Graduation Speech 2: The Political Truth That Dares Not Speak Its Name

I love graduation season for the speeches and writings it inspires among an older generation wanting to pass on its wisdom to the younger. I featured Steve Jobs' Stanford commencement in the last post; now I'll point to editor and author Tom Englehardt's imaginary commencement address "from the Edge of the Campus of Life."

I'll give you the ending, and leave it to you to read the rest to discover what Englehardt argues is the political word that dare not speak its name in American education. So, last things first:

You are, I assure you, entering an extreme world at an extreme moment. Don't leave it solely to them to describe it for you. Don't just let yourself be used by the language that our world makes so readily available to you.

Back in 1946, in his stirring essay, "Politics and the English Language," which he would later vividly illustrate in his novel 1984, George Orwell wrote of the problems, but also the satisfactions, of letting them define the limits of what can be spoken. You can, he pointed out, certainly save yourself some trouble "by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you -- even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent -- and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself."

But he also wrote: "Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."

Maybe what we need is fewer lies, less wind, and a new, stripped-down, weeded out, more honest vocabulary for our political world, words that don't fall so far short of the world as it is. . . . It's your job to find more of them, and where they don't exist to invent them. If you want to live in this world and not The Matrix version of it, you need a language that works for you, and you may have to create it. You need, in short, to speak up.

As all the collapsing businesses and the millions of out of work Americans make clear at this moment, you can be constrained from doing many things, but not from defining the world for yourself, and maybe even for some of the rest of us. Not if you want to.

Don't take my word for it. Take your own... and depart. (Read the rest....)

Next up, Barbara Ehrenreich offers some related words to the poor souls who are graduating with a journalism degree.