My Life
in Review: Have I been Lucky or What?
My Life
in Review: Have I been Lucky or What?
Honors Convocation Address at Brockport High School in May, 1970
Pleased faculty, proud parents, and our honored guests, those exponents of excellence and proven practitioners of the arduous art of academic achievement—as I survey this panorama of pulchritude and proven prowess for premier performance my reaction is, "Like wow, dig those cool, competent, characters!" But then I realize that the occasion calls for a more formal and dignified accolade. So I say sincerely, "Congratulations, well-done, carry on."
What a pleasure it is to be in on a celebration of the "relevance of excellence"—to have a "confrontation" with a crowd of young people who have not simply confined their energies to making demands for relevance but have employed those energies in meeting the exacting demands of excellence. And how important it is to have a convocation concerned with the "positive power of thinking" and dedicated to the proposition that "honor is not without profit in this country," and in recognition that honor can be an earned possession of the young, at a time when some adults are suffering from that dread disease "hardening of the categories," seeing all adolescents as four-letter men and the four letters as J.E.R.K.
But I must get on to fulfill my role—as the speaker I'm expected to "sling for my supper"—you know as well as I that the speaker has a ceremonial function on these occasions (having a speaker at times like this is parallel to having one's teeth drilled and filled—boring but essential in order to save face). He (the speaker) is expected to do double-barreled duty: first he extends congratulations, i.e., supplies the applause that refreshes—then after admiration he is expected to advance some admonitions; after felicitations—recommendations; after adulation—advice.
Now, at first blush the role of advice-giver seems to be an easy—even enviable—assignment. We all know that it is more blessed to give than to receive. However, if you stop and think about it you'll realize that the task of a professional advice-peddler is a rough one. He is universally regarded as a "big mouth and throat specialist," a guy who assiduously minds other people's business, who is presumptuous, pontifical, platitudinous and downright pestiferous—and, if it's the present speaker, suffers from an ancient aberration in articulation known as alliteration.
Further, there are at least five difficulties in dispensing advice at this particular time.
First, risk of resentment that any is needed—especially among embryonic eggheads. It may be true that you can always tell a smart high school student—but you can't tell him much.
Second. Most advice in capsule form is unusable. It consists of such comprehensive cliches as "be kind," "be brave," "be mature," "grow up," "get smart," "get with it," "get lost"—"drop dead."
Third. The advice-giver encounters the general feeling that common sense will see us through any problems. Some people set much store by it—and call it hoss sense. Of course, everybody knows what horse sense is. It's the sense that horses have which keeps them from betting on people. Actually, adult common sense and teen-age common sense is not common to both or sensible to either!
Fourth difficulty. The real danger that it's already too late to give advice. In these days of precocious and sophisticated adolescents by the time we parents can make an appointment to discuss the "facts of life" we are apt to run into the jarring gambit from our son or daughter, "What do you want to know, Dad?"
Fifth, and finally, the adult advice-giver these days faces the terrifying task of speaking across that "awful abyss," the generation gap.
Nonetheless here I am obviously and obsessively trying to win your sympathy, if not support. You know ceremonial speakers are the least necessary necessities of any social invention I know of. They have an audience which didn't come to hear them; they are given the privilege of sounding off when nobody is in the mood for it.
Why have honors banquet orators? In pondering this question I have figured out two sound reasons.
1. They are the final test of the honor student's ability to "take it," to demonstrate their mature qualities of patience, long-suffering and forbearance—the final requirement for that coveted award—similar to the tests and ordeals given during the middle ages—this one might be called ordeal by oration.
2. And secondly, for the parents and friends, the speaker furnishes them with the opportunity to prove their unwavering loyalty and undying affection and sacrificial devotion for the honorable offspring by enduring the hardships and rigors of the speaker's pious platitudes and ceremonial cliches.
So at a time when cliches are ceremonially appropriate I want to talk about cliches; on this occasion when categorical generalities are expected let me focus on the problem of categorical generalities—pious platitudes and their youthful counterparts—"saucy slogans." In short I'd like to confine my remarks to a few words about words. My watchword is watch the words—yours and other people's.
Despite the old cliche that "sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me" I contend that words can hurt. They can distort, damage and divide people. They can obfuscate as well as illuminate; they can stunt thinking and stimulate emotion, repress the rational and evoke the irrational. They can provide a rhetorical road to ruin as well as vehicles of thoughtful expression.
Let us be reminded that a cliche is a general phrase which purports to be a capsule of truth and distilled wisdom, e.g., "a penny saved is a penny earned," "know thyself," "haste makes waste," "look before you leap," "he who hesitates is lost"—and quick moral pronouncements, "to thine own self be true," "money is the root of all evil, "grow up instead of grow old." In short, cliches are catch-phrases that have "caught on" and have attained acceptance as "pearls of general wisdom."
While they have stood the test of time their endless repetition has turned them into ritualistic verbal incantations—sound simplicities which have become simply sounds, and easy substitutes for thoughtful analysis; thus when they are hauled out on ceremonial occasions such as this they are regarded, and quite rightly, as high-minded but relatively empty, meaningless symbols used by the older generation as evasions of the real problems—pious platitudes which, instead of being relevant, actually conceal an unwillingness to face up to the real issues and reveal that the user is a real "square" (old fogie) and not really "with it." That he doesn't know where "it's at." In short, they "turn off" the younger generation as another reflection of the intellectual bankruptcy as well as hypocrisy of those on the other side of the "iron-deficiency" curtain.
