In this issue, we present excerpts of deep — and not so deep — thoughts from a variety of this year’s commencement speakers:
Jon Stewart
College of William and Mary (May 16)
‘I’m honored to be here to congratulate you today. Today is the day you enter into the real world, and I should give you a few pointers on what it is. It’s actually not that different from the environment here. The biggest difference is you will now be paying for things, and the real world is not surrounded by a 3-foot brick wall.
“And the real world is not a restoration. If you see people in the real world making bricks out of straw and water, those people are not colonial re-enactors — they are poor. Help them. . . . And in the real world, there is not as much candle lighting. I don’t really know what it is about this campus and candle lighting, but I wish it would stop. We only have so much wax, people. . . .
“So I thought I’d talk a little bit about my experience here at William and Mary. It was very long ago, and if you had been to William and Mary while I was here and found out that I would be the commencement speaker 20 years later, you would be somewhat surprised, and probably somewhat angry. I came to William and Mary because, as a Jewish person, I wanted to explore the rich tapestry of Judaica that is Southern Virginia. . . .
“And yet now I live in the rarified air of celebrity, of mega stardom. My life a series of Hollywood orgies and Kabala center brunches with the cast of ‘Friends.’ At least that’s what my handlers tell me. I’m actually too valuable to live my own life and spend most of my days in a vegetable crisper to remain fake-news-anchor fresh.
“So I know that the decisions that I made after college worked out. But, at the time, I didn’t know that they would. See, college is not necessarily predictive of your future success. And it’s the kind of thing where the path that I chose obviously wouldn’t work for you. For one, you’re not very funny.”
President Bush
Louisiana State University (May 21)
`As you enter professional life, I have a few other suggestions about how to succeed on the job. For starters, be on time. It’s polite, and it shows your respect for others. Of course, it’s easy for me to say. It’s easy for me to be punctual when armed men stop all the traffic in town for you.
“On the job and elsewhere in life, choose your friends carefully. The company you keep has a way of rubbing off on you — and that can be a good thing, or a bad thing. In my job, I got to pick just about everybody I work with. I’ve been happy with my choices — although I wish someone had warned me about all of Dick Cheney’s wild partying.
“Let me leave you with one more lesson. Wherever life takes us, and whatever challenges we meet, each one of us has much to be grateful for. And the proper measure of response of a grateful heart is service. . . .
“There’s a wise saying: We make a living by what we get; we make a life by what we give.”
Novelist E.L. Doctorow
Hofstra University (May 23)
(According to news reports, Doctorow’s comments were booed by the audience)
` . . . because I’ve been telling them all my life, I’ve become a very good judge of the stories other people tell. . . . I’ve been listening for almost four years now to the stories this president tells. . . . And sadly, they are not good stories that this president tells. They are not good because they are not true.
“One story he told was that the country of Iraq had nuclear and biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction and was intending shortly to use them on us. That was an exciting story, all right; it was designed to send shivers up our spines. But it was not true.
“Another story was that the Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein, was in league with the terrorists of Al Qaeda. And that turned out not to be true. But anyway, off we went to war on the basis of these stories.
“And then followed the story that in just a few weeks the invasion of Iraq was a mission accomplished. That was the title of the story the president told, `Mission Accomplished.’ And that, terribly, tragically, is not a true story. It is so untrue that nobody is allowed to photograph the return of our fallen soldiers and Marines and National Guardsmen and women as they arrive every week to the United States in their coffins. The president doesn’t want us to know how untrue that story is. But, of course, we know.”
Bono
University of Pennsylvania (May 17)
`My name is Bono, and I am a rock star. Don’t get me too excited because I use four-letter words when I get excited. I’d just like to say to the parents, your children are safe, your country is safe, the FCC has taught me a lesson, and the only four-letter word I’m going to use today is P-E-N-N.
“Actually I saw something in the paper last week about Kermit the Frog giving a commencement address somewhere. One of the students was complaining, `I worked my [butt] off for four years to be addressed by a sock?’ You have worked your [butt] off for this. For four years you’ve been buying, trading and selling, everything you’ve got in this marketplace of ideas. The intellectual hustle. Your pockets are full, even if your parents’ are empty, and now you’ve got to figure out what to spend it on.
“Well, the going rate for change is not cheap. Big ideas are expensive. . . .
“So my question, I suppose, is: What’s the big idea? What’s your big idea? What are you willing to spend your moral capital, your intellectual capital, your cash, your sweat equity in pursuing outside of the walls of the University of Pennsylvania?
