Introducing Our Featured Speaker: Lots of conservatives are livid about the commencement address E.L. Doctorow delivered at Hofstra University on May 23. It was too "political" they say (he all but calls President Bush a liar), and it broke the "unspoken rule" against commencement addresses being anything but unrelentingly upbeat. The day after the address a parent from Florida assured Newsday that if Doctorow had given the same speech in Florida, the crowd would have "taken him out" of the stadium. Count me out of that lynch mob. As a matter of fact, Doctorow once gave me a private commencement address of sorts, and I never once had the impulse to remove him bodily from the premises. Far from it. I was finishing my master's in English at NYU and, as my thesis adviser, he had graciously agreed to meet me at a café bordering Washington Square Park to discuss my thesis (a collection of short stories) over a cup of coffee. It was commencement day, and as I sat waiting for him at the appointed hour, beaming grads rushed past on the sidewalk outside with their families while a brass band (or was it bagpipes?) blared in the not-so-distant distance. When Doctorow walked in, he expressed regret, remarkably, that our meeting was usurping my commencement and asked if I had any regrets about missing the hoopla. I told him, with absolute sincerity, that I had none. None whatsoever.
Given the nature of Doctorow's commencement address at Hofstra and the politicized climate of the times, it's not surprising that his reception from some in the crowd was decidedly less admiring. A chorus of boos forced him to stop talking until Hofstra President Stuart Rabinowitz quieted the malcontents and, in so doing, drew a standing ovation from still others in the crowd. According to the conservative media (e.g., George Neumayr's "The Heckler Heckled" in The American Spectator, Peggy Noonan's Op-Ed in The Wall Street Journal), the moral of this story is that "normal people" — Noonan's term — aren't about to sit by silently while an elitist boor cheats them out of their hard-earned celebration. That logic implies that Dick Cheney was equally wrong to inveigh against John Kerry during his commencement speech in April at Westminster College. Not surprisingly, neither Neumayr nor Noonan's vilifications of Doctorow make this connection.
The fact is, many commencement addresses this year were uncharacteristically "political," partisan in a way few graduation send-offs have been since Vietnam, our last sustained war. Historically, the urge to set aside celebratory blandishments and indulge in a little straight talk is strongest during times of war. It is not simply the case, however, that the extreme circumstances of war compelled Doctorow to shrug off the complacent conventions of commencement addresses. After all, in a speech he gave at Brandeis University's graduation ceremonies in 1989, he was similarly critical of Ronald Reagan. The truth is, Doctorow is a provocateur — an engaged public intellectual and a world-class writer firmly ensconced in a literary-prophetic tradition that tracks back to the Old Testament. He has been aggressively involved in a number of high-profile political spats (his defense of Mumia Abu-Jamal jumps immediately to mind), and his The Book of Daniel is widely regarded as perhaps the finest political novel of our time. Yes, he was being a pain in the ass; it's what he was determined to be. While such provocations may rankle some, they are something our society as a whole values. They are indispensable — and never more than in times like these.
