Azia Kim is the fairy godmother, the boogeyman, the ace of spades, the Grail Knight. A fearsome interloper, infiltrating our Green Zone like a stealth bomb sleeper cell. A confidence artist playing on the unbelievable naivete of our dangerously clueless populace. A rebel hero puncturing through the fattened stratosphere of our own entitlement. The tragic end product of a generation of high school kids raised for glory and doomed for a mid-life breakdown before they reach the legal drinking age.

Depending on who you ask, Azia Kim proves once and for all that private-school kids, women, Koreans or HumBio majors are crazy. Azia Kim. Isn’t that name perfect? Like out of a mass-market paperback espionage thriller by Clive Cussler. Azia Kim, mystery femme bomb, the spy next door, Stanford’s own Madame Butterfly.

She wanted only to live in peace and quiet prosperity. Half a life was enough for her. Barred from the library, spurned by the gym, never to attend a ski trip, never to vote in our pointless student government elections, she could have cared less. She wanted other people to believe she was a Stanford student, and maybe she wanted to believe it herself. She always studied for tests she would never take, whereas I never study for tests I always fail.

Azia Kim will never have a normal life. Timid moralists who beg for her privacy are missing the point. Would you beg for Teddy Roosevelt’s privacy, or Gandhi’s, or Jesus’s? She belongs to history now. Books will be written with her as a subject: psychological texts, sociological screeds, tell-alls by the people who knew her, an autobiography midwifed by the ghostwriter of O.J. Simpson’s “If I Did It.”

A fictionalized version of her story could make for frothy farce — an 80s’-style sex comedy, where the fake student teaches all the uptight squares what college is really all about. In the interest of broadening the demographics, Kim would be masculinized and deracinated into a plucky street urchin played by George Michael from “Arrested Development,” with Paul Giamatti as crusty old President Hennessy, hot on the fake’s trail.

Already, like moths to a supernova, Facebook groups in praise of Azia Kim have appeared out of the ether. “I Got Azia Kimmed By Housing,” one ruminates, exasperated that a non-matriculating con artist could get a better living situation than half the school. “Let Azia Stay!” proclaims another, arguing that her ingenuity justifies her continued participation in the Class of ‘10. People love Azia Kim. She’s done something truly different. All we can ever hope for is the extraordinary.

Some idiots fail to recognize the goddess in the doorway. This is a security issue, they say. “I don’t feel safe. An Asian girl attended classes! She told silly lies and lived like a hobo! Sound the trumpets, alert the National Guard, tell my mother I love her!” Some even compared this to Virginia Tech, accomplishing the significant feat of making Azia Kim look sane.

Remember after 9/11, how every five seconds there was a new security issue? CIA warns: Your next credit card report may contain anthrax! Amber Alert: Terrorists want to nuke the space needle! Intelligence indicates: Time traveling Muslims blow up Columbus! We are a culture of cowards, raised to seek protection rather than learn to deal with our fear. We welcome dystopia with open arms. Liberty dies to the sound of thunderous applause.

When my dad went to school here, there weren’t so many cops. It’s different now, he says, it’s more dangerous. I don’t think so. People are just more scared now. Instead of learning to accept the fear, we swathe ourselves in security: emergency blue lights, more cops, ID cards, retina scans, password protection. Implant a chip in your brain and you’ll be safe forever and ever! In the process, our campus, which used to be so relaxed, so otherworldly, so much better, has become overregulated and overridden with safety nuts.

Here’s a story about campus safety. A couple nights ago, I was at a Suites party, themed “The Beerlympics.” Loud music, drinking games, old friends, a couple making out on the couch and then the bean bag. Around 2:30, just as the gold medalist was slurring his victory speech, the cops showed up. They saw the one girl at the party who still had a beer in her hand and asked to see her ID. And golly miss molly, she was over 21. The pointlessness of their existence reaffirmed, the cops delivered an anguished soliloquy about how we happy drunken few were wasting their time with our loud music, distracting them from real cop work. One of them even said that they were there to stop “murders,” a notion offensive to reality itself, since they still haven’t found your laptop or your bicycle.

Exotic Erotic — where, rumors say, Azia Kim made out with a lucky fellow who, like Bottom from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” will live the rest of his life knowing he danced with a beautiful demon queen — was lame this year.

Maybe it was always lame. But I have faith that everything is someone’s fault, so I asked a nearby officer, “Was it worth it?”

“What?” he replied.

“All this, man. All this precaution. All the security.”

“We’re just trying to have a safe event.”

“Yeah, but at what cost? This party used to be so much fun.”

“Well, maybe this year there’ll be less date rapes,” he said, and walked away.

Hell, maybe he’s right. Nobody wants to be blown up. Nobody wants to get gunned down. If Azia Kim were a man, her story would not seem so amusing. But even so her deception was an extreme case. Virginia Tech was an extreme case. Sept. 11 was an extreme case. Should we live our lives according to the worst case scenario?

We don’t need any more security. We need to learn how to live in the real world. Azia Kim was only successful because we accepted her impossibly vague story. According to post-Sept. 11 doctrine, the thing to do now would be to demand to see an ID card whenever you meet someone, and just in case lock up all the quiet Asian girls in the middle of nowhere (oh, how good of the University to already have East!). We are smarter than that.

The lesson to take from “The Azia Kim Supremacy” is not that we need more protection. The lesson is that more security is meaningless. In the Information Age, this kind of con isn’t supposed to last for a day, much less a year. But there will always be cracks to slip through. Someday, the worst will happen. Someday, there will be another terrorist attack on American soil. We need to accept our fear and move on. We need to learn to live again.

Bless Azia Kim, the new Messiah, for showing us the truth. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed woman is queen. Like a goddess out of the darkness before existence, she made the world in her own image. Azia Kim is a liar. Azia Kim is a child. Azia Kim is America. She doesn’t exist anymore. She never existed. Her life is over. She will live forever. She’s the greatest Stanford student I ever knew, but she didn’t go to Stanford, and I never knew her.

Darren Franich wants to thank Azia Kim for making him love Stanford again. Email him at dfranich@stanford.edu.