Before he was merely Macklemore, Ben Haggerty called himself Professor Macklemore, which is just so perfect. Of course the reigning enfant tryhard of serious, Reddit-approved rap music once went by Professor Macklemore. Even though he seems to have lost his doctorate on his way up the Billboard charts, the dull haranguing remains.

I don’t mean to disparage those who pursue a career in academia, and I apologize for doing so. But what I’m trying to say is that if I wanted to have a fun time ruined this Saturday, I’d get drunk with some GTFs and listen to them debate the heteronormative anxieties present in that new Michael Bay movie about bodybuilders and wouldn’t go hear a Macklemore lecture at the Matthew Knight Arena about basketball shoes equaling murder.

The worst thing about Macklemore isn’t that he’s even the worst thing. Indeed, he’s actually pretty OK! “Thrift Shop” is a fun enough song, until the end of the second verse, in which Professor Macklemore offers a consumer culture 101 lesson about business trickery and the political economy of $50 T-shirts. I suppose this all might sound edgy and exciting if your parents didn’t let you listen to, like, Common or Lupe Fiasco in grade school, but whatever.

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king, as Erasmus put it, and in our democratized culture — blinded and stultified by retromania and a lack of curiosity – one-eyed artists like Macklemore and Odd Future and Aaron Sorkin and Lena Dunham, for example, are exalted. We cannot wholly blame the Internet for this (Reagan-era deregulations did a lot of it, “trickling down” from politics and the economy to the culture) but it served as an accelerate, transforming ours into an “upvote/downvote” culture, where artistic value is simply a matter of mouse clicks and page views.

This has utterly reshaped our relationship to the arts. Art was once a solitary, singular activity, pursued by men and women accompanied by nothing and no one but their genius. Yes, there were patrons (there would be no Michelangelo without the Medicis’ wealth) but the final artwork was the work of the artist’s alone. Now that work is crowd-sourced.

Because we all can be artists, it is said that we all are artists. Digital tools have helped to give more people more access to the means of producing art, a development we accept as self-evidently good. Perhaps we have lost something in the process of making art easier and easier, though.

Digitally-driven democratization has deformed the culture in other ways. It has led to us confusing information with knowledge, and trading the luminous and transcendent in favor of things that are “epic” or “awesome” or “restore our faith in humanity,” especially if those are relayed to us in .gif form. The .gif perfectly embodies what is wrong with our culture: Instead of letting moments live in conversation and memory, we force technology to help us relive those moments in a choppy, endless loop. We have Tumblr blogs that serve as galleries of .gifs, speaking to us about our modern condition. That is what art used to do. This is our new art?

Into this howling cultural wasteland steps a Macklemore figure, someone who has put in just enough effort, clocked in the requisite number of hours. In a declining culture, everything and everyone is graded on a curve. It’s not Macklemore’s fault that we mistake the best he’s got for the best there is.

Sport, George Orwell once observed, is war minus the shooting. I suppose that’s true, but I can’t really know for sure. There’s certainly something warlike, or gladiatorial, about football. To be honest, I’m sort of out of my element here; the extent of my football knowledge begins with the movie Little Giants and ends with NFL Blitz, the Nintendo 64 game. I loved that game because you could tackle and tackle and tackle with impunity, which sated whatever bloodlust I had as a six-year-old.

Bloodlust, which reminds me of this guy I saw at a football game my freshman year. I don’t remember anything about the game itself, except that it was “the Halloween game” and we were playing against USC. Anyway, this guy: He was shouting some of the most luridly, wildly savage things I have ever heard, things one could do to the opposing team and its fans if one were so inclined and lived in the Dark Ages. Something about tearing out their hearts and stomping on them or whatever.

Of course, it’s not like he was a berserk maniac who really intended to do all this stuff. He didn’t mean to disembowel the Trojans literally, and neither did the students who joined his chants, worked up by the promise of bloodshed. This is just the sporting spirit, in glorious sanguinary detail.

To understand the appeal of football, and sports generally, as a spectator, it is necessary to understand this particular spirit. It is the allure of the macabre, the same thing that makes you turn and look when you drive past a car accident or made the Saw movies box-office successes. Young men crunching into each other and sacrificing their bodies for our amusement has been with us since time immemorial, an uncivilized impulse just under the surface of our civilization. We haven’t become more sophisticated, only the equipment has.

People who agitate to make the game safer through tighter regulations and better padding miss the point, and have been missing the point for a long, long time. At the turn of the last century, football was a scourge of American society. It was an arena of “mayhem and homicide,” and the players were variously called “young gladiators,” “thugs of society” and a “disgrace of the university that tolerates their presence on the team.” There was a movement to ban the sport entirely, which at one point included President Theodore Roosevelt (his threat to ban football led to the creation of the infrastructure — the NCAA and NFL — we have today). A New York Times editorial, headlined “Two Curable Evils,” pondered football’s malignant effect on the culture and what to do about it. The other “curable evil” discussed was lynching.

