Starting a riot is easy. There are just two steps.

Step one: Make sure that people have nothing better to do. People prefer to do just about anything fun rather than riot. They’d much rather listen to music, dance, etc. So, in order to start a riot, you have to take all these other opportunities away from them.

Step two: Once you’ve created a huge mass of bored people, annoy them. That’s the spark that will set them off.

The Veishea Committee is doing an excellent job of this. They’re a textbook example of how to make people riot. Just look at their actions:

They briefly toyed with the idea of having the guy who runs People’s Bar book the music acts for Veishea. People’s Bar regularly has extremely popular bands and sold-out shows. So, allowing the same guy to choose the bands for Veishea would clearly have resulted in bands that are much too popular. People would have been so busy listening to music and shakin’ their booties that they wouldn’t have had time to riot. Wisely, the Veishea Committee changed its mind and gave the job of booking bands to some unnamed administrator, who’ll probably arrange to have Muzak piped in. No bands have been announced yet. Just to annoy people even more, they’ve put a P.C. gloss on this decision, saying that People’s Bar has music that some people might not like, and they don’t want to exclude anyone. The Veishea Committee will only allow music that “everyone will like.” This probably means bands that are extremely boring. Can you think of any decent band that no one dislikes? I didn’t think so.

Some of you might remember the radio station that “everyone liked” last year. KURE, the student-run station, offered to play music for Veishea for free. They play so many different types of music that everyone would have been happy with at least some of their songs. But the Veishea Committee instead paid some Des Moines station that played nothing but ’80s pop one night and nothing but ’70s pop the other night. Since everyone’s heard all these songs approximately a billion times already, this was extremely boring. Surprisingly, last year, the boring music wasn’t quite enough to make people riot. The Veishea Committee is clearly trying harder this year, making the live music just as boring as the recorded music was last year.

Another fun thing that might distract people from rioting is the Veishea Parade. My club wanted to march in the parade, so we filled out the proper form and turned it in on time. We got a form letter back, saying that 50 clubs had applied but they could only select 25. Only 50 percent of the people who want to be involved in the parade are even allowed in it! What are those other 25 clubs supposed to do? They can’t go listen to any interesting music. Maybe the Veishea Committee should cut back even further and not allow anyone to march in the parade. That would be even more boring and annoying.

Last year, I tried to watch the parade. A float would go by, and then there would be a gap of several minutes. People would peer down the street waiting for the next float. A perfect combination of boredom and annoyance! It’s a good thing the Veishea Committee isn’t allowing too many clubs to fill in those blank spaces with anything interesting.

Of course, the administration’s most famous effort to annoy people is the “Dry Veishea” ruling. This top-down imposition of authority on a supposedly “student-run” festival is guaranteed to annoy everyone on many levels. On the simplest level, students who want to get drunk are annoyed that someone’s trying to stop them. Judging from the beer-soaked opinions I’ve heard, many people intend to get extra drunk this year, just to spite Jischke. On another level, even students who don’t drink anyway are annoyed that the administration of ISU is attempting to control our personal, off-campus lives. ISU’s even influenced the government of Ames to impose stricter laws for Veishea, and attempted to control local businesses, despite the fact that they have no legal authority to do so. What a masterpiece of annoyance! By casting the ISU administration as an oppressive regime, they’re practically guaranteeing that the students will take on the role of rebels. What a brilliant job of manipulation.

I hope that this letter has clarified the reasons for some of the ISU administration’s recent actions, which otherwise would make no sense. They clearly want us to riot. The only question remaining is “Why?”

Melissa A. Kacalanos

Graduate student

Genetics

Editor’s note: Tom Zmolek, the manager of People’s Bar And Grill, is the current Veishea promoter.