Friends, family, distinguished guests, faculty, and the class of
2005, it’s that time of year again. Every May and June, we
celebrate graduates’ accomplishments, however spectacular,
middling, or unspeakable.
At some point in the history of academia, alas, we deemed a
diploma, a hearty handshake from the dean, and a hug from mom and
dad horribly insufficient compensation for four years of work and
tuition payments. Nor would remarks by the class president, the
dean, and the college president suffice. To augment such meager
offerings, great universities invite our nation’s learned scholars,
pretty faces, do-gooders, and idiot savants to offer our young
people their wit and wisdom. Maybe the idea is to entertain them
one last time.
There are three types of graduation speakers. The truly wise
stick to cliches about a bright future, “staying true,” or crossing
the threshold of life. Graduates and parents are bored, but the
speaker escapes embarrassment-free. The somewhat clever speakers
who address the graduates and the topic of graduation joke about
cliched graduation speeches, and then give a slight variation of
the three or four cliched graduation speeches. In addition to
bored, the gathered are a little annoyed. Yet major gaffes are
avoided.
The third category is something else altogether. These speakers
are Very Important People, Big Names in their respective fields.
Since they’re always being fawned over, they assume graduates will
find them irresistible too. People so enthralled with themselves
share a remarkable blindness to their failed brilliance, especially
when given a microphone and captive audience. So, for your
edification, here’s a sampling of some of the gifts America’s VIPs
have foisted upon this spring’s graduating classes.
We begin with the most newsworthy, Indra Nooyi, the
Indian-American president of PepsiCo. After dismissing cliched
graduation speeches as “the snooze before the booze,” Ms. Nooyi
demonstrated to Columbia Business School graduates last Sunday that
a hyphenated heritage lends a person incredible foreign policy
expertise. Using her hand as a model of world politics (with each
finger representing a leading continent), she said of the United States:
This analogy of the five fingers as the five major
continents leaves the long, middle finger for North America, and,
in particular, The United States. As the longest of the fingers, it
really stands out. The middle finger anchors every function that
the hand performs and is the key to all of the fingers working
together efficiently and effectively. This is a really good thing,
and has given the U.S. a leg-up in global business since the end of
World War I.
However, if used inappropriately — just like the U.S. itself —
the middle finger can convey a negative message and get us in
trouble. You know what I’m talking about. In fact, I suspect you’re
hoping that I’ll demonstrate what I mean. And trust me, I’m not
looking for volunteers to model.
Discretion being the better part of valor… I think I’ll
pass.
How generous and kind. Let’s all raise our Cokes to her.
John McCain, the maverick senator from television, contributed a
similar if more tactful analysis last weekend, telling the budding
minds at the University of Arizona that the United States must make
a show of wringing its hands if it is to be loved abroad:
But however certain we may be about our own motives,
the impressions of people abroad are the ones that count. Should
they sense a truly imperial impulse, they will speed their efforts
to limit America’s reach. But should they detect a truly
humanitarian motive behind American action, they are much more
likely to welcome a powerful United States, rather than oppose it.
Our moral standing is directly tied to our ability to maintain
America’s preeminent leadership in the world.
For outlandish worldliness and wit, you had to be in
Philadelphia Monday, where U.N. Papa Doc Kofi Annan rocked them at
the University of Pennsylvania:
I know you are all looking at me and thinking: “There’s
no way he’s going to be as good as Bono!” And you’re right: the
lead singer of U2 is a hard act to follow.
Annan rode roughshod over speechwriters to come up with this
account of the U.N.’s recent performance:
The United Nations is an idea, too. It is not just a
building, or a piece of international machinery.
Just what I was thinking over breakfast this morning.
We look then to my alma mater, Providence College, and its
honored guest, the recently beached anchor Tom Brokaw. Also
speaking last Sunday, Brokaw delivered the “dream the impossible
dream” speech and exhorted graduates to stand firmly for
wishy-washy politics. The greatest challenge facing this
generation, however, is caring for Mother Earth. Everyone bow your
heads, now:
It will do us little good to export democracy and
economic opportunity, to use our military power wisely and
efficiently, to nurture tolerance and cross-cultural appreciation
if we end up on a dead planet. … In my generation we have been
witness to the power of awareness, of an environmental
consciousness and the modest triumphs of renewal but we continue to
lose ground, clean water, creatures large and small, at an alarming
rate.
Apropos of creatures and their caretakers, Jane Goodall
screeched like a chimpanzee at three institutions in the last week,
Douglass College and Rutgers University in New Jersey, and Syracuse
University. At Syracuse Sunday, Goodall in fact sounded less coherent than any of her wards
would have:
And set against the darkness, there is this brightness,
these shining lights that you carry as you move out. Let them light
the darkness. Light other lights with them. You know the saying
“One candle can light a hundred more without dimming, but making
the world bright.” Take your light and do that.
No matter how worldly, concerned, or cogent this year’s speakers
have been, none could top pseudo-anchor Jon Stewart’s talk last
year to the College of William and Mary. Clad in a T-shirt,
Stewart, class of 1984, presented his expert news summary to
graduates of the College of William and Mary:
I don’t know if you’ve been following the news lately,
but it just kinda got away from us. Somewhere between the gold rush
of easy Internet profits and an arrogant sense of endless empire,
we heard kind of a pinging noise, and uh, then the damn thing just
died on us. So I apologize.
But his real gem drew from his own life experience, couched in
mastery of the English language: “Love what you do. Get good at it.
Competence is a rare commodity in this day and age. And let the
chips fall where they may.”
Will other speakers ever get so good at it?
