This is much more profound than one might think with one reading.
Hidden in between the lines are the dark dissilusionment with the American
system and all the dark right of passage that led to it with a country
called Vietnam. That thing shaped my generation more than anything for it
unveiled the lie of "American Exceptionally". Yet, the lie remains and
continues to play on like the band on the Titanic. It is a slow, mournful
wail towards collective suicide.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Miriam Vieni" <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Saturday, May 21, 2016 11:32 AM
Subject: [blind-democracy] My Commencement Speech to the Graduating Class of
the University of Connecticut
Stone writes: "The thing that people don't realize is that history can be
fun, that the narrative can be taught with great sweep and power like a
movie, not a museum."
Oliver Stone. (photo: Jean Paul Guilloteau/Express-Rea/Redux)
My Commencement Speech to the Graduating Class of the University of
Connecticut
By Oliver Stone, The Oliver Stone Experience
20 May 16
thank you both, Dr. Herbst and Dr. Choi for bringing me. And I'd also like
to thank Professor Frank Costigliola, of your History Department, who's
written a new book on the Cold War that greatly enlarges our understanding
of a time when countries resorted, once again, to paranoid fears of invasion
and subterfuge.
And I'd like to extend a BIG CONGRAGULATIONS to all of you -- the Class of
2016 -- on this wonderful achievement in your lives. Today is a great day.
And also congratulations to your parents and relatives who are here to
celebrate your evolution. Bravo!
I actually went to 4 different colleges in my life, so I'm not necessarily
the best-suited speaker for this ceremony, (but I think you knew that when
you invited me). My first college was down the road at Yale. In my class,
among others, was George Bush, two Olympic gold-medal athletes, one pro
football star, several future multi-millionaires and billionaires who now
have a big say in our destiny, Pulitzer Prize winners, a future Secretary of
State, etc, etc, what I'd call 'the Obama School of Ivy League Geniuses'.
But the truth for me was that Yale was so incredibly difficult academically,
and competitive in all things, that my 4 grueling years of preparation at a
boys' boarding school in Pennsylvania were not sufficient to compete. And
the freedom given by the College was far too liberal for my discipline.
Basically, all of a sudden, we were on our own -- study when you want; eat,
sleep when you want; do what you want. Go to New York City for a week, it
doesn't matter. No one really cares as long as you pass the course. That was
the point, no one cared, there was no headmaster around to scare the shit
out of you. I barely survived the first year, failed Greek, and just made it
through the most abstract course I ever had -- Economics. And after trying,
I also failed to make any of the serious athletic teams. I was just another
mediocrity and I quit school, shaken and depressed.
I went to Asia, Vietnam specifically, for almost a year, to teach high
school and work in the US Merchant Marine, as a 'wiper' in the South China
Seas. Then I gave Yale another try for half a year, and again I was
profoundly disappointed -- in myself. Mr. Bush could get Cs and party and
get through it all. And with a pedigree, he could become President. But I
had no pedigree. I think, more importantly, I couldn't stand any longer the
air of Ivy League superiority and competition. There was a lack,
essentially, of humanity -- a compulsive need to out-do your fellow man. I
wanted something gentler, something like I'd seen in Asia, an ability simply
to breathe a natural life. So I abandoned school once again, but it was
clear this time there was no going back. In fact, I'd failed every single
one of my courses. That's pretty hard to do, 4 out of 4 zeros.
Dad was pissed; some 9,000 in tuition (no tax deduction here) blown away.
And what would I do for the rest of my life? He'd expected me to get to Wall
Street at the least -- sort of as an 'idiot son' like Bush. Or, at worst, a
steady job at AT&T in New York, starting at a couple hundred bucks a week. I
went home and hid my face from my Dad's friends, who'd known me as a
promising, conservative young man. I was a BUM now -- in my eyes as well as
Dad's. I had no real skills or earning power. I decided I had nothing to
lose, so I'd join the Army, specifically the Infantry, and go to the front
lines in Vietnam. And if it was intended by the Greek gods, or the
monotheistic God from the Bible -- either way -- I was putting it on the
line. The divine forces would cast their decision, and I'd either live or
die.