—David Bramer
COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS, HOFSTRA UNIVERSITY, MAY 23, 2004 (excerpted by the author)
… I write stories. That's what I do, that is my profession. I do that because from the very earliest days of my life I considered stories very important. And they are. When they are told well, we can believe them and live by them and hold to the truths they embody. Think of the very old stories, the stories of the Bible, for example. They are well and meaningfully told, and so we are instructed and moved and try to live according to the truths discovered in them. So you see stories are important. And because I've been telling them all my life, I've become a pretty good judge of the stories other people tell. And of course not all the people who tell stories are writers. Some are politicians. Some are presidents of the United States. I've been listening for almost four years now to the stories this president tells. You almost have to listen when the storyteller is your president. And, sadly, they are not good stories this president tells. They are not good stories because they are not true. One story he told was that the country of Iraq had nuclear and biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction and was intending shortly to use them on us. That was an exciting story all right, it was designed to send shivers up our spines. But it was not true. Another story was that the Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein, was in partnership with the terrorists of Al Qaida. And that turned out to be, in substance, fiction. But anyway off we went to war on the basis of these stories. And then followed the story that in just a few weeks the invasion of Iraq was a mission accomplished. That was the title of that story the president told, "Mission Accomplished." And that, terribly, tragically, is not a true story. It is so untrue that nobody is allowed to photograph the return of our fallen soldiers and marines and national guardsmen and women as they arrive every week to the United States in their coffins. The president doesn't want us to know how untrue that story is. But of course we know. Eventually, a presidentially bad story reveals itself because it has bad consequences. …
You see when I tell a bad story, or any other writer tells a bad story, there is no great harm done — except perhaps to ourselves if a publisher won't publish it or, if the story, published, is soon forgotten. But when the president tells a bad story, bad as it is, it is published all over the world. And it has immense consequences. For one thing, it creates other bad storytellers in the president's style, from his cabinet members who decide to ignore the Geneva Conventions and sanction the subjection of prisoners to unlawful interrogation … right down the line to the level of American soldiers in Iraq who, in the very same prison Saddam Hussein tortured prisoners, have tortured and humiliated detainees, stuffed their heads in toilets to make them renounce their religion and posed them naked with dog collars around their necks. And before you know it we are hearing from this president and all the president's men, stories that are not true American stories, stories that are no longer our stories, stories that we turn away from because they are so un-American. Can we possibly be this story?
Pumping out the presidential stories is a whole stable of writers writing in his name, a writing stable of empire-dreaming ideologists and oilmen for whom the thirteenth century tribal-warring idea of preemptive war seems to them the way to be a twenty-first century American. Never mind that it has made us hated all over the world, and actually expanded Al Qaida's recruitment base with newly inflamed terrorists signing up every day, or that it has encouraged other countries to similarly abandon their diplomatic restraint, never mind that it tears apart international understandings and ways of dealing among nations that had inched the world into some reasonable hope of permanent universal détente, ecological sanity, and judicious means for the settlement of competing national interests. …
Our government is legally empowered now to arrest and imprison people indefinitely without bringing charges against them or ever giving them a trial. It may conduct secret searches and surveillances of homes and offices of people who for any reason come under its suspicion. It may subpoena the public library or your university library and demand to see what books you've been taking out. And so with all the consequences of this president's bad stories we have to ask ourselves, What is happening to us? What are we becoming? …
Why is this president so given to bad storytelling? Why does he do that? These are crucial questions. Because the total of his bad stories is beginning to sound like a deconstruction of the 228-year-old American story. And I'm bringing these questions up because now that you are graduated, you are joining the generations of us that must take the time to ask them. For wherever you choose to live, whatever you choose to do with your life, you will be living in American history. … You've been concerned to pass your courses and get your degree, but now you have to understand that your own private concerns, your well-being, your life's course will be profoundly affected by the condition of the country you live in. Right now, it is not a healthy condition. We are a deeply divided nation in danger of undergoing a characterological change for the worse. Are you prepared to say that we can tolerate ourselves as anything other than what Thomas Jefferson called the last best hope of mankind? That is what we are, that is what we must continue to be. For it is not just our politicians who are given to write the story we live by. The genius of our democracy is that, finally, everyone writes its story. We all write it together, a tale of the people, by the people and for the people. You will hear that to question authority is to aid terrorism. You will hear that to dissent is to signal weakness in the national resolve. Do not believe these bad stories; they are foul, they are beneath contempt. The stack of books you've collected in your years here is an icon of the humanist ideal. You have been taught how to think and to distinguish truth from cant. You have the means now to recognize the truth and write it. Your minds are enlisted in the struggle for a human future and society not in thrall to stupidity and terror. Your generation is endowed to write the American story to come. And be under no illusion — if you don't write it, inevitably someone else will write it for you.
This article appears in Jun 24-30, 2004.