Another Perspective
Got Balls?
Not happy with the OC's elections endorsement? Here is, er, another perspective on the matter.
By Bryan RobertsPerhaps more perfidious than the omnipresent construction signs I wrote about last time are those relentless admonitions to vote in the upcoming ASUO elections. The houses surrounding campus are virtually wallpapered with vacuous slogans: "Vote C.J. and Peter!"; "Vote Jay and Holly!"; "Vote Who Gives and A Shit?"
Anyone who has been at this school for a year or more has already come to the realization that student government cannot possibly do anything sufficiently valuable for the student to justify spending time deciding for whom one should vote. It becomes a thorn in one's side to have those meaningless messages reinforcing themselves in a mind in which valuable information is already crowding for room.
The only candidate who might conceivably address this problem would be a joke candidate, one whose very campaign is a statement about the futility of politics. Alas, this is also futile because the vast majority of voters is the minority of the student body that isn't fed up with the charade, the herd of dunderheads that will approach the polls and vote en masse for the name that has gotten the most exposure.
The candidate with the most poster money and the best regurgitation of last year's winning claptrap will inherit the office, while the numerous joke candidates will receive fragmentary portions of the total vote, according to the cuteness of their jokes and how many of their friends they convinced to vote for them.
The majority of students, while they might be amused or even intrigued by a few of the runners, will stay away from the polls knowing that no candidate with any merit has a chance. I have a solution to the problem; there is someone to vote for. Everyone who understands that there is usually every reason to avoid the polls should vote for Dan Atkinson of the Sinister Students United for Left-Handed Rights. I know he is the one for the job because he is the one with balls. Perhaps we need a little history here.
In December 1998, I didn't know Dan or anyone else at the Commentator. I guess I recognized that the magazine had some intriguing ideas and a few hearty laughs. I felt the same way about the Insurgent. Really, I did.
But at Christmastime that year a life-changing event befell me: my mother bought me a copy of Our Times: An Illustrated History of the 20th Century. I devoured that book and came to know a lot of facts about the villainy that has shaped our world which, at the time, horrified me with their newness.
I never knew before that Che Guevera's death was orchestrated by an arm of our government as he was attempting to liberate the oppressed people of Bolivia, and that his is the visage celebrated on all those Rage Against the Machine tapestries. I never knew that that same arm of our government replaced a democratically elected government in Chile with a quasi-fascist dictator and continued to support him as he killed thousands of his countrymen and some of ours. Or that Nazi war criminals went to work for, and were shielded from prosecution by, that selfsame arm of our government after the World War II.
Certainly, these assertions and the many factors that compose them are all arguable, but at the time they struck me like stark realities and corroded my very strong belief in America and democracy. I guess I went sort of insane.
I was also a little pissed about the media's insufficiently critical coverage of the bombing in Iraq, so I approached the Insurgent to congratulate them for being dissident. I was trying to keep my head on straight by being humorous. I told them I wanted to write satires about UN inspectors getting bent out of shape about not being able to look in Saddam Hussein's underwear drawer. What I ended up writing was an overblown piece of shit about an American who disavows his country; what I ended up finally getting printed was a pretty decent book review which alluded to a notion not very commonly found within their pages: peace is a great idea that has more to do with the human heart than with physical or political reality.
Dan Atkinson ended up dicing that article to absurd bits in the Commentator 's second annual Hack Attack issue. I wrote him back and became someone of interest to the hacks who put this paper together. Some highlights:
"Dear Dan Atkinson and other Commentators:
"You know, if you fellows drink as much as you say you do, we've probably already had a beer together at some point without realizing it, or if we did realize it, forgotten it by morning. Warm affirmations of fellowship aside, allow me to respond to your roasting of the Insurgent in a manner slightly more satiric than the cock-sucking you receive from the Emerald. If you had done your homework, Dan, you might have learned, at the very least, that "Earth's Holocaust" is a short story, not a novel. You might also have picked up somewhere that "the old adage that 'history repeats itself'" is merely the bastard progeny of the old adage that "those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it."
"Since we humans as a race do a pretty poor job, in general, of learning anything from history even when we are spewing up facts and dates and convincing ourselves that it adds up to whatever we are inclined to believe, perhaps the shorter catch-phrase you prefer is heretofore adequate...
"Conservatives fall into two camps: those whose perspective is hopelessly egocentric regarding time and place and who really do believe that Americans, or at least conservative Americans, are the most righteous people ever; and quasi-nihilists like yourselves who figure that since human nature is so fucked up, why not milk it, get rich, and laugh as we count our gold? Hey, I can identify. I felt that way myself-back when I was an anxious fifteen-year-old reading the words of William F. Buckley, Jr., in National Review and living on candy bars. At the time, I was as likely to open fire on my classmates as I was to admit that my perspective might be lacking in heart. Of course, you Commentators betray yourselves: you're not very conservative. Aside from that Mission Statement, which is a hallmark of boorishness, I would take you for a strictly comedic act. In one sense or another, reliably laughable...
"Is there relevance in the claim... that you - the Oregon Commentator - are funded by an off-campus conservative "think" tank, which is in turn funded by corporations, whose objective is to wrest power from students at academic institutions in order to turn back the tides, so to speak, of ground-level empowerment, which conservative "thinkers" believe to be synonymous with Marxism? I'm not quoting this as gospel, mind you; I'm simply challenging you to respond.
"The truth of such a claim would more than explain your eagerness to dispense with student incidental fees, the absence of which would leave you shopping for advertisers just to keep the presses rolling.
"And let's hear nothing of conspiracy theories, please: conspiracy theories go down nicely with three shots of tequila between The X-Files and the Outer Limits. In other words, they are sacred, and you are not worthy."
Of course, they didn't print the letter. And of course, I did learn that all the speculation about the OC's financial supporters amounts to a meaningless conspiracy theory. But I did manage to finally have some beers with some of the paper's denizens, which led to a lively discussion about Bible Jim (if you don't remember him from last year, just you wait...), which led me to submit a short spoof of his conversion methods. This is when balls became an issue.
Those layout guys, including Dan, with whom I hadn't gotten acquainted, used my name against my wishes and printed the piece as if I had not intended it to be tongue-in cheek, as if I were some kind of longstanding, off-my-nut enemy of the magazine.
I should have seen through the extra layer of irony to realize that no reader would take their spin at face value, but I was all shook up about finals to begin with.
When I cried foul, Dan wrote me in an e-mail that I should get in touch when I grew some balls. When I grew some balls?! Who didn't have balls enough to print my first letter?
Not much later I was offered the privilege of being the guy who writes the column in the back of the magazine, as "a counterpoint to the magazine's content and editorial position." Well, okay, I'll go out on a limb to save face. And aside from a sabotaged photo in the Back to the Booze issue, Dan has done great things as Managing Editor for my column.
There you have it: Dan Atkinson single-handedly rescued my sanity by forcing me to have a sense of humor. That's balls. That's what this campus can use. It's all a pretty cute joke, don't you think?