AlterNet has acquired a well-deserved reputation for doing what I call "Five-Most" articles. The obvious example is their weekly selection of five most absurd, most offensive, most delusional, most generally awful things that right-wingnuts have said during the week, which TC follows, and we follow with him, weekly.
They generally want to make me beat my head against the wall.
But this morning they featured a Five-Most article which made me smile, some of them even though bittersweetly, and I though it might be a good article to share.
As AlterNet points out in introduction, "The year 2016 is a hell of a time to graduate. Donald Trump is the presumptive Republican nominee, the past four months have successively been the hottest on record, the chasm between the rich and poor continues to widen, and bloody Andrew Sullivan is openly wondering if this whole Democracy thing has run its course. WTF!
Fortunately, this time of the year brings one reliable reprieve from the dispiriting caprices of our politics: commencement speeches. This year’s crop of speeches were as pointed, witty and incisive as ever, taking on hot-button topics ranging from political apathy to the big orange elephant in the room."
And here's one:
2. Lin-Manuel Miranda at University of Pennsylvania.
Zinger: “In a year when politicians traffic in anti-immigrant rhetoric, there is also a musical reminding us that a broke, orphan immigrant from the West Indies built our financial system.”
Lin-Manuel Miranda, whose hit musical Hamilton has garnered widespread critical acclaim and recently earned a record-breaking 16 Tony nominations, is having a huge moment right now. A child of Puerto Rican immigrants, Miranda is using his new platform as a celebrity to advocate for political causes he believes in: just recently, he performed a blistering rap about Puerto Rico’s debt woes on "Last Week Tonight."
At his University of Pennsylvania commencement speech, Miranda wisely took a different tack. He framed a relatively contemporary issue—the hateful rhetoric around undocumented immigrants—in its historical context, reaching all the way back to the nation’s founding for some perspective. This wasn’t coincidental. Many of the same people who cheer on anti-immigrant rhetoric tend to forget, or at least conveniently overlook, that our nation was founded by immigrants.
Ultimately, Miranda’s message was simple. Not only do immigrants have something to contribute to civic and cultural life in America, they’re the reason we’re here and that we enjoy many of the advantages we do.
Click through for the other four, including one from Elizabeth Warren. I hope they will make you smile too.
Cross posted to Care2 at
http://www.care2.com/news/member/101612212/3988347
6 Responses to “5 Top Commencement Speech Zingers This Graduation Season”
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Thanks for the welcome smiles JD
Thanks Joanne – it reminded me of one of my favorites …
When a Commencement speaker can make self-deprecating references to his own profession, it adds a delightful dimension of authenticity.
John Bogle, founder of the behemoth Vanguard Mutual Funds, did so for the MBA graduates at Georgetown University in 2007, helping them put some much-needed perspective on their chosen profession:
Wow – that is a zinger indeed! So true! I wish everyone could hear it, though some would faill to grasp it, alas.
Thanks JD. I needed the grns!!
I was unfamiliar with the concept of Commencement speakers at university graduations so I had to look it up first, Joanne ;-), as here graduating is a very individual thing, taking place at different moments in time for each student after they get through an individual graduation examination, so there is no graduation day for a whole class. Speakers are only invited at the opening of an academic year and then the audience is invited academics and very few students.
But after reading these zingers I could certainly appreciate a tradition like that, especially when the commencement speakers are of such caliber as these five.
Thanks for posting, Joanne and for the opportunity to learn something today.
YVW. It certainly makes at least as much sense to have the speeches at the beginning of the year as at the end, but it's also nice to send graduates out into the cold world with a little celebration. Every year, incidentally, there are petitions on Care2 for young people who are being told they "can't walk" (i.e. take part in the ceremonies with their class) for some reason, requesting that they be included. Often it's because an accident or illness slowed them down. I always sign those. Life is hard enough.