Hello and welcome, incoming students, to the prestigious Ohio University.
You come at an historic time when you will experience the fruits of the current administration's Vision Ohio plan without being tainted by knowledge of the university's past.
But more importantly, you come at a time when Nintendo finally releases its sequel to their 2001 game, Super Smash Bros Melee. And, like Vision Ohio's program eliminations and subsequent No-Confidence votes, this could very well define your college career.
From my freshmen year to this very day, a Melee addiction has raged throughout the campus. It acts like a bonding tool: creating and severing relationships, settling arguments and, for my comrades and I, wilting over 300 hours of our collective lives.
And just as if we had snorted lines of meth off one another's bellies for the past four years, our time as Melee addicts has warped our little minds to the point where our attention span barely holds for more than five minutes of bloodless combat.
This has put us in a state of reality'a kind of hyperreality'where we want everything (substances, sex, films, education, et cetera) quicker, faster and harder than the addicts of old who plodded along in college for years with the Nintendo 64 version of Smash Bros.
To them, we must seem unnaturally nervous in our lives: our hands always jittery, our teeth always clenched. They think, How can their bodies handle such stimulation
such fast-paced action?
Soon, the Melee wave will think the same for you, the coming Super Smash Bros. Brawl wave. Though it may be too much for us to take without having a seizure, your minds and bodies will surely become acclimated to the pace of the game within several months.
Brawl, though, would make you used to a quicker state of reality that the out-going Melee wave cannot take. But it is a type of ULTRA-hyperreality, filled with star-powered special moves, Nintendogs filling up the entire screen a-and even online multiplayer!
The ultra-hyperreality isn't just in Brawl, but also in much of Hollywood films like Live Free or Die Hard and 300'we're experiencing a whole movement of ultra-hyperreality right now!
So the past few years of reforming the school and eliminating the less flashy and action-packed programs were simply instances of forethought.
The Administration realized that, to hook those within the Brawl wave, everything at OU must become BIGGER and FASTER. There needs to be more PIZZAZZ!
Programs like Art Education, women's lacrosse, men's swimming and diving and men's track and field'and perhaps even the literary festival?'were simply too boring and too slow for the looming ultra-hyperreality.
The old college town atmosphere of Athens doesn't cut it anymore. Everything in your coming college life, now, has to match that new high or else you'll look somewhere else: substances need to be more potent, sex filthier and education less of an intrusion on social affairs.
Who would really want to watch swimming, they thought, given that entertainment nowadays has to be all FLASH and DAZZLE? Where's the excitement in a pottery wheel? Or books?
Football, though, is FAST. The new Baker center is MASSIVE. Forget the coziness of the old one'now we have escalators!
And within this new ultra-hyperreality at OU, everything has to be QUICK QUICK QUICK QUICK QUICK QUICK QUICK in order to get your attention.
This, it seems, is the Vision Ohio plan that you, the Brawl wave, will be entering into. It adheres to the ultra-hyperreality by cutting away the more boring sports and programs and putting all the marbles into the things that would give the school the most face time.
And any quibbling from students that results in a campus-wide No-Confidence vote against the school's President is trivial: These voices will fade within five years.
But if something falls into this ultra-hyperreality, it will eventually collapse in on itself.
A system can only take so much stimulation before its eyes roll back into its head, its body tremors with seizure and it inevitably needs to be hauled away from the source before any more damage can be done. 'Justin Noga is a senior English major. Email him at jn108203@ohiou.edu 17
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Justin Noga
