Democracy Is Dead, and I Wish I Were Too

I’m pissed off. For so long, I and other independent political observers could only speculate that America’s tender democracy — a system so beloved by so many so-called patriots that its advancement around the globe has cost this nation almost unfathomable quantities of blood and treasure in wars both hot and cold — is tragically flawed, not so much by any philosophical error on the part of the Founding Fathers, but by the willing ignorance of the citizenry and the dutiful deception and manipulation of that once-proud body by its government. Anyone paying attention could also reasonably deduce the mainstream media has sold out, as well, trading Truth and substantive discourse for ratings buzz and cheap headlines. The whole thing, it could be reasoned, is broken beyond repair.

I often took solace in the uncertainty of my cynicism, though, the inability to prove my pessimism, the thought that maybe I’m just one of many arrogant doomsayers incapable of seeing all the inherent good in a system built around something as fair as the Jeffersonian concept of one man, one vote. It’s romantic, after all, isn’t it? And there’s something to be said for romantic notions of equality. At the very least, perhaps the little plan outlined all those years ago on a now-tattered swatch of parchment deserves the benefit of the doubt.

But then this fucking primary season happened, and my worst fears have been confirmed, all those monsters lingering in the closet of my consciousness proven real by this campaign without end. I knew it was coming, too, when after having overachieving through Super Tuesday and then rattling off twelve consecutive primary and caucus wins Barack Obama had still failed to wrap up the Democratic nomination for president. The whole affair has since devolved into a back-and-forth battle between whoever happens to be most popular at a given moment in time, Obama or Hillary Clinton, based on some bullshit tangential issue that, thanks to rampant media harping, grips the nation and distracts from the things that matter most — economic and health-care plans, foreign-policy goals, ending our current war and avoiding our next one.

Aussie Wines

Hello from Down Under!

This weekend I spent a few crazy days in Sydney with some friends to experience an extreme Red Wine Tour at Hunter Valley!

It was time to experience Extreme Adventures again, which is the group that I went on my spring break trip with. This time we were headed two hours west of Sydney to explore the Vineyards and do some wine tasting. We started out at a reptile park where there were tons of crocodiles, and other creatures. We hung out with koalas and kangaroos, and saw platypus and turtles before heading to the bus to start our trip. We took a two-hour bus ride filled with music and wine to the most gorgeous wineries. We stopped at three, sampling red wine, white wine, champagne, liquor and dessert wines. It was all very good until we took a shot of Dragon’s Breath (alcohol and hot chilli peppers), and left us never wanting to drink again. I learned all the tricks on how to tell which wines were better than others, and which ones were best with each meals. We had cheese tastings and were bread at each place to compliment the experience.

After visiting the wineries we went to Dr. Gurd’s Jungle Juice Tavern where we were given a shot of some weird concoction of wines that tasted pretty terrible. We stayed at the tavern for a while and met some locals before heading back on the bus to drink even more wine and sleep away the day.

After the wine tour I spent a few days in Sydney with some of my friends from Syracuse studying at the University of New South Wales. I experienced the night life and went on a cliff walk on the beach with the most amazing views. It was unbelievable.

Next weekend I’m headed an hour south to go to Surf Camp!!! Wish me luck!

Cheers,

~Allison Marco

Song o’ The Week #6

This week’s Song o’ the Week is “Second Chance” by Liam Finn. Son of Crowded House’s Neil Finn, Liam got his start playing drums and guitar for his father’s solo album, “Try Whistling This.” However, Liam Finn doesn’t need to rely on the weight of the Finn name, as do many second generation musicians (*cough Jakob Dylan cough*). This charming New Zealander creates his own brand of soulful, pop music that walks a fine line between the singer/songwriter and the overly produced.

Citing Nirvana, Pavement, and Neil Young as his greatest influences, Finn mixes an eletro-beat with instrumentals and a catchy alto vocals. The video is just as charming, as Finn heart-wrenchingly dances in open fields and pours his heart out in front of a sea of wildflowers.

“Don’t forget me when you grow old. Those Demons wont leave you alone.”

~ Peggy McWeeney

Pennsylmania

There’s chum in the water, kids. And the sharks — all of which bear an eerie resemblance to John King or Tim Russert; although in reality King is amphibious and Russert’s dorsal fin is a bit more pronounced — are circling Pennsylvania with a bloodlust so savage civilian observers are advised to stay indoors or risk certain death and disfigurement at the hands of these hideous creatures and their dry-erase boards and exit polls and interactive, 3-dimensional maps.

Since this death march of a campaign season began with the Iowa caucuses way back on January 3, the beasts covering it have grown fat from regular feedings. But it’s been seven weeks since these monsters have had the opportunity to dine on the electoral results from Ohio, Texas, Rhode Island, and Vermont, with only contests a week later in Wyoming and Mississippi to hold them over until today.

