My Fuck Buddy Was in Skull & Bones

“In the early 1990s, the Russel Trust, the group that controls the money, changed the locks to the tomb and kept that year's class out because they rebelled and allowed women,” she said after we both drank ourselves stupid and set out from Toad's to my room in Ezra Stiles College. In the few months that we shagged, she never brought it up again, and I doubt she even remembered that one brief utterance. But how could I forget? It was the elephant in the room, the one thing that she kept off-limit.

Yes, Skull & Bones is real. The secret society counts multiple presidents in its roster, despite only selecting 15 members a year. It is the oldest, most prestigious secret society at Yale, and thus one of the most powerful in the world. The CIA was founded by Bonesmen, as somewhat accurately depicted in the movie, “The Shepherd.”

Many sources on the internet describe Skull & Bones as a Satanic organization, but this accusation is ridiculous. Skull & Bones is as Satanic as Christmas is a pagan winter festival; the members are too smart to believe in spirits or divinations. The only belief of most Bonesmen I know is the belief in self-betterment and the acquisition of power or prestige. But of course, some members are evil. I think the average person would argue that the Bush family, the most famous family in the gang, is not the nicest in America.

However, could I say that my buddy is evil? At the risk of being accused of serving as an apologist, allow me to quote Senator Palpatine: “Evil is just a point of view.”I never got the impression that my buddy was evil. She is not the kind of woman who could kill, order a killing, and in the many years I've known her, I have never felt an evil presence. I have a sixth-sense for these things.

Nonetheless, talking with her has allowed me to find myself, to come to my own conclusion on evil. We had few political disagreements back in college, since neither of us liked Bush. I always told her of the sulfur emanating from Bush, even through the TV; she just saw him as a joker who made too many mistakes. However, the Obama administration, and her blind support for all of his policies, has been the true test of our acquaintanceship.

My buddy believes in the legality of giving Obama the power to act as judge, jury, and drone executioner even when it concerns American citizens and their underage children (Anwar Al-Aulaqi.) Evil is merely a legal concern in The New Amerika – the thousand year superpower. She has other opinions on which we disagree, but the drones has led nearly to the end of what little we had. This article will surely be the last I hear from her, no doubt.

What we had in college burned to ashes; I saw her off to her investment banking job, and I went to Europe to waste my night drinking, smoking, and playing pool under deafening heavy metal at La Perra Gorda. I did a lot of thinking all summer over that dirty pool table. I pondered the true meaning of evil. I eventually came to conclude that evil was inaction, evil was passive cooperation, evil was participation. I was evil too.

I returned to Yale the fall of my junior year a different man. Secrecy clouded my thoughts on a near daily basis. I am not privy to all the secrets, but the Skull & Bones of today is not the same as it was during Prescott “The Nazi War Profiteer” Bush and his East Coast blue blood establishment. I met four Dominican women of color who rocked the 322, the number that represents Skull & Bones. Some were on track merely to become doctors and mothers.

These women are as innocent of involvement in Bush's crimes as any random student at Yale. Nonetheless, there is a reason why Poland makes it illegal for members of secret societies to serve as members of government: Catholic countries tend to be very afraid of anyone they perceive to be a Mason, and with good reason. There is no place in a true democracy for secret oaths, secret alliances, and possibly secret allegiances. This should apply even if some of those people are kind-hearted, innocent mothers. The 2004 presidential election is a perfect example of how secrecy can endanger democracy. 

Bush and Kerry were both members of Skull & Bones. Whoever won that election, Skull & Bones was fated to win. A group with less than 900 members should not be providing both of the presidential candidates for a nation of 300+ million diverse individuals. And so, this year, 2013, we shall once again get a Bonesman in the White House. During John Kerry's confirmation for Secretary of State, expect no one to ask him if he has ever masturbated in a coffin, or taken secret oaths. Yes, that much, and the orgies, are real. I got confirmation during a game of truth-or-dare.

Overall, I was too discreet, too afraid of what her reaction might be, to ever directly question her. Not on the details of what goes on in the tomb, but rather on how she felt about being part of a group suspected of hijacking the American democratic process. Instead, I simply remained stoic whenever she told her friends, “I am in one of the big ones.” It was those words that helped me understand just how much we all like playing for a winning team.

Take for example Derek Jeter, the Yankees baseball superstar. In the same way that Jeter rationalizes in his mind the hate that a Red Sox fan has for him and his success, so do the drone pilots in Nevada, the bureaucrats who rubber-stamp the legislation, and all the other tiny links in the chains of tyranny around Lady Liberty. They believe themselves to be hated because they play for a winning team.

And it is the “My Team VS. Your Team” mentality that has placed us in the precarious situation we find ourselves in today. The United States has essentially started a new global arms race – a drone war – with China, Russia, and Iran not far behind. Instead of setting a precedent that would have made it difficult for despots to target dissenters in foreign lands, far from any battlefield, and an international crime in the eyes of the law, it has made legal and acceptable. Only Muslim names currently make their way from CIA headquarters to the president's desk before he decides who gets taken out. Will we trust Obama's successor with that power?

In America, the people are silent. The Department of Homeland Security has purchased 2 billion rounds of hollow point bullets; bullets that have to be used domestically, since they are banned by international law. Hollow point bullets are designed exclusively to kill. And surely, one must wonder why the Dept. of Fatherland Security would go from nothingness a decade ago, to needing such a staggering number of bullets today. Congress just weeks ago, in codifying the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2013, gave Obama the power to indefinitely detain US citizens.

Only Abraham Lincoln had a level of power comparable to the power that a treasonous congress and a complacent American public have willingly handed to the executive branch, and Lincoln rode us through a civil war. Only history can now truly say whether The American Republic has fallen to tyranny, or will be restored to its tradition of the right to trial by jury. Will military tribunals behind a glass and sound delay in Guantanamo become the norm, or will we return to the principles of democracy which our drones supposedly help us export.

At this point, a civil war is either inevitable or necessary; I can't predict which as of yet. All because a bunch of men got behind close doors and shook hands. My buddy once casually told me: “Handshakes build more bridges than steel.” I didn't fully understand what she meant by it until just a few days ago.

I'd sent her an e-mail wishing her a happy new year, and eventually we ended up on the phone. We spoke about good things, eventually politics, and it was with one sentence that she inspired me to write this article: “Why are you worried? You're not some [emphasis mine] Muslim in Yemen or Pakistan!”

And that may be true, but China now has a working stealth prototype, and Iran recovered an SQ-170 Sentinel drone almost unscratched. Who will challenge China when it starts using drones on Uyghur rebels in Kazakhstan? Who will challenge Russia when it starts targeting rebels in Georgia?

We have probably already entered a phase that historians may describe as the Second Cold War, or if it escalates further... World War III. This time around, however, there won't be trenches. There won't be masses of foot soldiers behind a blitzkrieg. This new war will be fought on classified grounds, behind classified rules, with classified technologies, and by individuals with classified alliances. We have opened a Pandora's box that promises to shape the 21^st century in the same way the atom bomb shaped the 20^th.

Like the Cold War, this war won't have any end in sight. If people ultimately end up demanding the downfall of their regime, we should all remember that not all individuals who belong to a certain group are evil and responsible for what is happening. The criminals are in the CIA, in the executive, and the complacent legislative.