I found today’s featured link while digging around the homepage of Dr. David Reidy, a member of UT’s philosophy department. If all goes according to plan, I hope to sit in on his political philosophy seminar this fall — a course on John Rawls and His Critics. If things don’t go according to plan, I’ll just crib his reading list and learn something about liberalism on my own.
But back to today’s featured link . . .
I was thrilled to find on Dr. Reidy’s site a link to Tony Kushner’s May 26, 2002 commencement address at Vassar, which I’d never read before. His speech is built upon the simplest of conceits, and one that I’m sure must have plagued every speaker who has ever faced the task of sitting down behind a computer or over a pad of paper and writing words that will inspire, amuse, and inform college graduates (and their debt-ridden families) on this strangely ceremonial day. His conceit? Why Me? and What am I doing here?
As usual, Kushner is worth reading if for no other reason than the awesome playfulness of his language. Here, in one of the address’s many rambling, paragraph-long sentences, he gets really damn close to describing that confusing mess, life:
You could ask your parents WHY ME, if in asking you mean how did I come to be like this; they, after all, made you, at least some of you, no one will ask them to take responsibility for the whole of you, but if in asking WHY ME you are inquiring after the specifics of your specificity, WHY AM I ME AND NOT SOMEONE ELSE, you could begin by looking into your origins; some of the answers can be found in your home, and by setting the answers you glean through observation, coercion and psychoanalytic psychotherapy in a dialectical spin with the facts of your place in history, in time, your place in the world at large, in the culture which is your larger context, in the ideology you have inherited and I hope transformed by living and which with your psyche is the prism through which your self or your soul is refracted, the light and air baffle which your flame or the smoke from your smouldering traverses to reach the exterior world, by setting the inner and the outer up as combatants on the epic dramatic stage in your head, you will arrive, maybe by the time you’re 80, maybe earlier if you work hard at it, at some understanding of yourself, if you don’t fear the dark night of the soul you will; and you won’t fear it so much as long as you remember that no one is happy, only Bush is happy; the best you can hope for is to be happy-ish; remember too that the real value of a dark night of the soul is that it’s maybe the surest way of ascertaining that you have one, a soul that is.
The “What am I doing here?” part is where Kushner gets to talk politics, and, as usual, he takes full advantage of the opportunity, tearing into Bush, Cheney, Andrew Sullivan (though subtly here), the Greens, and the ideologies of individualism and consumerism.
one of the answers to the WHAT question ought to be: I am here to organize. I am here to be political. I am here to be a citizen in a pluralist democracy. I am here to be effective, to have agency, to make a claim on power, to spread it around, to rearrange it, to democratize it, to legislate it into justice. Why you? Because the world will end if you don’t act. You are the citizen of a flawed but actual democracy. Citizens are not actually capable of not acting, it is not given to a citizen that she doesn’t act, this is the price you pay for being a citizen of a democracy, your life is married to the political beyond the possibility of divorcement. You are always an agent.
And then he gives advice and quotes a beautiful poem by Czeslaw Milosz and reminds us of something that we should all know anyway — that we could all stand to read more Emerson, but especially the “Divinity School Address” — and then, as if that weren’t already more than any graduating class could ever deserve (even if it is a graduating class at Vassar), he sends us off with words that sound like they could be spoken by a character in a Tony Kushner play:
It’s time to stop talking. Oh it always goes like this, I start out not knowing what to say and before I know it I can’t shut up. So commence already! A million billion mazels to you and your parents and your teachers and Vassar for having done so self-evidently magnificent a job. I am certain you are aflame. Hurry hurry hurry, now now now, damn the critics and the bad reviews: the world is waiting for you! Organize. Speak the truth.
Amen!