STUDENTS: Ditch the Trite Socio-Political Simplifications of Commencement Speakers:
Soon, we will be submerged in a flood of platitudinous pablum as dowdy, dreary commencement speakers will regale youth with wholly unoriginal ideas – Savor some new ideas to rebut the BS
By
David Gottfried
This film clip is your appetizer, more edifying, and more emotionally nutritious, that any G-dforsaken commencement address:
In 2008, a Jewish comic, who if I recall correctly may have been Sarah Silverman, said that Jewish youth should tell their grandparents that they will not visit them if they do not support Obama.
Sarah Silverman’s message was a sarcastic, supposedly “humorous” version of the stuff we hear in commencement addresses, or addresses to graduating seniors which supposedly impart “words of wisdom.” These words are often a tired distillation of the favorite liberal nostrums of “The Nation” or NPR, and they will be spiced up with calls to “action” and “community service” which have all the elan and energy of drooling geriatrics extolling their glory days campaigning for Bobby Kennedy or Gene Mc Carthy. (I once had an art professor, one Dean Christman, who said an artistic movement is definitely in its dotage when it routinely recycles its greatest hits.)
We will soon be hearing a lot of unoriginal, repetitious commencement addresses which will solemnly instruct us on how to live happy and worthwhile lives.
Of course, the emphasis is on worthwhile, as opposed to happy lives, as the commencement speakers, for all their allegedly liberal flourishes, are almost puritanical about happiness, generally believing that a sun-drenched vacation in the Caribbean smacks of bourgeois decadence and that a good and dutiful liberal soldier should endure the winter months in a roach-infested tenement in that part of the upper, upper west side of Manhattan that borders Harlem and Columbia and spend his afternoons with a Jew-hating mob screaming that Palestine’s boundaries should stretch from the river to the sea. Incidentally, the last time a mob screeched its geographical demands was 1939, when German mobs demanded that Polish Gdansk be ceded to the Reich.
(Of course, neither the dopes in these mobs, nor the populace viewing them on the boob tube, know that the land mass of territories under an Arab flag is 500 times greater than the land mass under the star of David. Chic and Gallant a-hole demonstrators, Get yourself an education: Study an atlas.)
Since we are on the precipice of commencement-address season, I will offer my own counter commencement address to immunize us from the bullshit we will soon hear from famous personages who are so busy admiring themselves for being so rich and liberal and famous that they have lost all capacity for critical thought.
In this essay, I will, like the angel of death in Passover, for the most part pass over concrete political disputes. Instead, I will highlight the key ideational flaws, which give rise to dumb political ideas, that dominate the minds of commencement speakers (and most supposedly advanced, well-schooled people)
Before you can love the world, you must learn to love yourself or all your liberal good deeds will be infected with a smarmy, condescending smugness spiked with bitterness and bile.
Commencement speakers tell you to love and work for the good of the world, but…
Saintly people are often supreme Sons of bitches:
If one endeavors to love the world while neglecting oneself, one will eventually hate the world one seeks to love. While it might be sweet to be a Saint, it is impossible. We want to eat, to laugh, to get our rocks off.
Students, you must ditch the stultifying salt peter of sanctimonious scolds who will tell you to become a nebbishy nerd working for professional liberal saviors. After a couple of months in a miserable apartment that always smells of rat piss, you will hate the world so much they you will almost try to fuck up your work on behalf of your poverty-stricken clients at a housing clinic because you want other people to become as miserable as you. (As Hegal said, every thesis has within it the seeds of its own antithesis.)
Also, you must take care of yourself because your liberal deeds and endeavors will all be impotent if you are without money and concrete skills. Otherwise you’ll be just another clubbed body writhing in agony on Michigan Avenue.
The words “intelligence” and “intellectual” mean two very different things, and be wary of the attractive and imaginative rants of fashionable poseurs who are called intellectuals.
An intelligent person will think with clarity, and he will think correctly. He reasons in Aristotelian syllogisms.
An intellectual is a person who enjoys, or makes a living at, playing with ideas. Sometimes his ideas are valid. Very often, they are not.
An intellectual fabricates ideas not to solve a problem, but to strike the dramatic pose that will make him more popular with the ranks of emotionally insecure sad sacks who go to lectures and other forums specializing in emotional and intellectual uplift.
I love intellectual inquiry, and sometimes it may be rewarding, but much of it is like a whore’s costume jewelry. It sparkles, but there’s nothing there.
And so one of our finest Intellectuals, her bitchy eminence Ms. Susan Sontag, said, in 1968, that “the white race was the cancer of human history.” Only two years earlier she had said, in “Illness as Metaphor,” that illness should not be likened to political problems (as this linkage cheapened our understanding of both physical illness and political problems), but in ‘68, that year of epic fulminations, extravagant and purple prose to the effect that white people were cancer would be the ticket to the Holy of Holies in the “New York Review of Books.” Of course, by likening white people to cancer she may have endangered the physical security of white people, but like a good Stalinoid warrior she didn’t worry about collateral damage.
Of course, Sontag was not alone in her efforts to bewitch well-read people with ideas that seemed to have come from an ancient seer or sorcerer. Norman Mailer gave us wonderfully scathing indictments of modern life, but when he gives us his frequent rants to the effect that bureaucracies ineluctably lead to cancer, one really wants to clobber the exquisite windbag.
But I suppose none of our intellectuals have been as apishly idiotic as Allen Ginsberg. In a 1967 Demonstration at the Pentagon, against the Vietnam War, intellectuals seemed to have regressed to the status of 18-year-old freshmen who believe that one must be crazy to be a great artist. At that demonstration against the Vietnam War, Allen Ginsburg, that gay activist who was a walking advertisement for stern psychiatric treatment to turn gay people straight (In one of his most famous poems, he suddenly blurts out, “I want to suck the cocks of the grandfathers of Iowa.” He wrote that when he was in his 20s. Although I am gay, when I read that, and suffered the visage of a 20 something kneeling in cow dung and sucking off a grizzly cock, I quite simply, and most emphatically, vomited.), said that he would, by chanting Buddhist bullshit, levitate the pentagon. You read me right. That wasn’t a typo. Ginsburg said he would make the pentagon rise into the air.
Naturally, since he was queer and Avant Garde and out of his mind, the la di dah Limousine liberals loved him to death. He was the quintessential intellectual poet, sure to make the most brazen comments, delivering verbal venom as stunningly sardonic as Cleopatra’s asp.
The Vietnam war was an enormous mistake. But Ginsburg, by being such a phenomenal ass, may have helped prolong the war.