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Take all our cares away
To the editor, This Monday, October 19, we could hardly contain our delight at the way in which university students crossing the mall were being targeted for an aggressive advertising campaign, sponsored trilaterally by Pepsico, Arizona Student Unions, and the CatCard itself, celebrating the multi-faceted virtues of the CatCard's computer chip. "Get Smart," the placards advised us, "use the (chip)." We rejoice at this refinement of the university's ongoing effort to drill into its students the economic habits that will assure the hegemony of multi-national corporations well into the 21st century. Thankfully, our campus mall will remain a proving ground for Mammon's future middle-managers. We are jubilant that the future of the American way of life is being secured at the grass roots level. The usual variety of corporate quislings and student collaborators were there to shuttle the more cooperative segment of our student population into a veritable Skinner box, which reinforced their budding desires for our culture's detritus. Already slavering in anticipation of the "Free 20 oz. Pepsi" promised to them, the students carefully attended the warden's instructions, which taught them how to re-fashion their student ID into a debit card, so that the tangibility of money, that troublesome material signifier of how they are alienated from their labor, would no longer impede their mad rush to consume. Perhaps if the Pepsi machines were situated on box-cars en route to a more convenient learning camp, these critical training sessions could be administered even more effectively, without the distraction of classrooms, libraries, or University faculty. Then students could really "get smart" without all that troublesome book-learning around them. Maybe this camp could be that true "campus community" so dear to us and to our president, Peter Likins, a place where all tensions between individuals are resolved through a shared addiction to sugar-water, and brand name totems. But the apparent necessity for this particular advertising campaign troubled us. We all know that the CatCard truly is the panacea that makes college simple; the silicon-plated philosopher's stone that can unify, commmodify, automate and streamline the student's university experience, making it no more troubling than a visit to Disneyland, or Knott's Berry Farm. This campaign would seem to suggest that there are really those out there who have not yet entrusted the CatCard with the complete management of even the smallest aspects of their daily lives. We sincerely hope this campaign exterminates the remaining hold-outs, and cleanses our campus of their negativity. But until then, the Ding-Dong-eating apparatchiks of tomorrow will continually be threatened by that recalcitrant element in our midst, who will insinuate that never-ending consumption in the hopes of endless self-gratification is not really the best way to subordinate a populace. Some among these shifty parlor pinks would even have us believe that the populace doesn't require subordination! Let's leave them to their Xanadu, to their ivory towers of out-dated "knowledge." Perhaps the wheels of progress shall crush them without our intervention. In any event, let our University continue to commit itself to transferring control over education to our corporate overseers, who will continue to free the average person from decisions, responsibilities, and other nagging trivialities.
Jesse Showalter
Robert Horning
Ariane Hopkins |