It was literally on my 21st birthday -- I suspect many of you here are 21 or
close -- I was on a plane bound for Vietnam a second time -- all 120 of us
in Army khaki with buzzcuts. I never even had a 21st birthday; as we crossed
the International Date Line, my birthday dropped away into the sea as the
calendar jumped a day. It was like an omen -- that I'd never get to 21. I'd
be lost in some crack of time in Vietnam.
After 15 months of. let's say another kind of world, I went back to the US
with no idea of what to do and no skills except camping, surviving, hunting,
and not sleeping very well. I'd taken a few electronics courses through a
college extension program. I'd talked with some Army buddies about opening a
construction company down in Alabama, or maybe Latin America, getting
contracts from the Government -- all that fantasy died on the return, and my
buddies went to other small towns and cities in the country. And rarely did
we see each other again. This reality, along with something we didn't know
much about at the time, since called PTSD, left us each in some dark holes.
People simply didn't understand because that war was crazy and made no
sense. How can you explain it when it makes no sense?
After months of low-level depression, an old school friend who'd graduated
from Yale was pursuing a career making low-budget porno films -- and making
money at it; he told me I could actually go to one of these new "film
schools", and I could get 80% of my tuition paid from the GI Bill. It
sounded nuts to me. "You mean I can actually get credit for watching movies
all day?" It was too good to be true, but it was a new world. There were
respected schools in California -- but now NYU had one too. So I thank you
-- I mean it -- the US Government.
But it was really a vocational school for me. I was older than the others.
It was difficult for me to readjust to the mentality. I was quiet and didn't
mingle much. These students were in another world, and they probably looked
at me like I was the guy in "Taxi Driver" who ends up blowing up the class.
But I had fun there. I also learned the beginnings of a skill. And then
after 6/7 years of professional rejection and writing a lot of speculative
scripts, making low-budget films, breaks started coming my way, and I
actually made it into the film business with some success. In fact, much to
my Father's inability to think it possible, I actually started to make a
living at this film thing.
I think a point to be made of this experience is no matter how dark it gets
early, don't get too down on yourself. You have -- you may not know them --
hidden talents, skills, passions. You simply cannot recognize it yet. So
listen to the wind. The answer might be blowing right past you... But
although I now had a degree and some success, I didn't really have an
education. Learning a trade is not a complete experience. I was a partly
educated writer-director who'd never really studied with any rigor history,
mathematics, English, science. All I had was curiosity, and thank god for
that.
So almost 40 years later, like Rodney Dangerfield in "Back to School", in
2008 I went to my 3rd college -- not your normal campus with the bells
beautifully tolling and the cries of young people in the air -- but a
concentrated 5-year journey through American history from the 1890s to
today. Guiding me was a highly intelligent mentor and professor at American
University, and his staff of graduate students. (In fact, he's here today,
my co-author of "The Untold History of the United States", Professor Peter
Kuznick, who's been teaching for 30 years). I learned a lot -- too much in
many ways to function well in this culture. I learned how to check and
recheck everything -- every little detail. I learned how to doubt and
cross-examine myself. It took us almost 5 years and many drafts and edits to
make our incredible thesis entertaining enough for a wide audience
uninterested in history, able to watch it on a prestige cable company or
read the 700-page book we wrote to back it up. That millions watched it and
continued to watch it for ten weeks, and that it made the 'New York Times'
Bestseller List, and that it was sold in many countries in the world -- and
that we traveled to numerous colleges and high schools to share it, was
proof enough to me that I'd finally earned, my self-declared and really
proud-of-it college degree in History. And why not? The thing that people
don't realize is that history can be fun, that the narrative can be taught
with great sweep and power like a movie, not a museum. Nor need it be a
'Walt Disney movie' of American history the way it's taught now, which is
mostly a pat on the back for being a great and special country -- singular
in history and particularly blessed by God. That's why young people have so
often turned away from American history. They can smell Lies and Hypocrisy.
