[song] Barcelona – please don’t go

Jaco Pastorius – Portrait of Tracy

Memory and action

동생에게 살해당한 햄릿의 아버지 유령이 복수를 요구하면서 자신을 기억해달라는 말을 남기고 떠나자 햄릿은 다음과 같은 대사를 읊는다.

Remember thee?

Ay, thou poor ghost, while memory holds a seat

In this dsitracted globe. Remember thee?

Yea, from the table of my memory

I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records,

All saws of books, all forms, all pressure past,

That youth and observation copied there,

And thy commandment all alone shall live

Within the book and volume of my brain

Unmixed with baser matter.

(Hamlet, 1.5.95-104)

중세 시대에 성행하던 믿음 중 하나가 세계의 모든 기억이 한 곳에 저장된다는 것이였다. 처음 읽을 때는 무척 바보같은 생각이라고 비웃었지만 막상 디지털 카메라로 찍은 사진들을 USB 혹은 백업 디스크에 저장하고 핸드폰 단축키는 기억할지언정 전화번호는 기억 못하는 사람들을 보아하니 아주 틀린 얘기도 아닌듯. 당시 정황이 글, 인쇄술이 흔하지 않아서였는지 혹은 육체와 정신을 분리해서 다루는데 익숙치 않았기 때문에 자신의 기억을 어느 물리적 장소에 저장한다고 생각하게 되었는지 그 경과를 정확히 알 수 없지만 Giotto 조또;; 종탑이 그러한 ‘하드 드라이브’ 중 하나라고 생각할 정도였다니 진지하게 믿었던 듯 싶다.

셰익스피어도이러한 믿음을 갖고 있었음을 위의 대사를 통해 엿볼 수 있다. “memory holds a seat in this dsitracted globe.”라 할 때 globe는 두뇌를 가르키므로 뇌 구석탱이에 고이 간직하겠다는 말도 되지만, 당시 셰익스피어의 연극이 연출되던 극장 이름이 Globe였음을 떠올리면 “얼래? 이거봐라?” 소리 나오게 되는 것이지. 즉, 연극이 진행되는 Globe라는 물리적 장소 안의 자리seat에 앉은 관객에 의해서 메세지/기억은 전해질 것임을 암시하고 있다. 이렇게 물리적 장소를 통해 기억이 되살아난다는 햄릿의 믿음은 그 이후에도 여러차례 나타난다. 숙부인 클로디어스 앞에서 부왕이 살인 당하는 장면을 연극으로 재현함으로서 숙부의 기억을 되살리려 했던 장면 – 숙부의 얼굴 표정을 읽고 복수를 확신하는 장면 – 도 이에 해당된다.

얼마전 나의 메모리 박스-_-를 정리하다가 전 여자친구 중 한명의 물건이 하나도 없음을 알게 되었다.  ’다른 애들은 고스란히 있는데 왜 얘만 없지? 버리지는 않았을텐데…’ 하면서 생각해보니 사귀던 내내 둘이 남긴 것이 없다는 것이 떠올랐다. 그 애는 사진에 찍히는 것을 무척 싫어하기도 했지만 무엇보다도 자신의 뛰어난 기억에 대해서 매우 확신에 차있었기 때문에 내 표정, 내 목소리 모든 것을 빠짐없이 기억할 수 있다고 말하곤 했다. 그런 반면 조기 치매수준의 기억력 소유자인 나는 가급적 흔적을 많이 남기고 싶어했다. 둘이 서로 생각이 다른 점을 인정하기 보다는 나랑 헤어지기도 전에 를 잊기 위한 조치를 미리 취하는구나 싶어 무척 섭섭했던 기억이 그 와중에 용케 났다.

서로 기억에 대한 생각이 어찌나 다양하고 기억에 의해서 얼마나 고생하게 되는 방식도 어찌나 하나같이 다다른지…  기억이 어떻게 행동으로 이끌리고, 행동이 어떤식으로 기억에 남게 되는지는 한번쯤 누구나 고민하지 않았을까? 그래선지 일찍이 어린 아들을 잃고 – 아들 이름이 Hamnet이며 Hamlet 쓰기 3~4년전에 죽었다 –  아들에 대한 기억으로 필히 괴로했을 셰익스피어가 연극을 통해 담아낸 기억에 대한 생각이 궁금하다.

p.s.

근데 조낸 비싸 아흙 ;ㅁ;

[commencement speech] Suzan-Lori Parks @Mount Holyoke

SUZAN-LORI PARKS COMMENCEMENT SPEECH TO THE MOUNT HOLYOKE COLLEGE CLASS OF 2001 HELD ON MAY 27, 2001

THANK YOU, Graduating Class of 2001, Fellow Honorary Degree Recipients, Distinguished Administration and Faculty, Alumnae, Parents, Family and Friends, thank you all so much for inviting me to speak with you today. I graduated from Mount Holyoke in 1985. Here I am 16 years later. The learned faculty is seated there behind me, and so, before I get into the swing of things, I want to state that any grammatical errors, historical fabrications and inappropriate flights of fancy contained within the following speech are the sole responsibility of the Commencement Speaker and, if found objectionable, should in no way be viewed as an example of the caliber of education one would receive at Mount Holyoke College.

It is commencement and you all are commencing—you are beginning. Today is yr birthday. Its a sort of birthday for me too: this is my first honorary degree. Yr sitting there looking forward into me and Im standing here looking forward into you. I’ll be yr mirror for a few minutes, if you’ll be mine. All of us together, we are commencing. It is the beginning of things, its also the end of things and Ive brought along 16 SUGGESTIONS which may be of use—as you walk through the rest of yr lives.

Suggestions and Advice are funny things. In 1982 I took a creative writing class with James Baldwin. He suggested to me that I try playwrighting and I tried playwrighting and here I am today. That was some good advice. But it wasnt the best advice I ever got.

The BEST advice I ever got was also the WORST advice any one ever gave me. In high school I had a very stern English teacher and one gloomy day she summoned me into her gloomy office. She knew I loved English and that I wanted to study literature and perhaps someday become a writer—”Dont study English,” she said, “you havent got the talent for it.” What a horrible thing to say. What an excellent suggestion. It was an excellent suggestion because it forced me to think for myself. And thats my first suggestion for you.

SUGGESTION #1: CULTIVATE THE ABILITY TO THINK FOR YRSELF. When someone gives you advice, you lay their advice along side yr own thoughts and feelings, and if what they suggest jives with what youve got going on inside, then you follow their suggestion. ON THE OTHER HAND—there are lots of people out there who will suggest all kinds of stupid stuff for you to incorporate into your life. There are lots of people who will encourage you to stray from your hearts desire. Go ahead and let them speak their piece, and you may even want to give them a little smile depending on your mood, but if what they suggest does not jive with the thoughts and feelings that are already alive and growing beautifully inside you, then dont follow their suggestion. THINK for yrself, LISTEN to yr heart, TUNE IN to yr gut. These are just the things for which Mount Holyoke has educated you. Youve all received an excellent education here and education, excellent education, is just a kind of ear training. That’s all it really is—Inner Ear Training.

SUGGESTION #2: EMBRACE DISCIPLINE. Give yrself the opportunity to discover that discipline is just an extension of the love you have for yrself—discipline is not, as a lot of people think, some horrid exacting torturous self flagellating activity—Discipline is just an expression of Love—like the Disciples—they didnt follow Christ because they HAD TO.

SUGGESTION #3: PRACTICE PATIENCE. Whether you sit around like I do, working for that perfect word, or yr working toward a dream job, or wishing for a dreamy sweetheart. Things will come to you when yr ready to handle them—not before. Just keep walking yr road.

SUGGESTION #4; And as you walk yr road, as you live yr life, RELISH THE ROAD. And relish the fact that the road of yr life will probably be a windy road. Something like—the yellow brick road in the WIZARD OF OZ. You see the glory of OZ up ahead—but there are lots of twists and turns along the way—lots of tin men, lots of green women.

SUGGESTION #5: DEVELOP THE ART OF MAKING A SILK PURSE FROM A SOW’S EAR.

Cause, you know, it aint whatcha got, its how you work it.

SUGGESTION #6: For every 30 min of tv you watch, READ one poem outloud. For every work of literature you read, spend at least 30min in the mall, or in a mall equivalent such as Wal-Mart. This is cross-fertilization—a now-age form of crop rotation—a way to cross train yr spirit and keep interested in everything and not get too stuck in yr ways.

Speaking of yr ways and yr way:

SUGGESTION #7: GET OUT OF YOUR WAY. You can spend yr life tripping on yrself, you can also spend yr life tripping yrself up. Get out of yr own way.

Yr young, brilliant, and today is yr birthday. Yve got yr whole lives ahead of you and each of you will spend yr life doing some thing, or maybe a host of things. Dont just spend your life.

SPLURGE

SUGGESTION #8: SPLURGE YR LIFE BY DOING SOMETHING YOU LOVE. My husband Paul is a musician. He says that the concept of talent is overrated because “talent” is really the gift of love. “Talent” happens when yr in love with something and you devote yr life to it and its yr love of it that makes you want to keep doing it, its yr love of it which helps you overcome the obstacles along the way, and its yr love of it that begets a talent for it.

SUGGESTIONS #9, 10, 11, 12, & 13: Eat Yr Vegetables, Floss Yr Teeth, Try Meditation, Get Some Exercise, & SHARPEN YR 7 SENSES: the basic 5 Senses + the 6th Sense: ESP & the 7th Sense which is yr sense of HUMOR.

