Congratulations, Your Awareness Is Useless and Painful

Posted by: Avinash on Tuesday, June 5th, 2007

It’s certainly an honor to be compared to great figures in human history who have inspired us to change for their better. For instance, many people use Gandhi as their main man these days with that increasingly overused “you must be change” quote. So when Professor Mark Danner gloriously compared his graduates to a modern figure who some in this country consider to be even more divine than the Mahatma, we can imagine the reaction must have been…vociferous.

For today we are living under a presidential administration that not only is radical — unprecedentedly so — in its attitudes toward rhetoric and reality, toward words and things, but is also willing, to our great benefit, to state this attitude clearly.

Here is my favorite quotation about the Bush administration, a description of a conversation with the proverbial “unnamed administration official” by the fine journalist Ron Suskind in October 2004:

“The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’ ”

I must admit to you that I love that quotation. The unnamed official, widely believed to be Karl Rove, sketches out with breathtaking frankness a radical view in which power frankly determines reality, and in which rhetoric — the science of flounces and folderols — follows meekly and subserviently in its train. Those in the “reality-based community” are figures a mite pathetic, for we have failed to realize the singular new principle of the new age: Power has made reality its bitch.

Given such sweeping claims for power, it is hard to expect much respect for truth; or perhaps it should be “truth” — in quotation marks — for, when you can alter reality at will, why pay much attention to the idea of fidelity in describing it?

But this is all old hat to you, graduates of the Rhetoric Department of 2007, the line of thinking you imbibe with your daily study, for it is present in striking fashion in Foucault and many other intellectual titans of these last decades — though even they might have been nonplussed to find it so crisply expressed by a finely tailored man sitting in the White House. Though we in the “reality-based community” may just now be discovering it, you have known for years the presiding truth of our age, which is that the object has become subject, and we have a fanatical follower of Foucault in the Oval Office. Graduates, let me say it plainly and incontrovertibly: George W. Bush is the first rhetoric-major president.

We’re sure it pleases these new graduates to be compared to such a remarkable figure. Perhaps they too will be inspired to lead by example and ignore such annoying facets of life like reality. It’s close to what their neighbor philosophy majors end up doing. Power’s where it’s at. Why do you think everyone goes to business school? More power if you’re wearing a suit.

On the other hand, he handed out this gem.

BEING INVITED to deliver a commencement address to the Department of Rhetoric is akin to being asked out for a romantic evening by a porn star. Whatever prospect you might have of pleasure is inevitably dampened by performance anxiety — the suspicion that your efforts, however enthusiastic, will inevitably be judged according to stern professional standards. A daunting prospect.

Huh? What porn stars has this professor been dating? He should have given us his recount of that. That would have been the greatest speech of all time, until the feminists in the rhetoric department all started shrieking with self-indignation.

What was your commencement like? Your speaker any good? Any memorable moments? Let us know in the comments.

Words in a time of war [LA Times]
(Image from News-Record.com)



Topics: Events, Politics, Professors, UC Berkeley

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