Saturday’s spring game was played in tribute to our men in uniform, by our other men in uniform, drawing more apt comparisons than perhaps the athletics department cares to realize. Sports are to a university what the military is to a nation. Both engender intense, frenzied loyalties and exhaust an inordinate amount of resources. Just as the wider American society can tend to feel like the civilian arm of the Pentagon, the modern university sometimes feel like the academic department of the sports program. And if that man I encountered at the Halloween football game is any indication, football might be war minus the shooting, but barely.

There is Greek mythology’s titan Atlas, with the planet — our planet, our home — heaved onto his back. His face is twisted into a grimace, a mask of, yes, pain, but also of determination, responsibility and power. The fate of the world — our world, our home — literally rests on his shoulders, after all. It is his to defend — or destroy.

We are Atlas.

Or, we think we are. Like all others before it, this Earth Week is fraught with Atlantean urgency, and one can see why. The task we have charged ourselves with is an enormous — titanic even — undertaking: Nothing less than the salvation of Earth and everything living on it. On campus this week, we’ve walked past our fellow students bicycling and face-painting their way to a sustainable future. Perhaps you joined them, hoping that your one small action will be the one small action that makes all the difference.

If there is anything demanding a wider consensus than there already is, this is it. Yet, obdurate holdouts remain: Climate change “skeptics” who pop up on occasion to cry alarmism or conspiracy and sound almost pro-pollution. It is a little frustrating when you’re on a burning ship and there are passengers who deny the flames. They engage in a supreme leap of faith that everything will work out just fine.

While one side trusts the planet to extinguish the fires we have started, the other prefers to assign that gig to us, confident that we all have what it takes to be in the savior business. This notion humankind has a grave duty to tend to Earth, as though we were garden caretakers, is solipsistic nonsense, the stuff of vainglorious delusion.

No wonder, then, that it all comes straight out of the Book of Genesis.

According to Biblical mandate, humans have an obligation to both “replenish” and “subdue” the Earth and to “have dominion … over every living thing” on it. This divine instruction is at the core of, appropriately, dominionist theology, which places the human species (well, the Christian ones) atop a very large pyramid of animal species living on this planet, which itself is also ours to do with it whatever we want. The only difference between this kind of thinking and the worldview animating many “green” activists is merely emphasis. So, some people are more interested in the subduing part of humanity’s God-given mission; others concern themselves with the replenishing. Both sides draw from the same supremacist illusion: Human beings have an almost godlike capacity to reshape the world in our image.

We are not gods. We are not Atlas. But due to progress in technology and the sciences, we are confused, and we mistake that progress for an ability to transcend human limitations. In order to suitably deal with our problems, especially climate change, we must abandon our humanistic hubris. Let us not kid ourselves: We will not be able to save the planet. This isn’t any cause for anguish, however. The planet does not need to be saved.

Right now MOOCs — Massive Open Online Courses — are the hip and newfangled thing that education nerds (and just regular nerds) have glommed onto. This is because they are disruptive, a word that sends little shivers of excitement through Silicon Valley folk. Nobody has really explained why disruption is such an unalloyed good. Things just need to be disrupted, apparently. Disruptive thinking leads to some cool, if peculiar, ideas, like iTunes but for groceries or whatever, or iTunes but for college courses, which is what MOOCs are.

In a New York Times article (“Two Cheers for Web U!”) published this past weekend, author A.J. Jacobs enrolled in a number of MOOCs offered by Coursera. Other online education companies mentioned are Udacity (which has been hailed as the Napster of higher education) and edX. At the end, Jacobs gives his semester of MOOCs a B grade, saying that these disruptive Web programs will “likely have enormous real-world impact” and “may even be life-changing.” Lest he sounds totally won over, Jacobs is sure to add a dose of skepticism: Universities of “brick, mortar and ivy” are wonderful places to network, he reminds the reader. And, to show his good humor, he points out that Internet college is not a Playboy-certified party school. 

This article was published only a couple of days after members of the University faculty union met with officials of the administration to discuss pay increases. Faculty salaries at UO are among the lowest in the United States. Low faculty pay, high tuition costs, debilitating student debt — it certainly looks like higher education needs a swift, disruptive kick to the curb.

That would be too easy, but to the TED set, everything has an easy fix as long as you “gamify” or “apptomize” or disrupt it. However, such pursuits sacrifice deep, critical understanding of how and why the world works (or doesn’t work) in favor of shallow, whiz-bang tinkering. As impressive as these feats may be, they’re only as good as the next disruption.

Of course, that’s how life goes: You solve one problem, only for another to arise, requiring another solution. Alas, MOOCs are not the solution to our education problem. They are an alternative, and as a culture we have confused alternatives and solutions. How does one solve a problem? Suppose that there is no alternative, and start from there. Figure out how to go through the problem, not around it. An app is not an answer, but a diversion.

The promise of online academies is really the promise of an escape from inefficient, human imperfection. It is a part of a certain view of humanity, one that declares the world is perfect. It is a view held by humans who aspire to be computers.

