Fight Songs

Back in the day, I went to a little Division 3 school on the south side of Chicago that didn’t give out athletic scholarships. We also didn’t have a marching band, aside from a few drunken students in the stands invited down to the field at half time to haphazardly wander the field humming  into kazoos.  But fight songs? Of those we had more than a few, summarized by uchicago.edu and displayed in full for your edification below.

 

Chicago Fight Songs

Heroditus, Thucydides,
Peloponnesian War,
X squared, Y squared,
H2SO4.
Who for? What for?
Who we gonna yell for?
GOOOOO, MAROONS!

SCHOLARLY YELLS
Logarithm, biorhythm,
Entropy, kinetics,
MPC, GNP, bioenergetics!
Maximize and integrate,
Titrate and Equilibrate--
GOOOOO, MAROONS!

Maximize our GNP,
Titrate their solution;
Calculate their MPC,
Crush their revolution!
GOOOOO, MAROONS!

And my personal favorite...
Repel them!
Repel them!
Make them relinquish the ball! (3x)

 

I thought of this recently while reading a piece in the New Yorker called “The Athenian Plague, a Cautionary Tale of Democracy’s Fragility.” (You can read it, here.) The original author of the historical account was the aforementioned Thucydides. And the point is that Coronavirus isn’t humanity’s first pandemic, nor will it be our last. Also, the civil unrest we see now has been with us in Democratic societies from long before Black Lives Matter and will continue at least as long as we do.

Of course, I don’t expect you to go re-read Thucydides, or even to click the link for the New Yorker article. Though if you’re curious, go right ahead. My only point is that this too shall pass. And, of course, will come again – if history is any indication.

As for sports – Division 3 or otherwise – I look forward to the day in the not too distant future when we can cheer for – and sing the Fight Songs for – our favorite teams, live and in person.  Fight on!