¿Revolución? By Ben Cheney

I discovered a method of time travel last month. Combine history’s cyclical nature with a society whose nostalgic obsession is an attempt to escape the crumbling present, and one can reach a separate temporal plane without running into any of those pesky time travel paradoxes. Or was it just nostalgia? A slogging war backdrop, protests and counterprotests, and a denouement coated in tear gas? I have never heard any allegations against the elder Mayor Daley as severe as the ones I heard against certain Claremont administrators. Perhaps nothing has changed since 1968, except that yesterday’s hippies are now professors, or parents sending their children to school in liberal havens like Claremont. Nonetheless, political criticism is muted and apathy is high.

I wanted to see Karl Rove’s speech at Claremont-McKenna to see the kind of reception he’d get. I also wanted to see how many people would notice the event, at a time when there are ever more forms of bread and circuses for the public, and when college students are busy updating fantasy teams and building “Genius” iTunes playlists, not to mention plotting theses. I have been guilty of apathy myself at times, letting my mind turn numb from news of the chaos in the world, and focusing instead on academic trifles.

Last night there was a voter registration drive outside Doms Lounge at Pomona. It was a strange scene: beverage service at the counter, sweaty people crushed together in a pheromone-charged Kowloon Walled City, and booming rap, tonight from college freestyle performers, not Weezy. Apparently, the registration was successful because of the bait it chose.

Indymedia.org evidently did an effective job of spreading the word about the Rove talk, because the hundred or so student protestors were joined by a few dozen outsiders, whose weather-beaten skin and budget clothing contrasted with that of the gleaming Claremont students and so-called “trustafarians”. The protesters’ megaphone-fueled rhetoric always kept one foot in Southeast Asia as they spoke about the fateful time in their lives when restless youth saw villages destroyed in order to be saved. In the locked-down fortress of the Athenaeum-the Bastille wishes it were ever as secure-Rove did as expected. He calmly defended his legacy, cracked jokes to defuse the tension, and answered semi-softball questions. Aware of the differing opinions in Claremont concerning his visit, he joked about Pitzer’s relatively small endowment—indeed, smaller than a presidential campaign war chest. But I was hardly in attendance to listen to and consider Rove’s point of view. It was the spectacle of the event that captured my attention.

While the “Ath” was full of an elite cadre of CMC faculty and students as well as media and Republican consigliere, the rubberneckers and unwashed herds were consigned to stand across the mall. Every burst of applause from the Ath was countered by the boos of the six hundred-plus observers crushed inside the McKenna Auditorium watching a live feed of the speech. The protestors on the green did not seem to adhere to any time signature, repeatedly breaking into chants of “ARREST KARL ROVE!” They were backed by a steady tribal drum rhythm, as percussion has launched many a revolution before. I recall watching stock footage of Mayor Daley’s stormtroopers running in fear from the primal noise and the unusual smelling smoke emanating from the protestors at the Chicago Democratic Convention as the Age of Aquarius began.

After the speech, the consensus among the spectators in the Ath was that Rove was impressive in his defense of his legacy, but while the viewers left convivially, joking or discussing the elections, the crowd in McKenna Auditorium stomped out after an hour of listening to Rove push their buttons and denigrate their beliefs. The protestors formed a ring around the Ath and sat down in front of the entrances, while a group of about fifteen CMC students, dressed and sounding like Nixon’s Orthogonians, serenaded them with “FOUR MORE YEARS!” and made unsubtle demands that the protesters get off their campus. The rest of the night I didn’t see-security escorting Rove out, perhaps tear gas-but in any event the world was not watching Claremont this evening.

More than the speech, the entirety of the event was an interesting glimpse into a political consciousness that won’t go away as the culture wars deepen. My parents have told me: “If you remember the sixties, you weren’t there.” That statement has a sociological meaning now.