Day 1
The People’s Emancipated Autonomous Commonwealth of the Lower Euphrates (P.E.A.C.E.) was founded on the quad between the beach-volleyball court and the registrar’s office. It looks much bigger from the inside.
Everyone is welcome: after the social-media-background check, that is, and the communicable-disease screening, the signing of the socialist compact, the recitation of a land acknowledgment to the Tribes of the Three Fires, and the administrative-reparative fee (donation) of two-fifths of one’s immediate family’s annualized income (nonrefundable). Please allow a reasonable interval for processing, and you’re in.
Welcome to the borderless, blockadeless future. Right this way. Single file.
Upon admission, a yellowvest (not to be confused with a greenshirt) escorted me to the commonwealth’s manicured residential district. She (coincidentally, my freshman-year anthropology professor) issued me a keffiyeh, a pack of disposable masks, and Lime Crime blue-smoke cruelty-free semipermanent hair dye. This is our color revolution. Bring your own REI Skyward 4 or equivalent mobile home pre-approved by the tentowners’ association, voted in last Tuesday. Everything that isn’t mandatory is forbidden; sexual relations aren’t mandatory. This isn’t your parents’ revolt.
The terminal, imperial capitalism in which we were born was bound to be consumed by its innate contradictions, which were plain enough to our generation. The West’s tyranny exposed them. Our new order will resolve them — just as the great thinkers of the 18th and 19th centuries predicted. Marxism is the religion of P.E.A.C.E.
Day 17
We, the Remainers, rejected the agreement reached between the school’s administration and our (former) comrade Hayden Thomas. That fifth-columnist, the chief Exiteer, never spoke for all of us. His band of opportunists has decamped. Have heart. Conscience-stung townies have been seen tarrying around campus, purifying, diversifying our ranks. The suburbs are ours.
What did they expect? Look, chancellor: Trotsky promised us permanent revolution, which I take to mean permanent purpose. Board of trustees, listen here: George Orwell had the Spanish Civil War. Our grandparents had Vietnam (draft cards, meet combustion). Our parents had Afghanistan, Iraq: causes of mass seduction. What do we have? Vague furious resistance is the cause of our age.
Day 63
A chain of yellowvests, joined at the hip and cubital fossa, secured the perimeter of Hedon Hall. The greenshirts liberated the building of all Western-coded furniture (steel chairs, bookshelves, whiteboards — ottomans and footstools can stay). Make more “living space” for our growing realm. Witness history. Look at the emancipatory barricades.
This is how Bowdoin St. Pierre, our first citizen (we are all equal), addressed the decolonization detachment before it was sent to settle the building, now called Hebron Hall:
We are outcasts from the iniquity of those who gave us this world. Our worst enemies are not they, who rightly harm their enemies, but those who force their friends to become enemies. . . . We are actors in a new era in which we can have no truck with the mentality of the past. We have the strength of our truth, backed by the reality of our power. Our army has in it the flower of youth. . . . [illegible]