Rated as one of the top three personages of the Class of 2022 in “volume of humor” Jacob Zepp, the man we all thought we knew, has nevertheless shocked many of his past acquaintances at WCC. “He was always quiet, either reading or studying Theology or Philosophy” reported Brandon Tillman, a Wisconsin Sophomore on his past experience with his fellow Wisconsinite whom he knew from the age of ten. Similarly, he was extremely quiet or absent from the crazy “chat lifestyle” lived for a year by some of the other prominent 2018 Freshmen Rockers after the Fall 2017 Founders competition. This lead to a view by many that Jacob would be “just another Peter Tardiff or Matthew White”, reflective, studious, and yet detached from the wilder activities of student life. Maybe he was then, but of course that has changed as evidenced simply by his prominent standing of “volume of humor” from Destiny Massoth’s Official Unedited Class of 2022 Quotebook. Just how he managed his transition from normalcy to stardom in the humor business, however, leads surprisingly beyond him, to the very nature of being a Wisconsinite. Now he is also no ordinary Wisconsinite either, but the combination of his birthplace, talents, and coming to WCC have produced a superhero of cheese who stands up for his class, even against the terrors of the Rosie.
Jacob Zepp’s childhood was quite normal for those students who would ultimately end up at Wyoming Catholic College. Perhaps he was a bit too normal, however, in other respects, not having any of the crazy accidental qualities of a Blaise Galbraith or the life adventures of a Thomas Urgo, but he’d manage. He had eleven siblings, quite near average for a Catholic family of his kind, and was amongst the younger of them, something which forced him to get practice in standing up for himself and his convictions, as in what music to have on, what seat to take in a car, and whether it was his turn or Robert’s to wash the dishes. He read a lot, though, more than his siblings, but this only made him appear as “less of an active actor” (Tillman).
Nearly all of the Class of 2022 knew him for one reason or another before their arrival, but such knowledge of him was as such an ordinary personage. His face wasn’t dangerous like Andrew’s, he didn’t face off the Mafia like Thomas did, and neither did he have a military career on the side as Jack Swindell did. They knew him for small reasons and thought their friendship would remain small. And yes, even those who knew Jacob from PEAK in July of 2017 or from the Founders competition that fall felt the same. But they fatally overlooked that amidst all this normalcy, he was a Wisconsinite.
His normalcy was but being with the potential to be more. When he left Wisconsin to attend WCC, his true nature as a Wisconsinite could finally come out, put down and lost as it was amidst the force of millions of other citizens of that state, or cheeseheads as they are often called. Outside of Wisconsin, he was a cheesehead to the core, and, more importantly, was seen as such by everyone. He watched football, the Green Bay Packers of course so often that he called it an obsession to another Freshman saying: “You should occupy yourself with more useful things―like being obsessed with football” (Massoth, 13). Now those obsessed with the Green Bay Packers, in particular, are known as cheeseheads, making them at the very least per accidens qualities re Wisconsin for those who are not natives to that state. As such, Jacob, wanting another, in effect, to become a cheesehead, showcases a deep patriotic core aiming to colonize its good’s in the inverse of the way a pirate does, by offering his own social contract to others.
More than football, however, something near and dear to Wisconsin is cheese, something that stupefies most scholars as to how this became so because of the near absence of that element in nature. For this, as a connoisseur, craftsman, and historian of the subject, Jacob also distincted himself, answering the question as only a Wisconsinite could. Here he began to show forth his humorous side early in the first semester of his freshman year in the way he answered it but truthfully stated that which is “obvious” to everyone from Wisconsin. “We have no cheese naturally but we’re associated with it because of that. Because we go to such great lengths to acquire cheese we’re good at using it and everyone notices that!” And at WCC everyone came to realize the truth of this statement every Saturday when Jacob reorganized the pizza offered there at lunch that day in what Fortune Magazine calls the “fastest turnaround for such an ailing franchise”. Under Zepp, who not even as head of the operation, that power falling to Joe, made all the improvements he could, taste scores doubled about the pizza. And this was all because of the cheese, with which Jacob, because of his inborn inclination of desire to get it, was perfected of soul. Understanding this fully requires knowing how the Wisconsinite mind came to be what it is, so let’s take a look.
