IRREVERENT Magazine - Features

Honored guests, distinguished faculty, underpaid staff, suicidal parents and so-called graduates, thank you for your warm and gracious welcome back to the poison ivy covered halls of Ottsamatta U.  It's been some time since I was last given the honor of taking your money for imparting my words of wisdom just before you embark on your long and glorious career as welfare recipients.  I can't tell you how pleased I am that the university's administration was able to come to terms with my negotiation team.  Al Capone once said, “You can get much further with a kind word and a gun than with a kind word alone.  To that you can add the Mercer corollary, “Add a photographer, a midget, some methamphetamine and a live webcam and the world's your oyster,” eh Dean?  You wouldn't think a woman her age would be so hard on a box of Durex. 

But I don't do this only for the money no matter how many semi-trucks it takes for me to haul it away.  I don't do this for the extraordinary female companionship, this year provided by a exquisite little auburn haired co-ed whose capacity for adventure is exceeded only by her utterly complete knowledge of knot tying. I don't even do this for the amazingly endless supply of mind-altering substances pouring ceaselessly from the sky.  In truth, I do this for the looks of stunned disappointment on the faces of the parents who, thinking their duties as chief diaper changers had ended so many years ago, found themselves once more futilely attempting to make their offspring presentable for public.  To you parents I say congratulations, and please accept my sincere condolences that these people graduating today will be coming home with you.  I'm afraid campus security will insist.

[inset pos=left]But just one bullet. ...[Y]ou'll want to be able to get away while they reload.[/inset]Graduates, in a few moments you will be unleashed upon a world ill-prepared for your lack of development.  Crises abound: national and international, economic and environmental, spiritual and secular, all requiring a higher degree of intellectual development than determining which beer bong will cause the most inebriation in the shortest amount of time, or farting the theme song to Wizards of Waverly Place. Who can we blame for your spectacular failure?  Well not your parents.  Those poor benighted souls provided you with the best our society has to offer:  highly organized play dates, Elmo paraphernalia, Ritalin, Cable TV, cell phones, and high speed Internet.  Their hope, of course, was a Harvard scholarship and Ted Kennedy as the commencement speaker.  Instead they've taken out a third mortgage and been forced to listen to me, a word smith at a two bit e-zine.  Little wonder, then, your parents' drawn, haggard expressions, listless attitudes, and a fervent belief that the military should have re-instituted the draft.  Their disappointment has so blinded them that they don't realize that not even the Army had confidence in your ability to adequately serve as cannon-fodder.  So give them a break:  leave out a loaded gun.  But just one bullet. If they get the wrong idea about who it should be used on, you'll want to be able to get away while they reload.

[inset pos=right]You remember Ancient Rome don't you?  It's that mini-series remake of Caligula with Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein recreating Malcom MacDowell's role.[/inset]Still, setting aside dashed hopes of ever seeing your fat ass off the sofa and disappearing over the horizon, your parents can take solace in the fact that they'll never again feel the cold dead hand of academe dipping regularly into their pocketbooks.  At least until you awake from a drug induced coma and realize that a penchant for Amy's Macaroni and Cheese, Hawaiian pot, and low-income employment isn't going to keep the creditors at bay.  Suddenly, discounting all the current evidence about your prospects of success, the irresistible lure of graduate school and student loan forbearance will lead you once more into the clutches of these black robed charlatans. 

Which is not to say that your entire education has been a waste, where else would you have spent a winter learning how to impress Tila Tequila without being nagged every half hour about shoveling the sidewalk?  At least the cowled bastards sharing this stage with me recognized your lack of potential, took your money, and left you alone.  Not a bad deal for 150 large is it?  If there is one glimmer of hope for your future it lies in the debauchery and excess I witnessed last night.  To say that it would put Ancient Rome to shame would take too much away from the daily bacchanalia taking place in Wall Street financial firms every single working day. 

[inset pos=left]Harry Potter, showed his magic wand to theater audiences ... when Daniel Radcliffe, to the delight of NAMBLA card holders everywhere, starred in Equus.[/inset]You remember Ancient Rome don't you?  It's that mini-series remake of Caligula with Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein recreating Malcom MacDowell's role.  Only this time it's your future being sacrificed to the lions and the US Economy being raped like the emperor's consort.  So parents, as you look disgustedly at the offspring responsible for your presence here today, take heart that, while they haven't the intelligence to make a career in high finance, a field no longer known for being a bastion of the best and the brightest, they at least have the lifestyle skills to put up a good front.

In the four years since I last stood upon this dais, trying to keep myself from passing out from the stench wafting from the pen of livestock....er graduates, much in this world has changed.  When you entered these hallowed halls of academe, like lambs entering an abattoir, Brittany Spears had a full head of extensions.  In six short months, as you were failing out of remedial finger painting,  those extensions, as well as what little remained of her natural hair, were lying on the floor of an LA salon awaiting their turn on E-Bay.  That they were kept from auction due to their high levels of psychotropic drug residue says more about our draconian drug policy than it does about any degree of respect for privacy.  At about the same time, your childhood hero, Harry Potter, showed his magic wand to theater audiences in London's West End when Daniel Radcliffe, to the delight of NAMBLA card holders everywhere, starred in Equus.  The world held it's breath awaiting the reaction from Harry's creator, J.K. Rowling, to seeing the cinematic embodiment of her gravy train in all his glory.  History fails, however, to record his reaction to her backhanded support when she said, “It's no big deal.” 

