Hunter Maats

Mather House War

(Click images to see full-sized versions.)

In the beginning of 2004, bored out of our minds, the seniors of Mather, my college dorm, teamed up to start a war between the dorms. In the spirit of the times we stole a gong from one of the dorms, Adams, then blamed it on another, Kirkland, insisting an occupation would be necessary until the gong was recovered. Some people called the war timely social satire and some people called it a shining monument to my own vanity. A full understanding of the war will only come with distance and time. What I can say is I ended up in the school paper a lot...which is awesome.

Every war has a few iconic images. This was one of those. Me running naked around Harvard Yard with a misappropriated Harvard flag body painted in the middle of January.

This is what we left in place of the stolen gong. Sometime after the Russian Revolution the bells of the Danilov monastery were sold to Harvard. Now the monks want them back. The Russian is a letter to the monks of the Danilov monastery saying sorry about your bells here's a gong instead. As our "subtle way" of framing Kirkland we put the return address of Matt Mahan UC president and Kirkland resident.

This is a note sent by the gong to Adams, the dorm where he lived, sent purely to annoy them because they were whining all the time. A letter from a gong...how meta is that?

At this point everyone on campus basically knew we'd done it because no one else would have the patience to do something this unnecessarily elaborate. That's when the Senior tutor of Adams pulled one dick move too many and we decided to return it. This is us in our final moments with the gong right before we planted it on Kirkland's doorstep...

Actually atop their flagpole.

This is a bunch of people in Adams House celebrating the return of their gong by tearing up pictures of us. They had no actual evidence or for that matter confession of our guilt so the public voodoo-ery was totally unmerited. Now they do so...yeah.