Let’s end elections. For good. The presidential primary season has begun with, well, torpor. The campaigning is excruciatingly early, the positions reliably hackneyed, and the lobbyists’ money flows like cheap beer at a fraternity party. The system is stagnant, and ordinary Americans, especially younger ones, are disenchanted. So like Jonathan Swift, I have a modest proposal.

Imagine an American family seated together around the television on the first Tuesday of November watching — wait for it! — the selection — of the President of the United States of America. That’s no typo. What if we picked the President by lottery? Surely no one would object to exchanging a new dystopia for our current one.

Academia is a culture of openness, a culture of scrutiny. It’s a culture of tough questions and uncomfortable answers.

Yet on issue after issue, Cornell’s policy amounts to a betrayal of the values that make it great, a betrayal of its folk status as the “People’s Ivy,” and a betrayal of the admissions office’s pet claim that Cornell is “Elite,” but “Not Elitist.”

The issue lies with the kudzu vine of institutional exclusiveness that is choking open discussion and debate throughout the Cornellian system.

One of my first assignments on The Sun was covering the Student Assembly. I could say it was like covering the Jerry Springer beat, but I won’t. It wouldn’t be fair to Jerry’s rotating cast of teenage vampires, dysfunctional families and paternity-test foursomes.

The kids on the S.A. are hardworking and mean well, but the fact is that most Cornellians just don’t pay attention. When they do, they see the S.A. as a cage match’s worth of backbiting, infighting, self-aggrandizing Tracy Flicks.

Which is why the S.A. needs to change. I’m not saying we need to raise the tenor of the debate. I’m saying we need to bring the blood sport to the masses. Let’s give a vote on the Student Assembly to anyone who shows up with a student I.D.

“That’s what’s so great about this new kind of activism: it’s convenient. Just like masturbation. It’s better than sex, because it’s on your own time.”

— Stephen Colbert

Picture the American political beast. I am thinking of a huge obese lizard with all kinds of spines and slime coming out of him. Like Jabba the Hutt with horns and teeth. Ooh! Ooh! Remember “Pizza the Hut” from Spaceballs? Just wondering. My point is, this guy — or gal! — doesn’t like to move. For the average American politician, the costs of violating the status quo are prohibitively high. Often, it takes a Taser to the belly to, ahem, encourage action.

“This is where the money is,” the Bloomberg rep told me. And sure enough, Tuesday’s career fair was a place for people who aren’t satisfied with the prospect of banking, say $5 million a year, and really, really (really!) need to make at least 10. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. The Career Fair, I believe the headline says, is Decadent and Depraved. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, either.

Free enterprise and those who practice it — from Ghanaians selling Foakleys in Battery Park to lobstermen sailing out of Gloucester harbor to the most cutthroat of hedge and private equity fund managers — are part, if not all, of what makes America, well, America.

Cornell, according to the delicate geniuses over at Newsweek, is so hot right now. I can’t understand why; not when the University’s unsurpassed ability to choose staggeringly mediocre graduation speakers is a perennial embarrassment.

Of course, in the Annals of Completely Moronic Ideas (a leather-bound volume available in Olin and Uris libraries and by electronic reserve), Cornell’s entries are some of the most putrid stinkers of the lot. Like the Public Relations department’s decision to print up some totally spiffy “Hottest Ivy” celluloid buttons.

It’s this kind of narrow attitude and utter lack of foresight that leads to mistakes: mistakes like 12 shots of SoCo, the Iraq War and a convocation keynote by Soledad O’Brien.

It’s the first day of classes, so David Wittenberg thinks he can still get away with a column about stuff that happened over the summer.

Bong Hitz 4 Jesus. There. I just said it. How do you like me now, Supreme Court?

If Justice Stevens had wanted to do his dissent properly, he would have told Sarah Silverman’s version of The Aristocrats from the bench. On the same day that the Supreme Court protected Corporate America’s right to muck up our elections, it delivered a sucker punch — the kind with a roll of pennies squeezed in its balled-up fist — to high school students’ sacred right to say stupid stuff. I mean what I said there. High school kids ought to have a right to say stupid stuff.

Deckhead:

The Scoop

Body:

I still have a cardboard cutout of Mo Vaughn in my room at home in Newton, Mass. There’s a Pedro Martinez rookie card in a prominent space on my bookshelf and a Nomar Garciappara t-shirt somewhere at the back of my closet. As a lifelong baseball fan, I know this is a special time of the year.

The conservatives couldn’t even keep their hands off Kurt Vonnegut ’44. Fox News’ obit of Our Man in Heaven (which you can see yourself at politicstv.com) was too smoothly executed to be a hatchet job. So let’s just call it a job.

The yokels over at Fox knocked the life’s work of one of the most famous Sunnies ever as “sci-fi mumbo jumbo” and “left-wing screeds.” They said he could never hope for “induction into the great pantheon of American writers.”

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