A Graduation Address - 20 Years On

Almost 20 years ago, a well known author, E. L. Doctorow (Ragtime, World's Fair),  gave the commencement address to his alma mater, Brandeis University.  Shortly thereafter, it was printed in "The Nation", where I came across it.  It impressed me then, and it continues to impress me to this day.

I was thinking of it the other day - and how it was still topical, both in terms of the United States, but also in terms of the future of Afghanistan.  The sad thing is that the "Gangsterdom of Spirit" that Doctorow wrote about in 1989 was, in my humble opinion, kid stuff compared to that which we've seen since.  I'm talking about those behind Enron and the current banking/economic crisis we face. I'm talking about the entire political climate that leads to the Vice President dropping the "F-Bomb" on the floor of the Senate, and the mutual villification that is a political campaign today.  Here in Afghanistan, that same "Gangsterdom of Spirit" is what prevents progress from occuring more rapidly, and could, in fact, doom efforts to rebuild and modernize this beautiful country and people.  

So, for your reading pleasure, I present E.L. Doctorow's Commencement Address to Brandeis University, 1989.  I'll have an observation or two afterward as well...

     "Dr. Handler, members of the Board of Trustees, deans of the university, honored doctoral decree recipients, distinguished members of the faculty, parents, friends, and most especially the pride and point of these proceedings – the shining, resplendent Class of 1989.

    Good morning, class. You’ve been going to school all your lives, and in a few minutes you’ll be free. But not until I’ve finished talking to you. I’m the last compulsory lecture of your undergraduate careers. I represent your faculty’s last shot at you, their last chance to tell you what they meant, before you slip out of their grasp forever.

     You know, a few miles away, not one, but two heads of state are this moment about to address graduates like yourselves in a stadium seating 30,000 people.  What they say will be of only theoretical interest to the young men and women somewhere in that crowd whom they are presumably there to address. Perhaps they will use the occasion to enunciate major foreign policy statements, and when they are through, the will get back into their motorcade with the Secret Service men running alongside, and lift off in their helicopters, and the TV cameras will shut down, and the army of reporters will scatter, and those students, at least the ones who didn’t scalp their graduation tickets, will be able to look at one another and say: “Well, it is historic to see a president. But what, after all, has been celebrated here?”

     What indeed?

     It seems to me that your university this morning looks very, very good by way of contrast. Your president and faculty and Board of Trustees have presumed a commencement should be directed to the graduations seniors in an academic setting that retains its meaning and integrity – that what is being celebrated is the moment of your personal rite of passage, the moment of the beginning of your post collegiate lives.  And they know it’s a crucial moment, a solemn celebratory moment, that should not be scanted; and so, I’m honored to be called upon to speak to you – not a politician but a writer, a novelist included, I like to think, among the “unacknowledged legislators of the world,” in Shelley’s phrase – you English majors know that – unacknowledged like the poets, like all artists, in fact, helpless legislators of created consciousness who from the struggles of their own minds make poems and stories that would contribute to the moral consciousness of their time.

     So I will begin by turning for instruction to an earlier unacknowledged legislator, a storywriter, a novelist, who lived and flourished in the 1920s. His name was Sherwood Anderson, and he’s most famous today for a small book of stories about life in a small town in Middle America around the turn of the century.  Winesburg, Ohio is the title of the book. Some of you may know it. And in his introduction to the book, Anderson proposed a theory which he calls the Theory of Grotesques.  It is not a scientific theory, but a historical poetic theory of what happens to people sometimes as they strive to give value and meaning to their lives.

     Here is the theory:  that all about us in the world are many truths to live by, and they are all beautiful – the truth of passion and love, the truth of candor and of thrift, the truth of patriotism, the truth of self-reliance, and so on.  But as people come along and try to make something of themselves, they snatch up a truth and make it their own predominating truth to the exclusion of all others.  And what happens, says Anderson, is that the moment a person does this – clutches one truth too tightly – the truth so embraced becomes a lie and the person turns into a grotesque.

