With voter turnout at record lows and approval ratings dipping well below even Trump-like numbers, Duke Student Government announced today on their Facebook page that the DSG presidential race was “really just a war of attrition between pledges at this point.”
The organization, which has become well known for efforts like funding and then de-funding and then re-funding a defunct yearbook, continually debating their internal structure and helping students develop their resumes in anticipation of their McKinsey consulting interviews, decided to just cut the crap and admit what was really going on in a rare showing of sincerity.
“Look, we get it,” an anonymous DSG senator who asked to go by “Deep Throat” told Monday Monday at a secret rendezvous at the top of the Chapel. “We know that nobody really cares what we do. Hell, until The Chronicle started filming our meetings, they were mostly just orchestrated events to hear ourselves talk. We wanted to just come out and say what everyone else was thinking—nobody really cares about this race anymore, not even us, not even the candidates. It’s mostly just a fight between pledges at this point.”
The all-Greek executive board dispelled claims earlier this year that Greek-affiliations have any amount of undue influence over who gets elected and who doesn’t. They noted that all students had an equal opportunity to join their ranks, and the fact they were blessed with gregarious personalities and an army of sisters and brothers they paid for and could help them campaign had nothing to do with the positions they’d won “fair and square.”
However in recent days, many of those same members backtracked on their previous statements to corroborate the organization’s announcement.
“I’ll be the first one to admit that what I said earlier this year was all a big lie,” one anonymous executive board member told Monday Monday. “If you think for one second I didn’t tell my pledges they had to vote for me or that I didn’t write those little admirable paragraphs each of them added on their profile picture and cover photo change, you’re seriously senile. Half of them barely even knew my name at that point, let alone the resolutions I’d presented in front of Senate.”
He added that the proliferation of using first-year male “pledges” to do the bidding of candidates in DSG elections was a tradition “as old as time itself” and that it “long outdated traditions like tenting, Tailgate or Dean Gerald Wilson.”
“Oh, everybody has done it,” one former DSG candidate living in exile as an Accenture consultant told Monday Monday. “It doesn’t matter if you are a bizarrely prideful geed or a merit scholar who has never been to a barn party in your life. As soon as you decide you’re running for DSG president—which, let’s be honest, is a decision you make long before you say you did—you’re already recruiting a friend of a friend from inside a fraternity with some sway who can make their pledges help you do all the stuff you don’t want to.”
They reported that the role of pledges in campaigns has evolved over time. While many DSG candidates have these hard-working freshmen that definitely aren’t required to do so against their will do simple tasks like put up posters, knock on doors on East campus and hang banners from their windows, others have gone further. One former anonymous DSG President told Monday Monday that in addition to having pledges change their profile pictures, dorm storm, put up posters and send their pledgemaster photos of their ballot saying they voted for her, the impressionable freshmen were also asked to do some more “creative tasks.”
“I had one pledge learn how to spadgecock a chicken so he could cook it for me every night in my Central Campus apartment during the campaign. Another learned how to tailor pants, one learned how to do all my homework in calligraphy, and another sung me french lullabies in my room until I had fallen asleep every night. Stuff like that is pretty standard these days.”
When approached by Monday Monday in a large 100-level lecture class, one first-year pledge from an unnamed, two- or three-letter fraternity denied any participation in such activities.
“‘DSG?’ Isn’t that the group of shirtless foreign guys who tan on the Abele quad bench? Never been affiliated with them. But you know, you can tell I’m Greek-affiliated because I’m wearing this sweatshirt and I just called you ‘bro.’”
While the DSG community dukes it out among classes of pastel-clad men, the rest of the Duke student body has announced they “couldn’t care less” about the election.
“When a pledge knocked on my door last night, I told them to go away,” one member of the Pegram dorm told Monday Monday. “I felt kinda bad about it, too. Poor guys looked like they hadn’t slept in many days. I know a couple of girls down my hall took their quarter sheet and let them do their spiel, just to be nice.”
Other students have reported feeling equally as annoyed with all the profile picture changes and campaign promises that have blanketed their Facebook newsfeeds since the beginning of the campaign just two short weeks ago.
“It’s only been two weeks? It feels like it’s been 17 months at this point,” a Chronicle editor told Monday Monday. “Truth be told, I keep getting these ‘endorsements’ from groups, asking if we can run them and I don’t have the heart to tell them that the only people who read them are the candidates and their grandparents. The Editorial Board’s endorsement got seven reads—three from an IP address in Few and another from an IP address at a retirement community in Boca Raton.”
Written sitting next to those perverted study-exercise bikes in Perkins, dreaming of the nap pods that never came to fruition.
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