The Supernova Is Coming

The following was the commencement address for Columbia College, held June 1, 2003.

Thank you for this beautiful honor, and thank you for freeing me from the dark cave I've been sitting in all week -- and by dark cave I mean a theater, I've been in the dark all week watching a director and designers and singers and crew try to put together an opera double bill for which I provided the English-language libretti.

Thank you for releasing me for the afternoon from that dark and anxiety-filled cavern of illusion and bidding me welcome to the bright daylight dazzle of your commencement, your impressive achievement: Forget going oversees to fight in Bush's infinite war against terrorism, the really heroic thing in this country is managing against so many odds to get yourself educated.

Thank you for letting me share, even though it's unearned, a little of the reflected effulgence of the brilliant sun of your aspirations, your intentions, your ambitions, thank you for sharing with me your faith in the future.

I was trying to decide what to say to you today. It's never a problem that there isn't much to talk about but rather that there is so much to say and such a short time. I was told I should speak for three to seven minutes, and all week long I've been pondering the mystical significance of those numbers, three and seven, prime numbers, the Holy Trinity and the number of days it took God to make the world?

Last night after sitting all day in the dark, in the cab afterwards, heading back to the hotel and my midnight tech week ritual of eating eleven Hershey bars (11, another prime number!) before passing out in front of more awful nightmare news on CNN -- last night it was footage of Dubya and Laura touring Auschwitz, Dubya apparently saying only two things while he was in the concentration camp, "Look at the baby shoes" and, to the tour guide, "Does anyone ever challenge your statistics?" -- in the cab back to the hotel while I was trying to figure out what to say to you, the cabbie volunteered, with no prompting -- and I have noticed that Chicago cab drivers are much more philosophical than New York cab drivers, which I think has something to do with the superior condition here of the surface of the roads -- the cabbie said, and I'm not making this up, "If there's a supernova 60 light years away from here the world will be totally wiped out, we don't stand a chance."

I asked him if there was any hope that this might happen before next Wednesday, which is the opera's opening night.

He doubted it.

But he gave me something to think about, namely the fact that life, each individual life and our collective life on the planet is a teleological game, it is not infinite, like Bush's justice, it has an ending, and so the future you put your faith in is not, in fact, limitless; and given the catastrophic failure here and abroad of the Kyoto global warming accords, given our newfound post 9-11 imperialist exuberance, given the sagging of the world's economy and the IMF-directed refusal to see any solutions beyond making poor people suffer even more than they always do in the hopes of reviving a market that only ever revives long enough to make the rich even richer, given the eagerness in Washington to explore new and tinier kinds of nuclear bombs, well, it's sort of optimistic to believe it's a supernova that's going to get us, when it's clear that what's much more likely to get us, if we are got, is our present condition of living in a world run by miscreants while the people of the world have either no access to power or have access but have forgotten how to get it and why it is important to have it.

And this is what I think you people have gotten your education for.

You have presumably made a study of how important it is for the people -- the people and not the oil plutocrats, the people and not the fantasists in right-wing think-tanks, the people and not the virulent lockstep gasbags of Sunday morning talk shows and editorial pages and all-Nazi all-the-time radio ranting marathons, the thinking people and not the crazy people, the rich and multivarious multicultural people and not the pale greyish-white cranky grim greedy people, the secular pluralist people and not the theocrats, the metaphorical imaginative expansive generous sensual rational people and not the sexual hysterics, the misogynists, Muslim and Christian and Jewish fundamentalists, the hard-working people and not the people whose only real exertion ever in their whole parasite lives has been the effort if takes to slash a trillion plus dollars in tax revenue and then stuff it in their already overfull pockets -- whatever your degree, you have presumably read history and thought about justice and freedom and the relationship between ideas and action ...