I had the distinct pleasure of attending Duke’s graduation yesterday. A pleasure because I saw many good friends celebrate the end of four years in the Gothic wonderland. Distinct because I spent most of the day huddled under an umbrella in Wallace Wade Stadium (my first time there). But I digress.
Barbara Kingsolver, author of The Poisonwood Bible among others, was selected as the commencement speaker. She started out well enough. A few jokes, a cute anecdote about her daughter–all delivered with the smooth eloquence one would hope to find in a graduation speaker.
Then it went downhill. Really fast.
What had seemed tame enough quickly became an indictment of (1) climate change; (2) buying things; (3) materialism/owning things in general; (4) purchasing/eating anything not local; and (5) a general lack of a community spirit. Or something like that. I say something like that because the wince I felt at the first mention of the Kyoto Protocol became something akin to intellectual rigor mortis as the speech descended into trite ramblings and buzzwords that would do a precocious freshman writer proud. She didn’t say anything new: she essentially told the same old leftist story, just this time she had a funny robe and big words.
A sample? The really “wow” moment came about halfway through, when Kingsolver equated ending slavery with capping carbon emissions. Slavery. Caps on carbon emissions. Picked your jaw up off the floor yet? Then read and weep:
Before the last UN Climate Conference in Bali, thousands of U.S. citizens contacted the State Department to press for binding limits on carbon emissions?But our government is reluctant to address it, for one reason: it might hurt our economy?For a lot of history, many nations said exactly the same thing about abolishing slavery. We can?t grant humanity to all people, it would hurt our cotton plantations, our sugar crop, our balance of trade. Until the daughters and sons of a new wisdom declared: We don?t care. You have to find another way?Have we lost that kind of courage?
And that is not even the most amazing quote from the speech. So I invite you Lockeans to read her address and pick out your favorite parts. There are many to go around. Many as in so many it may make your head hurt. Have at it.
Just don’t steal my favorite lines from the poem at the end: “tiptoe past the dogs of the apocalypse that are sleeping / in the shade of your future.” Apparently I need another year of Duke edumacation to be able to appreciate that.