Well, needless to say, it was quite controversial and often ignored because
that's the price you pay to say something strong in this country. I'm proud
to tell you our mainstream media blasted it or ignored it because that's the
same media -- you know them, all the 'biggies' -- that since Vietnam have
helped cheer us on into so many pathetic wars without any purpose or
validity, and yet have never apologized for their mistakes. And then a few
years later they move on and recommend another set of disastrous choices
that lead to war. Where did this ongoing delusion start? This was the main
point of our series -- and why so many progressive historians praised it as
a work that brought an entire century into one tent with its recurring
pattern of militarism, false patriotism, racism, sexism, and financial greed
(revealed).
All because we never really learned from our past. Because we never looked
deeply in elementary or high school, and we went with this mythology that we
were somehow exceptional and outside history. And, as a result over time,
our memories became clouded, the history distorted by the politics of the
powerful school boards in Texas and California. And over those 80 years
since World War II, we began, on a grand scale, to truly lose our collective
memory of what we've done in the world without recognizing the consequences
(or apologizing), including the militarily unnecessary atomic bombing of
Japan. As a result your generation suffers all the consequences of this. And
you accept that, since 9/11, a policy of unending war is necessary and
endurable. Policies of torture, detention, drones and undeclared wars,
interfering in the affairs of every country in the world and declaring
unilateral "regime change" as if we were gods, has given us an overwhelming
arrogance that lives inside the skin and brain of the power elite in
Washington, DC -- the feeling that the State itself has the right over its
own citizenry to break the laws as it chooses, and most egregiously violate
the 4th and 5th Amendments in the name of defending our National Security.
In doing that we lose sight that security at any cost is a prison for all of
us without end -- a panopticon that cows us all to surrender our sense of
protest, of individuality, of privacy itself to this anonymous secret state
that has eyes on all of us. This is the triumph of force over liberty, this
is naked fascism, dress it however you like! -- and this has nothing to do
with the country I was born in and went to war for as a young, conservative
man.
Please don't ever forget that Edward Snowden was 29 years old when he
challenged this system on behalf of us all -- just a few years older than
you. He's an avatar for your generation. Do not be cynical and say,
'Privacy? So what? I have nothing to hide.' Because when you're older you
might understand what you're surrendering without knowing it is your
greatest secret of all -- yourself.
I told you I went to 4 colleges, but maybe I exaggerated a bit. Because the
fourth college is one you never graduate from. For want of better words, I'd
call it the 'College of Older Age'. It's the toughest of all because it
makes you question -- everything. It teaches to those who listen the
necessity for ambiguity in life's grayer matters, nothing being black or
white -- and it humbles us in ways we have never been before.
I'm sure in your lifetime you'll see things we never thought would happen,
as we were surprised by these wars, JFK/RFK/MLK assassinations, the theft of
the 2000 election, 9/11, the incorporation of the Citizens United Supreme
Court decision, allowing money once again to suffocate our voices. More will
happen to you, in the same way that everybody through the centuries feels
that theirs is the most important time of all. But I still believe that
we've been given a divine blessing to be alive in this world. And I believe
the purpose of our journey is to grow our consciousness, our tolerance, and
finally our love. This purpose allows us also to act badly at times, to
indulge ourselves, and hopefully discover both our mistakes and our regrets.
And with it comes an allowance for our weakness and strength because both
are so similar. Enjoy what you can.
And in closing, I'd suggest you take a year off and do nothing! Be a bum --
or do something you've never done before. If you choose nothing, see for
yourself if being a lazy person works for you or it bores you. Sit on a
bench, walk around, fish. But go to the end of that feeling and find out for
yourself. Be a janitor. Clean hotel rooms. Work with your hands. Learn how
to plant, grow, cook. Travel to foreign countries second/third class and see
how you relate to all kinds people and challenges. Above all, even if you
want to make a fortune as quickly as you can, I urge you to break your
pattern here and now, and don't do what you did for 4 years.
