounds is the causing of harm, or damage. In boarding school in India,
- as a boy, I once threw a rock at a hive of wild bees that had grown,
- high up, on the clock tower of the school's main building. My aim was
- unerring, and the hive broke, discharging scores of furious bees in the
- direction of my admiring friends. While I was able to scamper to
- safety, two boys were stung so badly that they were hospitalized. My
- act was not a prank, since it had caused damage. I was publicly caned,
- and rightly, by the principal.
-
-
-
- In the context of the White House, any harm or damage must be construed
- to include the infliction of a burden on the taxpayer--not to mention
- the interference, however temporary, with the business of government.
- So the hanging up, here and there, of signs that said "Dept.
- of Strategery"--a play on the president's bumbling way with words--was a
- prank worthy of my confreres at Trinity or Balliol, or even of the frat
- house at which our "frat boy" president earned his spurs.
-
- But the slashing of phone lines? The gluing shut of desk drawers? The
- gouging out from keyboards of the W key? The infection of computers
- with viruses? The redirection of official phone lines, on which the
- public and government rely? These, I fear, violate the prankster's
- rulebook. They caused damage; lines, desks, computers and keyboards
- needed repair and replacement. My money, and yours, was used for this
- repair.
-
- Most shabby of all, however, was the perpetrators' intent. A true
- prank--a prank properly defined--is carried out in a jocular spirit.
- Pranks are escapades, monkeyshines. They're not acts of venom or spite,
- of resentment or ill-will. If the actor is malefic, he is not a
- prankster but a vandal. He is, in truth, a delinquent.
-
- That's what I learned in grade school, and I commend that interpretation
- to you.
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- Mr. Varadarajan is deputy editorial features editor of The Wall Street Journal. His column appears Mondays.
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