Commie cred is important in college. The ability to dissect current events with a lefty laser beam--stripping away the TV reality will give you intellectual gravitas on campus. And that's not all. Important fact: While eggheads don't get laid in high school, they do in college.

Of course, it's not easy to stand out as a subversive guerrilla these days. Corporate marketers have figured out that lefties are hip--Che Guevara T-shirts, for example, are slick sale items at Urban Outfitters. Now that part of being a corporate clone incorporates left-wing signifiers, you've got to do a little work to distinguish yourself from the poseurs.

The perfect place to start is by reading French Marxist Herbert Marcuse's 1960s classic One Dimensional Man, because it actually--and presciently--explains things like why Che Guevara T-shirts are on sale at Urban Outfitters. From its sexy retro look--it was published in paperback in 1966 with a hip pop-art design--to its angry academic language, One Dimensional Man will give you an informed, cynical p.o.v. about everything. It will also arm you with the constant ability to subsume any counter-argument with accusations of "hegemony." Other basic texts include: Noam Chomsky's The Managua Lectures, James W. Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, Karl Marx's German Ideology, Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States, and--perfect for explaining why our cyber age is actually a surveillance state--Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish.

These left-wing staples, however, need to be fleshed out with a solid handle on current events. Using Marx's dialectical materialism to critique the USA PATRIOT Act without knowing what John Ashcroft said last week, for example, will make you look stupid. An easy way to stay on top of the news without much effort is to make a point of hitting some newsy websites every day. MSNBC.com and Salon.com's "From the Wire" are perfect.

Of course, you'll want to supplement your news gathering by perusing a few lefty periodicals at the library to give you the "larger context." There's a slew to choose from, but The Nation is the most topical and well reported of the bunch. A good one to actually spend some cash on, though--it always helps to have a cool lefty mag in your dorm room--is Extra!, which documents corporate bias in the media.

Speaking of periodicals--here's the secret trick: Don't be scared to be caught reading the mainstream press. A watchword of the Left is to "Know Your Enemy." In fact, I'd recommend reading a business periodical like Fortune or Business Week--magazines that will unwittingly alert you to the dystopian designs of the corporate machine. In particular, I'd suggest Advertising Age. This trade publication for the ad industry makes for scary, but informative, reading. And you will certainly disarm your nemeses in the young Republican club when you know more about the machinations on Madison Avenue than they do.

The only other required reading is staying up to date on Seven Stories Press' Open Media Pamphlets series--a parade of left-wing quick-read primers on topical issues. The latest, Silencing Political Dissent, for example, expertly dismantles the totalitarian USA PATRIOT Act, complete with a crash course on First Amendment law. Also, 10 Reasons to Abolish the IMF & World Bank is a recent must, and Corporate Media and the Threat to Democracy is a downright classic.

To make all this reading pay off--and to really be the campus lefty--you'll need files. Files! Files! Files! Go to Office Max and get a few file boxes and a pack of manila folders. Choose a general topic of interest (biotechnology is chic right now) and begin clipping and printing out all the stuff you read on it--an article on a drug ad campaign that you find in Advertising Age, a profile of Pfizer on www.hoovers.com, Seattle Times coverage of Amgen's Immunex takeover.

What about all your class work, you ask? Never mind. That stuff is designed to make you a tool of the hegemony.