So, go in peace, love justice and mercy -- and do well by this world. Thank
you.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Oliver Stone. (photo: Jean Paul Guilloteau/Express-Rea/Redux)
http://www.oliverstone.com/university-of-connecticut-commencement-speech1/ht
tp://www.oliverstone.com/university-of-connecticut-commencement-speech1/
My Commencement Speech to the Graduating Class of the University of
Connecticut
By Oliver Stone, The Oliver Stone Experience
20 May 16
thank you both, Dr. Herbst and Dr. Choi for bringing me. And I'd also like
to thank Professor Frank Costigliola, of your History Department, who's
written a new book on the Cold War that greatly enlarges our understanding
of a time when countries resorted, once again, to paranoid fears of invasion
and subterfuge.
And I'd like to extend a BIG CONGRAGULATIONS to all of you -- the Class of
2016 -- on this wonderful achievement in your lives. Today is a great day.
And also congratulations to your parents and relatives who are here to
celebrate your evolution. Bravo!
I actually went to 4 different colleges in my life, so I'm not necessarily
the best-suited speaker for this ceremony, (but I think you knew that when
you invited me). My first college was down the road at Yale. In my class,
among others, was George Bush, two Olympic gold-medal athletes, one pro
football star, several future multi-millionaires and billionaires who now
have a big say in our destiny, Pulitzer Prize winners, a future Secretary of
State, etc, etc, what I'd call 'the Obama School of Ivy League Geniuses'.
But the truth for me was that Yale was so incredibly difficult academically,
and competitive in all things, that my 4 grueling years of preparation at a
boys' boarding school in Pennsylvania were not sufficient to compete. And
the freedom given by the College was far too liberal for my discipline.
Basically, all of a sudden, we were on our own -- study when you want; eat,
sleep when you want; do what you want. Go to New York City for a week, it
doesn't matter. No one really cares as long as you pass the course. That was
the point, no one cared, there was no headmaster around to scare the shit
out of you. I barely survived the first year, failed Greek, and just made it
through the most abstract course I ever had -- Economics. And after trying,
I also failed to make any of the serious athletic teams. I was just another
mediocrity and I quit school, shaken and depressed.
I went to Asia, Vietnam specifically, for almost a year, to teach high
school and work in the US Merchant Marine, as a 'wiper' in the South China
Seas. Then I gave Yale another try for half a year, and again I was
profoundly disappointed -- in myself. Mr. Bush could get Cs and party and
get through it all. And with a pedigree, he could become President. But I
had no pedigree. I think, more importantly, I couldn't stand any longer the
air of Ivy League superiority and competition. There was a lack,
essentially, of humanity -- a compulsive need to out-do your fellow man. I
wanted something gentler, something like I'd seen in Asia, an ability simply
to breathe a natural life. So I abandoned school once again, but it was
clear this time there was no going back. In fact, I'd failed every single
one of my courses. That's pretty hard to do, 4 out of 4 zeros.
Dad was pissed; some 9,000 in tuition (no tax deduction here) blown away.
And what would I do for the rest of my life? He'd expected me to get to Wall
Street at the least -- sort of as an 'idiot son' like Bush. Or, at worst, a
steady job at AT&T in New York, starting at a couple hundred bucks a week. I
went home and hid my face from my Dad's friends, who'd known me as a
promising, conservative young man. I was a BUM now -- in my eyes as well as
Dad's. I had no real skills or earning power. I decided I had nothing to
lose, so I'd join the Army, specifically the Infantry, and go to the front
lines in Vietnam. And if it was intended by the Greek gods, or the
monotheistic God from the Bible -- either way -- I was putting it on the
line. The divine forces would cast their decision, and I'd either live or
die.
