Letters to the Editor
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A poignant message.
Bill Moyers' speech to the graduates of Hamilton College was full of wisdom, kindness, philosphical musings and most importantly hope. Acknowledging that the young graduates are inheriting a troubled, polluted and dangerous planet, mainly due to our irresponsable behavior, Mr. Moyers nevertheless believes that each person is given choices in life and that it is up to the individual to make the right ones, in other words do the right thing. "Will you chose to be the horse thief or the horse trader?" Mr. Moyers asks.
Bill Moyers believes that there are forces and dimensions in our lives which we cannot grasp or know but that influence us in mysterious ways. Maybe, he says, the answer to our cosmic puzzle and the meaning to our existence could be as simple as reaching out to our fellow man and offering to share our bread with him. It is a deeply symbolic, metaphorical message told to a college graduating class by a person who believes; it is a very fitting, poignant message.
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Inspiration through Bread
I know there will be the inevitable Salon reader backlash against something so eloquent and personal, but let me say that I wish I had been in Clinton NY that day. Bravo Mr. Moyers.
I wonder how many doomsday treatises were published around 1905???
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Here's the backlash
JLS says in the first posting above that there will inevitably be a backlash among Salon readers against a piece like this. Great! Let's get the backlash started, shall we?
I admire Bill Moyers, which is why I find this speech disappointing. Far from "personal," most of it looks cribbed from some kind of Toastmasters' guide to giving commencement addresses -- starting with Moyers' basic rhetorical pose, the classic "spokesperson for the older generation," and continuing through other Greatest Commencement Hits, like "Life has been full of humbling surprises" and "Yes, I'm an old-timer, but winsomely self-deprectating" and "I've learned that what matters are the little things; be sure to stop and smell the roses" (or buttered rolls). Etcetera.
All that's harmless enough, I suppose. But the business about how "we" (the older generation) have made a mess of things, and "you" (graduates, whom he just presumes are all kids) will face the challenge of cleaning it up, is just hooey. "We" didn't make a mess. Moyers certainly doesn't consider himself responsible for America's current national policies, and on other occasions he's been acutely critical of those who are. So he's really not even being honest here. "We" didn't invade Iraq, or turn budget surpluses into huge deficits, or trash efforts to stop global warming (to mention his own examples of the "mess"). THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION did these things, reversing the policies of its predecessor in all those areas. It's really a disservice to de-politicize the current problems and treat them as a common failure of "ours" -- and, for that matter, to treat younger citizens as if they're a single entity who won't themselves be just as politically divided as "we" are. Give people a little credit: They're going to keep arguing, not just about HOW to clean up the mess but even about which things are messes in the first place.
I can see where a commencement speaker might feel it's not the right occasion to make overtly political speeches. OK, but Moyers CHOSE to bring up political issues; he could have stuck with his buttered-roll story and other such vaporous bits of uplift, but he didn't. And he's not averse to naming names: Notice the obviously critical reference to Tom DeLay. So why is the rest of the speech just a big soft-shoe routine?
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Almost Psychedelic Dude
Recent research has shown that the THC in weed is probably so strong it kills lung cells before they grow. Wow, that's heavy, huh? Forgive me, I digress, sort of like this speech, which appears as if it was composed while the White Album was being played backwards and the brownies were, well, you know, laced.
I love Moyers. He's one of the heroes so he's entitled to an off-night. He's had plenty of stellar performances. The previous letter accentuates much that's wrong with it though I'd equivocate about whether or not Moyers truly feels he and his generation let the youngins down. Yes, it was the Republican administration's responsibility, but it's on its second term. How the hell did the country let that happen? Isn't there a collective sense of responsibility, even if it's secondhand? Granted, if there is he could've been more articulate about it. And if he's wrong, somebody better come up with a viable scapegoat 'cause the kids are gonna be enraged in a few years.
Maybe the inarticulateness or would it be the implicitality of it is exactly what he was striving for since it effectuates the immediacy the kids love nowadays. What's startling is that stream-of-conscious-trip-the-wild fandango-in-the-Godda-Da-Vidaville feel it has, as if these ideas were shattered from an original coherent whole into a hundred slivers of contemporaneous jive because the kids who passed it through a focus mill insisted he keep it light and breezy. Revelations and buns, eco disasters and hope, broken dreams and shattered popsicles. Indeed, now that I'm thinking about it, it seems almost like Solzhenitsyn's Harvard speech turned inside out.
Don't specifically blame society, just the generation standing in front of you. Don't claim a godless spirit has engulfed your soul, imply that, almost, there might not even be that God you've depended on for so many years. And as horrible as it gets, just maybe the worst thing about the future, aside from the air you can't breath without being conditioned, is that there won't be as many parking spots so your commute to work will be 5.6 minutes longer than it is today. He knows the stats and he's thinking, a bunch of you are on antidepressants and ritalin and since you already have a firsthand knowledge of how dark thinking without hope can be I'll not plum the depths of despair.
He's probably not as fragile as his rhetoric would have you believe; it's his sensitivity to the fragility of wild creatures who realize, now that the liberal artsy expressiveness has unfortunately concluded, we have to toss those colorful caps and gowns and don the gray costumes of conformity. That's what he's really afraid to tell them. Those other abstract monsters - Unexpected Miseries - are the kind of perplexing circumstances in Henry James and "Waiting for Godot," which they covered in Lit classes. Now, sad but unsaid, they're going to have to wait for rush hours, promotions and bonus checks that never get written. And politicians who do little more than aid the patrons who feed them, and, as sure as the sun rises, baseball players pumped up by heretofore unimaginably effective steroids that allow 90 home runs to be hit in one season, consistently, year after year. One distinct advantage, however, will be that hot dogs at the park will no longer consist of snouts, skins, and organ meat but contain only a delectable, genetically engineered soy bean that unnaturally tastes like beef.