Thursday, February 21, 2013
The following is a revised version of my admissions essay submitted to Macalester College, circa 2008. I post it now because I find it a humorous relic of my 19-year-old mania. I notice off the bat that I am plagiarizing ruthlessly from Mamet, and perhaps that accounts for the sardonicism. Without trying to sound too apologetic, I will say this: I wouldn't admit me.
Why Macalester?
I was raised up by the politics my parents—a Nepalese immigrant and
an earth-child of the 70s—espoused at home: namely the Leftist assumptions that
businesses are exploitative, government is evil, and all people are good essentially
Good At Heart.
My parents separated peacefully in 2004. A year later my sister
came out as a lesbian and joined me in the ranks of Gay. Good liberal that I
was, I matriculated at Hampshire College in 2007, the most liberal school in
America, according to the Princeton Review.
One evening, in the student union, I was accidentally smacked over
the head with a pool cue. And that’s when it hit me: living in a house tousled
by identity foofaraw, I had been lying to myself.
I was a liberal cow who hated Bush for no good reason other than
the ones people handed me on a platter.
People are not all good at heart. Lust,
greed, envy, and sloth rule the day (especially at college).
Luckily, in America, we have this contractual pillow
called the Constitution, which, rather than suggesting that we are, all of us,
well behaved, recognizes that, to the contrary, we are swine.
Oh no. I thought. WHAT
ELSE DO I BELIEVE THAT IS FALSE?
I ran to the library and began reading, soon realizing
that my hatred of the Bush administration, far from being an act of rebellion,
was an act of assimilation. I had hopped the bandwagon! And I had the audacity
to call myself a dissident.
JFK gets off the hook for Vietnam, but Bush needed to
be held accountable for Iraq. Why? Because my mother said so.
Bush stole the election in Florida; Kennedy stole his
in Chicago.
Bush outed a CIA agent; Kennedy left hundreds of them
to die in the surf at the Bay of Pigs.
Macalester is a school that is socially engaged, so
says the website. I would feel safe making the assumption that a decent
proportion of the school’s applicants will claim that they are or want to be,
in some capacity, socially engaged.
I do not.
Why?
Hampshire College is also ‘socially engaged,’ whatever
that means. Put all the liberal arts colleges in the country on a dartboard,
let ‘er rip, and tell me you didn’t hit a school that stakes a claim to social
engagement. I want something different.
So, “Why Macalester?”
The vast majority of the research I’ve done about Macalester
amounted to reading the essays available on the honor program’s website, and I
noticed that I had something in common with the students writing the essays. It
wasn’t the politics, the interests, or the empty promise of social engagement,
but the incessant leveling of questions.
I doubt it is my lot in life to be socially engaged the
way many Macalester Students are, but I do know that it is my lot in life to
level enough questions to re-evaluate what it means to be socially engaged in the first place. This constant reevaluation
is uplifting to me, because to question constantly, to reevaluate, is, in
effect, to be socially engaged.
Count on me to ask the tough questions. I want to be a
critic; that might disqualify me as a Leftist, but I have to stick to my guns.
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