It was literally on my 21st birthday -- I suspect many of you here are 21 or
close -- I was on a plane bound for Vietnam a second time -- all 120 of us
in Army khaki with buzzcuts. I never even had a 21st birthday; as we crossed
the International Date Line, my birthday dropped away into the sea as the
calendar jumped a day. It was like an omen -- that I'd never get to 21. I'd
be lost in some crack of time in Vietnam.
After 15 months of. let's say another kind of world, I went back to the US
with no idea of what to do and no skills except camping, surviving, hunting,
and not sleeping very well. I'd taken a few electronics courses through a
college extension program. I'd talked with some Army buddies about opening a
construction company down in Alabama, or maybe Latin America, getting
contracts from the Government -- all that fantasy died on the return, and my
buddies went to other small towns and cities in the country. And rarely did
we see each other again. This reality, along with something we didn't know
much about at the time, since called PTSD, left us each in some dark holes.
People simply didn't understand because that war was crazy and made no
sense. How can you explain it when it makes no sense?
After months of low-level depression, an old school friend who'd graduated
from Yale was pursuing a career making low-budget porno films -- and making
money at it; he told me I could actually go to one of these new "film
schools", and I could get 80% of my tuition paid from the GI Bill. It
sounded nuts to me. "You mean I can actually get credit for watching movies
all day?" It was too good to be true, but it was a new world. There were
respected schools in California -- but now NYU had one too. So I thank you
-- I mean it -- the US Government.
But it was really a vocational school for me. I was older than the others.
It was difficult for me to readjust to the mentality. I was quiet and didn't
mingle much. These students were in another world, and they probably looked
at me like I was the guy in "Taxi Driver" who ends up blowing up the class.
But I had fun there. I also learned the beginnings of a skill. And then
after 6/7 years of professional rejection and writing a lot of speculative
scripts, making low-budget films, breaks started coming my way, and I
actually made it into the film business with some success. In fact, much to
my Father's inability to think it possible, I actually started to make a
living at this film thing.
I think a point to be made of this experience is no matter how dark it gets
early, don't get too down on yourself. You have -- you may not know them --
hidden talents, skills, passions. You simply cannot recognize it yet. So
listen to the wind. The answer might be blowing right past you... But
although I now had a degree and some success, I didn't really have an
education. Learning a trade is not a complete experience. I was a partly
educated writer-director who'd never really studied with any rigor history,
mathematics, English, science. All I had was curiosity, and thank god for
that.
So almost 40 years later, like Rodney Dangerfield in "Back to School", in
2008 I went to my 3rd college -- not your normal campus with the bells
beautifully tolling and the cries of young people in the air -- but a
concentrated 5-year journey through American history from the 1890s to
today. Guiding me was a highly intelligent mentor and professor at American
University, and his staff of graduate students. (In fact, he's here today,
my co-author of "The Untold History of the United States", Professor Peter
Kuznick, who's been teaching for 30 years). I learned a lot -- too much in
many ways to function well in this culture. I learned how to check and
recheck everything -- every little detail. I learned how to doubt and
cross-examine myself. It took us almost 5 years and many drafts and edits to
make our incredible thesis entertaining enough for a wide audience
uninterested in history, able to watch it on a prestige cable company or
read the 700-page book we wrote to back it up. That millions watched it and
continued to watch it for ten weeks, and that it made the 'New York Times'
Bestseller List, and that it was sold in many countries in the world -- and
that we traveled to numerous colleges and high schools to share it, was
proof enough to me that I'd finally earned, my self-declared and really
proud-of-it college degree in History. And why not? The thing that people
don't realize is that history can be fun, that the narrative can be taught
with great sweep and power like a movie, not a museum. Nor need it be a
'Walt Disney movie' of American history the way it's taught now, which is
mostly a pat on the back for being a great and special country -- singular
in history and particularly blessed by God. That's why young people have so
often turned away from American history. They can smell Lies and Hypocrisy.