As a race, the native Wisconsinites were built for and to get cheese by nature during the thousands of years when Wisconsin was a cheese state. It covered the state, or at the time, the area which later would be a state to depths of hundreds of feet and made the area, when viewed from a distance, like a giant cap to the earth, or a “head of cheese” as the Roman traveler and writer Pliny the Younger claims. Thence off course is where we actually get the moniker of “cheesehead” although his report ultimately led to the destruction and defilement of the very “Cheesehead land” he had been the first from outside to behold. Seeing this new wonder, cheese, which never before had been tasted or beheld elsewhere, the Romans wanted in, and planned their bid in the typically Roman way. Overshadowed in historical consciousnesses by the destruction of Jerusalem the same year, the Roman assault on Wisconsin was nevertheless quite the larger, as recounted in Michel Rioux’s book Iron Woman to Iron Man. However, as they destroyed all evidence of their attack by the attack itself, as no one but Pliny from the Roman world had ever seen the cheese mound that was Wisconsin, they got away almost completely with it. Wisconsinites vowed revenge, and, quietly, insidiously, emigrated to Germany where they became known as the barbarians. There, they “ultimately brought down the Roman empire in vengeance for the loss of their ancestral cheese” after centuries of assaults, but still, the cheese was lost as the Romans had either blasted it into space or vaporized it on the spot.
Now the particular Wisconsinite drive to take vengeance on the Roman empire over a simple one-time plundering of their lands may seem overblown for ancient times, where you typically would just take all in stride, plunder their fields and take their women the next year and then move on. However, because the Wisconsinite was by nature connected to and made for cheese, the total loss threatened their very existence. To survive as a people, to avoid horrendous symptoms of cheese withdrawal for their culture as a whole, they had to get the cheese back. And all that remained, for the only real cheese that ever existed was once in Wisconsin, was then now blasted into a layer upon the moon. As the Romans were in the early first millennium after Christ the only nation with rockets capable of reaching the moon, Wisonsinite cheeseheads needed the Roman empire. And so, they conquered it eventually, launching what some call the “Dark Ages” but in reality, the secret period of Wisconsinite rule and business success when they got access back to their stockpile of cheese through commandeering the remainder of the Roman-era rocket arsenal.
Secretly ruling the world now that Rome was gone as a world power, the Wisconsinites now went after wealth, retrieving cheese bit by bit from the moon as a “food of the gods” (Rioux, 328). Cheese was now on the world market, and soon gained worldwide demand as the ultimate “spice”. However, the Wisconsinites provided it to the world only through third-party middle-men in the Far East throughout the remainder of the Middle Ages and managed to drive up the price acutely. Throughout the ages, they also convinced nearly everyone around the world that cheese really was from the Orient with their highly successful “Made In China” stickers placed distinctively on every package.
Christopher Columbus was one of those taken in hook, line, and sinker by this deception, His incredible drive to find a new way to the East was primarily then for the sake of cheese. However, when very little of it was found in the “East” he discovered, America, even he began, but for the wrong reasons, to have doubt in the official story about the substance. It wasn’t from the Orient, because there wasn’t cheese there when he landed. Even, ironically, in an angry moment, he stared up at the moon, looking up to heaven, and shouted, “O God, where is thy cheese?” (Rioux, 183). What makes it even funnier, even as he sadly showed still the more how played for a fool he and the whole world was at the time, was that he said this in Wisconsin while exploring that part of the “New World”, or to him, of the “Orient”. Contented partially with the other commodities he found in America, especially its oil and natural gas, Columbus, still nevertheless made finding “the true source of cheese (since it wasn’t where everyone thought it had come from) a final end for his life.
He died, this goal unrealized, living under a personal vow not to eat of the cheese again until he had found its source and summit, but had quietly made a breakthrough. There was a hole in the cheesy lie of millennia and it was only another twelve years until Newton famously insinuated the truth with his famous story of throwing a ball of cheese as big as the moon into the sky. Simple people, unburdened by the political necessities of guarded speech, redactions, carefulness leading to dishonesty and the like, figured out the truth soon enough as the fact that the moon had been covered by cheese entered into popular culture. Hence we have the “cow jumping over the moon” saying, which so elegantly demonstrates the beliefs on the matter in the substratum for “cow product” (what the Wisconsinites said cheese came from) flying over the moon before falling onto it thousands of years ago. Some even hit closer to the truth, wrongly suggesting that the moon is made out of Swiss cheese. Of course, cheese in its purest form is not so racially or culturally biased, and the moon as a whole is not cheese as they suggested but those who suggested so had gotten part of the metaphorical meaning.
The Wisconsinites, living in Europe as the much-feared barbarians, constituted much of the people known as the “Swiss” with Swiss cheese being the kind those of that region preferred to import, or that is, launder, through their Oriental middleman. Those few who made an association between the moon and the Swiss were thus closer than any per accidens to the truth of the matter. But they still weren’t there. For the cheese was still on the moon, few dared to suggest the truth that was becoming more and more known publicly, and the Wisconsinites continued to rack up profits from their profitability.
Technological advancement in the 18th century threatened to make it possible for other nations to develop rockets, reach the moon, and perhaps squat on the Wisconsinite claim. And even if others didn’t lay claim to it all, the truth would still someday get out with all the future Lunar tourists. Wisconsin leaders just couldn’t take the chance of some future Cyril or Destiny stumbling in on their find. So that meant diversion. Secretly, they used their vast profits to develop artificial cheese that could saturate and confuse the world market with for long enough for everyone to forget the truth they were seemingly just about to realize. At the same time, the early 19th century, they began to actively thwart all technological development elsewhere in the world to protect the moon’s cheese.
