Josh counted, as his number one enemy in life, hypocrisy. It was all around him. People who called themselves Christians designed weapons of mass destruction and were perfectly comfortable with the idea of America waging wars. His mother was against abortion, but she was fine with the death penalty. Even the Pope was against the death penalty, but for some reason, Mary parted ways with Christianity on this. Josh had teachers who told him he needed to be able to embrace the challenge of learning new things, but who refused to use the new copier in the front office, because it was too hard to understand. His school principal expelled kids for getting caught with beer, even though she’d been arrested for D.W.I. Priests all over the place were starting to get busted for raping young boys. Gambling was illegal all over the place, but then what the hell was the stock exchange? Josh’s own parents, having extolled the virtues of marriage all of his life, as both an idyllic wonder and a blessed gift from God, never to be rent asunder, had recently divorced. Yes, hypocrisy became Josh’s archenemy.
The hypocrisy would’ve been bad enough by itself, but the worst thing about hypocrites was that they often couldn’t or wouldn’t recognize it in themselves, and they felt they had the absolute right to judge people like Josh for questioning their inconsistencies. An English teacher who’d once given Josh an F on an essay about Tolkien, when Joshua had fudged with a few facts to pad his paper, told him how improper it was to present as fact what he knew wasn’t. That same month, his teacher taught the class that Hecate was a Greek goddess of agriculture. Joshua tried to correct him.
“Mr. Whitehall”, he said, raising his hand but not waiting to be called on, “Hecate is less a goddess of farming than sorcery. You might be thinking of Demeter.”
His teacher raised a sardonic eyebrow. “Mr. Megalos, where did you get your Master’s degree in European literature? You strike me as a little young. As for me, I got mine at Purdue. I think it’s safe to say I know what I’m teaching.”
The class snickered, which only fueled Josh’s fire.
“You’re absolutely right, Mr. Whitehall”, Josh acquiesced without surrender, “I don’t have a Master’s degree like you do from Purdue, but this guy”, he continued, reaching into his backpack for A Dictionary of World Mythology by Arthur Cottrell, which he had not only been reading, but highlighting and annotating like he never did for any of his actual assignments, “Well, he’s got a Ph.D., and he says, ‘Hecate – Literally, ‘the distant one’. Associated by the Greeks with the moon, Hecate had a beneficent influence on such activities as farming, but she was also a goddess of the dark hours – ghost and witchcraft fascinated by the distant one who dwelt ‘on tombs’, at places where ‘two roads crossed’, or ‘near the blood of murdered persons’. The Athenians propitiated her …”
“…As I said, Mr. Megalos, she is a goddess of agriculture.”
“I don’t know, Mr. Whitehall. Sounds a lot more Edgar All Poe than Old MacDonald. Wasn’t it you who told me I should never offer as fact what isn’t?”
After that, no matter what Josha did in Mr. Whitehall’s class, he knew he was sure to fail. He even actually tried to do his work, just to prove the point. If nothing else, Mr. Whitehall was always looking to get Joshua in trouble from then on. He accused Josh of stealing his watch, which he hadn’t (Whitehall had simply misplaced it), he called him out for talking when he wasn’t, he conveniently lost assignments Joshua had turned in, giving him zeroes, and he basically made life unpleasant for Josh overall. This was the price of correcting a hypocrite, but unlike many who might cower from the challenge of pantsing the world’s dissemblers, Josh became adamant about doing so.
Commencement was approaching, and if ever there was a time when hypocrisy was put on shameless display it would be then. He’d been to each of his siblings’ graduation ceremonies, and each had been a banal carbon copy of the one preceding it. Each had an obligatory benediction, each had administrators patting themselves on the back, each had students shaking hands with teachers they hated and teachers shaking hands with students they hated, each featured godawful performances of trite songs, especially “Pomp and Circumstance”, played so repetitively and thoughtlessly that even Elgar would’ve reached madness because of it, and each featured speeches about how this young group of diploma wielders would go on to transform their world.
The whole tradition, like most ceremonial traditions, had become formulaic, rote and bereft of integrity. It was a hallmark of American culture, a rite of passage, an insipid formality. Students didn’t give a shit. They just wanted to leave school in their dust. Parents only gave a shit when their own kids walked. Teachers and administrators would gladly have stayed home as well. It was perfunctory, and above all, to Joshua, it was a gigantic falsehood.
Seniors were allowed to submit speeches in competition to deliver the main address at graduation. Joshua wrote one and submitted it. His speech detailed the struggles of each student to learn, the important friendships they’d made, the unforgettable moments from the Manzano experience, gratitude toward the teachers and staff, gratitude for the parents and families, and most importantly, the pie-eyed idea that the students would take the gifts of knowledge and skill they’d received during their four wonderful years and go on to better their world with great hope and undeterred determination. It was absolute hogwash, and he knew it, but if it had been accepted, and if he’d been allowed to take the dais that day, he had his real speech ready.
