Update: courtesy of PG, here's a link to another of Tony Kushner's commencement addresses, this one at Vassar.
Here's a treat, suitable for consumption with your morning Sunday coffee.
Tony Kushner, author of Angels in America, gave the commencement address at Columbia College this year.
I'm always surprised by the attacks on Kushner, not those from the right, (no surprise there); the surprise is the snide vehemence of the attacks by the more respectable center/right typified by most of TNR, as if he's some type of radical nut case, completely cut off from mainstream America.
What rot. His audience, which ranges far beyond Broadway, gathers in a wider spectrum of Americans than do his critics, whose bond with the inhabitants of those red states whom they fetishize as the true America, is purely rhetorical.
What also gets to his critics is an underlying sweetness and lack of pretension, an exhuberance that makes him both "uncool," and a perfect commencement speaker. I believe he's given a number of them since America noticed that a major American talent had been revealed on a London stage. I remember reading one and marvelling at its directness, charm, wit, humor, unapologetic politics, and the bravery of that, since those politics are distinctly left wing.
This new one is a delight; come to think of it, a better description of his politics is that they are distinctly human. Bush isn't treated so much as a target than as a given, an unlovely, charmless, dangerous presence, whose real signifigance, perhaps, is in being a distraction from a larger struggle.
Contemplating the suggestion of his Chicago cabbie that..."If there's a supernova 60 light years away from here the world will be totally wiped out, we don't stand a chance," Kushner, while eschewing wishful thinking, manages to retain his optimism; what more can we ask of our artists?