16 years ago I sat where one of you is sitting now. The class of 1985 was graduating. And we were lucky as we had a great poet speaking to us. She was a great writer and an MHC alum. She was pretty and poised and she had such grace—so much grace that I sat there looking at her thinking that she looked more as if she had gone to Smith. Anyway it was sunny and we were all in black probably sweating a little and she spoke brilliantly and eloquently and to this day I have absolutely no memory of what she said. I dont remember one word of her brilliant commencement address the address that launched the class of 1985. Not one word. I want you to catch my drift. Im not saying our speaker was boring. Im saying that I dont remember what she said. But I do remember some words that went through my head at the very moment our speakers words were passing by. It was a voice, coming from my gut, a voice coming from my heart and the voice said: “Ah, Suzan-Lori Parks, the next degree youre going to receive is an honorary degree from MHC.”

Yep I really said that to myself. And here I am today.

SUGGESTION #14: SAY “THANK YOU” at least once a week.

SUGGESTION #15: LOVE YRSELF. Why not.

16 years from now who will remember these words? Maybe no one. But maybe someone will. Maybe, from back in 1985, there is a classmate of mine who, to this day, remembers every word of our commencement address and this classmate repeats those words and they lighthouse her stormy days, maybe. Or if not a classmate remembering then maybe an alum if not an alum maybe a family member, maybe a parent, up there, gathered in the background having given so much, helping you get to this special day. Whether my words today will be remembered is not the issue because, you see, what Im saying to you right now isnt as important as what you are saying, right now, to yrselves.

SUGGESTION #16: BE BOLD. ENVISION YRSELF LIVING A LIFE THAT YOU LOVE. Believe, even if you can only muster yr faith for just this moment, believe that the sort of life you wish to live is, at this very moment, just waiting for you to summon it up. And when you wish for it, you begin moving toward it, and it, in turn, begins moving toward you.

As the great writer James Baldwin said: “Yr crown has been bought and paid for. All you have to do is put it on yr head.”

THANK YOU

[commencement speech] Oliver Stone @UC Berkeley

This speech by Oliver Stone is four pages, outlined below:

1. Searching for the Spiritual
2. Movies and American Society
3. The Dream-State of Recent History
4. The Struggle for Consciousness

Searching for the Spiritual

I had the fortunate privilege recently to be able to shoot one of my movies in Thailand. It was called Heaven and Earth, and it’s coming out this year. I spent several months over there preparing the movie, and I was struck, as was my crew, by the spirituality of Thailand. By the concept of Buddhism immanent in every walk of life.

Of course Thailand has a very corrupt part of society, much like our own land. The politicians for years have been known to be on the take; there’s a large amount of deforestation going on; bribes get you everything you need in that society. And the military pretty much dominates it. It’s a military-dominated society. When we were there a military coup d’état occurred and democracy was shuttled to the side. It was an interesting time, because the people are very quiet, and in a sense, very passive by our standards. Until they killed some young people, some protesters, there wasn’t the outbreak of sensational newspaper reaction that you get in our country; but something deeper was going on.

Thailand, as I said, is a Buddhist society; at 6:00 in the mornings everywhere you go you see monks walking on the sides of the roads with their beggar baskets. People give them food. It’s very beautiful, the sharing and the trust given the monks.

At one point in my stay there, approximately 100,000 monks got together — in a country that’s about as big as Texas — to chant and sing and pray in protest against the military regime.

It was something that was not reported in the newspaper; you didn’t hear about it probably because our secular press doesn’t pick up  on things like that, but it had a tremendous, tremendous impact in that country. It wasn’t too much longer after that day when the force of their prayers worked and the military government collapsed. They gave up, and they returned to a form of democratic government. It was a very noble example of bringing change through prayer.

When I got back to America, I was wondering where that element exists in our society. We are a very secular, information- and result-oriented society. There’s very little faith in the right side of the brain type of thinking, or mysticism, or what we call spirituality. Buddhism in this country is not really understood; it’s regarded as sort of quaint, it seems to be an old-fashioned religion. But it isn’t, really. It’s a very active one and has a place in the modern world.

I couldn’t find that kind of spirituality in this country, except, oddly enough, in the American Indian cultures where I’ve been able to travel with some friends over the last few years. With the Sioux up north in South Dakota, and the Navajo and Hopi tribes down in the Southwest. It’s been a very eye-opening experience for me to attend a sun dance, for example.

A sun dance, some of you may know, is a coming together of the tribes in a vast gathering in the summertime to pray, to exorcise the demons, to bring the tribe together, to make speeches. Certainly the physical highlight of the event is the piercing of flesh, where the males of the tribe walk around a tree in circles and dance around the tree for days on end. When I was there, there were 300 sun-dancers. There were old people, young people; they beat the drums through the day. There must have been a hundred with pierced flesh on the front, here on the breast, and on the back. They were crying as they went through a wall of pain, young boys up to age ll. I saw men lifted into the trees by their chests. Horses were pulling the ropes, they were dragging buffalo skulls in the dust like Christ figures. There was a man walking backward the whole time, for three or four days, until he was totally dizzy, I’m sure. But he was looking for the vision.

Visions — often of ancestors. Without food and water in a hot summer, you start to see a lot of ancestors. And I felt that I was witnessing a combination of fear and an act of faith at the same time, which is rare.

The sun dance was their opera and their theater event of the year. In our culture, you go to the theater, the curtain comes down, you applaud, you pay fifty bucks and that’s it. But there is faith in fear. And I think the whole event, the four days, the building of that fear was intended to induce a sacred state of belief in what St. Paul called “the evidence of things unseen.” To the Indians, the thing unseen is the Great Creator of Being, Tonkasha or Tongashira. He’s sacred in all things of the earth. The rocks that are our ancestors, Mother Earth, the sky, the sacred pipe that they smoke, the Indians view all things as spiritual. All our winters, the 70 or 80 winters that we pass here on earth, are as a speck in time compared to the eternity spent in the spirit world. We here in this room really are ghosts, secondary to that spark.

For them, the Holy Spirit very much exists, but it exists in ritual. A byproduct is art, and art exists for them only if it is holy, blessed with the spirit. Because art, cultural or whatever, is meant to heal, to bind the tribe together on an annual basis to revive mourning and tears and pity and horror and joy. Those things the Greeks called catharsis, the sharing of pity and terror and joy with all. A bond exists between the onlookers and the pierced ones. They give their flesh as offerings as Jesus did. We watch and we are moved by the sun dance’s sacrifice, and after four days, we once again commit ourselves to things of the spirit.

Movies and American Society

This is what I think; I might be presumptuous, but this is what I think movies are for in our culture, or at least what movies should aspire to. A coming together of our tribe. Drama as catharsis, as release, as reaffirmation of the power of the spirit. Films, I feel, should be like the great Hindu and Buddhist ideographs I saw on the temple walls of Southeast Asia. Massive paintings and murals telling the common tales, well-known tales of danger, fear, death, heroes, elephants, love, the birth of children and new kings, new dreams. They worship dreams. Holiness in art, ritual, entertainment.

I tried in my own way, with Born on the Fourth of July and JFK, to tap into the national American conscience of the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s. I tried to show that and I hoped to bring together the nation by depicting a national event and showing how it divided this country, and how it could also heal. But I feel the wounds are still too fresh. The film was attacked in many intellectual quarters from both the left and the right, for being false or simple-minded.

I sometimes think that America, unlike the Sioux or the Buddhist societies I’ve seen, is torn by too many opinion-makers that divide us into a quarrelsome Athenian society where individual artistic achievements are suspect as attempts to enrich ourselves, or as political propaganda statements. If art exists as spiritual revival for the country or the tribe, then it must include controversy, because art must challenge the thinking and fashion of the time and of society. Art must peel back the lie. Often the official lies, as you know, are confused in our history books with the truth.

In our culture I often find the artistic is denied, the concept of catharsis is secularized. All meaning is over analyzed. The truth of the time of a working-class boy, Born on the Fourth of July, losing his legs in Vietnam and being angry  about it, or a young president, Kennedy, being assassinated for a viable motive is just too sentimental or too controversial for our opinion-makers, our cutting-edge magazines, our secular newspapers. Very rarely, in my experience, can a movie break through this secularization of thought, this barrier of repression in our culture. The news must be made by journalists. History must be interpreted by opinion-makers and scholars. Drama is, in our country, a political weapon. Hitler taught us how, with his mass theatrical lies. This century, with Stalin and Hitler and Madison Avenue and Lyndon Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, the political image-makers and their line of puppet presidents with smiling faces have taught us that the bigger the lie, the more likely that people are to believe it. We have, I believe, confused art, the spiritual basis of art, with media. Media as hysteria, media as propaganda, the skin of events only. We have taken the Hindu wall paintings and stripped them of religious and spiritual meaning, for our propaganda purposes.

This is frightening if you consider all the implications, because it puts us in a realm of 21st-century human beings who will not really be in touch with themselves. We’ll be cybermen and -women, artificial intelligence moving on fast-forward. It will probably be exciting but we may not be in touch with who we really are in our essence, our primal essence. I sometimes wake up and wonder how to make it through another day of belief. I feel as many of you might, stripped of spiritual meaning, of a place in the world. Sometimes we hear the earth is shot and the species is going to mutate into weird beings with plastic lungs, dying for food. The waters are dying. Progress itself is now suspect. Why do we breathe, why do we procreate? My generation, I think, is facing the most depressing moment in time. The question is why survive, why? Except finally because it is all we know.

