OK, but Darby STILL sucks

I've long thought that a civilization’s doom is sealed when it loses its sense of humor. If that’s the case, we're in big trouble. The latest evidence comes from Hilliard, Ohio, where high school student Kyle Garchar was suspended this week for tricking football fans from a rival school into holding up 800 stadium flip-cards in a pattern that read “We Suck.”

Garchar, a senior at Hillard Davidson High School, took about 20 hours creating a grid of black cards and white cards that were left on stadium seats for fans of Hilliard Darby High School to raise after halftime of last Friday’s game between the two schools. The fans thought they were spelling out “Go Darby.” They weren’t. The result turned up on YouTube, as does seemingly everything else of questionable significance these days. It was a typical juvenile prank, although more ingenious than most and fairly harmless. And it was far from original: Remember the 1961 Rose Bowl, when Washington fans were tricked into spelling out "CalTech" in flip-cards on national TV? But Garchar’s principal wasn't amused. Saying it violated his expectation of sportsmanship from his students, he gave Garchar three days of in-school suspension and banned him from extracurricular activities for a semester. Swell. That’ll give Garchar plenty of free time to think up new tricks.

The irony is that if Karchar had devoted those 20-plus hours trying to do something more subversive like, say, unlock the iPhone for use on other networks, as New Jersey teen George Hotz did early this week, he too might have parlayed his efforts into a “sweet Nissan 350z” and a cool job with a cell-phone firm. Instead, he gave an administrator yet another excuse to squelch student ingenuity, individuality and enterprise, not to mention the God-given right to do silly, juvenile things (remember “Bong Hits 4 Jesus”?).

Maybe the principal thought that holding up the cards hurt Darby fans’ self-esteem or something, but I suspect that many of the “victimized” rivals found the whole thing hilarious. Indeed, two Darby students helped Garchar set up the stunt. They got the same punishments after the two schools’ principals coordinated their zero-tolerance game faces. And after all, Darby won the game 21-10, beating last year's Division I state champs, so they couldn’t have, well, sucked that badly.

“We just thought it was all in good fun,” said Jen Trimmer, one of Karchar’s indicted co-conspirators. Sorry, Jen. Evidently there’s no such thing anymore.