Here’s what he’d really planned to say.
Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, Cicero, Martin Luther King junior. These are some of history’s greatest orators … and now, there is me, Joshua Megalos. Greetings to all of you; administration and faculty of Manzano High School, parents, honored guests and, of course, graduating class of 1987. When one embarks upon the daunting task of writing a commencement speech, one wonders what one can say that hasn’t been said so many, many, many times before, passed from decade to decade and generation to generation, with the monotonous lethargy of a dripping faucet. And so I have, in a fashion lacking in adherence to the traditions of gatherings such as this, decided to … tell the truth. What could be more novel than that? Tell the truth and shame the Devil. Yes? Well, here we go.
In 1987, as in 1977, 1907, 1887 or even 87 B.C.E (assuming our ancient ancestors chose, as we do, to suffer ignominiously through mind-numbing ceremonies such as this), the phrase “leaders of tomorrow” has been thrown around, like so many darts in a tavern, with the ease and redundancy of the “F” word from the mouth of Richard Pryor. “We are leaders of tomorrow”, you will invariably hear from one of the vacuous twerps presenting to you tonight, and right there with it, the brazen claim, “We will change the world” will soon follow. These phrases are the basic bacon and eggs of the common and acceptable graduation speech. You all came here expecting to hear them. You heard them when you were eighteen, graduating yourself, and you will hear them again tonight … from one of these popularity-contest-winning, brown-nosing schoolies sitting uncomfortably behind me. I will be lending credence to neither phrase. Rather, I will tell you unequivocally and with human history to back me up, that we will more likely be followers of insane or stupid leaders and that we will do little or nothing in the way of making our desecrated world into anything even resembling a better place.
As I gaze upon the lot of you, sweating it out drearily on a gymnasium floor, I see the future very clearly. I see foxes and hens, wolves and sheep, sharks and flounder.
Among the foxes, wolves and sharks, I see the corporate CEOs whose bottom line is simply the acquisition of wealth at any cost. Your favorite rationales? Survival of the fittest. It’s a dog eat dog world. I’m taking care of me and mine. Human beings are either slaves or consumers to you, and the planet earth is nothing but your toilet. You are the worst of the worst.
Then there are the politicians among you, the bureaucrats, the rule-makers. Everything you do is based on increasing your own wealth and power. If it was about even half of the things you promise us, while you make Pinocchio look like Honest Abe, this world would be a great place for all of us and not just the deep-pocketed plutocrats to whom you’re financially indebted. Calling you public servants is an oxymoron. Comparing you to whores is an insult to whores, because when they screw us, we at least get something for the money we paid, and I’d wager they’re nicer people.
Then there is organized religion, a unique form of organized crime. It’s the only business that creates a fake problem and then sells you a fake solution. Worried about Hell? Well, let us make sure you get to Heaven. All you have to do is everything we tell you to do, and give us as much money as you can. If you’re having any fun in this life, it’s probably a sin, and you need to stop it. If you meet people who aren’t part of your church, you have to do everything you can to get them to join. It’s what god/allah/vishnu/Santa Claus wants. If they won’t join us, well then we have to make our rules their rules, and that’s when we do everything we can to forget that the Founding Fathers tried to keep government and old timey religion separate. In seventeen states, fornication is against the law. Who knows how many places have made it illegal to buy alcohol on Sundays? Prostitution is illegal for one reason only, the Judeo-Christian intolerance of sex for fun. Freedom and religion go together like clean lungs and cigarettes. It’s an earthly institution, not a godly one, and it’s a source of evil.
Then there are the athletes among you. You’ll get millions of dollars to play with your balls; foot, basket, base, and so on, and you will complain that it’s not enough. You will prove yourselves to be stupid and criminal constantly, filling your noses with coke, your bodies with steroids, and your bedrooms with women you’re cheating on your wives with, taking what you give them whether they like it or not. And why would you think you shouldn’t? The rapes you committed in college were swept under the rug. Who’s going to jail you for it now? And when you open your mouths to say anything, your elocution and vocabulary serve as perfect evidence that you got your grades fixed in high school and college as well. You’re blunt objects, tools of the elite who own you.
Let’s not forget our celebrities. The hunger for fame is a sickness, and despite anything you may call “humble beginnings”, you are all thoroughly diseased. You’ll make $17 million on a picture, and when you’re interviewed, you talk about how hard what you did was. Ever dug a ditch? Ever worked fast food? Ever bussed a table? You spend so much time living in a fake world, you’ve lost all touch with the rest of humanity, but you’re outrageously confident telling us all how we need to live. God forbid anyone ever reinstitutes slavery, but if they do, you should be picking crops, building roads, and cleaning toilets, if for no other reason than to remind you that you are not Olympian gods.