The Dream-State of Recent History

As a filmmaker I have always responded as a dreamer, not as a doer. I don’t build houses, I don’t make the waters run, pump electricity, explore the universe, doctor people … all I do is dream. I make some semblance of those Hindu wall paintings that I hope people like because it reflects a dream of theirs. I try to go to the secret heart we all have, the collective unconscious. But the price I pay is that life increasingly seems to me but a dream, a psychological delusion and metaphor, all symbol, that I have witnessed in my lifetime. My critics like to call me “Oliver Stoned,” but I feel we all are “Oliver Stoned” because we have to be in order to fully understand the madness of modern times. Don’t we all, whether we know it or not, live in the mass delusion of a dream state of recent history? In my short lifetime, I’ve seen at least seven instances of it on a massive scale.

1. My mother was French. I grew up in France in the ’50s and when I was there everyone I spoke to, children my own age, adults, no one ever said one word about the French collaboration with the Nazis in World War II. As you may know now, it was very, very extensive. But everyone I talked to in those years was a member of the French Resistance or in some way had staked out his heroism. It wasn’t talked about, that was the point, it wasn’t talked about. It took one filmmaker, well more than one but one filmmaker in particular who did stand up, Marcel Ophuls, and his film “The Sorrow and the Pity,” to start to open up this aspect of French society that was a wound of denial.
2. I had the opportunity to go to Russia in the early 1980s to write a screenplay about dissidents in Russia under the old regime of Brezhnev, and all the people I talked to, old and young alike, were guilty of amnesia. No one accepted the crimes of Stalin. They treated Stalin like he was a benign grandfather, someone on the order of Winston Churchill. We all know that Stalin committed some of the largest numerical atrocities of this century, millions of people were killed. But they denied this — there was either an embarrassed silence about their leader or incredible praise. There again, I ran into society in denial.
3. In my own life, as you know, I went to Vietnam. I served over there in the military, once, and as a civilian another time, and I came back to America in 1969 and there was a blanket of silence over Vietnam. It was just not discussed. It was a very strange thing.  It was impolite. All the official histories I read of Vietnam were, in my opinion (everyone has a different Vietnam), all absolutely fraudulent. So that’s why I wrote Platoon, because I felt if I could do one thing in my life it would be at least to deal honestly with some truth I had experienced in my lifetime and to tell it like it is, as opposed to going along with this silence. Vietnam is still a wound, as you know. Bush and Reagan have told us repeatedly that the war is over, but Vietnam is a state of mind. It’s like the French collaboration, or Stalin in Russia — Vietnam is a sick state of mind that is evident in this country still to this day. I was just at a seminar down in Hampton-Sydney and the undergraduates hadn’t done a lot of reading, they didn’t know anything about Vietnam. They didn’t know what the Gulf of Tonkin was — which was, of course, one of the most interesting staged events of our lifetime. It led to the declaration of hostility against North Vietnam and was a staged and manipulated event. People forgot that we carpet-bombed Laos and Cambodia. Possibly a million to two million Vietnamese died — who knows, they don’t keep statistical MIA’s over there — but it was a holocaust for that society, and we were very much a part of it.
4. In the mid-’80s I was able to go down to Central America. That was another shock. I was in Honduras and in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala. I did a film called Salvador. There was a very strong bias towards invading Nicaragua at that time, up until 1986. When I saw the American soldiers in the streets of Honduras and El Salvador, I asked them if any of them remembered Vietnam. These were younger people but there in green uniforms, just like I was in Vietnam a few years before. And they really didn’t. They were embarrassed to draw any parallels to our behavior in Central America. I honestly don’t feel they knew anything about Vietnam. It was devastating, it was devastating to the shared experience of the country to find its citizens maintained an indifference to its own history.
5. Another example in my lifetime is certainly the John Kennedy killing. I won’t belabor it; I made a film about it, some of you people have seen it, but the official historians won’t tell you the truth. The polls have always shown a deeply inherent popular distrust of the government version of it, the Warren Commission. The people who control the memory of America, the newspaper, press people, the politicians, they would have you believe that Kennedy was killed simply by a lone nut in a random shooting and will not explore the pattern of events that has dictated our lives from the ’60s on. They tell you that Lyndon Johnson didn’t change a thing when he became president, that he didn’t change the policies of Kennedy. This is a very tricky question, but it is not accurate: there was a significant change of policies under Lyndon Johnson, starting with the day he came into office, his meeting on Vietnam with his chief advisors. They issued, two days after Kennedy was murdered, a new national security action memorandum called 273, which was much more aggressive in posture and tone than national security action 263 which was in effect until that moment. Kennedy had made very strong indications and plans, on paper, not just by saying it, but on paper, that he was going to withdraw by 1965, and it’s all in that paper which many intelligent people, in their contempt for Kennedy, continue to deny as some sort of public relations stunt.
6. I think another bogeyman in my life, another dream, is the CIA. To some people they’re benign, they don’t exist. But I don’t think the American people are aware of the strong links this country has to Germany, to the Nazis in World War II, and how much the CIA relied on the Nazi intelligence apparatus to get information against the Russians. I would argue that the Cold War really began in 1944, when we sort of knew that Germany was going to lose, when we started to collect all the smart people that we could in Eastern Europe, and in Germany and even in Russia, to start to fight the Soviet Union. The CIA is very much a part of that. In fact, I would argue that the Nazi scientists came here, the Nazi intelligence people, and they brought with them a Nazi frame of mind which inculcated itself into the American social fabric. What the CIA did through the 1950s and ’60s was destabilize foreign governments, use psychological warfare on a scale that dwarfed all Nazi efforts, and basically militarized our country into a state of fighting a Cold War. We were spending enormous sums of money that should have been going into a healthier society, being used only for weapons of destruction. The CIA is still there, it has not gone away. It is probably the largest criminal organization in the world, and has been in the past.
7. Another dream (or nightmare) is that the media industry can control the events of our time through the media, and through that media it becomes the truth. Every night on television you look at Dan Rather and he tries to sell you his interpretation of events, and it’s basically the consensus journalism that runs through channels ABC, NBC and CBS. The same story is repeated, the same take on the same story, the same spin. Vary rarely do they go into a deeper look, below the surface. This Afghanistan war business is frightening, the way they kept repeating the same mantra “the Russians did it, the Russians did it.” Anyone who studies Afghanistan, and I hope they will, will find that there was a lot of provocation going on in Afghanistan, through Iran; that we provoked the Russians, in many ways, to come into Afghanistan because we wanted to drain them.

The Struggle for Consciousness

I sometimes think that the media have dreamed our history up. They dreamed Watergate, the revelations of Watergate, of which we saw the surface. There so much missing tape, there’s 400 hours of tape, that we, the naive ones, saw just a few hours of — the surface events. There may have been a reason for Watergate, which I’m not going to discuss here, but I urge you to read a book such as Silent Coup. I urge you as students to look through Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States. It goes through American history upside down. It reexamines Columbus, the genocide against the Indians. It reexamines all the stories I grew up with; the Indian wars, the origins of the American Revolution, what George Washington was really doing. The origins of the Civil War. Was slavery really the issue it was supposed to be? Was it really such a noble conflict? How did World War I get started?  There are some fascinating economic reasons behind World War I. What about that most sacred cow of all, the origins of World War II? I’m not saying that Hitler was a nice guy by any means, but I am saying that the origins of that war were thicker and more dense than is the simplistic version of the “good war” against Germany. The Korean War is a puzzle to most of us. Vietnam eludes many people. I honestly have reached a point, cynical as it may sound, where I do believe that history is written by those who win. They won. They killed Kennedy, they rewrote it to match what they wanted you to believe, and if Hitler had won World War II, believe me, today we’d be reading a different history about the United States to justify Hitler. Winner takes all. Never underestimate the power of corruption to change history.

I guess I sound pessimistic, but in my heart, being a filmmaker and taking dramatic license, I am most optimistic. I do feel the media can be used for good purpose in the 21st century. I do feel that a golden age could be upon us. A higher consciousness, so to speak, through computers and communication. In a sort of Buckminster Fuller paradigm, people would be smarter because they have to be, in order to make the earth system work. Fuller would say no matter how greedy and selfish people could get, politicians, businessmen, lawyers, leaders, at some point it becomes naturally unproductive to be so selfish. They’ve got to start to clean up the atmosphere because it becomes economically profitable to do so. Profit motivates. Survival is profitable. Technology and soul.

We must, in our daily lives, struggle to keep our consciousness growing. I sometimes feel like my children, young people, are only getting film sequels, robots, sound-bites, created by cynical people. I feel that the minds of my children will perish in a sleepwalk through their adult years from the suburbs to the car to the golf course to the office. Devoid of a sensibility to look beyond their own lives to reach out to others. To trip over a homeless person in the street without noticing because they will be unable to deal with the reality of suffering. Nothing wrong with suffering, suffering is good. The Indians say “walk with the pain of the world.” It is good to be exposed to suffering, not to run from it, not to keep it at arm’s length through some expensive government program that we can ignore. It is good to make it part of your everyday life, like the Indians do in Calcutta.

