WASHINGTON — When New York Times war correspondent Chris Hedges was booed off the stage last week at Rockford College as he gave the commencement speech, many faulted his fervent anti-war message for their discourtesies to him. A good many parents complained afterward that he had not even mentioned the graduating class.
But underneath the discomfiting events in Rockford, Ill., one can detect the many new streams bubbling in American life today.
True, most commencement speakers at least give the time of day to the graduates and their parents. But longtime war correspondent Hedges, a former Protestant theology student who has worked in Nicaragua, the Middle East and the Balkans for many years, is not only intelligent but also intense — and he did not do that. Instead, he immediately launched into an attack on the American invasion of Iraq, beginning with the sentence, "I'm here to talk to you today about war and empire."
His country went to Iraq as "occupiers, not liberators," he told the stunned crowd. He likened American policy in Iraq to "piranhas and a tyranny over the weak." Israel was responsible for the killing of the Palestinians. "War in the end is always about betrayal," he was trying to say, before he was physically led away.
It didn't help at all when he tried to praise and sympathize with American soldiers on the ground in Iraq, because he described them as boys from places like Mississippi and Arkansas who joined the military for job opportunities. That attempt to identify with the soldiers in Iraq seemed only patronizing to the audience.
Still, no one expected the general tumult that immediately filled the room, or the student who threw his cap and gown down on the stage before stalking out, or certainly not the one student who actually made it up onto the stage and tried to assault the journalist. "No," Hedges told the Rockford Register Star afterward with wry understatement, "I did not expect people to climb up on the stage."
It might seem at first that what we witnessed in Rockford, a pleasant, small Midwestern city that gave the world the great social reformer Jane Addams, was some re-awakened patriotism — but was it? It might seem that these students and their parents were genuinely angry to have anyone, perhaps particularly an outsider from the East, criticize a war they believed in — but were they?
As a matter of fact, This spring has seen the Rockford scene repeated across the country in different, but related, venues. Former MSNBC hostPhil Donahue was booed at North Carolina State University on the same day as the Rockford commencement when he tried to give a commencement address on "what liberals believe." On the Academy of Country Music's biggest night of the year, even the very name of the Dixie Chicks, who had dared to criticize the war and President Bush last winter, was booed by a well-heeled audience every time it was mentioned.
I begin my modest attempt to explain what is happening in the country by mentioning the fact that I have known Chris Hedges, not well but with admiration, for some years. Our work as foreign correspondents overlapped in several, always troubled parts of the world.
The last time I saw him, we had a serious lunch together in Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, where he was living as The New York Times correspondent covering the deadly Serbian onslaught in the Balkans. His whole life then was covering the slaughter, the concentration camps and the lying prose of the war-planners. He was clearly exhausted. It was deadly business.
I remember that I asked him how it was that he had come there. "Well, nobody else on the Times volunteered for the job," he answered.
Now, I would say in retrospect that Chris is probably too intense a guy to give a commencement speech on war and empire on a sunny graduation day in a pretty Midwestern town when people were, inside themselves, still trying to figure out what we were doing half a world away. And I would add that he should have been more sensitive to his appointed role and at least started out by wishing the students well.
But I'd also say that Chris Hedges was "there" — out there in the war zones when precious few Americans were — and that he was trying to explain it all to his paper, to his country and, above all, to himself. Not only had none of those students been there, in terms of wars, but few of them will ever try to be there. Few of them will enlist. For most of them, the bill for their easy patriotism will never come due.
It is not their fault that their country chose to have a volunteer army after the traumas of Vietnam or that Iraq is a long way away, both physically and spiritually. Still, I worry that such apparently costless patriotism also comes with its own peculiar measure of guilt and blame, not to speak of a strange new patriotism untethered to responsibility or sacrifice — except, of course, for all those others.
Carrie Watters, the education reporter for the Rockford Register Star who covered the commencement day and its aftermath, told me that the paper had received upward of 600 e-mails from people all over the country, most of them critical of Hedges.
But what surprised her most, she said, was that many of the messages were obviously from members of the rebellious '60s generation who are now the parents of the graduating students, and who are now saying, in different words, "Back in the '60s when WE booed THEM off the stage, we were just basically being critical thinkers — now they are saying that WE have closed minds."
As to Chris Hedges, mule-stubborn theology student to the end, he said afterward to the Rockford paper, "You don't ask me to speak if you don't want to climb every mountain."
Universal Press Syndicate