Commencement Speech to Graduates of the Bush Years: Empire Continues in the Obama Era

By Tom Engelhardt, Tomdispatch.com. Posted June 12, 2009.

Maybe what we need is fewer lies, less wind, and a new, stripped-down, weeded out, more honest vocabulary for our political world, words that don't fall so far short of the world as it is. "Empire" is but one MIA word. It's your job to find more of them, and where they don't exist to invent them. If you want to live in this world and not The Matrix version of it, you need a language that works for you, and you may have to create it. You need, in short, to speak up.

As all the collapsing businesses and the millions of out of work Americans make clear at this moment, you can be constrained from doing many things, but not from defining the world for yourself, and maybe even for some of the rest of us. Not if you want to.

Don't take my word for it. Take your own… and depart.

[Note for Readers: Just to be clear, I was invited to no campus to give this commencement speech. I gave it in the campus of my mind. I should also add that I've written at length about the strange American world I grew up in -- its movies, TV shows, children's toys, comics, and so much else -- in my book, The End of Victory Culture (put out in a new edition, updated last year for the crash-and-burn Bush era). If you want to know more about the deep strangeness of the world I came from, the world you're inheriting, you might consider picking up a copy and checking it out.]

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Tom Engelhardt, editor of Tomdispatch.com, is co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The End of Victory Culture.

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