Those are the foxes, the wolves and the sharks. Now let’s talk about the hens, the flock, and the schools.
Let’s talk about our overseers, the human sellouts, the middle management of the powerful and the greedy, the people who keep us all in line. Let’s talk about our cookie cutter public schools. They talk a good talk about wanting to awaken our minds, but see what happens when you refuse to say the pledge of allegiance, dye your hair blue, challenge a teacher’s opinions, or say the word fuck in class. Very quickly you learn that the knowledge they wish to impart, that the skills with which they wish to leaves us, they are intended to make us effective worker bees and nothing more. The elite are getting taught how to dominate us at private schools while we’re being indoctrinated in public ones. Fail to bray along with the rest of the sheep, and be targeted by teachers and principals.
Let’s talk about law enforcement. They say they exist to protect and serve, but if that were true, would you see them casually driving by people who are stranded on the side of the road? Would you see traffic cops breaking every traffic law there is? Would you see so many crimes, for which plenty of evidence exists to prosecute offenders, going unpunished? No. And that’s because the cops aren’t here to protect us. They’re here to protect the interests of the state. The high school bullies who go on to become cops are better suited to breaking up peace rallies, rolling homeless drunks, collecting revenue from traffic violations, busting pot smokers, and using the drugs they confiscate than they are at deescalating domestic disputes, investigating violent crimes, gang intervention, or anything called service. Screw service! The cops are here to keep the rest of us in line. Nothing more.
Then there’s the rest of us: the flock, the herd, the food. We’re going to be the world’s insurance adjusters, bank tellers, restaurant managers, garbage collectors, telemarketers, accountants, farmers, and so on. We’re the people who produce things. We’re the people who make things work, and we’re the ones being kept down by the predators I’ve already spoken of. They have the means to keep us mediocre. They have the means to punish us if we step out of line. They make the laws that ensure we stay just above poverty enough not to get so angry we revolt, but poor enough to be in a constant struggle for our survival. In this way, we are too preoccupied caring for ourselves and our loved ones to have the time or energy to fight back against our essential enslavement. We’ve been rendered impotent, and this is why it’s foolish to imagine we’ll make the world a better place at all.
We’ll chew gum with our mouths open, eat popcorn too loudly in movie theatres, be obsessed with physical appearance, because the TV told us to be, rat each other out to the authorities over petty offenses, stab each other in the back at work, not use our turn signals, cut each other off in traffic, overstay our welcome as house guests, not return each other’s phone calls, express uninformed opinions as if they were gospel and defend them violently, cheat to win even the smallest competitions, cheat on each other, sell each other poorly manufactured goods, borrow things and never return them, waste water, waste food, litter, keep our neighbors up at night playing music too loud, cut in line at concerts, go to work sick and make others sick too, let our children run around like morons unchecked in public places, shoplift, suntan, pee in pools, throw out recyclables, beat our pets, beat each other, not cover our mouths when we sneeze, and claim that human beings are somehow superior to all other life on a planet, which no more celebrates the birth of a new one of us than a leukemia patient celebrates the birth of new cancer cells.
There may be a few angels among us, but the only thing I have to say to you, fervent in your hope that you can make the world a better place is this. If you don’t get crucified like Christ, shot like Martin Luther King, Jr., imprisoned like Andrei Sakharov, or character assassinated like J. Robert Oppenheimer, then the best you’ll be able to do is improve the lives of a small group of people, and while this is commendable, and quite frankly, the best anybody can do, you will eat, drink, and sleep with your disappointment in humanity twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year. The human race will not evolve until all our lives depend on it, and you know what? Even then, I suspect we won’t. Bless you for trying. Truly. Maybe there will be a place of honor for you in Heaven, but here on earth, you’ll be invalids.
You’re all looking at me like I’m standing up here, naked and smothered in feces. I’m the pariah now, I know. I’m bucking the system. But if you study human history, there has never been a time when the powerful didn’t subjugate the weak, when greed didn’t cause warfare, when tribal fears and religious zealotry didn’t create seas of blood. The human race has never been anything other than savage, and every time people get up at events like these and unthinkingly promise that they’re going to somehow, magically make the world any better a place, it makes me nauseous. “Pomp and Circumstance” isn’t the only inane song played over and over at graduations, but it least it’s better composed.
So, why? Why did I bother to make this speech at all, making you all angry and depressed? It’s simply this. No one here is going on to make the world a better place. My challenge to you, class of ’87 is to simply not be such assholes that you make it worse.
Thank you and God bless.