I think with movies we can begin to strengthen people’s immune systems, because people go into the movies with their defenses down. It’s not real, therefore not threatening. When they least expect it, that might be the best time for the guerrillas of art to get in there and move the head  and the heart. One hopes that people will leave the theater renewed, sacred. In a system that has rendered man more and more insignificant, where artists and all people are packaged and trivialized by the media, where their dreams are categorized and destroyed, I really want to believe in the greatness of the spirit of man. And I think so do our movies, that’s why we all like happy endings. I think it’s something fundamental to all people.

I choose to believe, in the back-burner of my mind, in some old movie hero besieged on all sides by enemy swordsmen, who by some inner force and greater love conquers his adversaries against all odds. What is a movie but this parade of faces across the screen? Greta Garbo to Julia Roberts, they’re faces that, for the most part, you love. Most of the power of movies is the close-up of the face. People, I think, want to see faces because that face of sorrow, suffering, pain, resurrection makes the audience, once again, believe in being human. In traversing the odds, in getting up in the morning and making it through the day.

I think man wants to believe in man, woman wants to believe in women, people in people. And in a world where the systems are crushing us, where many of our leaders are shadow-puppets, mouthing hypocrisies on the media stage, where centralization, big business, big government, is constantly, fascistically, gaining each day on the individual and has wiped out so much of the human spirit in this century, I think that people are the one recurrent hope we have. Day by day in the Calcuttas and Manhattans of the world, you get up and you get through the day, inch by inch, and by making it, you win. If adversity is big, and it is, then I choose to believe that man is bigger than his adversity. In the words of Andre Malraux, “The 21st century will either be spiritual or it will not be.”

Thank you.

[commencement speech] Ellen DeGeneres @Tulane University

Ellen DeGeneres gives a commencement speech at Tulane University on May 16, 2009.

Quote

Thank you, President Cowan, Mrs. President Cowen; distinguished guests, undistinguished guests – you know who you are, honored faculty and creepy Spanish teacher. And thank… More »

Thank you, President Cowan, Mrs. President Cowen; distinguished guests, undistinguished guests – you know who you are, honored faculty and creepy Spanish teacher. And thank you to all the graduating class of 2009, I realize most of you are hungover and have splitting headaches and haven’t slept since Fat Tuesday, but you can’t graduate ’til I finish, so listen up.

When I was asked to make the commencement speech, I immediately said yes. Then I went to look up what commencement meant. Which would have been easy if I had a dictionary, but most of the books in our house are Portia’s, and they’re all written in Australian. So I had to break the word down myself, to find out the meaning.

Commencement: common, and cement. Common cement. You commonly see cement on sidewalks. Sidewalks have cracks, and if you step on a crack, you break your mother’s back. So there’s that. But I’m honored that you’ve asked me here to speak at your common cement.

I thought that you had to be a famous alumnus – alumini – aluminum – alumis – you had to graduate from this school. And I didn’t go to college here, and I don’t know if President Cowan knows, I didn’t go to any college at all. Any college. And I’m not saying you wasted your time, or money, but look at me, I”m a huge celebrity.

Although I did graduate from the school of hard knocks, our mascot was the knockers. I spent a lot of time here growing up. My mom worked at (?) and I would go there every time I needed to steal something out of her purse. But why am I here today? Clearly not to steal, you’re too far away and I’d never get away with it.

I’m here because of you. Because I can’t think of a more tenacious, more courageous graduating class. I mean, look at you all, wearing your robes. Usually when you’re wearing a robe at 10 in the morning, it means you’ve given up. I’m here because I love New Orleans. I was born and raised here, I spent my formative years here, and like you, while I was living here I only did laundry six times. When I finished school, I was completely lost. And by school, I mean middle school, but I went ahead and finished high school anyway. And I – I really, I had no ambition, I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I did everything from – I shucked oysters, I was a hostess, I was a bartender, I was a waitress, I painted houses, I sold vaccuum cleaners, I had no idea. And I thought I’d just finally settle in some job, and I would make enough money to pay my rent, maybe have basic cable, maybe not, I didn’t really have a plan, my point is that, by the time I was your age, I really thought I knew who I was, but I had no idea. Like for example, when I was your age, I was dating men. So what I’m saying is, when you’re older, most of you will be gay. Anyone writing this stuff down? Parents?

Anyway, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, and the way I ended up on this path was from a very tragic event. I was maybe 19, and my girlfriend at the time was killed in a car accident. And I passed the accident, and I didn’t know it was her and I kept going, and I found out shortly after that, it was her. And I was living in a basement apartment, I had no money, I had no heat, no air, I had a mattress on the floor and the apartment was infested with fleas. And I was soul-searching, I was like, why is she suddenly gone, and there are fleas here? I don’t understand, there must be a purpose, and wouldn’t it be so convenient if we could pick up the phone and call God, and ask these questions.

And I started writing and what poured out of me was an imaginary conversation with God, which was one-sided, and I finished writing it and I looked at it and I said to myself, and I hadn’t even been doing stand-up, ever, there was no club in town. I said, “I’m gonna do this on the Tonight Show With Johnny Carson”- at the time he was the king – “and I’m gonna be the first woman in the history of the show to be called over to sit down.” And several years later, I was the first woman in the history of the show, and only woman in the history of the show to sit down, because of that phone conversation with God that I wrote. And I started this path of stand-up and it was successful and it was great, but it was hard, because I was trying to please everybody and I had this secret that I was keeping, that I was gay. And I thought if people found out they wouldn’t like me, they wouldn’t laugh at me.

Then my career turned into – I got my own sitcom, and that was very successful, another level of success. And I thought, what if they find out I’m gay, then they’ll never watch, and this was a long time ago, this was when we just had white presidents – this was back, many years ago – and I finally decided that I was living with so much shame, and so much fear, that I just couldn’t live that way anymore, and I decided to come out and make it creative. And my character would come out at the same time, and it wasn’t to make a political statement, it wasn’t to do anything other than to free myself up from this heaviness that I was carrying around, and I just wanted to be honest. And I thought, “What’s the worst that could happen? I can lose my career”. I did. I lost my career. The show was cancelled after six years, without even telling me, I read it in the paper. The phone didn’t ring for three years. I had no offers. Nobody wanted to touch me at all. Yet, I was getting letters from kids that almost committed suicide, but didn’t, because of what I did. And I realised that I had a purpose. And it wasn’t just about me and it wasn’t about celebrity, but I felt like I was being punished… it was a bad time, I was angry, I was sad, and then I was offered a talkshow. And the people that offered me the talkshow tried to sell it. And most stations didn’t want to pick it up. Most people didn’t want to buy it because they thought nobody would watch me.

Really when I look back on it, I wouldn’t change a thing. I mean, it was so important for me to lose everything because I found out what the most important thing is, is to be true to yourself. Ultimately, that’s what’s gotten me to this place. I don’t live in fear, I’m free, I have no secrets. and I know I’ll always be ok, because no matter what, I know who I am. So In conclusion, when I was younger I thought success was something different. I thought when I grow up, I want to be famous. I want to be a star. I want to be in movies. When I grow up I want to see the world, drive nice cars, I want to have groupies. To quote the Pussycat Dolls. How many people thought it was “boobies”, by the way? It’s not, it’s “groupies”.

But my idea of success is different today. And as you grow, you’ll realise the definition of success changes. For many of you, today, success is being able to hold down 20 shots of tequila. For me, the most important thing in your life is to live your life with integrity, and not to give into peer pressure. to try to be something that you’re not. To live your life as an honest and compassionate person. to contribute in some way. So to conclude my conclusion: follow your passion, stay true to yourself. Never follow anyone else’s path, unless you’re in the woods and you’re lost and you see a path, and by all means you should follow that. Don’t give advice, it will come back and bite you in the ass. Don’t take anyone’s advice. So my advice to you is to be true to yourself and everything will be fine.

And I know that a lot of you are concerned about your future, but there’s no need to worry. The economy is booming, the job market is wide open, the planet is just fine. It’s gonna be great. You’ve already survived a hurricane. What else can happen to you? And as I mentioned before, some of the most devastating things that happen to you will teach you the most. And now you know the right questions to ask in your first job interview. Like, “Is it above sea level?” . So to conclude my conclusion that I’ve previously concluded, in the common cement speech, I guess what I’m trying to say is life is like one big Mardi Gras. But instead of showing your boobs, show people your brain, and if they like what they see, you’ll have more beads than you know what to do with. And you’ll be drunk, most of the time. So the Katrina class of 2009, I say congratulations and if you don’t remember a thing I said today, remember this: you’re gonna be ok, dum de dum dum dum, just dance.

