Grad speeches are an interesting thing; are they not? And let’s be honest; some are awesome; some are awful. And sometimes we disagree which is which.
To be clear, the audience matters. The speech one gives at West Point wouldn’t be the same one gives at Barnard, Benedictine, nor at Morehouse or Mississippi State. The size, the students, the academic focus, and the private, public or parochial nature — all of that matters. It didn’t matter enough at a recent graduation we attended when they welcomed a notably divisive congressperson giving a grossly partisan speech. For a large, DI public university, that indeed seemed negligent, likely appealing to no more than 33% of the audience, regardless of the partisan angle.
Yes, some are awesome; some are awful. It reminds me of the once always witty satirist, P.J. O’Rourke, in May of 2008. As Forbes once said, O’Rourke “never minces words or pulls his punches, whatever the subject.” I wonder if any attempted to shut down the excerpt below…
Well, here you are at your college graduation. And I know what you’re thinking: “Gimme the sheepskin and get me outta here!” Not so fast. First you have to listen to a commencement speech. Don’t moan. I’m not going to “pass the wisdom of one generation down to the next.” I’m a member of the 1960s generation. We didn’t have any wisdom… We were the generation who believed we could stop the war in Vietnam by growing our hair long and dressing like circus clowns. We believed drugs would change everything — which they did, for John Belushi… My generation spoiled everything for you. It has always been the special prerogative of youth to look and act weird and shock the grown-ups. But my generation exhausted the earth’s resources of weird. Weird clothes — we wore them. Weird beards — we grew them. Weird words and phrases — we said them. So, when it came your turn to look and act weird, you had to tattoo your faces and pierce your tongues. Ouch. That must have hurt. I apologize… It’s my job to give you advice. But all the rest of the advice I’m going to give you is bad advice. I figure it this way: You’re finishing 16 years of education, and you’ve had all the good advice you can stand. Let me offer some relief.
1. Go out and make a bunch of money! Here we are in the most prosperous country in the world, surrounded by all the comforts, conveniences, and security that money can provide, yet no American political, intellectual or cultural leader ever says to American young people, “Go out and make a bunch of money.” They say money can’t buy happiness. But it can rent it. There’s nothing the matter with honest money-making. Wealth is not a pizza where if I have too many slices you have to eat the Domino’s box. In a free society, with the rule of law and property rights, no one loses when someone else gets rich.
2. Don’t be an idealist! Don’t chain yourself to a redwood tree. Go be a corporate lawyer and make $500,000 a year. If you make $500,000 a year, no matter how much you try to cheat the IRS, you’ll end up paying $100,000 in taxes—property taxes, sales taxes, excise taxes. That’s $100,000 worth of schools and sewers, fire fighters and police. You’ll be doing good for society. Does chaining yourself to a redwood tree do society $100,000 worth of good?…
3. Get politically uninvolved! Politics stink—and not just bad politics. All politics stink… But let me make a distinction between politics and politicians… Politicians are chefs, some good, some bad. The problem isn’t the cook. The problem is the food. Or let me restate that: The problem isn’t the cook. The problem is the cookbook. The key ingredient of politics is the belief that all of society’s ills can be cured politically. This is like a cookbook where the recipe for everything is to fry it. The fruit cocktail is fried. The soup is fried. The salad is fried. So is the ice cream and cake. The pinot noir is rolled in bread crumbs and dunked in the deep-fat fryer. This is no way to cook up public policy. Politics is greasy. Politics is slippery. Politics can’t tell the truth. But we can’t blame the politicians for that. Because just think what the truth would sound like on the campaign stump, even a little bitty bit of truth: “No, I can’t fix public education. The problem isn’t funding or teachers’ unions or a lack of vouchers or an absence of computer equipment in the classrooms. The problem is your kids!”
4. Forget about fairness! We all get confused about what role politics should play in life. This is because politics and life send contradictory messages. Life sends us the message, “I’d better not be poor. I’d better get rich. I’d better make more money than other people.” Meanwhile politics sends us the message, “Some people make more money than other people. Some people are rich and others are poor. We’d better close that ‘income disparity gap.’ It’s so unfair!”
Well, I’m here to speak in favor of unfairness. I’ve got a ten-year-old at home. And she’s always saying, “That’s not fair.” When she says that, I say, “Honey, you’re cute. That’s not fair. Your family is pretty well off. That’s not fair. You were born in America. That’s not fair. Darling, you had better pray to God that things don’t start getting fair for you…”
5. Be a religious extremist! So don’t get involved with politics if you can help it, but if you can’t help it, read the Bible for political advice—even if you’re a Buddhist or an atheist or whatever. Using politics to create fairness is a sin. The Bible is very clear about this. “Oh, gosh,” you’re thinking, “this is the worst advice yet. We get federal funding here. And the commencement speaker has just violated Constitutional law about separation of church and state.” But hear me out. I am not, in fact, one of those people who believes that God is involved in politics. My attitude is: Observe politics in this country. Observe politics around the world. Observe politics down through history. Does it look like God’s involved? No, that would be (the) Other Fellow who’s the political activist.
However, in one sense I do get my politics from the Bible, specifically from the 10th Commandment. The first nine Commandments concern theological principles and social law: Thou shalt not make graven images, steal, kill, et cetera. Fair enough. But then there’s the 10th: “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is thy neighbor’s.”
Here are God’s basic rules about how we should live, a brief list of sacred obligations and solemn moral precepts. And right at the end of it is “Don’t envy your buddy’s cow.” How did that make the top ten? Why would God, with just ten things to tell Moses, choose as one of them jealousy about livestock?
And yet think about how important this Commandment is to a community, to a nation, to a democracy. If you want a mule, if you want a pot roast, if you want a cleaning lady, don’t whine about what the people across the street have. Go get your own. So do get rich. Don’t be an idealist. Stay out of politics. Forget about fairness. And I have another piece of advice: … Don’t listen to your elders! After all, if the old person standing up here actually knew anything worth telling, he’d be charging you for it.
May the celebrations continue… with one more to come…
Respectfully…
AR