All right, people. We all know full well what we’re here to discuss. Over the past semester, a disturbing trend has begun to develop: with startling regularity, every few weeks a column will be published in The Chronicle that triggers a huge outpouring of anger, disbelief and rebuttal. Many of the authors of these columns are not guest contributors but instead full-time Chronicle columnists, meaning that they are able to regularly laud their inflammatory views and cultivate their public notoriety. These individuals demonstrate no tact. They push extreme viewpoints to no productive effect. They bring The Chronicle into disrepute.
In short, they have stolen my job.
You may not know this if you’re a relative newcomer to Duke, but Monday Monday has a little bit of a tendency to generate controversy. This is a tradition as old as Monday Monday itself, stretching right from the first Monday Monday’s barbed quips back in the 1970s to Spring 2013’s seminal tour de force in outrage, “Higher Ground”. Time and again, Monday Monday’s authors have been roundly rebuffed and removed for the scandalous content they had written. One writer was so offensive he actually almost managed to have Monday Monday destroyed forever.
So it is with growing horror that I have watched the scorn and infamy to which I am entitled be usurped by a whole new class of controversial Chronicle columnists. I try and I try to capture my birth right back from them, but they have an advantage over me that I simply cannot overcome; what they’re writing is real. Do you realize that last week I wrote a column in which I have the LGBTQIA+ community basically say thank you for Jack’s death threat? Or that three weeks ago I wrote an unsubtle, incendiary polemic under the title of #AllLivesMatter? But both of these were satire! So when someone comes along actually saying that the only way to solve the Israel-Palestine conflict is to drive Palestinians off the land or that black culture is actually a major cause of black poverty, how am I supposed to compete?
And you know what’s worse? Inevitably, every time one of these columns comes out, someone will post it to Facebook and comment something to the effect of “It took me a minute to work out this wasn’t satire,” or maybe, “Wow, Monday Monday’s best work yet!”
That hurts, people. But this really gets at my central problem right now: when the real columns are more satirical than the satire columns, how do I do my job? Do I up the hyperbole even more? Do I drop the jokes and just plunge full-throttle into propounding facetiously right- or left-wing ideas? Or-
Wait. I’ve got it.
When all the normal columns are satirical, the new satire is normalcy. The most subversive, satirical thing I can write right now is a perfectly normal, calm, generic Chronicle column. Watch and learn, world.
…
MONDAY MONDAY: The value of sympathy
When I was in high school, I used to like going to the bookstore. I would spend hours upon hours there just browsing, often times not even buying a book. There was a cashier there a lot of the time—we wouldn’t really speak, but he seemed friendly and would always smirk when I waved awkwardly upon seeing him. One day—surprisingly!—I actually decided to buy a book. I made my way triumphantly to the checkout, book proudly in hand, prepared to finally make up for all those times I’d visited without buying anything.
The cashier started to ring me up; he told me the price: $12.99. I’d decided to clear out my spare coins that day, so had to awkwardly rustle through all my change to get him the money. But then, disaster. I counted and recounted, but it was true—I only had $12.87. I apologized profusely and offered immediately to take the book back to the shelf, not bearing the thought he would have to work to undo the damage of my stupidity. But—and I’ll never forget this—he said “It’s fine. There’s a line forming behind you. Just give me what you have.”
The kindness of that cashier stays with me to this day. But I think the value of that moment goes beyond my being able to start Philip K. Dick’s Ubik one day earlier. The subtle smile and human grace that cashier afforded me speaks to a wider lesson I think all of us at Duke could really stand to UGH I CAN’T DO IT THIS IS STUPID.
Look: I need this, people. I can’t besmirch the Monday Monday name. I need to get shares and infamy and angry calls for my resignation. I can’t do that while you guys are stealing my spotlight—so this represents my formal request that you normal columnists stick to balanced and neutral intellectual territory. I will keep writing the unconstructive, bombastic satires that are the hallmark of my position. If you don’t agree, I just don’t see any way for me to go on. Of course, I could probably always drum up some notoriety by just publicly bashing The Chronicle. But that would be too easy, you know?
Monday Monday would like to apologize to John for publicly calling him out in a column he himself will have to edit.
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