UCLA student columnist Alec Mouhibian has churned out a gem of an article that would be utterly hilarious if the phenomen it captures weren’t so depressing. He begins: “In order to ride a high horse for any considerable length of time without getting sore, you need a fancy saddle. A group of righteous high horse hobbyists on campus has chosen the accusation of murder as theirs.”

He goes on to chronicle the parade of absurdities put forth by a student group called “Coke-Free Campus,” which “wants to ban Coca-Cola products from UCLA because some of the casualties of the ongoing civil war in Colombia have allegedly included union leaders and Coca-Cola factory workers.”

In a classic case of campus activism for activism’s sake, these anti-Coke student protestors have taken an issue about which they know very little and used it to build a pyramid of anti-capitalist platitudes. They rail against the sinister profit motives and corporatism of Coca Cola, even as the company has acted as a beacon of stability and productivity in a war-torn country. One Colombian professor familiar with the situation calls the company a “rare force for saving lives.”

Mouhibian chronicles some priceless banalities from the anti-Coke crowd: comparisons of the company to “apartheid, Vietnam, the genocide of black people in the Sudan region”; “We support workers, we don’t support Coke”; “It’s all for profit!”

And then there is this sequence:

[One of the protestors] admitted Coke isn’t the one doing the killing. . . . The paramilitary in Colombia is the one causing all these deaths, massacres and tortures.” Two minutes later, she was chanting: ‘Cherry, diet or vanilla: Coca-Cola is a killa.’”

Maybe they can get partial credit for lyricism.