I fall in the latter category. I like to think of myself, in words from the tragically cancelled Deadwood, as “Chief officer...of air-headed smugness and headlong plunges...into the fucking abyss.” It has a certain musicality.

Or at least I did until recently, when an AdHoc editor suggested that people who work for a political magazine should read the news. Consequentially, I'm wading into the inky, crinkly world of newspaper reading. Now I can debate with conviction a wide range of current issues, as long as they've appeared in campus publications since September.

It seems incomprehensible for someone to live nearly 22 years acquainted only casually with the real world, but then, we're at a university, and I study the arts. And in academic circles, it's perfectly defensible to run from facts. There is a particular brand of established ignorance for everyone who refuses to follow the news.

Artists and bibliophiles, who can't let facts impinge on their sensitivities, glorify a certain romantic disengagement. Press them hard enough, and they may even pronounce that literature is truer than fact. Current events, after all, are ephemeral and can only have an impermanent effect, while literature imparts unchanging, essential truths. Or, if you're a deconstructionist, go with the argument that “facts” are really facets of constructed narratives, just as much stories as this week's text for Origins of Literary Imagining.

The funny thing is, once you start caring about current events, it's really sort of fun. Among the many benefits of a news addiction are liberation from the pressure to mask ignorance (as it turns out, it's much easier just to skim the headlines) and a whole new set of opinions for starting overheated arguments when things get dull. There's even a sense of control: Schoolhouse Rock promised that knowledge is power, and that confident glow persists even when knowledge in no way catalyzes action. Given the perks, you'd think everyone would jump on the knowledge bandwagon. What's keeping them? Is it really just insurmountable laziness?

Probably, yes. But as I'm still acquiring the taste for bitter reality, I prefer a more sympathetic explanation: we like to believe in the goodness of people. This grows difficult with the ever growing accumulation of facts that suggest they are inherently chaotic and violent. Between Darfur, AIDS, global warming, nuclear proliferation, and our own country's innumerable policy blunders, it's hard to know where to begin to worry, much less how to formulate solutions. It's easy to see how such threatening complexities might turn students who once cared, voted, rallied, petitioned, and debated away from the world.

But preserving our ideals by refraining from engaging with the world is cowardly. It requires a refocusing of attention on oneself, divesting responsibility for the state of things. This careful shielding of ideals renders them irrelevant and ultimately dead. Awful as the exterior world may be, idealists have to respond to real problems, not pretend they don't exist.

In a strange way, the Minutemen protest has provided a healthy jolt to the willfully isolated. The only way to remain perfectly unaware would be to refuse to read any campus publications, e-mails, or posters, talk to friends, or leave one's room. Not only does everyone know about the Minutemen protest, but everyone can talk about it and the many issues it raises. Free speech! Immigration! Columbia's disciplinary policies! The farce that is FOX News! Anyone can feign an understanding of current events with this one. And when you pretend to care, you may find yourself forming opinions and even reading newspapers to back those opinions up.