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In This Issue

• Morningside Heights = Wormhole
• First Year Friendships are for Fakies
• Stupid Shit Last Year's Frosh Did
• Letters to and from the Feditrix
• Meet Columbia's Least Employable Grads
• Drunken Email: Sloshed Slacker Salvation
• A Well-Engineered SEAS Survival Guide
• Engineers Get Jobs, But never Blowjobs
• Thirty Things to Do Before you Graduate
• Tips for Keeping Your Room Tidy and Your Roommate Pissed Off
• Pass that Class with Your Hot Ass
• Attack of the Killer Barnard Blowjob
• Apathy is for Jerks, Imperialism is for Turks
• Student Spends Summer Choking Chickens
• Columbia is Folsom Prison All Over Again
• Get Laid Quick, or your Genitals will Melt
• CUicide: A Proud Tradition

Let me guess— raised on stories of the ’68 riots at Columbia? You came here expecting to join the Movement? Well, give up now, dipshit, because a lot has changed in 30 years. Everyone at Columbia is bored to death of politics. We’ve got the Young Spartacists flyering up every building on campus with ridiculous demands like "Free Mumia! Black Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!" --assuming that using these phrases in a single headline creates a clear, logical link between them. We’ve got the ISO hitting us up for money every time we lay foot on College Walk. Lately we’ve had more than our share of Palestinians screaming at Israelis, and vice versa. Well, you know what? Both sides kill babies. And meaningful discussion of a tricky little bit of a problem is not the same as shrill rants in favor of your cause.

I mean, for fuck’s sake, when America was shit-storming Iraq last year, the Spartacists’ response was to not only denounce the invasion, but try to rally folks to go defend Iraq from U.S. imperialism. This only fueled the campus right-wing (A.K.A. the football team plus girlfriends). Suddenly the statement “Go back to Iraq, hippies!”vwas a meaningful rebuttal to people who had serious concerns about shock-and-awing a couple of million Iraqis into crispy critters.

Aside from trying to figure out how to fund pizza and beer while you’re waiting for the revolution to occur, there are many other problems in Morningside Heights.

Morningside Heights regularly hosts meeting of its Resident’s Association to gripe about how Columbia, the third-largest landlord in New York, treats its tenants. Columbia is opening up a school on 110th for faculty brats plus a quota of neighborhood kids admitted so they can beat a discrimination rap. The University was originally mandated to build a public school in that location, but opted instead to construct a private school in order to avoid having to deal with the annoying building code requirements that would have been involved. Additionally, Columbia is in the process of buying, well, vast tracts of land from Harlem’s ample bosom to expand in true imperial fashion. Has the New York housing shortage really been solved overnight? What about tearing up a bit of St. John’s to at a 30-story Columbia building? Doesn’t this strike you as an issue with more pertinent bearing on your situation? There are problems in your immediate vicinity that student activists could actually have a chance at making a difference fighting for. But that just wouldn’t be their style, now, would it?

Here’s a tip: learn to fucking smile once in a while. They said it best in Paris in 1968—"Revolution in the service of poetry, not poetry in the service of revolution." For Cthulhu’s sake, fornicate on the roof of Butler, spray-paint the hallways of the IAB (go in the 6th floor, turn right, and go down the stairwell with the concrete walls for an excellent spot). Anything, just to reclaim the spirit of activism as life-giving and not just sucking all the fun out of shit.

Reclaim the creative spirit that must lie as both the motivation and goal of any revolution. Don’t just go out there an ape your ancestral activists. Have a good time, because otherwise, there is no point to any of it. "Boredom is counter-revolutionary"—so why does everything seem to be so ho-hum and standardized in our political scene?

Adapt or die. You’ll notice that Columbia left-wing politics is almost entirely ignored by mainstream campus life, in spite of the times when groups like SDS, the Black Panthers, CORE, and other famous bands of the 60s and 70s roamed our campus like the majestic buffalo, Why is this? I have no answers—only suggestions. But if you cared enough to read them, you should also care enough to go out there and find your own answers. Talk to people. Try to understand what are the real problems facing people’s lives, and then create new solutions rather than defaulting to buzzwords like ‘Class War’. Never fall into the trap of thinking of yourself as some sort of revolutionary vanguard leading an ignorant proletariat—that’s just insulting. Mao said ‘the vanguard is the fish swimming in the stream that is the masses’ but Mao was full of shit and fucked 12-year-old girls regardless.

So no matter where you fall on the political Kinsey scale, there’s definitely room for improvement around here. Go forth and bring me back the head of the Wicked Witch of the West.