What’s been going on in this column? I have tried to make it a relatively ruthless criticism of everything existing, specifically in our culture. I have tried to get you thinking about how unsexy T-Pain is, how frats are undemocratic and why drinking underage is way better than drinking legally. Quite often, then, oppression, repression and resistance. So it is only fair, if I have ruthlessly critiqued things like my community’s sometimes blind support for Israeli policies, that the column now ruthlessly critique itself.

If I have gone so far as to deconstruct, then this column will now deconstruct itself.

Really, Marvin Gaye’s refrain “what’s going on,” might have been a better title.

It started as cosmology. Cosmology technically means the study of the world’s existence, but to me it just meant Big Ideas, like nationalism and belief in God. Those are things that we prefer to accept rather than to discuss, and I feared boring you. So I figured I would do it colloquially, on the rocks. And I called my first column “Nationalism Feels Good!” Yay!

But as I learned from the anthropological study of nationalism, nationalism also kills and then celebrates it. If you’ve ever wondered where I came up with this crazy talk, it’s just what I’m learning in school — the humanities, that is. Prof. Brann never tires of reminding us that your view might compel you, but there’s another view that compels someone else. Prof. Willford’s class on nationalism taught me that the nation is imagined, and it is an ongoing and sometimes deadly project. No nationalism.

And no cosmology, if it causes or ignores human suffering.

The humanities make room for a type of religion that is about the real live redemption of human suffering. Emmanuel Levinas wondered “if there isn’t a certain connection between the establishment of working hours and the love of God …” He was even inclined to believe, “there are not many other ways to love God than to establish these working hours correctly, no way that is more urgent.”

Fair contracts for Cornell workers. Acceptance of gays and lesbians in religious groups. No Philosophy, and certainly no Religion, until then.

As for Enlightenment, which is its own religion? OK, but not the part that operated an international slave trade, teaches Prof. Susan Buck-Morss. And not the neo-conservative Enlightenment of the Middle East. Buck-Morss really changed things when she directed our seminar’s research efforts to the mall, or the outmoded strip mall. In that spirit, “Cosmology on the Rocks” has attempted philosophy at the mall and the frat party, where I think it matters.

And no “On the Rocks.” Colloquial writing is nice, but now “on the rocks” seems to me like something you’d say at the Statler Lounge. Still, I’ve got a dependency that I’ll come out and admit: alcohol has been my most secret weapon. Whenever I wrote something I thought would piss you off or put you to sleep, BAM, booze reference. If it didn’t work, I’m sorry.

With this last alcohol reference, it would only be fitting to end with Slope Day. But that doesn’t mean I won’t get in a word about it. Like graduation, it’s another ending, another sexy but fleeting construction: there’s always the morning after. Or maybe the night before: Last Call, I am so pumped for our Slope Day eve sleepover where we drink beer, watch How I Met Your Mother and share our feelings.

Like many of you, I am pumped, really pumped. I don’t want to go to class (at least not before the pregame). Enough honors thesis. To quote Sir Mix-a-Lot, I’m tired of magazines, er, journals.

Let’s start the revolution. Tomorrow, 9 a.m. My friend Brian is making Keystone ice-pops.

Sounds radical, huh? Well, radical but fenced in (an oxymoron). That is the principle of the fence around the slope: you have one slope and one day to be radical. Use it or lose it. That may be “what’s going on”: a one day trial of anarchism. Regardless, happy Slope Day.

The point of asking this question, “what’s going on,” is to make things better for the have-nots. And the humanities will keep asking it even as schools around the country are applying cost-benefit analysis to every department, finding (surprise!) that English and History don’t make money and defunding them. For me and many classmates, though, this is all the more reason to keep funding the humanities, to keep asking just what is going on with our world and our institutions.

Studying and living here has been a paradise for me that I think most people only dream of. And the very excess of it is, more than graduation, something I still can’t totally fathom. But I am grateful.

So, mom and dad, thanks.