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| 2025 University of Maryland commencement speaker |
Now, I'm fine with Kermit. Grew up with him. Before the dark days, The Muppet Show was a cultural watering hole in which everyone at school talked about last night's guests and mimicked the old geezers in the balcony box. But Kermit? And I know, that's Henson's alma mater. Nonetheless, Kermit?
Remember when this is what was considered a newsworthy commencement speech back in the day:
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| Solzhenitsyn's legendary 1978 Harvard commencement speech |
Even high schools tried. I recall one of our graduations (not mine, but a grade or two ahead) featured a young, starting out state politician named John Kasich. Even in a small, rural high school, that's what we shot for. But Kermit? Oh, and flash - it's not Kermit. It's a puppeteer and performer who delivered, and possibly wrote, the message. Just saying since the news coverage this morning failed to point out that most obvious fact.
Lowering standards, lowering expectations, discarding historically grounded values and common sense has been a goal of our ruling institutions for generations. The result? I think it speaks for itself.
BTW, to show I'm not anti-Muppet, a little song from my kiddo days. I've liked it since I first heard it on an old Sesame Street record I was given to cheer me up when we moved to a new home. It wasn't Kermit, but it's a reminder that pop culture has it's place, as long as it stays in its place:
(Tom New Poster)
ReplyDeleteThe kindest explanation is the shallowness and extreme immaturity of that tiny portion of the student body likely paying attention to the committee who selected the commencement speaker, as well as the obtuseness (or spinelessness) of faculty and staff who refused to stand against them.
The darker explanation is the derangement of a media and academic culture that has so lost contact with reality, that it thinks a puppet can be honored as if a man: rather like Caligula making his horse a consul (and at least the horse was a living creature). Yet disposing of human beings to replace them with things is a hallmark of modernism.
I tend to lean toward your second explanation, with the addition that it's a bit of the old hubris, and that ages old desire to lord it over the masses. A pleasure that must come with encouraging people to live to the lowest from the ones who didn't do that to get where they got. The feeling that must come from saying 'we just told the world that boys and girls don't really exist - and they now insist it's true!'
DeleteIf I had been a grad at that commencement, I would have been completely insulted. What kind of respect does the school even have for their own students that they would subject them to such a “speaker”?
ReplyDeleteIt's as if almost everything in our society is meant to dumb down. To be the least. The worst. The lamest. As if we decided that striving for the best is too hard, so we'll excuse settling for the worst. Oddly, this is often done, as I said above, by those who by definition of their success didn't do those things.
DeleteI've seen one graduation speaker who earned his keep. It was Bill Cosby. John McCain wasn't bad.
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Graduations are shot through with humbug. If the administrators wish to reduce the quantum of humbug, stop inviting dignitaries and handing out 'honorary degrees' to them. Have a brief note of congratulation delivered by one of the following: the president of the board of trustees, the college president, the provost, or the dean of students. Hand out the diplomas. The day is about the accomplishment of those students, not an excuse for some twit like Anna Quindlen or Chris Hedges to sound off (selected to do so by a committee of faculty twits). A puppeteer is less offensive than that.
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Also, if you want to reduce the humbug quotient, limit the number graduating with honors to 16% of the class, the subset among them graduating with enhanced honors to 2.5%, and the subset graduating with the highest honors to 0.5%. And eliminate the positions of valedictorian and salutatorian. Of course, you'd have to stop penalizing professors who issue C's and D's.