Connections: Make ’Em Laugh
Mine was called the Silent Generation. We probably didn’t have the collective energy of today’s millennials, but take a look at some of those, like me, born in the generation between the early 1920s and 1944: Martin Luther King Jr., Elvis Presley, Malcolm X, Andy Warhol, Robert F. Kennedy, Ray Charles, Che Guevara, the Beatles, and, get this, Bernie Sanders. Maybe we weren’t so quiet after all.
As students at Douglass College in New Brunswick, N.J., my friends and I campaigned for Adlai Stevenson. More to our credit, however, we desegregated the movie house by sitting, over strong management objection, in the balcony, to which African-Americans had been relegated.
Douglass is part of Rutgers University, so it was no surprise that I was interested in the commencement address President Obama made there on Sunday. Rutgers is a very old college, one of the nine established in the colonies before the American Revolution, and, according to the president, its student body “could be the most diverse” in the country.
It is evident that in the last year of his presidency, Mr. Obama has been more outspoken about politics. At Rutgers he took clear aim at Donald Trump. Maybe you have seen the video clips of the speech that have been making the rounds?
“Facts, evidence, reason, logic, an understanding of science — these are good things. These are qualities you want in people making policy,” Mr. Obama said, adding, to roars of laughter: “In politics and in life, ignorance is not a virtue.”
The president didn’t actually name Mr. Trump, but who else could he have been thinking about?
The millions of voters who support and rally heartily on behalf of Mr. Trump do not seem to care that Mr. Trump rarely deals with facts or follows logic. They seem to think he’s great because he loudly tells us he is, and because his outrageous opinions somehow come across as bucking the system. He’s about as consistent as a toddler in describing his policies and his own past? So what.
Of course, Donald Trump hasn’t been the only Republican candidate to distort the facts. Ted Cruz had a problem, too. And Mr. Trump, quick as a fox, had fun calling Ted Cruz “Lyin’ Ted” after dealing Jeb Bush, who tried to stick to reasonable discourse, a powerful blow by calling him boring. Mr. Bush, although he is starting to look like a pillar of Republican common sense at this point, is boring.
Mr. Obama said Rutgers was precisely the kind of institution he wanted to celebrate and he told the graduates that “America is better and the world is better than it was 50 years ago or 30 years ago or even eight years ago.” Noting declines in crime, teenage pregnancy, and poverty, and, on the other hand, improvements in longevity, clean energy, and the status of blacks and Latinos, he said, “The good old days weren’t all that good.” That, obviously, was a tweak to the nose of the “Make America Great Again” candidate.
Many aspects of American society differ greatly from what they were like when I was an undergraduate — attitudes toward women at home and in the workplace, voting rights for minorities. . . . From the cheers and laughter, it sounded like the graduates enjoyed hearing the optimism in Mr. Obama’s commencement speech. I wish I’d been there.