When I got back from class last Friday, the airwaves were buzzing with the release of the Starr report to the public. I watched the press conferences, reports and commentators and listened to my next door neighbor read aloud the more interesting parts of the report off the Internet. I couldn’t help but feel disappointed, but I wasn’t exactly sure why.

It wasn’t any disbelief that something like this could happen, or that old Bill let me down. In fact, I knew he was a low-down, sleazy horn ball when I voted for him two years ago.

Then I thought it might be the Starr report. Maybe there was some resentment because this only came to surface after one man’s personal witch hunt. Maybe it was because taxpayers spent $40 million on something that I could find in a Penthouse at a truck stop for five bucks, without defecating on everyone in my path and wiping with the Constitution. But then I realized that I wasn’t really that mad about that either.

A few days later I put my finger on the source of my anger. It seems that our society and government has somehow fallen under elementary school rule. How so?

Imagine, if you will, yourself at age seven in school working hard to figure out what 7+12 is. The teacher tells everyone that it’s time for lunch, and as if no one in the room has ever been to lunch, you all grab your brown bags and lunch money and stampede to the door to be first in line.

But today is not like other days. Today you drop your lunch, and the rocket scientist next to you gets the idea to stomp on your lunch. Of course, everyone around is shocked by the incident, and the girl that always narcs screams for the teacher.

Then the teacher comes and yells at the kid and makes him apologize, even though it’s obvious to a 7-year- old that if the person is at all sorry it’s only because they got caught, and it will only be another hour before the same scientist will be testing how hard they can kick a ball at your head.

It seems old Bill has stomped on my lunch. No matter how much he apologizes, or even if he gets thrown in the iron maiden, I’m still stuck swallowing some purple mass that used to be my peanut butter and jelly sandwich. As I look at my bag of crumbs that used to be cookies, I can’t profess to be too interested in obligatory justice.

At recess everyone runs outside and starts to worry about being picked last for the kickball team. Or perhaps you might find yourself in a heated debate about which girl has the worst cooties.

Meanwhile, inside the school, teachers are busy putting you in the low reading group just because they don’t like you or writing things down in your records that can cause you pain and hardship for the rest of your public education.

While we run around worrying about lying about oral sex, that tricky Clinton is busy cutting deals with the Chinese, the details of which haven’t yet surfaced. Just a couple of months ago, a large U.S. corporation that is interested in cheap rocket launches from China ‘accidentally’ gave the Chinese a document that is nearly an intercontinental ballistic missile cookbook.

When I don’t live four blocks from Ames Lab, I live two miles from West Law in Eagan and 18 miles from the Federal Reserve Bank in Minneapolis. That makes me a nuclear target all-star and a whole lot more worried if Bill had anything to do with this than anything else.

As I recall, the last guy we elected president was the former director of the CIA. As far as I can tell, the only thing that would motivate someone to be the director of the CIA is the burning desire to meet Satan. Being the cheese of the CIA is probably the most efficient route to hell. When you’re not helping people shoot Argentine college students out of cargo planes over the Atlantic, you can prop up governments against the will of everyone in the country.

Not to mention, that last president was up to his arm pits in Iran-Contra. But for some reason everyone is so worried about infidelity and having illegal immigrants as housekeepers that they don’t have to worry about truly disturbing things.

So everyone should wise up and change their ill ways?

Not unless you want everyone to go insane. I say if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. My r‚sum‚ is available upon request to anyone hiring an elementary school student. I figure an average day would include gluing pieces of pasta to construction paper, with periodic breaks to go outside for Nerf football. At the end of the day, I would show my macaroni masterpiece to an actress who would act like she was convinced that it was the greatest work of art she had ever seen and that it belonged in the Louvre, at which point she would put it on the fridge with magnets for all to see.

Forget about freedom — in the America of the 1990s, give me macaroni or give me death.

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Erik Hoversten is a senior in math and physics from Eagan, Minn.