Founded as a protest to American involvement in the Vietnam War, the Mifflin Street Block Party has now devolved to the point where students feel like they’re fighting the power by calling out the poor production value of a YouTube clip. There is something pathetic about a generation that can’t even fake a good cause for the excuse to get drunk. 

Compounding this stupidity is the utter worthlessness of the event itself. If you have never been to Mifflin, here’s a quick reconstruction: Gather 15 or 20 of your most distant friends and friendliest acquaintances into a small room, get drunk, start yelling, and see which piece of furniture escaped without an indelible odor of piss.

If it’s patronizing, as so many have said, to instruct “adults” not to attend Mifflin, one wonders about the status of the “No Public Urination” signs placed prominently about a crowded daytime street, an admonition that most find wholly unnecessary after preschool. Yet, according to the gaggle of commentators, while it’s patronizing to advise students against attendance, doing so is simultaneously an attempt by the university to abdicate responsibility. Some have even gone so far as to say that the YouTube clip Dean of Students Lori Berquam uploaded and then removed will increase attendance. This reveals, in a delectable way, the pedigrees of those likely to partake.

Considering the laughable criticisms of a video with the only “ulterior” purpose of preventing a bunch of moronic students from irrevocably harming themselves, one can only conclude that we doth protest too much. One senses that just beneath the surface there is recognition of Mifflin’s idiocy, given the extravagance of the pouting – which is over an event that costs Madison taxpayers an extra $130,000 each year for policing alone, the Wisconsin State Journal reports, and that results in innumerable arrests, sexual assaults and injuries. It’s natural to suspect those who childishly defend an event where the closest resemblance to entertainment is a couple of besotted bros brawling over a porta potty.

There is one substantive portion of the video: the assertion that Mifflin makes smart people do stupid things, with which I disagree. A more proper pronouncement would have said that Mifflin makes stupid people reassess on just how stupid they are willing to be. So shame on you, Lori Berquam. Had you realized just what quality a student body you were addressing, this whole fiasco could have been avoided. Having said that, one looks forward to seeing just how far supposedly intelligent persons are willing to degrade themselves.

I trust that while you’re being arrested, stabbed or doing God-knows-what while black-out drunk, you’ll have the absence of mind to make it as clownish as possible. So for my sake at least, go to Mifflin.

Vincent Dumas ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in history and philosophy and minoring in computer science.