Schaff: Dispatches from Pitt’s 2016 CMU invasion

–CLASSIFIED–

April 17, 2016

Dearest Mother and… –CLASSIFIED–

April 17, 2016

Dearest Mother and Father,

I received those articles making specious comparisons between us and the Bush Administration’s Iraq War, and I know you meant well. But really, you’ve got to stop listening to the apologist media. Listen to me — shut your ears, shut your eyes, shut your mouth; whatever it takes to prevent yourself from being controlled. Otherwise, you’re un-American.

All these journalists want is for Chancellor George W. to fail and for our beloved University to flounder in its glorious crusade to bring a wave of Pitt-ocracy to the region. Publishing such fact-based reports that fairly depict Pitt’s administrative bungling of the ongoing war is tantamount to siding with the enemy: the bomb “threatenists,” as they’re now called. Anyone not with us is, by definition, against us — these despicable truth-tellers are nothing more than articulate threatenist sympathizers. They’re letting the threatenists win.

We cannot simply wake up tomorrow, as the bloodthirsty journalists demand, and accept that our invasion has descended into quagmire, that it sent thousands of young people into treacherous conditions based on false pretenses and that it’s provided an attentional diversion allowing University administrators to give themselves raises, all while sinking Pitt’s reputation on the international stage. Collectively taking such a cold shower of reason is dangerous. The infallibility of our leader shall not be compromised — we need to protect Pitt pride, after all.

Perhaps some renewed good will — like the kind we felt in early 2014 — could deflect these viciously accurate media attacks. You remember 2014, a short time after Chancellor W. assumed his current role, when Pitt buildings sustained their second round of successive, seemingly endless bomb threats. Facing the first round in 2012, Chancellor Mark Nordenberg, father of current Chancellor W. (his full name is George W. Nordenberg, but he prefers the name “W.”), limited his approach to treating the “threatenists” as only a traditional law enforcement problem. The bomb threats fizzled eventually, no doubt, but sure enough they resurfaced two years later, with faculty schedules compromised and students evacuated from exam periods. It was then that the son promised to finish the job his father started — to once and for all nip “threatenism” from where it had indubitably budded.

That’s why Chancellor W., mired in random bomb threats, decided to declare “The War on Threatenism” and invade Carnegie Mellon University.

All shades of mud were slung at the Chancellor over this most courageous decision — you’ve heard the buffoons in the media. When he could have devoted precious focus to hunting down the real people responsible for terrorizing the Cathedral of Learning and Chevron Hall, Chancellor W. thought it more appropriate to squander political capital, institutional values and the educational experiment by spuriously directing blame at a regime with tenuous connection to the threatenists, so they say. When he could have listened to intelligence reports that CMU engineering students weren’t actually building weapons of mass intimidation (WMIs), Chancellor W. preferred to encase his ears in Roc’s panther head, so they say. And when, upon committing his institution to this course, he could have allocated the massive resources truly needed to support the CMU Occupation, he instead cut tuition, lost donors and raised his administrator buddies’ salaries and benefits, so they say. But who cares what they say? Remember, these Pitt pride-less ingrates are merely thinking with their heads; our Pitt generation will only achieve greatness if we follow the lead of Chancellor W. and base our understanding of the world on “gut feelings.”

Here’s one such gut feeling chock-full of extrapolatory power: Pitt’s 21-day “blitzkrieg” of a post-2014-bomb-threats court case whose ruling established blue-and-gold hegemony over Tartan plaid — we sure-as-heck busted those CMU lawyers’ bunkers — was nothing short of awesome. Therefore, anything Pitt administrators do or say must be similarly awesome — like the new policy, out of the “See Something, Frame Someone” campaign, or the installment of electronic “Patriot Peepers” in Pitt buildings, particularly bathrooms. Armed with these ubiquitous microphones, which can recognize “threatenist-like” mutterings the second they fall out of students’ mouths or other orifices, we can now valiantly protect our University’s honor by dishonoring our colleagues’ privacy rights.

But as much as we’ve judiciously put the rights of Pitt students on hold, we’re doing everything we can to address the plight of Carnegie Mellon students, which of course was the whole reason we initiated this pre-emptive war in the first place (unless of course someone finds WMIs in a CMU storage closet, or dining hall receipts of senior fugitive threatenist Al K. Ayda).

Yet, as the media likes to harp on, we’ve run into some “challenges” in getting that favor returned. For God’s sake, we’ve freed them from CMU’s ninth president, the evil, scheming, Hitler-look-alike Sallam Hosseini, and we’ve magnanimously gifted them with the imposition of Pitt’s superior academic values, without the money to implement them (as Chancellor W. says, there’s no need for modern warfare to necessitate budgetary sacrifice from the Pitt community). You’d think by this point they’d be finally greeting us as liberators.

But apparently they don’t know what’s good for them — just last week my convoy was hit by an IEDD, an “improvised, explosively disturbing device.” Designed by CMU robotic engineers-turned-insurgents, these anthropomorphic devices are found hidden in trash bags along the road and, upon discovery, spontaneously perform annoying pop songs from the 2000s (like Justin Bieber’s “Eenie Meanie”), evidently to strike fear in our occupying hearts. And judging from the material you sent, you’ve clearly seen how the agenda-driven media has made this ruthless, perverse IEDD tactic’s demoralizing effects a top story.

But don’t be too muddled in tragedy. The insurgency won’t last; we’ll be out of here in no time. Why? Chancellor George W. Nordenberg has declared that an extra-special guest has joined our side — God — and as He knows so well, there’s no better way to protect a campus from bomb threats than by overreacting.

Best wishes,

Cornelius Schaff

Vice Chancellor for War-Related Public Relations

University of Pittsburgh-Mellon

Write Matt Schaff at matthew.schaff@gmail.com.