Lord Julius' Goat

From SWILwiki

A little-known fact among current students is that Lord Julius' Goat is actually a reference to a character in Cerebus (http://www.cerebusarchives.com/story-2-40.htm), a comic book which began publication in 1977 and soon announced that it was going to be a 300-issue single storyline (which it finished in 2004, making it by far the longest-running English-language comic book series by a single writer/artist). Around issue 40, when Cerebus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerebus_the_Aardvark) was still fast-paced, funny, and full of parody, the title character runs for political office, his opponent being the puppet candidate supported by the Groucho-Marx-like Lord Julius: Julius' own goat. (He's not a real puppet, but he is a real worm. Er, goat.)

Voat Goat

The Goat is more widely known as a perniciously recurring candidate in year after year of SWIL elections. It was first nominated sometime in the late 80's, and made a number of sad and pathetic (yet mind-bogglingly persistent, given that in that era four or five candidates were usually all that were nominated) bids for the presidency, losing by a wide margin every time. It was notably defeated along with David Randall in 1990 by Jeff Hildebrand, the Secret Master of SWILdom. However, in the fall 1995, with the help of able campaign manager Dan Wells, who led an aggressive propaganda campaign for the goat, it managed to finally win the presidency, defeating the more human candidacy of Joe Robins, Fred Bush, and Stephanie Dyrkacz. The human triumvirate served as regents for the goat for the first half of their presidency, under the titles of Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite, until the goat retired, sometime later in the semester.

Dan Wells writes, on the SWILhistory page (http://www.swil.org/swilhistory2.html):

I noticed that the recent history of Lord Julius' Goat has made the history page, but there are some intermediate steps in that saga. First of all, the goat ran for President EVERY SINGLE YEAR at least from 1990 or so until it finally won in 1995-that's all I know from personal experience, but old-timers in SWIL seemed to think the goat had been trying for a while even back then, so the goat story may be older than that. It was certainly already running by my freshling year (Dec. 1991), and goes back at least one more year, but I think more than that. My own involvement with the goat saga was kind of on and off through those years, mainly limited to proposing the goat as a candidate twice (1992 and 1995) (who nominated the goat in 1993 and 1994?), producing a Swarthmore ID for the goat (who, by the way, is a professor in the Econ department, according to his ID) in 1992 with the help of Jim MacLeod, and coordinating (anonymously, and with much help from Jeremy Dilatush and others) the successful 1995 campaign-which featured Voat Goat posters in multiple languages. The 1995 campaign was actually largely non-SWIL, I had help and encouragement from several sophomores on ML 2nd who had little to do with SWIL, and I really wasn't active in SWIL by then, other than goat stuff. The goat retired to a sheep farm in Weybridge, Vermont (I've actually been to the particular sheep farm in question - run by Swat alums) only weeks after that election, and has not been heard from since. I believe that Josh Smith may have been involved with goat stuff right before I was, and that there was one more before him --(DW) [Dan Wells]

Despite having already won the SWILpresidency once, the goat was still not satisfied, and continued to run for SWILpresident, despite the cruel and horrible things people did to prevent it from running. In 1999, the list of presidential nominees included "The Rotting Corpse of Lord Julius' Goat", followed, the next year, by "The Scattered Ashes of Lord Julius' Goat", which certainly seems to indicate that some vile and horrible deeds occurred between one election and the next. In 2005, despite forming a coalition with the Square Root of Negative Yak, the goat lost yet another SWIL election, despite the fact that the goat had been revived for the previous years' elections (e.g., it was now the Revived Ashes of The Rotting Corpse of Lord Julius' Goat, or something like that).

The fact that the Goat's held on this long is a powerful testimony to the blind stubbornness of SWIL when it comes to holding on to traditions, long after the fall from popularity of their original referents.

At the same time, the Goat has become a bit of localized SWIL slang, acting as the most obvious symbol of a "wasted vote", since voting for the Goat means voting for a candidate who not only does not exist but has no connection to any concepts understood by most of SWIL, and therefore -- unlike, for instance, voting for Subtext -- does not even imply approval of a particularly funny joke.

Before the instatement of "No Confidence" as a serious ballot choice in 2005, "Voating Goat" was therefore a metaphorical way to express apathy, disdain or detachment from the election (whether serious or satirical -- see Greg Robinson's cranky grumblings of "Guess I'll have to Voat Goat again next year" whenever frustrated), and "losing to the Goat" was the metaphor invoked in moments of angst for a Presidency's ostensible incompetence or unpopularity ("I guess this is why you guys lost to the Goat", or "We could just cancel the whole thing at this point, but I don't want to lose to the Goat next year"). (It should be noted that the Goat has only ever actually won the Presidency in the mid-'90s when it was still a somewhat current, and funny, joke, and that in recent years the serious ticket has only lost an election to The Picard/Q Subtext, which is similarly not actually the same as "Losing to the Goat".)