Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!mhuxl!ihnp4!inuxc!pur-ee!uiucdcs!uicsl!keller From: keller@uicsl.UUCP Newsgroups: net.politics Subject: William Styron on Reagan, Jefferson - (nf) Message-ID: <6137@uiucdcs.UUCP> Date: Sun, 11-Mar-84 22:35:00 EST Article-I.D.: uiucdcs.6137 Posted: Sun Mar 11 22:35:00 1984 Date-Received: Tue, 13-Mar-84 00:27:24 EST Lines: 91 #N:uicsl:16300056:000:5408 uicsl!keller Mar 11 16:34:00 1984 = In the most recent University of Virginia Alumni News there is the text of the 1983 UVA convocation address given by William Styron. Mr. Styron is an accomplished author who is perhaps best known for his books "Sophie's Choice" and "Confessions of Nat Turner." I think that his speech fits well with the style of net.politics even if it is more learned and considered than most entries. He mainly spoke about how Thomas Jefferson might respond to contemporary American government and culture, but began by relating a conversation he had with his good friend Art Buchwald about what he should say at the convocation. I cannot say that I agree with all of Mr. Styron's points, but I did very much like some of what he said. Some excerpts follow: >From the conversation with Buchwald: "The University of Virginia," [Buchwald] said, "that's very heavy. Very heavy indeed." "What do you mean, 'heavy'?" I replied. "They're very serious down there. I mean, that's not Idaho State. You'll have to say something interesting. Even though a convocation address doesn't have much of an afterlife." . . . "[Afterlife is] merely my own personal term for the period of time between the moment the last word of a speech is uttered and the moment it has begun to be totally forgotten by the audience." . . . "Excepting, of course, the Gettysburg Address, presidential speeches are the only ones that actually have a negative afterlife. People not only don't remember them for any length of time, they consciously make an effort to forget them. Speechmaking, in general, is a counter productive activity, unless you can get a group of insurance executives of jellybean manufacturers to cough up a lot of money for one." The words president and jellybean, not unnaturally, brought to mind the person I had been mulling over as a potential subject for my presentation here at the University. Not too long before, I had spent an intimate though somewhat excruciating evening at a private home in Washington in the company of the President of the United States, who politely ignoring (or perhaps I should say, I think, refusing to acknowledge) the fact that the tiny group of informed and sophisticated people gathered after dinner were eager to converse about matters of some substance, spoke instead about show business for one hour and ten minutes which is a long time for the Marx Brothers as much as one might admire them. . . . "Look Art," I continued, "I'm well aware that it was part of our national destiny to choose an actor for president." Buchwald interrupted: "In speechmaking, the key to persuasion is understatement. Already there is so much rage in your voice that people in Charlottesville might not believe you . . . steer clear of partisan politics . . . try Thomas Jefferson." On T.J.: Companionship with such extraordinary men as Washington, Madison and John Adams may have innocently deluded him into a belief that the American presidency was destined always to be a class act; and indeed he would have discovered rich qualities to praise in a poignantly small number of those who followed him in the office. But if he were here now to study the rollcall of those politicians who have hustled their way to the top, he would marvel at how the Republic survived, it seems to me, the ministrations of--out of forty--an arguable majority of mediocrities, among them at least a half dozen undisputed ignoramuses . . . Suppose he had seen the Russian revolution. I have no doubt that it would have excited him more than any single event in this century. Yet its betrayal by the bloodthirsty professors and, finally, by a mass murderer would have left him, too, betrayed, and I would conceive of him developing a passionate opposition to the Soviet system long before the Second World War, long before so many others who were perversely blind to the glaring fact that this system, to its core, was the implacable enemy of the single most important element of earthly life: individual liberty. Even so, that reflective, skeptical, imperturbable side of his character would have kept him from panic and fear, and certainly form hysteria. He would be totally without illusions concerning the aims and extent of Soviet ambition. But he would perceive our terror of communists under every bed, in every domestic closet, as being unworthy of a nation as strong as we are, and our incessant interventions in places we have and have had no business at all--in Vietnam and now Nicaragua--as being exercises in power gone berserk. He would see the demonology we have constructed around Communism as largely mythic--partly the product of horrible dreams in the minds of the sons of Presbyterian missionaries, John Foster Dulles and Henry Luce-- and in any case a fetish that has distracted us from detente, and from discourse, and from negotiation. I think he would be profoundly depressed at the impasse such a philosophy has helped bring us to in this fall of 1983, and I know he would be chilled, like all of us, by the menacing sounds abroad in the world, with their auguries of death and impending doom. But I'm sure that if he were here today in his glorious University he would counsel hope, even though that hope be fought at the price--on the part of every one of us here--of constant concern with what our politicians and statesmen do, and of never-ending vigilance. ----------------------- -Shaun