Well, needless to say, it was quite controversial and often ignored because
that's the price you pay to say something strong in this country. I'm proud
to tell you our mainstream media blasted it or ignored it because that's the
same media -- you know them, all the 'biggies' -- that since Vietnam have
helped cheer us on into so many pathetic wars without any purpose or
validity, and yet have never apologized for their mistakes. And then a few
years later they move on and recommend another set of disastrous choices
that lead to war. Where did this ongoing delusion start? This was the main
point of our series -- and why so many progressive historians praised it as
a work that brought an entire century into one tent with its recurring
pattern of militarism, false patriotism, racism, sexism, and financial greed
(revealed).
All because we never really learned from our past. Because we never looked
deeply in elementary or high school, and we went with this mythology that we
were somehow exceptional and outside history. And, as a result over time,
our memories became clouded, the history distorted by the politics of the
powerful school boards in Texas and California. And over those 80 years
since World War II, we began, on a grand scale, to truly lose our collective
memory of what we've done in the world without recognizing the consequences
(or apologizing), including the militarily unnecessary atomic bombing of
Japan. As a result your generation suffers all the consequences of this. And
you accept that, since 9/11, a policy of unending war is necessary and
endurable. Policies of torture, detention, drones and undeclared wars,
interfering in the affairs of every country in the world and declaring
unilateral "regime change" as if we were gods, has given us an overwhelming
arrogance that lives inside the skin and brain of the power elite in
Washington, DC -- the feeling that the State itself has the right over its
own citizenry to break the laws as it chooses, and most egregiously violate
the 4th and 5th Amendments in the name of defending our National Security.
In doing that we lose sight that security at any cost is a prison for all of
us without end -- a panopticon that cows us all to surrender our sense of
protest, of individuality, of privacy itself to this anonymous secret state
that has eyes on all of us. This is the triumph of force over liberty, this
is naked fascism, dress it however you like! -- and this has nothing to do
with the country I was born in and went to war for as a young, conservative
man.
Please don't ever forget that Edward Snowden was 29 years old when he
challenged this system on behalf of us all -- just a few years older than
you. He's an avatar for your generation. Do not be cynical and say,
'Privacy? So what? I have nothing to hide.' Because when you're older you
might understand what you're surrendering without knowing it is your
greatest secret of all -- yourself.
I told you I went to 4 colleges, but maybe I exaggerated a bit. Because the
fourth college is one you never graduate from. For want of better words, I'd
call it the 'College of Older Age'. It's the toughest of all because it
makes you question -- everything. It teaches to those who listen the
necessity for ambiguity in life's grayer matters, nothing being black or
white -- and it humbles us in ways we have never been before.
I'm sure in your lifetime you'll see things we never thought would happen,
as we were surprised by these wars, JFK/RFK/MLK assassinations, the theft of
the 2000 election, 9/11, the incorporation of the Citizens United Supreme
Court decision, allowing money once again to suffocate our voices. More will
happen to you, in the same way that everybody through the centuries feels
that theirs is the most important time of all. But I still believe that
we've been given a divine blessing to be alive in this world. And I believe
the purpose of our journey is to grow our consciousness, our tolerance, and
finally our love. This purpose allows us also to act badly at times, to
indulge ourselves, and hopefully discover both our mistakes and our regrets.
And with it comes an allowance for our weakness and strength because both
are so similar. Enjoy what you can.
And in closing, I'd suggest you take a year off and do nothing! Be a bum --
or do something you've never done before. If you choose nothing, see for
yourself if being a lazy person works for you or it bores you. Sit on a
bench, walk around, fish. But go to the end of that feeling and find out for
yourself. Be a janitor. Clean hotel rooms. Work with your hands. Learn how
to plant, grow, cook. Travel to foreign countries second/third class and see
how you relate to all kinds people and challenges. Above all, even if you
want to make a fortune as quickly as you can, I urge you to break your
pattern here and now, and don't do what you did for 4 years.
So, go in peace, love justice and mercy -- and do well by this world. Thank
you.
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
