| Submit your comments on this article |
| Home Front: WoT |
| Peggy Noonan: Doctrow deserved to get booed |
| 2004-05-25 |
| Wall Street Journal; EFL. Did you hear about the college commencement speaker who was almost booed off the stage Sunday because his commencement address was an anti-Bush rant? The speaker was E.L. Doctorow. The college, God bless it forever, was Hofstra University on New York’s Long Island. . . . I want to explain to Ed Doctorow why he was booed. It was not, as he no doubt creamily recounted in a storytelling session over drinks that night in Sag Harbor, that those barbarians in Long Island’s lesser ZIP codes don’t want to hear the truth. It is not that they oppose free speech. It is not that the poor boobs of Long Island have an unaccountable affection for George W. Bush. It is that they have class. The poor stupid people of Long Island are courteous, and have respect for the views and feelings of others, and would not dream of imposing their particular views on a captive audience that has gathered to celebrate--to be happy about, to officially mark with their presence--the rather remarkable fact that one of their family studied and worked for four years, completed his courses, met all demands, and became a graduate of an American university. This indeed is something to be proud of. Did Eddy Doctorow know that? Did he care? I don’t think so. Did he understand that what the students needed from him--after all, he has lasted a long time, has been a member of a profession, has won the favor of the elite media for lo these many years, and manages to produce many books nobody reads in the computer age while still using a quill--was perhaps a sense of . . . All right, I give up. I don’t know what they needed from him. America hasn’t been the same since the dream of socialism so rudely ended? What will we do for a sense of communitarian ideals now that Marx is gone? "God may not exist but we need to tell stories about him nonetheless? Fast Eddy Doctorow told a story at the commencement all right, and it is a story about the boorishness of the aging liberal. An old ’60s radical who feels he is entitled to impose his views on this audience on this day because he’s so gifted, so smart, so insightful, so very above the normal rules, agreements and traditions. And for this he will get to call himself besieged and heroic--a hero about whom stories are told!--when in fact all he did was guarantee positive personal press in the elite media, at the cost of the long suffering patience of normal people who wanted to move the tassel and throw the hat in the air. . . . I’m glad [that boos are] what Eddy Doctorow got this Sunday from what appear to be his intellectual and moral superiors on Long Island. Go Hofstra. Go read it all. Peggy Noonan is one of the two best writers in the world, IMNTBHO. (Lileks is the other.) |
| Posted by:Mike |
| #2 BigEd - I'm sure you were right. |
| Posted by: Laurence of the Rats 2004-05-25 11:19:37 AM |
| #1 When I went to Junior College back in the 1970s, I ducked the graduation ceremony. I was transferring to a State University. Besides, the then-local NBC news anchor, Tom Brokaw, was the speaker. I figured he had nothing important to say. |
| Posted by: BigEd 2004-05-25 11:06:03 AM |