“There’s a truly great Irish poet; his name is Brendan Kennelly, and he has this epic poem called `The Book of Judas,’ and there’s a line in that poem that never leaves my mind; it says: `If you want to serve the age, betray it.’ What does that mean to betray the age?
“Well, to me, betraying the age means exposing its conceits, its foibles, its phony moral certitudes. It means telling the secrets of the age and facing harsher truths. . . .
“What are the ideas right now worth betraying? What are the lies we tell ourselves now? What are the blind spots of our age? . . . It might be something simple.
“It might be something as simple as our deep-down refusal to believe that every human life has equal worth. Could that be it? Could that be it? Each of you will probably have your own answer, but for me that is it. And for me the proving ground has been Africa.
“Africa makes a mockery of what we say, at least what I say, about equality and questions our pieties and our commitments because there’s no way to look at what’s happening over there and it’s effect on all of us and conclude that we actually consider Africans as our equals before God. There is no chance. . . .
“Equality for Africa is a big idea. It’s a big expensive idea. I see the Wharton graduates now getting out the math on the back of their programs; numbers are intimidating aren’t they, but not to you! But the scale of the suffering and the scope of the commitment — they often numb us into a kind of indifference. Wishing for the end to AIDS and extreme poverty in Africa is like wishing that gravity didn’t make things so damn heavy. We can wish it, but what the hell can we do about it?
“Well, more than we think. We can’t fix every problem — corruption, natural calamities are part of the picture here — but the ones we can we must. The debt burden, as I say, unfair trade, as I say, sharing our knowledge, the intellectual copyright for lifesaving drugs in a crisis, we can do that. And because we can, we must. Because we can, we must. Amen.”
Novelist Richard Russo
Colby College (May 23)
`A couple years ago I was talking to a man whose son had graduated the year before from Stanford University. He was proud of the boy, who’d done well there, and proud, too, that his son had received the kind of education he, himself, had never dreamed of.
“But he had misgivings as well. I could tell he had something on his mind that I, as a former college professor, might be able to help him understand. It took him a while, but he finally came to the point, which was, `Why do you have to mess with them?’
“`Mess with them,’ I repeated.
“`Right,’ he said. `I sent my son off to Stanford a good Republican, and four years later he comes home and tells me he’s voting Democratic. You should hear some of the things he says.’
“`Well, he learned to think,’ I explained. `If it makes you feel any better, I sent my daughter off to Colby College a good liberal, and by the end of her junior year she was dating the president of the College Republicans.’
“`Let’s swap kids,’ he suggested. `Yours got smart.'”
Bill Cosby
Johns Hopkins University (May 20)
`I went out to this club [called the Gate of Horn in Chicago in the early ’60s], and I knew that I was good. I knew it and I performed and I was good. . . . And [later] two men came. . . . They had a club called Mr. Kelly’s [in Chicago]. . . . Now Mr. Kelly’s, this is where the big guys play. This is the major league, hard-liquor drinking club, and you do three shows. The last show is 3:30 in the morning. Comedians like Mort Sahl played there, headlining, Dick Gregory and Lenny Bruce, etc., etc.
” . . . And I went to the club early because I’m playing Mr. Kelly’s, and I sat in my dressing room, and I don’t know what happened. But my mind started to drift in such a negative vein. Demons started to tell me that I wasn’t funny. And I began to believe it because I was telling myself that, and who knows me better than I.
” . . . I got up knowing that I’m not funny, and this is before the movie `Dead Man Walking.’ But I just walked. I just walked and went downstairs. And you stand off to the side in the dark, and there’s a trio playing [imitates trio playing and announcer] `Ladies and Gentleman, Mr. Kelly’s is proud to present one of America’s fastest rising new comedians,’ and the people clap. . . . And I did my 35 minute act in 18 minutes, and I said, `Thank you.’ And they said, `No, thank you — for getting off.’
“And I walked off, and I went upstairs, and sure enough what I knew had happened. I was not funny, and they knew I wasn’t funny. . . .
” . . . It got worse. I said, `Man, I have to stay here and second show people and, oh, man.’ And the guy [knocks on the lectern] — `Five minutes!’ — Oh God. I go back down here and face them. I don’t know if I can do it. I’ll do a 10-minute show this time. And I stood in the darkness, and the trio [plays]: `And now, ladies and gentleman, Bill Cosby.’ I said to the guy, `What are you doing? Where’s my intro?’ And he said, `Did you see the first show?’