The national media has, in the meantime, been forced to sustain itself on fabricated and overblown misstatements from Senators Obama and Clinton, as well as a few scandals and half-truths, some bad bowling and beer guzzling, a touch of bitterness, all topped off by the dreaded politics of fear. Slim pickings indeed. But now they are ready to feast once again, and we should all be afraid.

For those of you brave or stupid enough to turn your TVs to any of the cable news networks tonight, you will watch pseudo-journalists morph into logic-defying zombies and giddy, cackling schoolgirls as they attempt to interpret the meaning of the outcome of the Pennsylvania primary.

It’s a fair bet, for instance, that Chris Matthews will achieve multiple orgasms as Chuck Todd outlines various delegate-distribution possibilities; Pat Buchanan will make at least two overtly racist remarks; Wolf Blitzer and his beard will utter no less than seven mind-numbingly obvious predictions (i.e. “The winner of tonight’s contest will have shown a greater ability to connect with voters than did the loser.”); Fox News will begin its coverage with live video of John McCain removing his teeth and slipping into bed, and then immediately cut to a set adorned with somewhere between 75 and 130 American flags.

All this hoopla, the hungry media machine hopes, will remind you that what’s going on in the Keystone State is very important and very exciting and very good for American democracy.

The real truth, however, is that the whole thing is more or less meaningless and nothing at all will change with the closing of the Pennsylvania polls. These races are so overanalyzed, so heavily tracked, that any uncertainty is long gone. Hillary Clinton will win by a margin of somewhere between five and nine points, netting maybe six delegates [Ed: He was pretty close. Clinton took it by 10% and netted 12 delegates], doing just enough to justify her continued existence in the race but hardly making a dent in Barack Obama’s overall delegate or popular-vote leads. By the time the outcome in PA is know, even the candidates themselves will have moved on to Indiana, where the next make-or-break vote will take place on May 6, leaving nothing but empty sound bites and frayed campaign banners in their wake.

If all of that just made your eyes glaze over, don’t worry. Just know that when you wake up Wednesday morning and hop online, the headlines won’t tell you much. After all, depraved politics have no time to rehash yesterday’s news. They have but a short life to live and must keep moving, searching desperately for food, or else they will die out and sink to the depths of public consciousness, left to rot, the same as all those forgotten pundits of yesterday, never to be heard from again.

~Chris Rosenbluth

Watts up bitches?

Spring is upon us, which means it’s time to do dumb shit on the quad again. Toss a frisbee, get a hilarious sunburn, look like a dirty hippie – whatever.

If you’re looking for some real entertainment, Jerk will be playing the Daily Orange staff in kickball this Sunday at 3 p.m. I’ve never been to a game, but apparently we trounce these nerds every year. We can’t guarantee that the D.O. will report the box score or spell our names correctly, but we can guarantee a victory.

I thought that would be the end of the kickball buffoonery, but I found this message in my inbox earlier:

Dear Jerks,

As you may know, we didn’t accept your challenge for a kickball game
on Mayfest. But we don’t want you guys to get the wrong idea. We’re
confident we can kick your asses, but we didn’t want to do it on a day
when we’ve got a ton of parties to go to all day long. We understand
that not everyone is as popular as we are, so we hope you can find
something to do with your day off tomorrow.

We’d still like to beat you in kickball, so let’s meet on the Quad on
Sunday, May 4 at 2 p.m.

Be there.

-20 Watts

It’s on, bitches. Your jeans are too tight to play kickball. Have fun at your hipster parties tomorrow, see you next weekend!

~ Liam

Strut it

Some freshmen are more concerned with fraternity theme parties and J. Michael’s than getting involved on campus. Not Sara Turnbull. The music education major from Rochester plays flute in the marching band, started a campus humanitarian group and will be modeling in the Syracuse University fashion show for three different designers next week. I caught up with her in-between model fittings so she could tell me about herself and teach me how to walk like Tyra Banks.

Jerk Magazine: What made you want to model in the fashion show?
Sara Turnbull: It seems like a fun thing to be able to dress up and parade around in. My mom and sister both went to modeling school – actually my sister is still in modeling school – and everyone always tells me I should model because I’m tall and skinny

JM: What do you do at modeling school?
ST: You learn how to hold yourself and how to put makeup on. I don’t know, I’m not the one going (laughs). It’s on the weekends, like, once a month.

JM: Have you ever been in a fashion show before?
ST: No. I’ve never even been to a fashion show.

JM: What kind of outfits are you wearing?
ST: I’m modeling for three people: Alexis Lam, Abbey Campbell and Hope Apicella. Abbey’s design is a short, gold dress and Hope’s dress is black, short and tight.