At lunch, over a meal of some unrecognizable meat substance and mashed potatoes, Joshua shared his speech with Tony Silverman, Raymond Mensch and Kevin Connor.
“If yours gets chosen”, asked Raymond, “The bullshit one that is, would you really do this one instead?”
“I get a spiritual erection just imagining it, Ray”, Josh answered smugly.
“Your parents would never forgive you”, cautioned Kevin.
“They forgave me after the whole Fubba Wubba affair. They’ll cope with this too. Time will turn their anger into humor”, Josh retorted, “And I’m outta there anyway. Life on my fuckin’ terms, not theirs.”
“If you even got half way through it before you got yanked off the stage, I’d be shocked”, added Raymond.
“If even that much got said, I’d be happy about it”, replied Josh.
“What if they don’t give you your diploma?” asked Kevin.
“Dude, I have a 1.6 cumulative GPA. I’m actually missing three credits of algebra. They shouldn’t even be giving me one in the first place. So the truth is, if they handed me a roll of toilet paper up there, it’d be more useful to me.”
Tony snickered. “If they handed you a wad of used toilet paper, it’d be about the same thing.”
Joshua raised his carton of milk to toast Tony, who sardonically reciprocated. “I couldn’t have put it better myself.”
Kevin got serious for a moment. “What about the other students and their families? Wouldn’t you be ruining it for everybody?”
Joshua looked at him speculatively. “Have you been to one of these before, Kevin?”
“Yes.”
“Well, it’s like turning on your TV for your favorite show, only to find that it’s just a re-run. In fact, it’s worse than that, Kevin. It’s like the same re-run, over and over, each time you tune in.” He smiled mischievously. “People might pretend to be outraged, but the fact is, I think they’d be grateful for the novelty.”
“Relax, Kevin”, Tony asserted, “Josh’s contribution is as likely to be chosen for this graduation as Geraldine Ferraro is to become Time’s ‘Man of the Year’. They choose the student body schoolies, the preppies, and the drill teamers over morons like us any day.”
“It’s a fact”, confirmed Joshua.
“Then why even submit?” asked Kevin.
“Because, my dear Kevin”, Josh spoke mercurially, “I refuse to submit.”
Unbeknownst to Joshua, Kevin, concerned that Joshua posed a real threat to the great tradition of commencement, ratted on him to Lannie Tanner, the school’s activity director, responsible for selecting the graduation speeches. The whole plan had been revealed, and Joshua was called in to meet with Ms. Tanner.
“I want to read your speech, Joshua”, she told him grimly.
“I turned it in to you already.”
“Not the nice and polite one. The secret one you were planning to read had the nice one been selected.”
“Whatever do you mean, Ms. Tanner?”
“Look, you’re not facing any disciplinary action, Joshua”, she said, attempting to be amiable. “Neither speech was going to be presented at graduation. Surely you knew, when you gave us the respectable one, that you had to have a 3.5 GPA or better to be chosen to speak. Add to that the fact that you embarrassed the school internationally on CNN, and frankly, even if you’d managed the next Gettysburg address, you wouldn’t have made it up on that stage, Josh, so there was never a risk of wrong doing. As far as I’m concerned, you’ve done no wrong. I’m, just curious what got your friend, Kevin …”
“… Not a friend, Ms. Tanner. He is not my friend.”
She leaned back in her oak chair, her face full of recognition that Joshua felt terribly betrayed.
“Well, I’m curious about what riled him up so. You mind if I read it?”
Josh reached in to his backpack. Why not give it to her? There was no chance in Hell that the masses would hear it, but he’d get the attention of at least one person not already in the choir to whom he’d thus far preached. Maybe she’d even make copies of it to share around the staff. It wouldn’t get global traction, but maybe it would, at least, be discussed and considered. Joshua had nothing to lose. He handed it over.
Lannie Tanner had been a Texas cheerleader all her life, in high school, at UT Austin and even for the Dallas Cowboys. To look at her in 1987, it was plain to see that, before the gray hairs, the additional seventy-five pounds and nature’s inevitable etchings, she had been gorgeous. In addition to her duties as activities director, she coached the drill team. She was an exuberant, generally good-natured dynamo, well-loved be faculty and students alike. As she read Josh’s real speech, the smile, which seemed to exist as the default of her facial expressions, dimmed. Her lilted crow’s feet gave way to a furrowed brow. Her face somehow seemed to become paler. When she finished, she handed the speech back to Joshua, who quickly put it in his back pack. There followed a moment of silence.
Finally, Ms. Tanner spoke, looking at Joshua with genuine lament in her youthful blue eyes. “How can you see people this way?”
Joshua thought about her question for a moment, then, rather matter-of-factly, he answered with his own question. “How can you not?”