Author:
Emma Parker’s sermon about Genderf*ck gave me the incentive to do something which for a long time has been necessary. I am not identifying Ms. Parker, specifically, as a Square. I simply use her moralizing rhetoric as emblematic of a certain life perspective I call Squareness. I do so to make
AN ADDRESS
To The Square Community:
You have seen my various inebriated antics. You have heard me talking loudly about lewd matters, and from it you have realized that I am not one of you. But I bear you no ill will. I have ruined the lovely decorations of our school dances with drunkenness and debauchery. I have ruined your studies with my loud stereo and your sleep with late night pot smoking. I have spoiled your appetite with obscenities and tomfoolery in the Marketplace. It seems I have done all this with a laugh in my throat, a contempt for you, unfortunate victim. But it is not so.
For the same reason you condemn and judge me, I provide you with displays to do so: it is my nature. I do not begrudge you of your desire to assess the moral implications of your peer’s actions. Must you constantly complain and attempt to intervene, though? You control much: RHA, ASOC, The Administration, Congress, Roswell. I control only the party’s location, from whence you hear the sounds of illicit things and people having more fun than you are. As I wag a dumb tongue at your lameness, refraining to lecture you except in the most violent throes of intoxication, is it so much to ask you to occasionally turn a blind eye to things which distress you? I confess that your square attitude seems judgemental; it reeks of superiority. But I am not asking you to change. I am willing to maintain our odd coupling if you will, once in a while, cease bitching and recognize the sacrifices I have made for you.
You have called campus safety on me and dispersed my parties. You have interrupted my love making with noise complaints, foiled my cigarette breaks with obnoxious denouncements. Yet I have endured you. I have not given you wedgies or called you nerd-ass lamezoids or spiked your punch or tried to offer you my marijuana. I am content to tolerate your square behavior. Will you not, just once in a while, join me in the circle, in coolness? Hang up the phone. Open your door. Follow your ears to the thumping of bass and badness. Take the advice of a man who, through his divine coolness, mocks your box. In the words of George Clinton: free your ass and your mind will follow.
-Max Weidman, sophomore, ECLS
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