     Suppose, for instance, you’re thrifty and you work hard and scrimp and save and live modestly in order to pay your way through college. Your thrift is a good thing. But then afterward, in later life, long after it is necessary, you continue to deny yourself and you save and save until hoarding money becomes an end in itself. Your thrift has become a lie. You’ve turned into a miser. You’ve become a grotesque.  You see how it works? If, for instance, your patriotism blinds you to all other moral and ethical truths, and from your love of country you deceive duly constituted bodies of governmental authority, and you break laws and shred documents, the truth of patriotism has turned to a lie in your embrace of it, and made you a grotesque.  Or take the truth of self-reliance. It is undeniably beautiful. It was the truth that underlay the entire Administration of the previous President, Ronald Reagan – this idea of self-reliance, rugged individualism.  Who wouldn’t like to stand up for himself independently, and make his own way through life?  Yet Mr. Reagan’s advocacy of self-reliance caused him to scorn or forget other truths – of community, for example, and the moral responsibility we have toward those with fewer advantages, and the profound truth of the interdependence of all society’s citizens. And so he was moved at various times in his Administration to take away school lunches from needy children and tuition loans from students, and to deny legal services to poor people and psychological counseling to Vietnam veterans, and Social Security payments to handicapped people. You see how it works – this theory?

     In fact, I will venture to say that insofar as Mr. Reagan inserted his particular truth into the national American mind he made it the lobotomizing pin of conservative philosophy that has governed us and is continuing to govern us to this very moment.

      The philosophical conservative is someone willing to pay the price of other people’s suffering for his principles.  And so we now have hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of our citizens lying around in the streets of our cities, sleeping in doorways, begging with Styrofoam cups. We didn’t have a class of permanent beggars in this country – in the United States of America – fifteen or twenty years ago. We didn’t have kids selling crack in their grade schools, or businessmen magnifying their fortunes into megafortunes by stock manipulation and thievery – I don’t remember such epidemics of major corporate fraud. A decade ago you did not have college students scrawling racial epithets or anti-Semitic graffiti on the room doors of their fellow students. You did not have cops strangling teen-age boys to death or shooting elderly deranged women in their own homes. You did not have scientists falsifying the results of experiments, or preachers committing the sins against which they so thunderously preached. A generation or so back, you didn’t have every class of society, and every occupation, widely, ruggedly practicing its own characteristic form of crime.

      So something poisonous has been set loose in the last several years as we have enjoyed life under the poser and principles of political conservatism. And I have used Sherwood Anderson’s theory of the grotesque to account for it, but I don’t know what to call it – a "gangsterdom of spirit," perhaps. I do know that to describe it is bad form. To speak of a loss of cohesion in society, a loss of moral acuity is tiresome. It is the tiresome talk of liberalism. In fact, part of this poisonous thing that I’m trying to describe is its characteristic way of dealing with criticism: It used to be enough to brand a critic as a radical or a leftist to make people turn away. Now we need only call him a liberal. Soon “moderate” will be the M word, “conservative” will be the C Word, and only fascists will be in the mainstream. And that degradation of discourse, that, too, is part of the something that is really rotten in America right now.

     Some of you, perhaps some of your parents, may be wondering at this time if I am speaking appropriately for this occasion, which is, after all, a celebration. In answer, I have to say I believe my subject is all too appropriate; I think it is my obligation to tell you, as truthfully as I can, the context, the social setting in which you will find yourself when you walk out of here with your degree. As an unacknowledged legislator, I am giving you not a State of the Union address but a State of the Mind of the Union address.

      What does it do to you young people, I wonder, to grow up in a time in which the bottom-line standard of business thinking now controls every aspect of our lives? You may have heard our presi­dent ask just the other day that the Senate delay its consideration of a bill to apply stricter ethical standards to government officials. Mr. Bush is worried that if men and women are made to behave hon­estly, they won’t want to work for his administration. That’s funny, except that at one time people were honored to be called upon to use their expertise for the sake of their country. There was an ideal of public service, and financial sacrifice was part of that ideal. Now, it is taken for granted by everyone in Washington that people can be expected to come to work for their country only if they can afterward turn a trick from it.

