Commencement Address: The Tazmanian Devil

Hooray for Mark Danner! He is a professor at UC Berkeley who so boldly exposed the true nature of political activity in his recent commencement address, reprinted in the Los Angeles Times.

Hooray for his honesty! Hooray for his sincerity! And above all, hooray for his folly!

His folly? Well, you can often learn a lot from someone who says foolish things.

To his credit Danner elucidates what government is all about, through the glowing transcription of a conversation journalist Ron Suskind had with a Bush administrative aide in 2004:

“The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’”

Danner is downright giddy about this, because he thinks he’s somehow discovered the secret modus operandi for the president’s nefarious schemes. And he is correct that they do these things! There it is, in black and white, the breadth of institutionalized deceit in a full confession straight from the horse’s mouth (this mouth was believed to belong to Karl Rove). In essence the government is saying “We lie as a matter of practice, but you are so jaded in your ‘reality’ that you’re not just impotent, but you look silly too.”

But, this is where the hearer of this monumental truth tends to take a huge bounding leap into folly. The entrenched World inhabitant goes into a pious rage, off to do his best Tazmanian Devil impersonation. You know the Tazmanian Devil, he’s the spinning growling creature that goes nuts whenever Bugs Bunny (who bears a striking resemblance to George Bush) does something to rile him up. Taz chases after ol’ Geor—er—Bugs in quite the foolhardy way, and every time he gets the whacking he deserves.

Danner is just another Taz, for while he does lay out the truth about deception, he commits three critical errors in his response. That’s okay— World inhabitants do it all the time. These mistakes are nothing new. Just had a thought, however, that much like the Warner Bros. cartoons, pointing them out here may enable those who happen to come across this blog to see them for what they are and humbly avoid the folly.

So without further adieu, I present each error (identified by the appropriate Taz signature rasp). Cartoon episode fanfare, please!

No. 1—“Rarr-garg, whaarll, yabble-rrrar!” Danner presumes this “strategy of pretense” is all brand spankin’ new, referring to George Bush as the first rhetoric-major president. This comment almost made me fall off my chair. Is he serious? The first? Does he really believe that anything any dutiful potentate has shared with the general public ever in history has not been mere rhetoric?

The truth is, Danner just doesn’t like George Bush, and he needs some novel rationalization to be really really angry with him. (Whoops, that’s Marvin the Martian, sorry.) Because it is so unfathomable that such an oaf as George Bush could wield such power, the Radical Selfists whom Danner speaks for must insist that any power he avows has got to be pretend.

They’re completely missing the point of what the Bush aide said. He didn’t say everything they did was pretend. He merely said that their job is to convince the people that they are doing things they don’t really do. Their job is to make alternate realities for those who ask them to do so, and Danner’s elaborate protestation is the flowering of his own deception. He too is seduced by those realities, because he details some of those government facades as if they were real, when he was just told they’re not.

Well, oop, there he goes letting himself get bonked on the head with a dropped anvil.

No. 2—“Yopple-snargg, werrrgl, macclrogg!” Danner takes as the truth the government’s lie that he and his Radical Selfist crusaders are the ones who are thinking in terms of real reality. But how can that be when that itself is a grand government prevarication? “Yep, they’re right, we’re the ones with the truth and they aren’t.” This is much like telling a slug he’s an eagle and then hearing him say “Isn’t that the truth, look at me flying above the mountaintops!”

Now, are you thinking what I’m thinking? Are you thinking of the statement “Everything I say is a lie”? Were you thinking of that? I thought you were.

Here’s the tricky part of it: Is the government saying this? Could be. The point is, if you knew about the government and what it does, you’d know that nothing it says can be trusted, even that confession of deceit. As much as you get sucked into this game, you are just as much deceived and in turn deceiving. Danner tries valiantly to declare himself above it all, but he’s just as much the rhetorical blitherer. He’s sloshing around in the Culture War with the rest of them, and he is, indeed, the honest and sincere deceiver.

So, whup, there he goes, devouring the dynamite disguised as chicken. Blam.

No. 3—“Frggle-dghoggrl, flrAH-erAH-erAAAAAAHHH!!!” This is the most dangerous error of all. Danner sends off a jillion college graduates with nothing to trust but their own benighted thinking. In a profoundly humanist-driven society, this seems so noble. Danner closes with this (Ooo it just sounds so, um, so real…)

"Graduates, you have chosen a path that will let you look beyond the rhetoric that you have studied and into the heart of reality. Of all people, you have chosen to learn how to see the gaps and the loose stitches and the remnant threads. Ours is a grim age, this Age of Rhetoric, still infused with the remnant perfume of imperial dreams. You have made your study in a propitious time, and that bold choice may bring you pain, for you have devoted yourselves to seeing what it is that stands before you. If clear sight were not so painful, many more would elect to have it."

Well, clear sight isn’t painful, only to those who try to get it by poking their eyes out with the World's sticks. This is, of course, what they do— sadly what they’ve probably done for years at UC Berkeley.

What gets you clear sight is the One who gives healthy eyes— the very One who made them. I just can’t help but laugh at conclusions like Danner’s. They are so idiotic, but quite commonplace— indeed virtually every commencement speech has them. Which means, yeah, after a chuckle, I weep a bit because they are so destructive.

“Go out and try real hard to see what the truth is because there are so many liars out there,” he says. In other words, “Slugs, go out and try real hard to fly. We’ve taught you really well to see what wings aren’t. So off you go where you’ll have toughness and goodness and, um, you’ll be out there and, um, yeah.”

The problem is, you won’t fly.

You can’t fly without the wings.

In real reality.

Jesus Christ is the wings.

He is the One who gives eyes that see. And with those eyes, you’d see that anything government says cannot be trusted, but that’s the way it is supposed to be— it's just doing its job. It’s been doing it that way for millennia. It does it that way for people like Danner who can’t see but must be convinced that they can so they don’t leave the fold.

If Danner actually wanted reality he’d turn and converse with the One who is Reality itself— the only full measure of truth. Not only that, but from Him are all the things it seems Danner wants all along: peace and joy and exhilaration and phenomenal abundance of all the things that are meaningful.

Instead he wants to spin and growl and spew and garble and sneer at a foe he can never defeat.

So, yeah— WHAM. There he goes, slamming into the wall with the painted-on tunnel entrance.

Or did that only happen to Wile E. Coyote? My bad.

For a bit more on the Culture War, go here.