It was the great frat star Benjamin Franklin who once said, “Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.” But much like the Constitution, antiquated sayings like this must be updated and amended and refreshed with the blood of patriots and all that, in order to befit our ever-changing times.
If Ben had been at Duke this past weekend, I think he would agree with my 21st century edition of his adage: Tailgate is proof that God is irrelevant to our happiness, and in fact it is how many Busch Lights we can shotgun while wearing pirate outfits that is the best barometer of our contentment.
It was at this weekend’s Tailgate that I had my own revelation. You could call it a vision quest, of sorts, and somewhere between the time when I was drinking beer through the face of a CPR dummy and the time when I was vomiting up my WaDuke brunch into a Potty Queen, I saw the light.
For whatever reason, I thought of this year’s summer reading book for the incoming freshmen class. For those of you who don’t know, it’s called “Everything Matters!” by Ron Currie Jr. I considered this title for a moment, and then I looked around me. I saw drunken fairies having beers with slutty pirates; I saw Mario and Luigi racing around in cardboard go-karts right before my eyes; I even saw a gorilla stumbling out of a portable bathroom into a man who had his name suntanned into his chest. I saw all of these things, and do you know what it was that I concluded? Nothing Matters!
Just think of all the purported disasters in the world and ask yourself, does this really affect my life in any way? Does this matter? Ten times out of ten the answer will be a Resounding No, and you’ll go on living your life and getting blackout drunk at Tailgate—and you should!
Take the oil spill. Apparently 50 billion gallons of oil were spewing into the Gulf every second for a hundred days or something, and guess what? Nothing in our lives changed. Gas prices didn’t even go up. The only difference was that you saw the occasional pelican covered in this gooky stuff and you changed the channel because you’ve never seen or cared about a pelican in real life anyway. But what about the fishermen? They should’ve hedged their bets and shorted clam futures; Gossip Bro sees no reason to cry over spilled trout.
And apparently there’s an impending global water crisis? I personally don’t see the crisis in walking into the Loop and getting a bottle of water for free with my Duke Card, or getting it extra-free if I just walk out without paying.
OK, OK, fair enough, Gossip Bro, but what about the recession? Surely that affects us all. Does it, though? Two years ago every professor was screaming, “There’s no more finance industry!” Oh, Goldman Sachs is still sniffing up Duke talent like Lindsay Lohan on a coke binge? That’s what I thought.
The point is that even though politicians and pundits would have you believe that nuclear Armageddon will ensue if Republicans are elected, or that the government will enslave the nation if Democrats are elected, the truth is that nothing will change no matter who is elected. Remember when George Bush was a dastardly tyrant who would waterboard his own grandmother and Barack Obama was the second coming of Jesus Christ, Mohammed and Haile Selassie all at once? And then remember when your life was exactly the same in 2007 as it was in 2010? Yeah, me too.
Sure, it was alright to care about politics or religion in middle school, but now that we’re grown up we can accept the liberating truth of which Tailgate is categorical proof: we can do whatever we want, at all times, and no one will stop us. So take comfort, because nothing matters. Nothing at all.
Was there a Tailgate postgame in Wallace Wade?
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