      It is in this context that I find myself thinking of a lately deceased Brandeis graduate, as unbusinesslike a person as you’d ever meet. He is not the sort of alumnus you would expect to be mentioned or that I would expect to mention in a commencement address. His name was Abbie Hoffman. Class of ‘59. I knew Abbie, though we were not close, and I didn’t have that much contact with him after the sixties. The truth is I found him easier to take from a distance; I have to admit that our ways were different, but I admired him tremendously. He was fearless, and very funny, with the humor, the precision of insight, of a great political cartoonist. And as an activist he put his body on the line. In the sixties he was a scruffy sort of fellow, skinny and nimble, somewhat unwashed-looking with his torn T-shirts and jeans, his long hair, his headband. He was a founder of the Yippies, the Youth International Party. And he was in the vanguard of the antiwar movement in the days of big street demonstrations, much like the one they have been having in China, the students, these days, and for the same reasons, to bring government into alignment with the popular will of the people.

      Anyway, Abbie did street theater; he staged events that might be clownish or vulgar but that invariably caught the attention of the media and enraged the authorities. (For instance, I remember he once wore a shirt made from an American flag, and when angry policemen tore it off his back he shouted, “I have only one shirt to give for my country!”) He got people terribly mad, Abbie, and for very good reason: He was insufferable. He was insufferable be­cause he held the mirror up so that we saw ourselves. That’s just what the biblical prophets did, they operated in just that way. Wasn’t it Isaiah who walked abroad naked to prophesy the depor­tation of the Jews? And wasn’t it Jeremiah who wore a yoke around his neck to prophesy their slavery? Same insufferable thing. So Ab­bie was a kind of unacknowledged legislator of this order. Once he organized a demonstration to ring the Pentagon and by means of prayers and incantations make it rise from the ground and levitate. And another thing he did, he stood in the gallery overlooking the New York Stock Exchange and threw handfuls of dollar bills down on the floor and watched all the traders scramble to pick up the money. These were prophetic acts, were they not? Throwing money onto the floor of the Stock Exchange knowing people would crawl around in a frenzy to pick it up? The Pentagon and the Stock Ex­change are in the eighties the twin images of our idolatry. He had it exactly right.

     It’s my view that in the last decade or so of life in our country, roughly the time since you were in the tenth grade, we have seen a national regression to the robber-baronial thinking of the nine­teenth century. This amounts to nothing less than a deconstruction of America, the dismantling of enlightened social legislation that had begun to bring equity over half a century to the lives of work­ing people, to rectify some of the terrible imbalance of racial injus­tice and give a fair shake to the outsiders, the underdogs, the newcomers. We have seen the ideals of environmental sanctity sac­rificed to the bottom-line demands of business thinking in which we have done only as much to protect our environment as industry has found convenient, as if only a few songbirds and some poor dumb animals were at stake, as if the bleeding hearts of woodsy environmentalists were the issue, and not our lungs and skins and genes, and the wholeness and health of our children and their chil­dren. We have seen a new generation of nativist know-nothings called up like primitive comic-book warriors to make overt the co­vert racism and anti-Semitism of the campaign demagoguery of our conservative politicians. And we have seen with more and more deadening frequency the banning of the books of our heritage in our schools and public libraries, as for instance in Panama City, Florida, where they have found it necessary to expunge such dan­gers to the republic as Wuthering Heights, Hamlet, The Red Badge of Courage, and The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin.

      So that we may in fact have broken down, as a social contract, in our time, as if we were supposed to be not a just nation but a confederacy of stupid murderous gluttons.

     So that, finally, our country itself, the idea, the virtue, the truth of America, is in danger of becoming grotesque.

     This is certainly serious stuff for a happy day, but I would not be doing honor to you and to this occasion if I did not tell you what’s been going on while we’ve been waiting for you.