[inset pos=right]In the past the only career you could have possibly have had with your level of skill and talent would have been in publishing.[/inset]In an eerie replay of the Late Night Wars of the nineties, your generation's Johnny Carson, Conan O'Brien, found himself punted by your grandparents' generation's Johnny Carson, Jay Leno.  Not that it mattered much to you, because you don't even know who Johnny Carson is.  Well, I'm not telling you.  You'll just have to sit there feeling helpless without a laptop and Wikipedia. But the biggest entertainment news to rock your academic stay here came last year.  As you lounged by the pool, blissfully ignoring your parents' entreaties to make something of yourself, Michael Jackson died in a bid to restart interest in his career.  Traditionally the shy and reserved Jackson resented intrusions into his privacy.  With a new concert tour in the works and a fantastic debt load to liquidate, Michael lifted the veil on his privacy just enough for us to see his rapidly cooling corpse.  What a trooper.

Privacy, not only of the rich and famous, is something that also changed greatly during your slog through this institution.  To you and your generational cohorts privacy is something you give up even more readily than you do your innocence.  First through 'blogs, then with Facebook, you gave all of us full access to everything we wanted to know about you.  Now, of course, 'blogs are getting tireder than daily newspapers and Facebook has been taken over by middle aged rednecks pretending to be mafia farmers.  As you watched the deterioration, you leapt for the next big thing and found Twitter.  Based on the idea that anything anybody could ever care about other people could be boiled down to 140 characters, Twitter's given you a place to tell the world what you're currently yakking up after a hard night's “studying” at Pancho Shirley's 5 cent draw-fest.  Its genius lies in the ability to tweet from, in increasing levels of coolness, your PC, laptop, cell phone, iPod Touch, iPhone, and iPad.  Fortunately for you, Twitter's ephemeral nature means that, unlike Facebook, you can completely be yourself without worrying prospective employers about your level of productivity. Like thousands of graduates before you, you can let your transcripts do that.

[inset pos=left][L]etting other people make money off your intellecutal property is what the new economy is all about.[/inset]But you'll try to find employment won't you?  It won't be easy.  In the past the only career you could have possibly have had with your level of skill and talent would have been in publishing.  Of course the only creativity you've managed to show is in finding the appropriate place to which to send your inappropriate sexts so that they amusingly end up on texts from last night. And you don't make any money from that do you? Nope. After you amusingly send that SMS about how you violated 49 of the 50 obsolete sodomy laws on the books to your phone book, the guys at TFLN, and others like them, are busy collecting those texts from your marginally soberer friends, packaging them up like an x-rated CDO and selling them short to Simon and Schuster for thousands of dollars and an iron clad intellectual property use agreement that your buddies didn't even read.  See you on the NYT bestseller list, chuckles. 

You see letting other people make money off your intellecutal property is what the new economy is all about. Look it up on your iPad you don't believe me. But remember, don't use Flash. Steve Jobs says that's a no-no.

[inset pos=right]Despite their best efforts, you have once again escaped exposure to liability for breach of contract...[/inset]Of course I kid.  For me to talk about prospective employers at a time when you'll be lucky to flip burgers, simply demonstrates the command of irony that makes my satire so biting.  Let's face it:  as the economy started to melt down, taking your parents' retirements, and in some cases homes, with it, it also crushed the extremely thin hope you might have had for gainful employment.  Not that you didn't try to cover your bases.  In overwhelming numbers you helped place America's first African American since Bill Clinton into the presidency, but, just when he most needed your help as he tried to give us meaningful health care reform, you abandoned him for the latest Lady Gaga video and Chatroulette. 

Twisting in the wind, he had almost no choice but to give up millions of dollars to insurance companies in exchange for adding a mere 37 million uninsured Americans to the rolls.  I guess that's OK though, because when it comes down to it we can always rely on Goldman Sachs to help out.  I mean who will they screw over when the rest of us are lying sick or dead from the next flu pandemic?  There won't be a Greece forever.

Well I see by the slanting sun, and by the glassy eyed stares that I'm close to overstaying my welcome.  As Mr. Suntori says in his new book:  And Zen What Happened? “Remain no longer than it takes to collect the check.”  Before I take my leave of you and this temple to outrageous grade inflation, singing the immortal words of White Zombie, "Up yours, baby," I have one more task before me.

Members of the Board of Trustees, Mr. President, Madam Dean.  It is with heavy heart, but, fortunately a heavier wallet, that I present to you these candidates for the degree of Baccalaureate of Arts.  Despite their best efforts, you have once again escaped exposure to liability for breach of contract, and they are found to be possessing of the minimum requirements set by the state academic and parole boards for release, if not success.  You should be ashamed of yourselves.