Few feelings compare to the smug joy generated by some handily crafted, self-gratifying piece of wit. It’s the moment when someone gaffes, purposely or not, and you’re armed with a string of snappy attacks.
The topics that lend themselves best to the aforementioned tactics are precisely those that were once considered dangerously taboo, and which I wish still were. Namely I’m talking about politics and religion, the fast acting relief to many a friendship, polite dinner and 200-level discussion section.
Late last week we chose religion, and I’m afraid NU manhandled another nuanced campus news story by diving headlong into a shallow debate. We’re hurting ourselves in the process.
Whether living wage or chalking Muhammad or after-class demonstrations, one would think we derive some twisted, masochistic pleasure from getting worked up.
Since the events of last week, I can now call each instance decidedly Markwellian.
The pattern surpasses the outrage generated because we rarely anchor our anger to the facts. Instead, we launch into our one-line exchanges of insults, citing an article only as a springboard for resuming an undying Reddit thread.
And so Northwestern Memes actually takes over campus.
Between the timestamp on North by Northwestern’s Markwell article Tuesday night and my alarm Wednesday, the online commenters and their pernicious troll counterparts had assumed their posts, and several student bloggers had begun railing against the medieval brute of Cru’s latest conversion campaign, its phenomenally effective poster and chalk strategy.
Just judging by the intensity of the online response by 8 a.m., I thought I could safely assume all the heathens would be on their knees taking communion before lunch.
My roommate read aloud the gripes of one blogger in particular over breakfast whose mastery of fire and brimstone rivaled those very fundamentalist Christians she so vehemently accused. No confirmation from him but I suspect my reaction that morning was to roll my eyes. I must have misheard him in my decaffeinated haze, I thought.
I remember I asked him to repeat one more time what precisely all the fuss was about, because the longer it went on and the more people wrote, the more I was overwhelmed by a sensation of deja vu; Hadn’t we argued about this before?
We have. A thousand times, we have. Let me make it painfully obvious.
When the Living Wage Campaign was circulating petitions and marching on the Rebecca Crown Center, they became either visionaries or communists, their opponents became conservatives or fascists (and either way they were staunch).
When Human Sexuality was cut from the course catalog, to defend it in any regard made someone a freak, and criticizing Professor Bailey made them a Republican.
What should shock us all is not the crude content of our discourse, but the ominous mechanization of it. And as a result, its stagnation.
Now, I know that people have been hearing, spreading and denying “the good news” since it was announced, and wrestling with god(s) since long before that.
What bothers me is that, if NBN’s editors had told me about the story before publishing it, I would have been able then to map out the “conversation” for the rest of the week then and there. Of course it would spark a firestorm of page views. The same old critics would pan the entire thing and use it as evidence for the frightening rise of America’s right wing; others would retaliate against the condescending left.
My roommate would post an obnoxiously accurate meme to summarize it all.
The tragedy is the way some people must think quite highly of themselves for spouting off on controversy, or at least whatever is in vogue. Like I said, last Wednesday it was God.But don’t mistake volume for intelligence. In most cases the former is a sad attempt to conceal a shortage of the latter.
When we had the opportunity to respond thoughtfully to Cru, to potentially reflect on the merits of the arguments getting set forth and make new assertions challenging the old, as a student body we balked. We recited our assumptions and prayed for the weekend.
Peter Larson is a Medill junior. He can be reached at peterlarson2013@u.