“And we stood there going back and forth, and the people were laughing, and they thought that he was a part of my act, and something just cleared the way, and I went up and ad-libbed for 38 minutes, which did not make the person following me happy. But the rest of the time, I just went on and I soared.
“Now it’s quite obvious why I’m telling you this, but then again, you need to hear it. Whatever it is you’re going for, you show up. Don’t make yourself nervous about something. If you know your stuff, then you show up. Don’t talk yourself into being that person that nobody wants to see. Failure is easy. No problem, it’s a bungee jump. And so is your showing up for everything. Your showing up for the exam, your showing up for the audition, your showing up for whatever work you’re going to do. It is not for you to doubt. It is not for you to say, `But what if it falls over?’ because you are headed in that direction if you think that way.”
Toni Morrison
Wellesley College (May 28)
`So, I’m left with the last thing that I sort of ignored as a topic. Happiness. I’m sure you have been told that this is the best time of your life. It may be. But if it’s true that this is the best time of your life, if you have already lived or are now living at this age the best years, or if the next few turn out to be the best, then you have my condolences. Because you’ll want to remain here, stuck in these so-called best years, never maturing, wanting only to look, to feel and be the adolescent that whole industries are devoted to forcing you to remain.
“One more flawless article of clothing, one more elaborate toy, the truly perfect diet, the harmless but necessary drug, the almost final elective surgery, the ultimate cosmetic — all designed to maintain hunger for stasis. While children are being eroticized into adults, adults are being exoticized into eternal juvenilia.
“I know that happiness has been the real, if covert, target of your labors here. Your choices of companions, of the profession that you will enter, you deserve it, and I want you to gain it; everybody should. But if that’s all you have on your mind, then you do have my sympathy, and if these are indeed the best years of your life, you do have my condolences because there is nothing, believe me, more satisfying, more gratifying than true adulthood.
“The adulthood that is the span of life before you. The process of becoming one is not inevitable. Its achievement is a difficult beauty, an intensely hard-won glory, which commercial forces and cultural vapidity should not be permitted to deprive you of.”
Christopher Reeve
Middlebury College (May 23)
`I’ve learned by being literally paralyzed that, to a large extent, paralysis is a choice. We can either watch from the sidelines or actively participate. We can rationalize inaction by deciding that one voice or one vote doesn’t matter, or we can make the choice that inaction is unacceptable; either let self-doubt and feelings of inadequacy prevent us for realizing our potential, or embrace the fact that when we turn our attention away from ourselves, our potential is limitless.
“Some people have to be pushed to the edge or confront their own mortality in order to gain that perspective, to learn to live a more conscious and fearless life. But, you don’t have to do that. You don’t have to go to the edge, and you can choose not to be paralyzed.”
Secretary of State Colin Powell
Wake Forest University (May 17)
`Do the right thing. Simple words. Childhood words. And you’ve heard it since childhood. . . . Do the right thing, even when you get no credit for it, even if you get hurt by doing the right thing. Do the right thing when no one is watching or will ever know about it. You will always know.
“Our nation is now going through a period of deep disappointment, a period of deep pain over some of our soldiers not doing the right thing at a place called Abu Ghraib. . . . I told the audiences that I spoke to [in Jordan] over the weekend that all Americans deplored what happened there and there could be no excuse. . . .
“I also told them that, in their disappointment about America right now, watch America. Watch how we deal with this. Watch how America will do the right thing. Watch what a nation of values and character, a nation that believes in justice, does to right this kind of wrong. Watch how a nation such as ours will not tolerate such actions.”
Bill Clinton
Cornell University (May 29)
`Half the world is living on less than $2 a day, a billion people live on less than $1 a day, a billion people go to bed hungry every night, a billion and a half people never get a single clean glass of water in their lives, 10 million children die every year of completely preventable childhood diseases, one in four of all people who will perish on the Earth this year will die of AIDS, TB, malaria and infections related to diarrhea. Most of them are little children who never got a single clean glass of water in their lives.
“If you solve all these problems, does it mean there will be no terrorists? No. But it means there will be fewer people who will have a reason to hate, to resent, to feel left out and left behind. One hundred and thirty million children never go to school at all. We are sitting here at Cornell celebrating the fact that students from all over the world got great educations — in a world in which 130 million kids never darken a schoolhouse door anywhere. It would cost us a tiny fraction of what we are spending on defense and homeland defense to put every kid in this world in school for six years. We ought to do it.”