[commencement speech] Conan O’Brien @Harvard University

Commencement Speech to the Havard Class of 2000

by Conan O’Brien

I’d like to thank the Class Marshals for inviting me here today. The last time I was invited to Harvard it cost me $110,000, so you’ll forgive me if I’m a bit suspicious. I’d like to announce up front that I have one goal this afternoon: to be half as funny as tomorrow’s Commencement Speaker, Moral Philosopher and Economist, Amartya Sen. Must get more laughs than seminal wage/price theoretician.
Students of the Harvard Class of 2000, fifteen years ago I sat where you sit now and I thought exactly what you are now thinking: What’s going to happen to me? Will I find my place in the world? Am I really graduating a virgin? I still have 24 hours and my roommate’s Mom is hot. I swear she was checking me out. Being here today is very special for me. I miss this place. I especially miss Harvard Square – it’s so unique. No where else in the world will you find a man with a turban wearing a Red Sox jacket and working in a lesbian bookstore. Hey, I’m just glad my dad’s working.
It’s particularly sweet for me to be here today because when I graduated, I wanted very badly to be a Class Day Speaker. Unfortunately, my speech was rejected. So, if you’ll indulge me, I’d like to read a portion of that speech from fifteen years ago: “Fellow students, as we sit here today listening to that classic Ah-ha tune which will definitely stand the test of time, I would like to make several predictions about what the future will hold: “I believe that one day a simple Governor from a small Southern state will rise to the highest office in the land. He will lack political skill, but will lead on the sheer strength of his moral authority.” “I believe that Justice will prevail and, one day, the Berlin Wall will crumble, uniting East and West Berlin forever under Communist rule.” “I believe that one day, a high speed network of interconnected computers will spring up world-wide, so enriching people that they will lose their interest in idle chit chat and pornography.” “And finally, I believe that one day I will have a television show on a major network, seen by millions of people a night, which I will use to re-enact crimes and help catch at-large criminals.” And then there’s some stuff about the death of Wall Street which I don’t think we need to get into….
The point is that, although you see me as a celebrity, a member of the cultural elite, a kind of demigod, I was actually a student here once much like you. I came here in the fall of 1981 and lived in Holworthy. I was, without exaggeration, the ugliest picture in the Freshman Face book. When Harvard asked me for a picture the previous summer, I thought it was just for their records, so I literally jogged in the August heat to a passport photo office and sat for a morgue photo. To make matters worse, when the Face Book came out they put my picture next to Catherine Oxenberg, a stunning blonde actress who was accepted to the class of ‘85 but decided to defer admission so she could join the cast of “Dynasty.” My photo would have looked bad on any page, but next to Catherine Oxenberg, I looked like a mackerel that had been in a car accident. You see, in those days I was six feet four inches tall and I weighed 150 pounds. Recently, I had some structural engineers run those numbers into a computer model and, according to the computer, I collapsed in 1987, killing hundreds in Taiwan.
After freshman year I moved to Mather House. Mather House, incidentally, was designed by the same firm that built Hitler’s bunker. In fact, if Hitler had conducted the war from Mather House, he’d have shot himself a year earlier. 1985 seems like a long time ago now. When I had my Class Day, you students would have been seven years old. Seven years old. Do you know what that means? Back then I could have beaten any of you in a fight. And I mean bad. It would be no contest. If any one here has a time machine, seriously, let’s get it on, I will whip your seven year old butt. When I was here, they sold diapers at the Coop that said “Harvard Class of 2000.” At the time, it was kind of a joke, but now I realize you wore those diapers. How embarrassing for you. A lot has happened in fifteen years. When you think about it, we come from completely different worlds. When I graduated, we watched movies starring Tom Cruise and listened to music by Madonna. I come from a time when we huddled around our TV sets and watched “The Cosby Show” on NBC, never imagining that there would one day be a show called “Cosby” on CBS. In 1985 we drove cars with driver’s side airbags, but if you told us that one day there’d be passenger side airbags, we’d have burned you for witchcraft.
But of course, I think there is some common ground between us. I remember well the great uncertainty of this day. Many of you are justifiably nervous about leaving the safe, comfortable world of Harvard Yard and hurling yourself headlong into the cold, harsh world of Harvard Grad School, a plum job at your father’s firm, or a year abroad with a gold Amex card and then a plum job in your father’s firm. But let me assure you that the knowledge you’ve gained here at Harvard is a precious gift that will never leave you. Take it from me, your education is yours to keep forever. Why, many of you have read the Merchant of Florence, and that will inspire you when you travel to the island of Spain. Your knowledge of that problem they had with those people in Russia, or that guy in South America-you know, that guy-will enrich you for the rest of your life.

There is also sadness today, a feeling of loss that you’re leaving Harvard forever. Well, let me assure you that you never really leave Harvard. The Harvard Fundraising Committee will be on your ass until the day you die. Right now, a member of the Alumni Association is at the Mt. Auburn Cemetery shaking down the corpse of Henry Adams. They heard he had a brass toe ring and they aims to get it. Imagine: These people just raised 2.5 billion dollars and they only got through the B’s in the alumni directory. Here’s how it works. Your phone rings, usually after a big meal when you’re tired and most vulnerable. A voice asks you for money. Knowing they just raised 2.5 billion dollars you ask, “What do you need it for?” Then there’s a long pause and the voice on the other end of the line says, “We don’t need it, we just want it.” It’s chilling.
What else can you expect? Let me see, by your applause, who here wrote a thesis. (APPLAUSE) A lot of hard work, a lot of your blood went into that thesis… and no one is ever going to care. I wrote a thesis: Literary Progeria in the works of Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner. Let’s just say that, during my discussions with Pauly Shore, it doesn’t come up much. For three years after graduation I kept my thesis in the glove compartment of my car so I could show it to a policeman in case I was pulled over. (ACT OUT) License, registration, cultural exploration of the Man Child in the Sound and the Fury…
So what can you expect out there in the real world? Let me tell you. As you leave these gates and re-enter society, one thing is certain: Everyone out there is going to hate you. Never tell anyone in a roadside diner that you went to Harvard. In most situations the correct response to where did you to school is, “School? Why, I never had much in the way of book larnin’ and such.” Then, get in your BMW and get the hell out of there.
You see, you’re in for a lifetime of “And you went to Harvard?” Accidentally give the wrong amount of change in a transaction and it’s, “And you went to Harvard?” Ask the guy at the hardware store how these jumper cables work and hear, “And you went to Harvard?” Forget just once that your underwear goes inside your pants and it’s “and you went to Harvard.” Get your head stuck in your niece’s dollhouse because you wanted to see what it was like to be a giant and it’s “Uncle Conan, you went to Harvard!?”
But to really know what’s in store for you after Harvard, I have to tell you what happened to me after graduation. I’m going to tell you my story because, first of all, my perspective may give many of you hope, and, secondly, it’s an amazing rush to stand in front of six thousand people and talk about yourself.

After graduating in May, I moved to Los Angeles and got a three week contract at a small cable show. I got a $380 a month apartment and bought a 1977 Isuzu Opel, a car Isuzu only manufactured for a year because they found out that, technically, it’s not a car. Here’s a quick tip, graduates: no four cylinder vehicle should have a racing stripe. I worked at that show for over a year, feeling pretty good about myself, when one day they told me they were letting me go. I was fired and, I hadn’t saved a lot of money. I tried to get another job in television but I couldn’t find one.
So, with nowhere else to turn, I went to a temp agency and filled out a questionnaire. I made damn sure they knew I had been to Harvard and that I expected the very best treatment. And so, the next day, I was sent to the Santa Monica branch of Wilson’s House of Suede and Leather. When you have a Harvard degree and you’re working at Wilson’s House of Suede and Leather, you are haunted by the ghostly images of your classmates who chose Graduate School. You see their faces everywhere: in coffee cups, in fish tanks, and they’re always laughing at you as you stack suede shirts no man, in good conscience, would ever wear. I tried a lot of things during this period: acting in corporate infomercials, serving drinks in a non-equity theatre, I even took a job entertaining at a seven year olds’ birthday party. In desperate need of work, I put together some sketches and scored a job at the fledgling Fox Network as a writer and performer for a new show called “The Wilton North Report.” I was finally on a network and really excited. The producer told me the show was going to revolutionize television. And, in a way, it did. The show was so hated and did so badly that when, four weeks later, news of its cancellation was announced to the Fox affiliates, they burst into applause.
Eventually, though, I got a huge break. I had submitted, along with my writing partner, a batch of sketches to Saturday Night Live and, after a year and a half, they read it and gave us a two week tryout. The two weeks turned into two seasons and I felt successful. Successful enough to write a TV pilot for an original sitcom and, when the network decided to make it, I left Saturday Night Live. This TV show was going to be groundbreaking. It was going to resurrect the career of TV’s Batman, Adam West. It was going to be a comedy without a laugh track or a studio audience. It was going to change all the rules. And here’s what happened: When the pilot aired it was the second lowest-rated television show of all time. It’s tied with a test pattern they show in Nova Scotia.

So, I was 28 and, once again, I had no job. I had good writing credits in New York, but I was filled with disappointment and didn’t know what to do next. I started smelling suede on my fingertips. And that’s when The Simpsons saved me. I got a job there and started writing episodes about Springfield getting a Monorail and Homer going to College. I was finally putting my Harvard education to good use, writing dialogue for a man who’s so stupid that in one episode he forgot to make his own heart beat. Life was good.
And then, an insane, inexplicable opportunity came my way . A chance to audition for host of the new Late Night Show. I took the opportunity seriously but, at the same time, I had the relaxed confidence of someone who knew he had no real shot. I couldn’t fear losing a great job I had never had. And, I think that attitude made the difference. I’ll never forget being in the Simpson’s recording basement that morning when the phone rang. It was for me. My car was blocking a fire lane. But a week later I got another call: I got the job.
So, this was undeniably the it: the truly life-altering break I had always dreamed of. And, I went to work. I gathered all my funny friends and poured all my years of comedy experience into building that show over the summer, gathering the talent and figuring out the sensibility. We debuted on September 13, 1993 and I was happy with our effort. I felt like I had seized the moment and put my very best foot forward. And this is what the most respected and widely read television critic, Tom Shales, wrote in the Washington Post: “O’Brien is a living collage of annoying nervous habits. He giggles and titters, jiggles about and fiddles with his cuffs. He had dark, beady little eyes like a rabbit. He’s one of the whitest white men ever. O’Brien is a switch on the guest who won’t leave: he’s the host who should never have come. Let the Late show with Conan O’Brien become the late, Late Show and may the host return to Conan O’Blivion whence he came.” There’s more but it gets kind of mean.
Needless to say, I took a lot of criticism, some of it deserved, some of it excessive. And it hurt like you wouldn’t believe. But I’m telling you all this for a reason. I’ve had a lot of success and I’ve had a lot of failure. I’ve looked good and I’ve looked bad. I’ve been praised and I’ve been criticized. But my mistakes have been necessary. Except for Wilson’s House of Suede and Leather. That was just stupid.

