by Dan C
GUEST WRITER

If any recent high school sophomore, wide-eyed and untried, had taken the time during his or her doubtlessly eventful visit to the school to sample the political spectrum here on campus, the result would have been a broad sample of liberal and conservative views, from dedicated (and surprisingly cut) activists for social justice to entrenched plutocratic scions and their smug, quasi-literate ideological fellators. Such diversity springs from the spirited efforts of our campus Republicans, who have vigorously asserted their rights to a day in court, so to speak, while meeting little or no apparent resistance from our famously liberal student body. This threatens everything.

In his “Essay on Criticism,” Alexander Pope wrote:

No Place so Sacred from such Fops is barr’d,
Nor is Paul’s Church more safe than Paul’s Church-yard:
Nay, fly to Altars; there they’ll talk you dead;
For fools rush in where angels fear to tread.

Despite the fact that I have added emphasis to this quotation, I have no idea what it means in its original context, and even the tweediest professor of the belles-lettres can only guess as to what was Pope’s intent in writing this pages-long rambling literary abortion. The important part is that last line, a sly reference to the 1997 Matthew Perry/Amanda Peet vehicle “Fools Rush In,” in which fast-talking businessman Alex Whitman (Perry) impregnates the sultry Latina Isabel Fuentes (Peet) after an ill-advised one-night stand. This leads to an unlikely marriage and numerous zany hijinks as the coldly WASPish Alex attempts to adapt himself to the intimate camaraderie and devout Catholicism of an American Hispanic family. In that work, screenwriters Joan Taylor and Katherine Reback beautifully characterize the divide between love and culture. In particular, Isabel’s abuela, or grandmother, has the memorable line “It is not your faith that has betrayed you. It is your fear.” So it is with we liberals: Our fear has overcome our faith.

We true-blue liberals have been remiss in our duties to the campus this semester, smugly resting on our laurels after having exploded a trivial and under-attended Sigma Chi event all over the drainage ditch of cable news. Now our enemies have sensed our luxuriant ease, and have lunged like the heartless, brutal, and highly cooperative wolves that they are (an aside: don’t ever deceive yourself on that point—they are your enemies, and they will sandbag your efforts towards anything from guaranteeing a decent industrial hemp crop for the East Appalachians to teaching underprivileged Kazakh kids Derrida and frolf). And we have become afraid of their preening and committees, the ease with which they breed Facebook groups and radio shows, their effortless finesse in accepting the most ludicrous of principles as “sound moral reasoning,” while we huddle around our fires and our squat black iron kettles of hop-skip and Franzia boxed wine, holding one another, ostensibly comforting each other while really only wondering whether or not all that Listerine we threw back tonight will be for naught.

Enough! Pound asked “Who has brought this to pass?/ Who has brought the flaming imperial anger?” I say that we have brought this upon ourselves, and, furthermore, only we can ever overcome this dreaded insufferable conservative blight, which starves us and beleaguers us, giving endless chase and offering no quarter. Leave off from your Super Smash Bros. tournaments and your keg stands, your “Arrested Development” and your frantic depledging—there is work to be done presently, and no one save us to do it.

Consider this the first sounding of the tocsin which stirs the gendarmerie from their hearths: Arise, you children of Whitman. What does this horde of slaves, traitors, and plotting kings want? For whom these long-prepared irons?