Dear College Freshmen,
Yes, I’m talking to you—including you with the Dat Nguyen jersey, and you young ladies over there wearing the cat ears on your head. That’s cute, by the way.

I hear you’re all going to college—from UC Irvine to UT Austin to NYU. I’ve got a few words of advice for you. So sit down, sip on that bubble tea or juice or whatever it is you young kids are drinking these days. Come listen to Uncle Irwin. I am, after all, at least fifteen years older than you, and I’m extraordinarily wise.

Now, the first thing you do when you go to college is, you’ve got to make a decision on the whole virginity issue. Yeah, that’s right. You’re Asian. Some of you weren’t even allowed to contemplate the sex act. Your parents would knock on your bedroom door, asking, “What are you doing? Awfully quiet in there. Hello? Yoohoo! If you’re watching Ally McBeal, please remember that Ling is a whore and not a role model. Do you want some mango? I just cut some mango. Stop thinking about sex; open the door, and eat!”

Young ladies, please remember that nobody wants to take your virginity away from you. Except for the twenty thousand male students on campus. And guys, if you wish to remain a virgin, you too will find a great deal of support on campus, particularly from the twenty thousand guys happy to see you on the sidelines.

The point is, take care of your sexual needs so that you can concentrate on what’s important: politics. If you don’t satisfy your sexual needs and instead decide to repress them and resent all those people who are having sex, you’ll still get involved in politics. By joining the College Republicans.

The point is, college is the place where you must make yourself dangerous. No, I’m not talking about joining the Chai Vang Rifle Club. I’m talking about educating yourself about politics, history, colonialism, war, racism, and systemic control and oppression such that you represent a danger to The System.

“The System?” you ask. “Do you mean the capitalist system? The system of Western Imperialism? I thought you were Uncle Irwin, not Uncle Ho!”

First of all, just because I question authority, bash warmongers, and demand my dignity in an oft-dehumanizing America, doesn’t make me a Communist. It makes me Senor Civic Duty Tang.

Second, allow me to couch my exhortation in terms of your education. The System wants you to actively and passively maintain your ignorance, your fear of questioning, and your suppression of your own critique of our world and its massive follies. The System, and I’m gonna get gratuitous on you, wants you to simply watch—for four years at a time—the political/economic system lie to you, waste your tax dollars, ignore the victims of Katrina and distort the truth. The System, a.k.a. the ruling elite, drub your brain with a steady stream of propaganda and misinformation, until you believe that torturing sometimes innocent people through “extraordinary rendition,” violent forced feeding of hunger strikers, perverted sexual humiliations and sleep deprivation are the price of your freedom as an American.

The System is currently still searching for and destroying all those thousands of nuclear weapons in a nation that was ruled by a guy named Saddam (pronounced SAHDam like Sodom of Sodom and Gommorah) who was once our second-most important ally (behind Israel) in the region and whom we (meaning George Bush Sr. and the CIA he directed) armed with massive numbers of weapons, the same Saddam who suddenly became our greatest enemy when we most needed an enemy and who was, without question, worth killing tens of thousands of Iraqis and Americans in order to depose so that we could initiate the bloodiest civil war in the region since the American-armed Osama Bin Laden and his fellow Afghan rebels succeeded in kicking out the Soviets and ringing in years of devastating factional fighting. All this as we watched, not minding too much that the area was developing into a sanctuary for terrorists like Al Quaeda, who would commit the most heinous act of violence ever on the territory of the United States, outside of the genocide of the Indians, enslavement of Africans, and the Civil War. The act of violence, summed up by the odd fraction, 9/11, of course, set into motion our discovery of kajillions of nukes and throngs of terrorists long-stationed in Iraq. No question.

>next

NHA Magazine Inc., © 2007–Private Policy by–Terms of use.