The gore-drenched spirits of Hernan Cortes and Francisco Pizarro descended on campus on Friday, cutting a bloody swathe through the mindsets of the student body as they relentlessly colonized the political worldviews of Columbia students. Trailed by an army of armor-clad ghouls in Spanish imperial garb, carrying pikes and harquebuses, the two conquistadors set out to relentlessly suppress the development of triumphal post-colonialist narratives while retarding the progress of the social justice movement.
“We have come to aid our brothers in the fraternities, the Columbia bureaucracy and the economics department in the perpetuation of Euro-American empire for another millennia,” said Cortes in a flawless Westchester accent, approving a stack of white Beta brothers’ JP Morgan applications with his left hand while waving a flaming lance in his right. “Just as I burned the armies of Cholula, so too will I crush the spirits of progressive college radicals in Morningside Heights.”
While cannonballs of white privilege rained down on liberal fortifications in Joe’s Coffee and the Butler café, Columbia’s Women and Gender Studies, Human Rights and Comparative Literature majors began to collectively renounce their academic interests and political beliefs. Pizarro’s “Famous 13” expeditioners, their gold chains clanking as they circled overhead, brutally conquered the political mentalities of students not “woke” enough to engage in successful resistance.
Crying for deliverance, campus activists subjected to the imperial yoke found themselves unwillingly undergoing long-belated haircuts, filling out applications for finance internships and reading assigned class material instead of just repeatedly asking why more writers from subaltern populations weren’t included on the syllabus. However, a majority of humanities professors, deprived of the bulk of their lecture material, stayed at home and filled out law school applications.
“As a cisgendered, heterosexual white male, it was of course my duty to heed the cry of my brethren at Columbia and institutionalize oppression from 110th street all the way to 125th, if need be,” said Francisco Pizarro. His soldiers, draped in the finery they had stolen from the Inca imperial capital in Cuzco, cheered wildly as psychologically subjugated Columbia students began subscribing to the Wall Street Journal and mass-downvoting liberal comments on Bwog.
“Truly, I, like every other man at Columbia with my physical characteristics and sexual preferences, nurse a vision of enforcing my white supremacist ideology on all the minorities I can find,” said Pizarro, reaching down from the saddle of his ghostly white steed to decapitate the Marxist principles of a Barnard junior. “Viva Espana! Viva!”
Resistance was sporadic and feeble, but holdouts from the International Socialist Organization, Barnard-Columbia Divest, Columbia and Barnard for Bernie, No Red Tape, and Students for Justice in Palestine clustered together in a foxhole in Avery. The rebels used mounds of plaid scarves, unused deodorant canisters and copies of Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” to keep out the colonizing demons. Clad only in Che shirts and pajamas, as per usual, the students decided to wage a guerilla postcolonial feminist insurgency.
“We will never give in, never surrender, never compromise!” said Barnard-Columbia Divest president Paulina Miller, as the ephemeral vapors of Cortes’s army began to trail under the doorway. Midway through a rant about fracking bans, Miller froze solid, blinked, and began to intone professions of love for Morgan Stanley in a low monotone.
“Thanks to these swarthy Spanish conquistadors, I’ve realized the love of my life: day trading,” she said. “I’ve got six job offers, I haven’t checked Jezebel in almost forty-five minutes, and I’ve dropped my English major boyfriend for the starting running back.”
Within hours of Cortes’s and Pizarro’s arrival, the coed literary fraternity ADP reluctantly shuttered its doors and sold its townhouse for use as an Exxon Mobil refinery. The theatre program collapsed, the Intercultural Resource Center was converted into a military base and President Bollinger enthusiastically climbed atop a gold throne in front of Low, from which he used a tranquilizer gun to sedate activists.
“Our work here is done,” said Pizarro, his hand on Cortes’s shoulder as the two surveyed a campus full of newly pledged financial economics and math majors. “From beyond the grave, we have colonized America once again, proving that the patronizing jargon of Tumblr social justice warriors prophetically foresaw a real, hostile and uncomfortably attractive threat.”
Chanting “God Bless the USA,” the conquistadors faded into the background, promising to return in white men’s next hour of need.
