keller@uicsl.UUCP (03/12/84)
#N:uicsl:16300056:000:5408
uicsl!keller Mar 11 16:34:00 1984
=
In the most recent University of Virginia Alumni News there is
the text of the 1983 UVA convocation address given by William Styron.
Mr. Styron is an accomplished author who is perhaps best known for
his books "Sophie's Choice" and "Confessions of Nat Turner." I think
that his speech fits well with the style of net.politics even if it is
more learned and considered than most entries. He mainly spoke about how
Thomas Jefferson might respond to contemporary American government and
culture, but began by relating a conversation he had with his good friend
Art Buchwald about what he should say at the convocation. I cannot say that
I agree with all of Mr. Styron's points, but I did very much like some of
what he said. Some excerpts follow:
>From the conversation with Buchwald:
"The University of Virginia," [Buchwald] said, "that's very heavy.
Very heavy indeed."
"What do you mean, 'heavy'?" I replied.
"They're very serious down there. I mean, that's not Idaho State.
You'll have to say something interesting. Even though a convocation address
doesn't have much of an afterlife." . . . "[Afterlife is] merely my own
personal term for the period of time between the moment the last word of a
speech is uttered and the moment it has begun to be totally forgotten by the
audience." . . . "Excepting, of course, the Gettysburg Address, presidential
speeches are the only ones that actually have a negative afterlife. People
not only don't remember them for any length of time, they consciously make
an effort to forget them. Speechmaking, in general, is a counter productive
activity, unless you can get a group of insurance executives of jellybean
manufacturers to cough up a lot of money for one."
The words president and jellybean, not unnaturally, brought to mind
the person I had been mulling over as a potential subject for my
presentation here at the University. Not too long before, I had spent an
intimate though somewhat excruciating evening at a private home in
Washington in the company of the President of the United States, who
politely ignoring (or perhaps I should say, I think, refusing to
acknowledge) the fact that the tiny group of informed and sophisticated
people gathered after dinner were eager to converse about matters of some
substance, spoke instead about show business for one hour and ten minutes
which is a long time for the Marx Brothers as much as one might admire them.
. . . "Look Art," I continued, "I'm well aware that it was part of our
national destiny to choose an actor for president."
Buchwald interrupted: "In speechmaking, the key to persuasion is
understatement. Already there is so much rage in your voice that people in
Charlottesville might not believe you . . . steer clear of partisan politics
. . . try Thomas Jefferson."
On T.J.:
Companionship with such extraordinary men as Washington, Madison and
John Adams may have innocently deluded him into a belief that the American
presidency was destined always to be a class act; and indeed he would have
discovered rich qualities to praise in a poignantly small number of those
who followed him in the office. But if he were here now to study the
rollcall of those politicians who have hustled their way to the top, he
would marvel at how the Republic survived, it seems to me, the ministrations
of--out of forty--an arguable majority of mediocrities, among them at least
a half dozen undisputed ignoramuses . . .
Suppose he had seen the Russian revolution. I have no doubt that it
would have excited him more than any single event in this century. Yet its
betrayal by the bloodthirsty professors and, finally, by a mass murderer
would have left him, too, betrayed, and I would conceive of him developing
a passionate opposition to the Soviet system long before the Second World
War, long before so many others who were perversely blind to the glaring
fact that this system, to its core, was the implacable enemy of the single
most important element of earthly life: individual liberty. Even so, that
reflective, skeptical, imperturbable side of his character would have kept
him from panic and fear, and certainly form hysteria. He would be totally
without illusions concerning the aims and extent of Soviet ambition. But he
would perceive our terror of communists under every bed, in every domestic
closet, as being unworthy of a nation as strong as we are, and our incessant
interventions in places we have and have had no business at all--in Vietnam
and now Nicaragua--as being exercises in power gone berserk. He would see
the demonology we have constructed around Communism as largely
mythic--partly the product of horrible dreams in the minds of the sons of
Presbyterian missionaries, John Foster Dulles and Henry Luce-- and in any
case a fetish that has distracted us from detente, and from discourse, and
from negotiation. I think he would be profoundly depressed at the impasse
such a philosophy has helped bring us to in this fall of 1983, and I know he
would be chilled, like all of us, by the menacing sounds abroad in the
world, with their auguries of death and impending doom. But I'm sure that if
he were here today in his glorious University he would counsel hope, even
though that hope be fought at the price--on the part of every one of us
here--of constant concern with what our politicians and statesmen do, and of
never-ending vigilance.
-----------------------
-Shaun