Monday, April 10, 2006
A Princeton professor gives advice to graduating seniors
Half a million French youths on the barricades of their privileged entitlements, united in an unembarrassed, indeed self-righteous, defense of economic stagnation, have given me much needed perspective. Young Princetonians, I take it all back and beg your pardons. Compared with your French counterparts, you are all mini-Magellans and micro-Mother Teresas. French protestors carried a huge banner: "We Will Never Surrender" (in English, especially for CNN). Bracket the fact that surrender has been France's national outdoor sport for two centuries. What are they refusing to surrender to — apart from common sense, I mean?
I couldn't have spent four decades as a humanities professor without gaining fluency in the sclerotic cliches of a soft left rhetoric. But it appears that in France, the mainstream political spectrum actually believes it. The place is positively crawling with time-warped Socialists who still quaintly believe in Marxism. You still find in "Le Monde" terms like "comprehensive economic planning," "common ownership of the means of production" and even "revolutionary cadres." In allegedly communist China, 73 percent of the population agrees that "free market capitalism is the best economic system." In statist France, it's about 35 percent — possibly the same 35 percent working their guts out to keep afloat a "social model," untainted by Anglo-Saxon iniquity, of paying people for producing nothing and, not infrequently, doing nothing, while they suck off the great teat of the State...
What we laughingly call the "real world" can be a scary place. But as seniors hand in their theses and enjoy the last relaxed weeks before facing it, I have a few words of advice for graduates. Not a one of them is "Plastics." A Princeton diploma is, among other things, a testimony to a lifetime of privilege. It is never too early to start paying back. Do something serious, useful, daring and fun. Travel around, and use the foreign language we helped you learn. Invent something. Start a company. Teach something wholesome to somebody who needs it. Revel in your individuality and personal enterprise in a way that satisfies you by helping our needy world. Take some big risks, and fail a few times. Let your attitude be closer to that of an immigrant Mexican yard-worker than of a French bureaucrat. This country doesn't owe you a living, but it affords you unequalled opportunities to make a decent one. Work really hard. Create the wealth of the commonwealth. Combat social pathologies, illiteracy, epidemic disease and sanctified ignorance. Be "rich of holy thoght and werk." If you end up rich in dough as well, endow a Princeton chair and found a charitable foundation. Die happy.
Indeed. RTWT.
5 Comments:
By 
, at
Mon Apr 10, 05:19:00 PM:
Yeah. And oh, by the way, I'm German.
Let me also tell you that quite a few of us over here still have VERY strong sympathies for the US (of the non-Democrat variety, that is).
By 
TigerHawk, at
Mon Apr 10, 08:16:00 PM:
That is wonderful to know -- I think many of us were stung by Schroeder's decision to campaign on an anti-American platform. The way we look at such things, he would not have done so unless it would attract voters at the center, because in the United States candidates tend to move toward the political center as the campaign progresses. Therefore, we felt that the German political center must be extremely anti-American for Shroeder's campaign to have exploited that sentiment so successfully. I hope we are wrong.
By Dawnfire82, at
Mon Apr 10, 08:46:00 PM:
Negative. Germany runs on a representative system, not a so-called First Past the Post regional candidate system like the US or Britain. Without going into painful analytical detail, a representative system hosts a wide variety of political ideas all across the spectrum, as opposed to the Anglo-Saxon Left of Center and Right of Center tradition. Schroeder's posturing was meant to secure German liberals to vote for his coalition. (i.e. Green/Socialist/Communist if I remember right) He doesn't need a majority, he just needs a plurality strong enough to make a deal with other parties for the Chancelorship, and nasty populist rhetoric always gets people riled up and ready to vote for their narrow little ideology. Too bad it hopelessly poisoned his foreign relations and made him look like a nasty populist bitch.
Doesn't mean that Germans like the US though. As a German woman once told me in 2003, "We've always hated you. It's just that now we have a clearer reason."
Comforting, isn't it?
By , at
Mon Apr 10, 11:37:00 PM:
"This country doesn't owe you a living, but it affords you unequalled opportunities to make a decent one."
Amen.
By , at
Thu Apr 13, 10:15:00 AM:
France has become a nation with spoiled brats and a wussie little wonk running the country
