In Defence of De Min

I've heard it said around the hallowed halls[1] of the #1 Law School in Australia[2] that De Min is a sorry excuse for a publication; a journal of absolutely no note that serves only as a soapbox for hypocritical malcontents[3] to fruitlessly snipe at their fellows in law student politics. All of which might be perfectly accurate;[4] still, I must object. Not to the content of the comments below every article that mentions the recent MULSS election, but to any imputation that such charges amount to criticism of our beloved student publication. And so I find myself moved to write, in De Fence of De Min, of the sense of the sublime instilled in me upon reading a recent article.

My synapses were set a-tingling at the first - "A spectre is haunting..." - for I knew that to see so bold a filching from the Manifesto in a student publication meant that I was about to read the thoughts and furies of a literary talent befitting a second-year polsci student. I expected spittle, blissfully unaware self-implication in minor acts of immorality, and an unstated sense of entitlement that can only come from failing upwards one's entire life. And let me tell ya folks, I was not left wanting. But imagine my delight to find, six paragraphs in, so abrupt a change of topic that I was left reeling. To draw your readers in with platitudes of a problem universally acknowledged before awkwardly framing a personal vendetta as a case in point - why, it takes practice to care for the ills of the world only as far as one is personally affected, and here I beheld a master of the art.

"But why," you fairly ask, "would you want to read such drivel?"

Allow me to answer my rhetorical device by means of simile. Consider the McDonalds Cheeseburger. A $3.65[5] agglomeration of industrial starches and congealed fats, eating one is by any measure an objectively dreadful experience. And yet, by virtue of that one burger I ate while pissed drunk at 19 in the gutter by the 24 hour Elizabeth Street Maccas, every cheeseburger I have eaten since then has evoked the chemical memory of that perfectly contextualised ur-burger, and is transmuted into something subjectively good.

As the cheeseburger is, dearest void, so be de Min. Reading it calls to mind those heady days of my first weeks of my first semester of my first degree, with my youthful potential stretching out ahead of me and a stack of student magazines toppling to my side. I picked a copy up and beheld the articles within - so much passion! so much pique! so much unattributed borrowing from core readings that I, too, would briefly skim in due course! While nothing can truly return what time generally and two years of MLS specifically has taken from me, reading de Min evokes that fading memory of feeling so young that I still thought that student politics mattered enough to whinge about. So I must stand in defence of this august[6] journal and applaud its utterly gutless anonymous contributors[7] for never letting the pettiness to be found in stupol north of Grattan Street lift from our hearts.

[1] Read: FB group chats.
[2] Now #5 in the world; moving on up, natch.
[3] Excepting, of course, the competent satires within.
[4] Read: is.
[5] When did a cheeseburger get so dang expensive?.
[6] Read: rotten to the core.
[7] And I am proud to now count myself among their number.


Anonymous is a Second Year JD Student.