Commencement

As anxious parents search for parking spots and hung-over graduates saddle on their college funeral attire of cap and gowns, all across the country thousands of commencement speakers, from the ubiquitous Bill Cosby to George Bush, are preparing to give their addresses to the Class of 2004.

Jon Stewart's address to his alma mater, William & Mary, is a highlight out this year (he also happens to be a personal hero of mine):

"So how do you know what is the right path to choose to get the result that you desire? And the honest answer is this. You won’t. And accepting that greatly eases the anxiety of your life experience....

When I left William and Mary I was shell-shocked. Because when you’re in college it’s very clear what you have to do to succeed. And I imagine here everybody knows exactly the number of credits they needed to graduate, where they had to buckle down, which introductory psychology class would pad out the schedule. You knew what you had to do to get to this college and to graduate from it. But the unfortunate, yet truly exciting thing about your life, is that there is no core curriculum. The entire place is an elective. The paths are infinite and the results uncertain. And it can be maddening to those that go here, especially here, because your strength has always been achievement. So if there’s any real advice I can give you it’s this: College is something you complete. Life is something you experience...

Love what you do. Get good at it. Competence is a rare commodity in this day and age. And let the chips fall where they may."

An even better address, from 4 years ago, came when Conan O'Brien spoke to his old school, Harvard:

"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."

Last year Harvard was graced by Will Ferrell's genuis, which doesn't come across as strongly in writing, but just imagining him give it is worth the read:

"Now in some cases, you actually have contact with some of the people you play. As a byproduct of this former situation, the President and myself have become quite good friends. In fact, I might even call him a father figure of sorts, granted a dim-witted father figure who likes to take a lot of naps and start wars, but a father figure nonetheless."

Back in 2002 when I graduated from Georgetown, I think that we had some president of some other local college speak, which while I don't remember it sucking, it definitely was not memorable. (Hey, at least it wasn't last year's Georgetown speaker, Cardinal Arizne, a possible successor to JPII, who instead of offering the graduates and their families insights into his work with inter-religious dialogue, he decided to take the opportunity to bash gays and people who get divorced.

I wish that instead we had Vassar's 2002 speaker for my graduation, Tony Kushner, who's speech clearly demonstrates why he's one of our country's best contemporary playwrights:

"You could ask your parents WHY ME, if in asking you mean how did I come to be like this; they, after all, made you, at least some of you, no one will ask them to take responsibility for the whole of you, but if in asking WHY ME you are inquiring after the specifics of your specificity, WHY AM I ME AND NOT SOMEONE ELSE, you could begin by looking into your origins; some of the answers can be found in your home, and by setting the answers you glean through observation, coercion and psychoanalytic psychotherapy in a dialectical spin with the facts of your place in history, in time, your place in the world at large, in the culture which is your larger context, in the ideology you have inherited and I hope transformed by living and which with your psyche is the prism through which your self or your soul is refracted, the light and air baffle which your flame or the smoke from your smouldering traverses to reach the exterior world, by setting the inner and the outer up as combatants on the epic dramatic stage in your head, you will arrive, maybe by the time you're 80, maybe earlier if you work hard at it, at some understanding of yourself, if you don't fear the dark night of the soul you will; and you won't fear it so much as long as you remember that no one is happy, only Bush is happy; the best you can hope for is to be happy-ish; remember too that the real value of a dark night of the soul is that it's maybe the surest way of ascertaining that you have one, a soul that is. A few rare souls are genuinely native to daylight but in my experience most of us, if we have souls, have the nocturnal kind; they aren't dark but darkness may be their element, darkness is a comfort to anything so divided against itself."