I’ve dwelled on my failures today because, as graduates of Harvard, your biggest liability is your need to succeed. Your need to always find yourself on the sweet side of the bell curve. Because success is a lot like a bright, white tuxedo. You feel terrific when you get it, but then you’re desperately afraid of getting it dirty, of spoiling it in any way.
I left the cocoon of Harvard, I left the cocoon of Saturday Night Live, I left the cocoon of The Simpsons. And each time it was bruising and tumultuous. And yet, every failure was freeing, and today I’m as nostalgic for the bad as I am for the good.
So, that’s what I wish for all of you: the bad as well as the good. Fall down, make a mess, break something occasionally. And remember that the story is never over. If it’s all right, I’d like to read a little something from just this year: “Somehow, Conan O’Brien has transformed himself into the brightest star in the Late Night firmament. His comedy is the gold standard and Conan himself is not only the quickest and most inventive wit of his generation, but quite possible the greatest host ever.”
Ladies and Gentlemen, Class of 2000, I wrote that this morning, as proof that, when all else fails, there’s always delusion.
I’ll go now, to make bigger mistakes and to embarrass this fine institution even more. But let me leave you with one last thought: If you can laugh at yourself loud and hard every time you fall, people will think you’re drunk.
Thank you.

[commencement speech] Kurt Vonnegut @Rice University

Home > Commencements > Rice University
TITLE: I have no name for it, and hope nobody else comes up with one.

RICE UNIVERSITY GRADUATION ADDRESS
May 9, 1998

Hello.

For those of you getting your first university degrees, I like your generation a lot, and I expect good things from you, and wish you well.

This is a long-delayed puberty ceremony. You are at last officially full-grown men and women — what you were biologically by the age of fifteen or so. I am sorry as I can be that it took so long and cost so much for you to at last receive licenses as grownups.

I have not calculated how much your diplomas cost in time and money. Whatever those ballpark figures are, they surely deserve this reaction from me today: Wow. Wow. Wow.

Thank you, and God bless you and those who made it possible for you to study at this great American university. By becoming informed and reasonable and capable adults, you have made this a better world than it was before you got here.

Have we met before? No. But I have thought a lot about people like you. You men here are Adam. You women are Eve. Who hasn’t thought a lot about Adam and Eve?

This is Eden, and you’re about to be kicked out. Why? You ate the knowledge apple. It’s in your tummies now.

And who am I? I used to be Adam. But now I am Methuselah.

And who is a serpent among us? Anyone who would strike a child.

So what does this Methuselah have to say to you, since he has lived so long? I’ll pass on to you what another Methuselah said to me. He’s Joe Heller, author, as you know, of Catch 22. We were at a party thrown by a multi-billionaire out on Long Island, and I said, ”Joe, how does it make you feel to realize that only yesterday our host probably made more money than Catch 22, one of the most popular books of all time, has grossed world-wide over the past forty years?”

Joe said to me, ”I have something he can never have.”

I said, ”What’s that, Joe?”

And he said, ”The knowledge that I’ve got enough.”

His example may be of comfort to many of you Adams and Eves, who in later years will have to admit that something has gone terribly wrong — and that, despite the education you received here, you have somehow failed to become billionaires.

This can happen to people who are interested in something other than money, other than the bottom line. We call such people saints — or I do.

Well-dressed people ask me sometimes, with their teeth bared, as though they were about to bite me, if I believe in a redistribution of wealth. I can only reply that it doesn’t matter what I think, that wealth is already being redistributed every hour, often in ways which are absolutely fantastic.

Nobel Prizes are peanuts when compared with what a linebacker for the Cowboys makes in a single season nowadays.

For about a hundred years now, the most lucrative prize for a person who made a really meaningful contribution to the culture of the world as a physicist, a chemist, a physiologist, a physician, a writer, or a maker of peace, has been the Nobel Prize. It is about a million dollars now. Those dollars come, incidentally, from a fortune made by a Swede who mixed clay with nitroglycerin and gave us dynamite.

KABOOM!

Alfred Nobel intended that his prizes make the planet’s most valuable inhabitants independently wealthy, so that their work could not be inhibited or bent this way or that way by powerful politicians or patrons.

But one million dollars is only a white chip now — in the worlds of sports and entertainment, on Wall Street, in many lawsuits, as compensation for executives of our larger corporations.

One million dollars in the tabloids and on the evening news is “chump change” in 1998.

I am reminded of a scene in a W. C. Fields movie, in which he is watching a poker game in a saloon in a gold-rush town. Fields announces his presence by putting a one-hundred-dollar bill on the table. The players barely look up from the game. One of them finally says, “Give him a white chip.”

But the cost of a college education, a minor fraction of a million dollars, is anything but chump change to most Americans. Have academic degrees in the past been passports to international glory, to wealth grotesquely out of scale with the needs of ordinary families?

In a few cases. Rice can no doubt name a handful of celebrities who came from here. Larry McMurtry I know about. But most graduates from Rice, or from Harvard, or Oxford, or the Sorbonne, or anyplace else you care to name, have been of use locally rather than nationally. They have commonly been rewarded with modest but adequate amounts of money — and even less fame. In place of fame, they may have had to be content with someone’s seemingly heartfelt thanks for something well done from time to time.

In time, this will prove to have been the destiny of most, but not all, of the Adams and Eves in this, the Class of 1998 at Rice, and the graduate students as well. They will find themselves building or strengthening their communities. Please love such a destiny, if it turns out to be yours — for communities are all that is substantial about what we create or defend or maintain in this World.

All the rest is hoop-la.

For your footloose generation, that community could as easily be in New York City or Washington, DC or Paris — as in Houston — or Adelaide, Australia, or Shanghai, or Kuala Lampur.

Mark Twain, at the end of a profoundly meaningful life, for which he never received a Nobel Prize, asked himself what it was we all lived for. He came up with six words which satisfied him. They satisfy me, too. They should satisfy you:

”The good opinion of our neighbors.”

Neighbors are people who know you, can see you, can talk to you — to whom you may have been of some help or beneficial stimulation. They are not nearly as numerous as the fans, say, of Madonna or Michael Jordan.

To earn their good opinions, you should apply the special skills you have learned here, and meet the standards of decency and honor and fair play set by exemplary books and elders.

It’s even money that one of you will get a Nobel Prize. Wanna bet? It’s only a million bucks, but what the heck. That’s better than a sharp stick in the eye, as the saying goes.

This speech is now almost twice as long as the most efficient oration ever uttered by an American: Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. Lincoln was murdered for his ideals. The founder of this university, William Marsh Rice, another idealist, was murdered for his money. Whatever! The good both men did lives after them.

Up to this point this speech has been new stuff, written for this place and this occasion. But every graduation address I’ve delivered has ended, and this one will, too, with old stuff about my Uncle Alex, my father’s kid brother. A Harvard graduate, Alex Vonnegut was locally useful in Indianapolis as an honest insurance agent. He was also well-read and wise.

One thing which Uncle Alex found objectionable about human beings was that they seldom took time out to notice when they were happy. He himself did his best to acknowledge it when times were sweet. We could be drinking lemonade in the shade of an apple tree in the summertime, and he would interrupt the conversation to say, “If this isn’t nice, what is?”

So, I hope that you Adams and Eves in front of me will do the same for the rest of your lives. When things are going sweetly and peacefully, please pause a moment, and then say out loud: ”If this isn’t nice, what is?” Hold up your hands if you promise to do that.

That’s one favor I’ve asked of you.

Now I ask you for another one. I ask it not only of the graduates, but of everyone here, including even Malcolm Gillis, so keep your eyes on him. I’ll want a show of hands, after I ask this question:

”How many of you have had a teacher at any level in your educations who made you more excited to be alive, prouder to be alive, than you had previously believed possible?”

Hold up your hands, please.

Now take down your hands and say the name of that teacher to someone sitting or standing near you.

All done? Thank you.

If this isn’t nice, what is?

I thank you for your attention. Hey, presto! God speed.

[commencement speech] Atul Gawande @University of Chicago Medical school

Atul Gawande: University of Chicago Medical School Commencement Address

This morning, the New Yorker staff writer Atul Gawande delivered this commencement address, titled “Money,” to the graduates of the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine. It expands on the themes he touched on in his recent article about health-care costs in McAllen, Texas, which figured in President Obama’s speech on health care yesterday.

Thank you to the students and to the Dean for inviting me here to participate in your graduation. It is an honor.

