Stanford Commencement address by Dana Gioia

[nngmm]

<p><a href=“You’ve requested a page that no longer exists | Stanford News”>You’ve requested a page that no longer exists | Stanford News;

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The loss of recognition for artists, thinkers, and scientists has impoverished our culture in innumerable ways, but let me mention one. When virtually all of a culture’s celebrated figures are in sports or entertainment, how few possible role models we offer the young.</p>

<p>There are so many other ways to lead a successful and meaningful life that are not denominated by money or fame. Adult life begins in a child’s imagination, and we’ve relinquished that imagination to the marketplace.</p>

<p>Of course, I’m not forgetting that politicians can also be famous, but it is interesting how our political process grows more like the entertainment industry each year. When a successful guest appearance on the Colbert Report becomes more important than passing legislation, democracy gets scary. No wonder Hollywood considers politics “show business for ugly people.”</p>

<p>Everything now is entertainment. And the purpose of this omnipresent commercial entertainment is to sell us something. American culture has mostly become one vast infomercial.</p>

<p>I have a reccurring nightmare. I am in Rome visiting the Sistine Chapel. I look up at Michelangelo’s incomparable fresco of the “Creation of Man.” I see God stretching out his arm to touch the reclining Adam’s finger. And then I notice in the other hand Adam is holding a Diet Pepsi.</p>

<p>When was the last time you have seen a featured guest on David Letterman or Jay Leno who isn’t trying to sell you something? A new movie, a new TV show, a new book, or a new vote?</p>

<p>Don’t get me wrong. I love entertainment, and I love the free market. I have a Stanford MBA and spent 15 years in the food industry. I adore my big-screen TV. The productivity and efficiency of the free market is beyond dispute. It has created a society of unprecedented prosperity.</p>

<p>But we must remember that the marketplace does only one thing—it puts a price on everything.</p>

<p>The role of culture, however, must go beyond economics. It is not focused on the price of things, but on their value. And, above all, culture should tell us what is beyond price, including what does not belong in the marketplace. A culture should also provide some cogent view of the good life beyond mass accumulation. In this respect, our culture is failing us.

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[JHS]

<p>I love Dana Gioia. But that’s not a very original speech, and some of it is a little silly. Does he not realize that the people he saw on Ed Sullivan when he was 10 were there because they were trying to sell something, too? That the percentage of kids graduating from high school now is much, much higher than it was in his youth? Or, for that matter, that several times a year Oprah Winfrey makes a multi-millionaire out of a literary author who could never have gotten public attention in the 50s, notwithstanding the status of Frost, Miller, or Steinbeck?</p>

[CC_Admin]

<p>That was not the whole speech. Something does not have to be original to be relevant. </p>

<p>There was another graduation ceremony at Stanford the previous day. It was the religious ceremony. That was opened with the recitation of the Muslim Call To Prayer.</p>

<p>Both ceremonies emphasized peace, love, unity, compassion. What could be more relevant or important in the world today?</p>

[JHS]

<p>The whole speech is in the link.</p>