MOOCs are diverting the attention and money of the people in our country who have a lot of attention and money to give, away from the education system we already have. But we broke that, and in order to truly fix it we first have to acknowledge that somewhere down the road we messed up badly. It is easier not to.

When the founders of this country got all pissed off at the British for taxing their tea or whatever and started killing them for it, there existed in the 13 colonies a patchwork of privately-owned presses, churning out pamphlets, tracts and newspapers. These journalistic enterprises bore little resemblance to the publications we read today. They were ludicrously, often downright criminally sensationalistic, full of bile and vitriol toward whomever the publisher didn’t like — whether they were government officials or that awful neighbor next door. They looked and read more like the untamed elements of the blogosphere of today than anything else.

Despite all this, despite the unprofessionalism and flagrant negligence of the best journalistic practices by these founding publishers, we live in the country they built, one pamphlet at a time. Despite all of their faults — and there were many — these “infamous scribblers,” as George Washington called them, obviously spoke to something real at the core of the human condition or whatever you want to call it. They showed that the truth needs advocates. That beyond just reporting the facts, a newspaper’s role is to give opinions, to persuade, to agitate.

Which is why we’re bringing back, after an overlong hiatus, the opinion page to the Emerald. This is the section of the paper reserved for you, to talk to us and each other, to offer your own views on things and to get real 1770s with it and mouth off if necessary. It’s your patriotic duty to do so.

Before we really get started with this whole thing, allow me to introduce myself. I come to the Emerald after writing and editing for Flux and Ethos magazines; last year, I wrote for the Emerald as an arts and culture columnist. I like to wear bow ties, and I’m generally fond of all sartorial matters (I have theories of style and everything.) I am a rap music enthusiast — I love Kanye West, Organized Konfusion, the Gravediggaz, Gucci Mane, all sorts of trap rap and the Black Hippy collective  — and I find arguments involving putting the word “real” in front of “hip-hop” utterly boring and loathsome. The less said about Odd Future and their abysmal racket, the better. Most of the time, though, I’m listening to podcasts like “This American Life” and “Bullseye.” I enjoy Nicolas Cage on a deeper level than you.

As I draw this column to a close, I’d like to share with you a philosophy of living, one I have borrowed from Gore Vidal and Oscar Wilde: You’ll get a lot farther in life if you’re amusing about serious things and serious about amusing ones. And, to steal from Thoreau, if you’ve built your castles in the air, you’ve done most of your work already — in the air is where your castles belong. Now build your foundations.

On Monday night, the first citations under the Social Host Ordinance — passed unanimously by the city council in January — were issued to the residents of a house on 17th Avenue and Mill Street. Each resident was fined $700 for hosting an unruly social gathering, violating noise disturbance laws and allowing minors to consume alcohol. The purpose of the ordinance is to decrease these behaviors, to make the streets quieter and safer and to increase harmony between college students and the residents of Eugene. Alas, by criminalizing such youthful indiscretions, the Social Host Ordinance effectively criminalizes youth.

When I set out to write on this topic, I was prepared to chastise my fellow students for their apathy and inaction; Democracy is all about showing up and you get laws like this when you don’t show up. I was surprised, pleasantly so, when I found that we did show up in large numbers, made our voices heard, turning city hall meetings into somewhat unruly gatherings. And what happened? The ordinance passed 8-0. Either the spokespersons against the Social Host Ordinance were remarkably unpersuasive and unreasonable or we don’t matter. In the eyes of legislators, the young — as a demographic of voters and citizens — do not matter.

The ignored root of conflict in our society is, and always has been, not race or gender or religion or class, but age — old versus young. In an article called “The War Against Youth,” published in Esquire one year ago, Stephen Marche writes, “Nobody ever talks about generational conflict. Who wants to bring up that the old are eating the young at the dinner table? How are you going to mention that to your boss? If you’re a politician, how are you going to tell your donors? Even the Occupy Wall Street crowd, while rejecting the modes and rhetoric and institutional support of Boomer progressives, shied away from articulating the fundamental distinction that fills their spaces with crowds: young against old.”

The reason this conflict is ignored is simple: Young becomes old; disenfranchised becomes enfranchised; that young and dumb hippie in the 1960s becomes old and wise in the 1980s. Because it is by nature transient, youth might be the last acceptably oppressed minority in modern America. Employers are allowed to rummage through potential employees’ Facebook profiles for indecent, incriminating material — a de facto ageist discrimination. Many employers also rely on unpaid, college-age interns to do work that would have come with a paycheck only 25 years ago. One recalls the slogan printed in The Baffler journal: “Interns Built the Pyramids.” And finally, billions of dollars in entitlement programs will suck dry this generation and generations yet born. With all this, it is no wonder that college students just want to get wasted and unruly while they still can.

A possible, no doubt unintended consequence of the Social Host Ordinance is that it could transform normal, rowdy house parties into stages for social protest. Like most things of this generation, it is vapid and self-absorbed, but it just might be the only revolution we have left. Now that we have entered the age of the Social Host Ordinance, we may indeed have to fight for our right to party.