BY FLETCHER WORTMANN

In print | October 2, 2008

On Thursday, Sept. 18, 2008, I noticed an 8 1/2½ by 11 piece of paper taped to the door of the Kohlberg lounge. Underneath a prominent MTV logo, it explained in small print that by entering the building the reader had authorized MTV productions to make use of their name and likeness for promotional purposes.

Placing such a flagrant, unapologetic violation of our Constitutional rights, perpetuated by a massive multimedia multinational no less, in the center of the Swarthmore campus takes a kind of genius. It is equivalent to, say, placing a handful of progressive college students wearing shockingly blue t-shirts in the middle of a campaign rally for a populist conservative, or shooting a blast of citronella directly into a cloud of angry gnats; it is like an angry tapeworm, a little malevolent tumor of injustice. From a sociological perspective, it could be viewed as a fantastic, horrible experiment into the disruption of equilibrium. It is evil, brilliantly so, a tiny masterpiece of evil like a Microsoft in miniature, and for this I salute you, MTV.

Indeed, I am sorry to admit that I allowed myself to be sort of infuriated, and actually started to consider ways to protest. I thought of drawing the MTV logo on a sheet of looseleaf and then attaching it by elastic to my face, but reconsidered when I realized that, if I saw someone else doing this, I would persuade them to remove it by repeatedly punching them. It occurred to me that I might skip class, sacrificing an irreplaceable hour-and-fifteen of my precious education in the name of civil rights. But I realized that I had my media studies course with Professor Rehak, and I’d have to tell him in advance, which I couldn’t do without entering Kohlberg. Although I thought of tossing a rock up at the classroom window to get his attention, and then telling him I was ditching for political reasons but if he opened the window and promised to lecture very very loudly I’d try to contribute, this all seemed ill-advised for a number of reasons. I considered a number of other options; hunger strike? petitions? boycott MTV itself, and leave my insatiable hunger for outrageous sixteenth-birthday party exposés and close-up confessionals forever unsated?

So I went to class, dismayed, silenced by the youth-oriented-music-entertainment establishment. Dejected, I asked my assembled classmates if any of them knew the reason for the filming. I was informed that they were filming the first-year seminar “Battling Against Voldemort” for a segment on MTV news.

I was really prepared to let the whole thing go, honestly, but there was no way in hell I was going to let them get away with that one without comment. There was only one sane reaction to this horrible goddamn situation. I filled my heart with hatred and my gut with firewhiskey. When the going gets weird the weird turn pro and when the going gets professional goddamnit the weird get wizardly.

By way of background: MTV was founded in 1981. The first video broadcast was “Video Killed the Radio Star” by The Buggles; the first words spoken on air were “ladies and gentlemen: rock and roll”. It was a declaration of purpose, then, an alternative lifestyle option for the garish dispossessed young suburbanites of the day. When I came of age, in the early aught-aughts, the network had modified its format to focus on Hot Tub Elimination Challenges and the music video for Sisqo’s “Thong Song”. Today, apparently, the network visits prominent liberal arts colleges and videotapes seminars on the supposed literary subtext of popular British children’s books about a boarding school of a most wizardly inclination, and the magical adventures that occur herein. Presumably forthcoming are “Tolkien Request Live” and “Hey Kids, You Like Those Sexy High-School Vampire Novels, Well Guess What So Do We” hosted by ’N Sync’s JC Chavez.
I leave it to my reader to consider the implications of this trajectory for teen culture, for higher education, and for the continued supremacy of the American empire.

I located my intended victims as soon as class ended. When I approached them the filmmakers were polite and courteous, clearly unaware I was about to go all Rita Skeeter on their asses. They were obviously fans; one’s shirt read “I solemnly swear I am up to no good,” a reference to the series’s roguish Marauders and their shenanigans. She agreed to speak to me, provided I swore that I was up to good and only good and she received explicit legal permission from MTV’s promotional department. It was not clear why she, a legitimate associate of an admittedly dubious news organization, was not allowed to speak to me, a highly dubious associate of a fairly legitimate one, but presumably there was enough legal Devil’s Snare involved to choke out any possibility of communication.

I subsequently spent forty-five minutes attempting to contact someone who had, as I eventually learned, left her job at MTV immediately after this year’s Video Music Awards; the show had featured a minor controversy involving the aggressive endorsement of abstinence by several artists, as well as a segment in which Cristina Aguilera, clad in a pleather straitjacket, rubbed her business all up on a pane of glass while intoning “Genie in a Bottle 2008.” This is enough to break the brain of any sane person, so I was not unsympathetic to the ex-publicist. Nonetheless, my hopes of penning a searing, venomous indictment of the hypocrisies of the American entertainment industry were tragically crushed.

I can offer you little by way of closure. In a brief, terse exchange the MTV people informed me that the instigating paper was a “cablecast sign,” apparently standard procedure while filming in public. The video segment has been posted on the MTV news website, and features suspiciously attractive freshmen discussing centaurs or something, as a fatherly voice helpfully informs viewers that the course indeed “fulfills a writing requirement for all majors since it combines literature, composition and theory” (Ladies and gentlemen: rock and roll). And our heroic maverick reporter, sadly lacking in actual content on which to report, was forced to conjure up an incoherent retrospective from press releases and dubious Wikipedia articles; regardless, he was able to complete his column by deadline and so escape the righteous judgment of the Board of the Phoenix.
So hey, abracadabra! All is well.

Fletcher Wortmann is a senior. By reading this column, you have authorized him to make use of your name and likeness for promotional purposes, and ­­­also granted him power of attorney. You are welcome to contact him at fwortma1@swarthmore.edu if you have any questions regarding his recent revisions to your life insurance policies.

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