But the Spartans, who underlied even the Wisconsinites in their perfidious control of world events, decided they had had enough of the Wisconsinites.As Spartans, they could take a lot, but “cheese-like-non-cheese” on their pizza was just not something they could stand. So in a typically Spartan fashion, they launched first the 1st World War and then the 2nd to push the Wisconsinites out of their immediate neighborhood of dominion (Europe). And this distraction worked. For lost in the devastation of the World Wars was the world exodus of the Wisconsinite people back to Wisconsin. The tables turned by Spartans of even greater ambition than they, the Wisconsinites who moved back to the state of Wisconsin by the millions in the 20th century gave up on their prior methods. For one, they had to, when the Spartan controlled U.S. government landed men on the moon, discovered the cheese stockpiles there, took over the cheese trade almost entirely. The CIA was put in charge of the cheese trade, which they ran through clandestine moon operations and missions distributing it through Area 51 in Nevada. Wisconsin leaders, their people keeping up enough cheese smuggling to support themselves on the side, determined that they should use cheese as an “olive branch” of sorts to the American and world people, while they truly rebuild their attempts at conquest to operate through football. Hence, the founding of the Green Bay Packers was quite in accordance with this well-thought-out plan as Wisconsin worked to restore its reputation publically through giving cheese and cheese-wisdom away rather than monopolizing it for profit directly.
Thus in the latter part of the twentieth century, Wisconsin became known as the land of cheese, and offered its advice to a world now overflowing with cheese on how to enjoy, use, and think about cheese. Pizza became popularized around the world through their efforts as a food of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, an “all-American” food to go along with the patriotic image they were creating of themselves with the “Packers” and Football. Unified under the “cheesehead mentality” as “cheeseheads”, Wisconsin began to gain many followers and began to prepare to strike back. Until, that is, when Jacob Zepp appeared on the scene. In a culture pervaded and formed by the idea of cheese, he was part of it like everyone, but did not live as the rest of the state did to conquer and rule it over others. Hence, released to a potential unhindered by the propaganda and inefficiencies that trying to rule the world brings, Jacob, when he left Wisconsin, an ordinary teenager except for his origin, became extraordinary.
Only for the sake of others and for the cheese itself, and not for his reputation, Jacob, when he unofficially took over pizza production at Wyoming Catholic College, inverted the covetous Wisconsin goals. The good that was in Wisconsin’s social contract was his to offer, the bad in it became inverted to jokes and humor. Football, his passion, in “being obsessed with it” (Massoth, 13) was an outlet of peace, and not of division for the sake of conquest in his mind. Bringing improvement beyond anyone’s expectation to the pizza brought him the social standing to do even more good for his class, standing up to the Rosie as he said, “I called Michael Rose “Rosie” today. I don’t think he liked it.” Without fear, even though there would be no benefit to such a bold action, he defended his class for its own sake in his continuing inversion of the Wisconsinite plan which would have put revenge over justice (their motives compared to his). But even this was not his greatest move. His focus on fashion, again for its own sake, regardless of popular opinion, when he dressed up for example in a 1960s “surfer dude” style completed a trifecta inversion of Wisconsin ideals when he stood up to the complaint of a Wisconsinite also at the school, John Paul who took issue with his choice. Rejecting the propaganda of Wisconsinite fashion even under such pressure from one still enthralled to it, Jacob’s sacrifice brought John Paul freedom to begin following in his path.
Though Wisconsin remains as a state with its goals of conquest, rule, and seizure, Jacob Zepp’s story in his ability to reverse its norms, illustrates a path of hope for the rest of the world. The very tools of oppression, when one is removed from the propaganda which sustains them, can become instead tools for joy, humor, and peace. And as they became so in Jacobmat Wyoming Catholic College in the Class of 2022, we see that the rocker culture which so recently developed there is already bearing great fruit for the benefit of all. The solution to counter the remainder of the Wisconsin antagonists is now simple. Simply send them all to WCC and make them join the Class of 2022. Then, by the blessing of Andrew, they also will be converted, and peace will reign again in all hearts.
Bibliography:
Massoth, Destiny. The Official Unedited Class of 2022 Quotebook. Irkutsk: Irkutsk Ice Books, 2019
Rioux, Michel. Iron Woman to Iron Man: Throughout the Metallic Ages. Lander: CES Press, 2018
Pliny the Younger, Travels in Bigfoot Country. Trans. Hamilton. Denver: Bushy Books, 1994
Tillman, Brandon. “Zepp’s New Lifestyle”. CHEESE NEWS DAILY. May 22, 2019
Zepp, Dr. Jacob. Dr. Zepp’s Guide to Fine Driving. Appleton: Zepp Books, 2018