Best Commencement Speech of the season

[alcibiades_mystery]

http://www.markdanner.com/articles/show/130

[Lisa]

1. "my gratitude to you for training yourself to see"

Wow. It would be appropriate if the students -- specialists in communication -- were left speechless!

[alcibiades_mystery]

2. I do disagree, however, with his characterization of Foucault

He calls Bush a fanatical follwer of Foucault (tongue in cheek, of course) because the Bushies feel they can "create reality." This belief is actually 180 degrees apart from Foucault's arguments about truth and power. If you suggested to Foucault that a small cabal of schemers can transform the complex web of words and things through deliberate action, he would have rolled his eyes at you, and provided a very succinct "Non." That's not what Foucault was saying at all. The opposite, even.

Indeed, Danner has an extremely naive understanding of the relationship between what he calls "rhetoric" and "reality." But it's a nice polemic anyway.

[Lisa]

3. but it would be just like Bush to misinterpret those fundamental ideas ...

Kind of like if he seized upon, say, Swift's "A Modest Proposal", and did the exact thing that the author was criticizing.

Come to think of it, I don't recall seeing any Western philosophy courses on Bush's Yale transcript, so it someone said "Foucault" to him, he would probably think it was an insult! (As in, "you don't know Foucault".)

I do like Danner's idea of explaining why rhetoric is especially relevant these days, even though (as you say) he undoubtedly did simplify things quite a bit, for a public address.