I want to tell you the story of a friend I lost to lung cancer this year. Jerry Sternin was a professor of nutrition at Tufts University, and with his wife, Monique, he’d spent much of his career trying to reduce hunger and starvation in the world. He was for awhile the director of a Save the Children program to reduce malnutrition in poor Vietnamese villages. The usual methods involved bringing in outside experts to analyze the situation followed by food and agriculture techniques from elsewhere.

The program, however, had itself become starved—of money. It couldn’t afford the usual approach. The Sternins had to find different solutions with the resources at hand.

So this is what they decided to do. They went to villages in trouble and got the villagers to help them identify who among them had the best-nourished children—who among them had demonstrated what Jerry Sternin termed a “positive deviance” from the norm. The villagers then visited those mothers at home to see exactly what they were doing.

Just that was revolutionary. The villagers discovered that there were well-nourished children among them, despite the poverty, and that those children’s mothers were breaking with the locally accepted wisdom in all sorts of ways—feeding their children even when they had diarrhea; giving them several small feedings each day rather than one or two big ones; adding sweet-potato greens to the children’s rice despite its being considered a low-class food. The ideas spread and took hold. The program measured the results and posted them in the villages for all to see. In two years, malnutrition dropped sixty-five to eighty-five per cent in every village the Sternins had been to. Their program proved in fact more effective than outside experts were.

I tell you this story because we are now that village. Our country is in trouble. We are in the midst of an economic meltdown like nothing we’ve seen in more than half a century. The unemployment rate has passed nine per cent. For young people ages twenty-five to thirty-four, the rate is approaching eleven per cent. Our auto industry has filed for bankruptcy. Our housing and finance industries are shadows of their former selves. Our state and local governments are laying off teachers and municipal workers.

It is worth reflecting on how extraordinarily lucky we who are doctors, or doctors-to-momentarily-be, are. Consider the contrast between what every other graduation ceremony taking place today must feel like—the graduation ceremonies for the undergraduates, the business-school students, the law-school students, the architects, the teachers—and what ours does. There are thousands graduating proudly today but fearing for their future. Many have no jobs, no sense of how they’ll make it.

We doctors meanwhile remain with no significant unemployment. Virtually all of us can find gratifying and well-compensated work in our chosen fields, and that is remarkable. It is something to be deeply thankful for.

Yet the idea that we can proceed oblivious to the economic conditions around us is folly. In fact, it is not just folly. It is dangerous.

Job losses and cutbacks have produced an unprecedented increase in the uninsured. Half of hospitals were already operating at a loss before the economy tanked, and the rise in patients who cannot pay their medical bills have since pushed many into insolvency. Hospital closures and layoffs have started, as you know all too well in Chicago. We will be affected by what is going on in our country.

More than that, though, we in medicine have partly contributed to these troubles. Our country’s health care is by far the most expensive in the world. It now consumes more than one of every six dollars we earn. The financial burden has damaged the global competitiveness of American businesses and bankrupted millions of families, even those with insurance. It’s also devouring our government at every level—squeezing out investments in education, our infrastructure, energy development, our future.

As President Obama recently said, “The greatest threat to America’s fiscal health is not Social Security, though that’s a significant challenge. It’s not the investments that we’ve made to rescue our economy during this crisis. By a wide margin, the biggest threat to our nation’s balance sheet is the skyrocketing cost of health care. It’s not even close.”

Like the malnourished villagers, we are in trouble. But the public doesn’t know what do about it. The government doesn’t know. The insurance companies don’t know.

They brought in experts who explained that a quarter of our higher costs are from having higher insurance administration costs than other countries and higher physician and nurse pay, too. The vast majority of extra spending, however, is for the tests, procedures, specialist visits, and treatments we order for our patients. More than anything, the evidence shows, we simply do more expensive stuff for patients than any other country in the world.

So the country is now coming to us who do this work in medicine. And they are asking us, how do they get these costs under control? What can they do to change things for the better?

It is tempting to shrug our shoulders. It is tempting to say, This is just the way good medicine is. But we’d be ignoring the evidence otherwise. For health care is not practiced the same way across the country. Annual Medicare spending varies by more than double, for instance—from less than $6,000 per person in some cities to more than $12,000 per person in others. I visited a place recently where Medicare spends more on health care than the average person earns.

You would expect some variation based on labor and living costs and the health of the population. But as you look between cities of similar circumstances—between places like McAllen and El Paso, Texas, just a few hundred miles apart—you will still find up to two-fold cost differences. A recent study of New York and Los Angeles hospitals found that even within cities, Medicare’s costs for patients of identical life expectancy differ by as much as double, depending on which hospital and physicians they go to.

Yet studies find that in high-cost places—where doctors order more frequent tests and procedures, more specialist visits, more hospital admissions than the average—the patients do no better, whether measured in terms of survival, ability to function, or satisfaction with care. If anything, they seemed to do worse.

Nothing in medicine is without risks, it turns out. Complications can arise from hospital stays, drugs, procedures, and tests, and when they are of marginal value, the harm can outweigh the benefit. To make matters worse, high-cost communities appear to do the low-cost, low-profit stuff—like providing preventive-care measures, hospice for the dying, and ready access to a primary-care doctor—less consistently for their patients. The patients get more stuff, but not necessarily more of what they need.

Fixing this problem can feel dishearteningly complex. Across the country, we have to change skewed incentives that reward quantity over quality, and that reward narrowly specialized individuals, instead of teams that make sure nothing falls between the cracks for patients and resources are not misused. President Obama, I’m pleased to say, committed to making this possible in his reform plan to provide coverage for everyone. But how do we do it?

Well, let us think about this problem the way Jerry Sternin thought about that starving village in Vietnam. Let us look for the positive deviants.

This is an approach we’re actually familiar with in medicine. In surgery, for instance, I know that I have more I can learn in mastering the operations I do. So what does a surgeon like me do? We look to those who are unusually successful—the positive deviants. We watch them operate and learn their tricks, the moves they make that we can take home.

Likewise, when it comes to medical costs and quality, we should look to our positive deviants. They are the low-cost, high-quality institutions like the Mayo Clinic; the Geisinger Health System in rural Pennsylvania; Intermountain Health Care in Salt Lake City. They are in low-cost, high-quality cities like Seattle, Washington; Durham, North Carolina; and Grand Junction, Colorado. Indeed, you can find positive deviants in pockets of most medical communities that are right now delivering higher value health care than everyone else.

We know too little about these positive deviants. We need an entire nationwide project to understand how they do what they do—how they make it possible to withstand incentives to either overtreat or undertreat—and spread those lessons elsewhere.

I have visited some of these places and met some of these doctors. And one of their lessons is that, although the solutions to our health-cost problems are hard, there are solutions. They lie in producing creative ways to insure we serve our patients more than our revenues. And it seems that we in medicine are the ones who have to make this happen.

Here are some specifics I have observed. First, the positive deviants have found ways to resist the tendency built into every financial incentive in our system to see patients as a revenue stream. These are not the doctors who instruct their secretary to have patients calling with follow-up questions schedule an office visit because insurers don’t pay for phone calls. These are not the doctors who direct patients to their side-business doing Botox injections for cash or to the imaging center that they own. They do not focus, the way business people do, on maximizing their high-margin work and minimizing their low-margin work.

Yet the positive deviants do not seem to ignore the money, either. Many physicians do, and I think I am one of them. We try to remain oblivious to the thousands of dollars flowing through our prescription pens. There’s nothing especially awful about that. We keep up with the latest technologies and medications in our specialty. We see our patients. We make our recommendations. We send out our bills. And, as long as the numbers come out all right at the end of each month, we put the money out of our minds. But we do not work to insure we and our local medical community are not overtreating or undertreating. We may be fine doctors. But we are not the positive deviants. `

Instead, the positive deviants are the ones who pursue this work. And they seem to do so in small ways and large. They join with their colleagues to install electronic health records, and look for ways to provide easier phone and e-mail access, or offer expanded hours. They hire an extra nurse to monitor diabetic patients more closely, and to make sure that patients don’t miss their mammograms and pap smears or their cancer follow-up. They think about how to create the local structures and incentives to make better, safer, more appropriate care possible.

I recently heard from one such positive deviant. He is a physician here in Chicago. He’d invested in an imaging center with his colleagues. But they found they were losing money. They had a meeting about what to do just a few weeks ago. The answer, they realized, was to order more imaging for their patients—to push the indications where they could. When he realized what he was being drawn to do by the structure he was in, he pulled out. He lost money. He angered his partners. But it was the right thing to do.

I met another positive deviant, a thoracic surgeon named Dr. Mathew Ninan, who joined a group of pulmonologists, surgeons, and oncologists in Memphis to change the quality of care for lung-cancer patients in their city. “Our approach is simple,” he told me. “We will see every patient regardless of insurance status. We will make every attempt to see patients jointly in one visit. We will discuss every new patient that we see in a multi-disciplinary format on the same day and decide on a plan of treatment. We will follow every patient to track whether they receive the right treatment. And we will enroll as many patients as we can in clinical trials dedicated to improving lung-cancer care.”

To insure that unnecessary costs are avoided, they took yet further steps. The toughest was that the surgeons agreed to do no operations on lung-cancer patients unless the pulmonologist and oncologist agree that it is indicated. This is radical. “I have had to swallow my ego repeatedly to stick to this principle,” he said. Sometimes he’s had to persuade them an operation was best. More often, however, they persuade him to drop his plan and with it the revenue. And he did—because it was the right thing to do.