JM: I’ll have to find you after the show and ask if you want to do it again.
ST: Well, I won’t actually be here. I’m transferring to Global College, a part of Long Island University. You study abroad every semester. So I’ll be in India next year.

JM: That’s so cool. What are your interests?
ST: Well, I started a chapter called Challa for Hunger here. We bake challa bread every Sunday and then sell it on Mondays from 8:30-10am in Crouse-Hinds Hall. The money goes for Darfur. I also knit a lot.

JM: How did you learn how to “walk?”
ST: My sister told me five minutes before my audition. As I was walking to the audition, she was telling me what to do. She told me to put one foot in front of the other. There was something about stopping at the end and moving your feet. I don’t remember it at all. It’s very complicated.
(Hope interjects to say that Sara got one of the highest scores at her audition.)

JM: Have you been practicing?
ST: No, I’m too shy too. I should. Every once in a while when no one is around, I will. I’m going to have to start because I’m getting really nervous.

~ Emily Laurence

Song o’ The Week #5

This week’s song of the week is the sweet and satisfying “Five Years Time” by Noah and the Whale. Noah and the Whale is a folky rock outfit out of London, comprised of five members Charlie, Doug, Urby, Laura, and Fiddle. Their first single, “Five Years Time” is a simple melody with practically spoken verses and a catchy, danceable chorus. However,underneath this saccharine exterior is a layering of violin, ukulele, flute, claps, and several other unrecognizable clicking sounds. The video is shot in the nostalgic prep style of a Wes Anderson film with choreography fitting of a second grade class. All in all it’s a light-hearted, infectious tune that makes you wish you were cool enough to be invited to their parties.

“And it’s Love, love, love. All through our bodies.”

~ Peggy McWeeney

Reviews, Week 4: The Lover

Continuing my trend of shamelessly stealing article ideas from my neighbor, I read The Lover, a partially autobiographical novel by the French author Marguerite Duras. The story follows her childhood outside Saigon, the problems she has with her mother and brothers, and her affair with an older Chinese man.

Duras writes in small, descriptive paragraphs that follow no particular order. The sections, sometimes as short as a sentence, reveal the acute emotion of each situation. The narrator has exceptional self-awareness for such a young age; many of the passages are painful to read for anyone who has experienced the awkwardness of middle school. As the story progresses and the French teenager deals with her mentally unstable mother, the blatant failures of her older brother, and her questionable love of the Chinese man, Duras expresses the narrator’s forced maturation, with its impressive management and unfortunate insecurities, so that it is impossible not to find relevance in the book.

Independent of the emotional writing, the non-chronological style of the novel makes it hard to follow. Besides a constant transitioning between the first and third persons, the narrator reveals memories that may or may not be about main characters, real and imagined events are indistinguishable from one another, and there is some uncertainty about true identities. The story is short, which is probably so that we can go back and try to understand the order of events, and what is true or false about people and their actions. And while it likely isn’t good that a story besides Finnegan’s Wake should be so difficult on the first try, a second reading is worthwhile so that you don’t forget the skill of Duras’ empathetic approach.

~ Meg Martin

Extreme Spring Break

Greetings from Aussie!

I just got back from an extreme spring break trip up the northeast coast of Australia, going from Brisbane up to Cairns and the Barrier Reef! It was a 10 day party with 73 amazing people and two wild tour guides that I will never forget.

We started our trip off at Steve Irwin’s Australia Zoo where I hung out with kangaroos, fed an elephant and saw a crocodile show. From there we went to Fraser Island which is the largest sand beach in the world, with fresh water lakes and barely any inhabitants. We got to swim there and ex foliate with the natural sand. Next stop was the Whitsunday Islands where we were dropped off on a remote island to party, kayak, relax, snorkel, and sail for three days. The Islands were paradise and like nothing I’ve ever seen before. After that we headed north towards Cairns where for three days we went white water rafting, bungee jumping, scuba diving at the Great Barrier Reef, and sailing. I got to hold a koala and spend my days in the most tropical place in the world.

I can’t even put into words how unbelievable the experience was. It was the wildest and greatest time of my life. I popped a blood vessel in my eye bungee jumping, and came back with a million scrapes and bruises from all of the incredible things we did but it was so worth it. This week I’m in recovery mode but many more adventures to come.

~ Allison Marco

English as a second language in Japan

I’ve always wondered why so many foreigners are so good at English. Now I know why:

 

In other news, jerkmag.net has been updated for April – check out highlights from the 5th Anniversary Special and extra interviews from JERK Alumni, one lady’s opinion on female rivalry and a profile of a young man lost in cyberspace dating.

And please Donte’ Greene, stick around for a while and bring back the glory.

~Liam