     That is something else I meant to say. That we’ve been waiting for you. Did you know that? Your mothers and fathers and grand­mothers and grandfathers, in fact all the generations older than yours, have been watching you and waiting for you. Because whether you know it or not, you have learned here at Brandeis the difference between authentic thought and cant, between rational thought, honest perception, on the one hand, and simplistic intel­lectual flummery on the other. And that makes you very precious to us, and to our nation.

      And if your teachers here have seemed to you at various times to possess commanding intellectual presence, and I trust they have, the truth is they are itinerants, like you, having given their lives over to the strange species-grooming that is peculiarly Homo sapi­ent: the modest, exhausted instruction in mind-survival of the gen­erations that will succeed theirs.

      And everything impractical they’ve given you, lines of poetry, phrases of music, and philosophical propositions, and ancient histories, and myths and dance steps, is terribly practical, in fact, the only means we have of defending the borders of a magnanimous, humanist civilization—just that civilization which is today under such assault.

      The presumption of your life here, the basic presumption, is that every life has a theme. It is a literary idea, the great root discovery of narrative literature: every life has a theme and there is human freedom to find it, to create it, to make it victorious. And so how­ever you find your society as you walk out of here, you do not have to embrace its lies, or become complicitors to its cruelties. Perhaps that is what your faculty wanted to say to you.

     You are in charge of yourselves.

     The stack of books you’ve collected in your four years here is an icon of the humanist ideal.

     You have sanctity of thought, the means to stay in touch with the truth.

     Your living, inquiring, and lighted minds are enlisted in the struggle for a human future and a society unbesieged by the gro­tesqueries of stupidity and terror.

     Yes, I think that’s what your faculty might want me to tell you. You may not have realized it, and we are somewhat embarrassed to have to say it, but willy-nilly and ipso facto, you commence this day in the name of civilization.

     I have every confidence in you. And I congratulate you. From up here I have to say you all look beautiful to me. Your families, I know, are proud of you, your teachers are proud of you, Brandeis University is proud of you, and let me say as an itinerant speech­maker, I find that I am proud of you too. God bless you all."

 

I find it amazing that this address has stood the test of time so well - change the names of the President and this could have been given this past year, or even this past month.  

Our country was made great by our ability to intellectually and politically disagree with each other - yet be able to work together to find common ground and work toward common goals. If you don't believe that's what we were founded on, go back and reread all of The Federalist Papers and The Anti-Federalist Papers and the essays of Madison, Hamilton, Henry and Jay.  Unfortunately, it is said, politics are like sausage - you don't want to know what went into it, and it's unpleasant to watch it being made.  But we have to watch it, to ensure that what rules are being enacted, what regulations are being made and enforced, what laws of the land are being foisted upon us are, in fact, representative of the will of the people, and not designed to benefit only a few, or only the powerful, or only the rich.

Here in Afghanistan, the Gangsterdom of Spirit exists on all sides of the conflict. The Taliban are more than willing to sacrifice innocents for their cause, likewise the Criminals - the drug kingpins and smugglers.  The Government is struggling against corruption at all levels, in all organizations (see the front page story in the NYT, Friday 2 Jan on the issues within the Police).  But then, once corrupt, Government members become synonymous with the Criminals.

The saddest part is that, just like in America, amidst all of this greed and graft and gangsterdom of spirit, it is the people who suffer the most. The individuals who are trying their utmost to feed their families and keep a roof over their heads and just get a little ahead - they have dreams and aspirations, but they are modest - money enough for a nice vacation or a new car at least once a decade or so.  The capability to add a bedroom when another child is born without having to refinance the entire house (or borrow the money from predatory lenders).  The middle class, which is credited with making the United States so strong, compared to so many other countries.

I have hopes that moderation (and the middle class) will win out in the end.  That service to country and community (go soldiers and teachers!) will be as prestigious as a movie star or CEO. That the measure of a man's success isn't his bank account, but in the quality of his children - after all, we are waiting for them to take the reins of power from us!

Hooah!

SLK

Publish Post

PS - The command cracked down and the puppies were moved off the compound (adopted by local families).