Now, I submit that there is something to this indictment, but I further submit that the older generation has no monopoly on cliches and that the old "cornball cliches" have their counterpart in the new "saucy, sassy, slogans" so prized by the young. That they are actually new cliches. Let's look at three of them and make a couple of hit-and-miss commentaries about each.
Examine the basic assumption of this currently popular pearl of wisdom. It assumes that you know instinctively, intuitively, what you are and what your thing is. It offers you no point of reference except your feelings. It puts heavy reliance on your sympathetic nervous system, your ductless glands and unstriped muscles. It appears to leave all the options open but gives no direction beyond your visceral impulses. Your "thing" can be "anything," including robbing banks, I suppose.
At best, this new catch-phrase is a variation on the old cliche—"to thine own self be true" which you Shakespearean scholars will recognize was first uttered by that old windbag Polonius. At worst it is an invitation to a "do-it-yourself" morality, anarchy and chaos, and, in general, it is so general that it has no specifically useful meaning.
What is the basic assumption of this phrase? Simply and smugly—and self-righteously—that you know what it is like! i.e., that you have a firm grip on the "truth," a clear perception of reality in all its bewildering contradictory complexity. At best it says, "be honest." At worst, it says that it's a virtue to give vent to your feelings and to be brutally frank which usually turns out to be frankly brutal. But, above all, I am struck by the appalling conceit or the sublime stupidity of the person who presumes he has comprehended the complexities of many-sided reality, who has "truth by the tail" and actually believes he can tell it like it is. He is not only incredibly simple minded and smug, he is downright dangerous.
This assumes that experience is corrupting and corrosive, that the more experience you have the worse off you are, that continued contact with reality, familiarity with the facts of life makes it impossible to "tell it like it is." Then, pray tell, on what basis are you in a position to tell what it is like—to know the truth that will set you free?
This is not to deny that persons over thirty can have cluttered vision and that their judgments are often hedged in by their stake in the status quo—but it is ironic that the same people who subscribe to the "don't trust anyone over thirty" dictum put great stock in their own direct experience as a guide to their own judgments. They seek truth through experience and at the same time, turn their backs on books and the storehouse of accumulated human experience.
Thus I contend that the so-called "generation-gap" is fortified on both sides by fences of hardened categorical cliche's—formidable barriers which put off and put down those on either side who try to build bridges of accommodation and humble understanding.
Now, let's turn from catch-phrases to sticky labels—from phrases which presume to contain double-distilled truth to terms which pretend to describe accurately large groups of people. In short we turn from cliches to stereotypes. A stereotype, like a cliche, has fairly innocent beginnings and develops from an effort to fix in simple terms an easy classification that will quickly identify a class or group with a single symbol or descriptive label.
Often this task of over-simplification and categorization is executed by fastening on one alleged characteristic—a single, simple, obvious trait, quality or feature which conjures up a mental image into which all members of the category neatly fit. Just as cliches purport to capsule truthful essences of complex reality so do stereotypes cram human diversity and infinitely varied individuality into a common monolithic mold. Both claim to accomplish "mission impossible." Could anyone be so simple-minded, so naive, so gullible as to accept these artificial abstractions—let alone to use them? The answer is painfully obvious and obviously painful. Just as we try to reduce life's issues to cliches we try to press people into stereotyped molds; into crude and cruel caricatures. It's silly, stupid, and downright dangerous but the best substitute for thinking or rational expression yet invented.
No single group or generation has a monopoly on stereotypes any more than they do cliches. Even the president and vice-president are not immune. Thus one set of people are categorized as "bums," "campus kooks," "hippies," "yahoos," "college creeps," "copouts," "radicals," "acid heads," "the pot generation" and "effete intellectual snobs"—and another set are categorized as "red necks," "hard hats," "squares," "the establishment," "them," "agents of the system," "the man." We impale each other on sharp, petrified words.
We insist on categorical confrontations and we divide people into two categories—"good guys" and "bad guys"—old and young, black and white—of "we" and "they." Thus hardening of the categories in its final phases becomes the disease of the dichotomy, splitting issues and people into two categorical camps, and its last phase symptoms are the "polarization syndrome." In the end we lose all sense of complex reality and succumb to social schizophrenia—and we wind up babbling banalities and uttering epithets. In the final analysis the name of the game becomes an insane name-calling brawl.
So, you embryonic eggheads, we need recruits to adult society who are not captivated by cliches—old or new, who are not seduced by slogans, who do not succumb to stereotypes, who are neither victims or users of simplistic rhetorical devices, who will face the complexities of reality—the dilemma of war and the ambivalence of racial conflict, the paradoxes of progress and poverty, who recognize that life is a complicated spectrum, not a neat dichotomy, who will see simplistic symbols for what they are, and who will supply the only effective antidote to "hardening of the categories," thoughtful analysis and rigorous examination of the many sides to life's issues in the 1970's.
We need a generation that is wary of words. We look to you. We need your help. We congratulate you. We look to you as guardians and custodians of the future. We hope your watchword will be to watch the words. I close with a cliche to end all cliches—"Continue to do your own thinking before doing your own thing."
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