No one talks to you about money in medical school, or how decisions are really made. That may be because we’ve not thought carefully about what we really believe about money and how decisions should be made. But as you look across the spectrum of health care in the United States—across the almost threefold difference in the costs of care—you come to realize that we are witnessing a battle for the soul of American medicine. And as you become doctors today, I want you to know that you are our hope for how this battle will play out.

As you head into training and then further onward into practice, you will be allowed into people’s lives in a way that no one else in society is permitted. You will see amazing things. And you will develop extraordinary abilities.

Along the way, you will sometimes feel worn down and your cynicism taking over. But resist. Look for those in your community who are making health care better, safer, and less costly. Pay attention to them. Learn how they do it. And join with them.

If you serve the needs of your patients, if you work to ensure that both overtreatment and undertreatment are avoided, you will save your patients. You will also save our country. You are our hope. We thank you.

[commencement speech] Ali G @Harvard University

Ali G @Harvard University

2004 Harvard University Commencement Speech
“Booyakasha – Professor G indahouse aiii. Big shout out de Harvard massiv I iz done a capital ‘H’, coz Harvard iz a place innit – u see I ain’t no ignoranus. Things like ‘apple’ and ‘orange’ do not start with a capital letter, unless dey iz at de start of a sentence – but some of you brainboxes probably know dat already innit.Me name be Ali G and me represent de UK. For those of u who didn’t study geography de UK is a place over a 100 MILES away from here, de capital of it is? Anyone? Not u geography square! ….yes, it is Liverpool. U iz clever and quite fly if u don’t mind me sayin.

First of all, I iz got to say I iz a bit nervous speakin to so many of you – at least me would be if I weren’t totally mashed. Normally de only public-speaking I does is to 12 people – and it’s well easy all me has to say iz me name and de words ‘not guilty’.

Checkit, me agreed to speak here today coz me wanted to talk to de brightest minds of our generation, to see what makes Harvard de most special university in de world, and also coz dey agreed to pay for me flight over here and hotel room. Sorry to bring dis up now, but when u iz told dat your hotel bill is bein paid for, u naturally assume dat dat includes essential extras like breakfast AND special interest pay-per-view movies. Imagine my surprise den dis morning, when I was given a bill for $164. Me was actually tryin to SAVE Harvard money by buying the 24-hour ’slutfest’ packages at $19.99, rather dan paying for individual films at $11.99 each. Which would have cost u – [go thru them] Young and Tight….Backdoor Burglar 2……Backdoor Burglar 3…..Campus Confessions….Asian Fever…Shaven Buffet [get lost] twice dat one… Cold Mountain – dat was a mistake, Backdoor Burglar 4 ….almost 490 bucks. I mean come on, some of it was even research for dis, I iz sure one of de cheerleaders in ‘Ivy League Amateurs’ was wearin a Harvard sweatshirt…..infact allo darlin, respek – I expect u need a cushion to sit on, aiii.

Anyways I digest. It iz a well big honour to be arksed ere today. To fink dat so many great people has been educated ere like Lyndon Banes Johnson, or as he is better known – JFK, George Clinton was also ere I fink , and de one before him, and also…William Tell – is he one of your lot, probably, and dat bloke wiv de hat, but most importantly dat really fit honey from Star Wars – if u iz out dere, me’d love to – me iz stayin at de Best Western Hotel – me’s got a really nice room, altho since dis morning dem has put a parental lock on de tv.

As I stand here today lookin at all of you, on this, your first day of university – I fink of all de fings me can offer you – wisdom, experience but most importantly of all 22 ounces of de finest Morrocan chronic. Well, Dat iz if de Ex-Lax works – to be honest I usually go at 11 in de morning – but nothing dere – infact me’d appreciate it if one medical students here wouldn’t mind takin a look. Don’t worry it’s clean as a whistle, u could eat your lunch of it – infact meJulie has. I know u don’t mind dat kind of fing does u.

Hearmenow, u iz de most cleverest students in America – some of u iz probably brilliant at counting – ye know…1,2,3…4…. I could continue…easy. Others of u will be brilliant at English – have memorised de whole alphabet ‘a to x’ and even be able to spell words like ‘hippototamus’.

I iz also well clever – me was so brainy dat me finished me education 6 years before any of u – at de age of 15 – de teachers had to admit dat dere was nothing else dat dem could teach me. U students has come from every corner of de US from de rainforests of Arizona to de deserts of Alaska. Some of you iz probably never even seen a black man before…….allo

Dere is all types of people ere, and it’s fantastic to see dat Harvard has finally let in so many women. A lot of u iz probably feminists or as we call dem in England ‘lezzas’. I agree wiv u, dat u gotta treat women wiv respec – its de least dat bitches deserve.

Relationships should be brought into dis -de 20th centrury – u women out dere shouldn’t have to do de cookin and de cleanin when u come home from work – u should do it before u leave in de morning.

But more importantly it’s wikid dat in Harvard young women and men gets to learn so many amazing subjects.

Some of u here will have been studying medicine…dat knowledge come wiv a lot of responsibilities. Remember, doctors is some of de most powerfulest people in de world – u can give life, u can cure disease and u can ask to see a woman’s [whistle] wivout getting slapped.

For those of u studying history, u probably learnt a lot about de Presidents. Like who was Jefferson, and what did Lincoln give America – apart from de town car.

Some of u iz de best legal students in de country. U would know wivout even thinking, how to get someone off a charge of possession. And if any of u do, then can me remind u – Room 204 at the Best Western. Just do me a favour put your ear to de door, and don’t come in if u hears me shouting ‘Natalie, play wiv me light saber’.

Let’s talk about de finances of all dat k-nowledge dat’s been dropped on u. It costs $38,000 a year to go to Harvard. Now I don’t know how u lot has earnt dat – apart from u – and u iz earnt every penny, but most of u iz got dat cash from your parents.

All you fathers out dere u iz made choices – wiv dat money u could have bought top of de range Lexus but instead u chose to invest in ya kids future. IZ U MENTAL? If u iz got other kids me hopes u don’t make de same mistake again innit. Does u realise how many honeys u can get wiv a Lex. ‘allo sweetness my son’s got a Harvard degree’ [FEMALE VOICE] ‘wot, who cares’

Or allo darlin, wanna check out de dvd player in de back aiii.’ [her] ‘wot’s dat?’ [me] ‘it’s ostrich leather’ So students give it up for your parents.

Let’s talk bout de future – your future. A lot of you iz probably worried bout employment. Unfortunately most of u WILL end up gettin jobs – especially now u iz got de burden of a degree.

You iz de elite, u will be tomorrow’s captains of industry. Sittin infront of me is probly da next Bill Gates, Donald Trump…or even Ronald Mcdonald. And even if you can’t all be Ronald himself, most of you iz probably McDonald’s Team Leader material. By da way, if any of u ever gets to do business wiv Sir Ronald, a word of hadvice – don’t mention de size of his feet….him iz well sensitive about it. Me mate Dave hactually met him, and he said dat even tho him may seem like he’s always smiling, dere’s a sadness in de eyes…coz of dem feet. All de money in de world – and science still can’t do nothing. Maybe dat’s something dat some of u M.I.T. nerds can fink about innit.

You lot will become powerful people who can change de future – and you need to, coz de world at de moment iz totally f-blank-blank-blank-ucked. Yeknow de word – I been told I ain’t allowed to say it – u know – u know de rude word. U know U definitely know…wiv de whole team.

Anyhow, u iz gotta fink bout de problems in de world coz u iz gotta sort dem out innit. Look at da envirolment – global warming is so bad, dey say in 100 years time, all de rainforests will be gone and all de ice caps will have melted. Actually, 100 years time, we ain’t gonna be around den, so don’t need to worry about dat one.

But dere is other fings – look at de state of family today – girls is havin sex at younger ages, dere’s an increase in absentee fathers and more and more people is havin affairs – but we shouldn’t just concentrate on de good fings.Believing in something is easy. Actually doing something is harder. Actions speak louder dan birds.

U has all got de potential to become great americans. And remember America is de greatest country in de whole world …apart from Jamaica…and Holland.. oh yeah and Thailand coz u got dose girls who do all de ye know and probly some others – but u iz definitely in de top 20.?U people iz de future, u has de chance to change de world, to hactually improve de life of de poor, OR U could goto Wall Street and earn millionz – get plasma screen, chinchilla coat, a series of relationships wiv gold-digging hoes happy to de de most disgusting sexual favours for some bling. Don’t waste de opportunity dat g-d has given you – see u in Wall Street.

Let’s rap dis up now, coz I fink me feels somethin movin down below. So, what iz I hopin to take away wiv me from dis time in Harvard? – new friends, different ways of finking about de world, and as many laptops as me mate Dave has managed to nick from your dorms, while u has been sitting ere listening to me stalling.

But I has got ideals too. Just like de great civil rights leader Martin Luther…Van Dross, I has a dream…of little black girls and little white girls…playin wiv each other. Let’s make it happen I look out and I see 1000s of people wiv different hopes and different dreams – but it is important never to forget where u all came from – becoz black, white, brown or pakistani we all come from de same place – de punani. Jah bless – bigupyaself Princeton…and keep it real… wesside.”

Is you mental?