RuPaul Charles: And a Wasted Evening at the Ath

Initial thought on RuPaul Charles: It could have been worse.

On the one hand, he's be applauded for not using some of his cruder language. (He abbreviated M.F. for the audience so as to keep it G-rated.) On the other hand, it seems as if those of us who questioned him being brought to the Ath have been vindicated by the silliness of his presentation.

In the wisdom he supposedly dispensed from the "inside," he seemed to be appealing to a kind of Gnosticism -- a transcendence that culminates in the nonsensical phrase, "that we're all one gender, really."

And he decried materialism. Of course, that's just the kind of thing one is required to say if one lives in Hollywood and is a self-described "star." But then he said that he loves shopping and likes to wear by his own admission three different set of clothes a day. I'm just as confused as you are.

His message of comforting your supposed inner child suggests a level of childishness and impulsiveness. His joy, he said, comes from being good to his inner child and recognizing that inner child in everyone. "We're all really just little kids," he said. No thanks, some of us are adults.

One of the odder moments of the evening came when he showed off pictures of himself in drag. RuPaul, who is black, pointed to a picture of himself in drag wearing a Confederate flag as trousers. "Why you might ask was I wearing a Confederate flag?" he asked the audience, rhetorically, "because the South shall rise again!"

The audience chuckled. The first person to say that said it in Latin -- John Wilkes Booth after he assassinated Lincoln.

Only in America could a black man -- descendant, no doubt, from slaves in Louisiana -- so extol his own personal freedom to dress like a woman, be so ignorant of the sacrifice of a man who risked all to give it to his antecedents.

Later, a student in the audience confessed himself to enjoying dressing up in drag as "Okama Jinja" -- his drag persona to the approving claps of the crowd.

And just like that, the purpose of the Athenaeum, has become supplanted. What was meant to encourage, in the fashion of the famous athenaeum of London, "the life of the mind" has now become a temple to the vulgar.

It seems CMC's "scholars" are more intent to get the marshmallows on the spits and be merry while Rome burns. Let this be a lesson to anyone so considering donating money for a speaker series to the Athenaeum.

The Debate Forgot Our History

attended the student debate last night and have to say that I was a bit disappointed with what I heard.

In part, this was brought about by the rather distracting text message board placed up on the projection screen in the back room, which I confess to having had some (but not nearly enough) fun distorting for the sake of a few cheap laughs. But even was I was able to pay attention to the speakers, I wasn’t hearing what would have made the discussion worthwhile.

In such debates, I find it instructive to ground our understanding of what CMC is in its history. What did President George C. S. Benson have to say on the matter of what kind of college Claremont McKenna should be? Here I direct you once again to his masterful assessment presented in a speech entitled, “How Pink Are Our Colleges”? I recommend the reading as it is pretty clear that Benson did not see a distinction between teaching “practical affairs” and the liberal arts. Instead, this division, constantly cultivated, produced solid and effective custodians of the American system. “We are going to see that the graduates of one college in the country have a clear-cut conception of the values of American economic heritage,” Benson told Colonel J. G. Boswell.

And he saw the liberal arts widely enough to encompass Peter Drucker, a healthy appreciation for the American founding, Lincoln, Goethe, Tocqueville, and others as encouraging a kind of liberalization of American business elites. Most of Claremont’s graduates he reasoned would be men of “public affairs” or businessmen and so familiarity with these great thinkers would serve to both enrich their lives and form the basis for the corporations or polities that the graduates would one day lead. It was leadership, as we are found of saying, but it had a direction and a purpose: namely, the preservation of the American way of life — a way of life that was accessible to all peoples.

But at the same time that Benson stressed the virtues of the Declaration of Independence and individualism, he fought for a professor of real estate and counseled students to take accounting — a required course. So the technical balanced appropriately the liberal arts.

If there is any problem with our current existence of Claremont McKenna, it is that much violence has been done to this harmony between both the technical and the humanities. The reason so many majored in both government and economics (or accounting) was that practical and ethereal could and indeed, should exist in one man’s mind, operating simultaneously.

In our present times, many fear that the financial tail of $200 million dollars will wag the liberal arts dog. But this reaction is terribly shortsighted. Claremont ought to be grateful that its alums — many of whom are in finance — feel compelled to generosity to their alma mater. It is doubtful that the rather posh lifestyles of academics could long endure were it not for that benevolence.

Instead, I encourage my friends in the humanities department to dig deep in the history of the college and find some kind of accommodation between the liberal arts and finance side the college. And I encourage my friends in the finance department to make a more substantive argument in favor of why finance and management ought to be properly understood as a liberal art.

Otherwise our current problem seems intractable. This hitherto approach of balancing the practical with the mental is frayed. It is that both of them have gotten too out of whack.

To Ink Or Not to Ink That Is The Question...

I've decided to get a tattoo. Call it a quarter-life crisis, call it youthful rebellion, or whatever, but I am more or less convinced that I have to do it. Don't worry, it'll be tasteful. But I don't want to spoil what it is before I get it.

I know that this isn't exactly a Claremont connection, but I figured I might make it one by asking my fellow Claremont students and alums if they know of any local parlors that offer reasonable price and safety. (Read: I don't want HIV/AIDs.)

Yes, this means I won't be able to donate blood anytime soon. But hey, I can live with that.