t is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now.
Wallace used figurative language to relate to the audience and wraps the speech up leaving with the message that everyone can experience freedom with the right form of discipline.
know that this stuff probably doesn’t sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational the way a commencement speech is supposed to sound. What it is, as far as I can see, is the capital-T Truth, with a whole lot of rhetorical niceties stripped away. You are, of course, free to think of it whatever you wish. But please don’t just dismiss it as just some finger-wagging Dr Laura sermon. None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death.
Doesn't use his authority to be the person that tells them what to do but comes off as genuine and helpful in his advice.
That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.
Reinforces his message to make the audience ask themselves what side they want to be on. Whether to be conscious or to be on the default setting.
If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you.
Uses more repetition and parallelism to elaborate how close-mindedness is bad.
This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship.
The idea being reinforced to the audience is that the power they hold can be used to make their world a better place.
It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.
Creates credibility with the audience and uses more hypothetical stories to give the person a chance to experience freedom.
Again, please don’t think that I’m giving you moral advice, or that I’m saying you are supposed to think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it. Because it’s hard. It takes will and effort, and if you are like me, some days you won’t be able to do it, or you just flat out won’t want to.
Opens up by not trying to come off as someone who needs to teach you this but explains how the influences won't get to you.
It’s the automatic way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I’m operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the centre of the world, and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world’s priorities.
Wallace puts the audience in his shoes to think about other people rather than oneself. He disregards the unconscious belief that only he matters.
And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is.
Wallace uses simile to compare the mundane people around your life to cows. He continues to berate the people but he stops to gather some empathy by saying how that's not fair to the person.
Everyone here has done this, of course. But it hasn’t yet been part of you graduates’ actual life routine, day after week after month after year.
Relates to the audience to relate to similar experiences
all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for an hour, and then hit the sack early because, of course, you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there’s no food at home. You haven’t had time to shop this week because of your challenging job, and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It’s the end of the work day and the traffic is apt to be: very bad
Wallace uses a hypothetical situation to talk about how the person encounters all those situations with a negative outlook because the person chooses to do so.
learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience
Here Wallace uses repetition of the phrase to reinforce the idea of how important the experiences are.
This is not a matter of virtue. It’s a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self.
Wallace wants to makes the audience think about the way they interpret the world.
Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. I have learned this the hard way, as I predict you graduates will, too.
Here Wallace admits his faults and points out that he can be wrong too but it establishes a connection with the audience. He notes that he isn't perfect and had to reform his way of thinking but proves it can be possible.
But religious dogmatists’ problem is exactly the same as the story’s unbeliever: blind certainty, a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn’t even know he’s locked up.
He wants to use the stories to create logos and reasoning to point out the flaws in thinking too close-minded.
Because we prize tolerance and diversity of belief, nowhere in our liberal arts analysis do we want to claim that one guy’s interpretation is true and the other guy’s is false or bad. Which is fine, except we also never end up talking about just where these individual templates and beliefs come from
The exact same experience can differ in the two men due to their beliefs but Wallace wants to reinforce that the other side has to be acknowledged.
I’m going to posit to you that the liberal arts cliché turns out not to be insulting at all, because the really significant education in thinking that we’re supposed to get in a place like this isn’t really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about
He builds common ground with the graduates by being relatable with the 'teaching you how to think" but the advice to use the college experience to focus on making themselves happy with their choices..
but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.
He conveys that the real things you should focus on in life are never talked about. So the audience relates to the fish feeling confused about life.
The story thing turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of the genre, but if you’re worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don’t be. I am not the wise old fish.
He wants to have the audience entertained with his story and conveys it in a story about the fish. He seems down to earth and wants to connect to the audience rather than coming off as a generic commencement speech
They're suffering in this country. And we talk about evidence — look at the evidence of the last four years. It's absolutely extraordinary. We've got 23 million people out of work or stop looking for work in this countr
Here Romney is trying to make up ground by backtracking and wanting to do well by the people out of employment.
I'm not in favor of a $5 trillion tax cut. That's not my plan. My plan is not to put in place any tax cut that will add to the deficit. That's point one. So you may keep referring to it as a $5 trillion tax cut, but that's not my plan.
Romney is trying to disassociate with that phrase because he knows it makes him look bad, Obama did a good job by applying pressure to his opponent.
Get the rates down, lower deductions and exemptions to create more jobs, because there's nothing better for getting us to a balanced budget than having more people working, earning more money, paying — (chuckles) — more taxes. That's by far the most effective and efficient way to get this budget balanced
Here the moderator brings up a good point by bringing up the experiences of small time business owners who end up paying way more due to Obama's tax plan.
These small businesses we're talking about --
Here Romney has been caught up in his words and he can't respond as well as Obama did.
And the reason this is important is because by doing that, we can not only reduce the deficit, we can not only encourage job growth through small businesses, but we're also able to make the investments that are necessary in education or in energy.
Obama makes sure that with his plans that small businesses will grow as well as making sure that education and energy are boosted in growth as well.
And — and that kind of top — top-down economics, where folks at the top are doing well so the average person making 3 million bucks is getting a $250,000 tax break while middle- class families are burdened further, that's not what I believe is a recipe for economic growth.
Here Obama points out the contradictions of Romney and talks about how his tax cuts actually helped middle class families.
But I also want to close those loopholes that are giving incentives for companies that are shipping jobs overseas. I want to provide tax breaks for companies that are investing here in the United States.
Trying to appeal to the crowd who cares a lot about taxes. Obama is trying to prove that he can do right by the countries investing here in the US.
We've got a program called Race to the Top that has prompted reforms in 46 states around the country, raising standards, improving how we train teachers. So now I want to hire another hundred thousand new math and science teachers and create 2 million more slots in our community colleges so that people can get trained for the jobs that are out there right now. And I want to make sure that we keep tuition low for our young people.
Here Obama is using his education plan to talk about the advances would come with his election to strengthen education and begin training for jobs.
Are we going to double down on the top-down economic policies that helped to get us into this mess, or do we embrace a new economic patriotism that says, America does best when the middle class does best?
Here Obama poses a rhetorical question to get the audience thinking of what choice they would come down to in the election.
Governor Romney has a perspective that says if we cut taxes, skewed towards the wealthy, and roll back regulations that we'll be better off.
Here Obama points out Romney's plan and explains how it won't help as much as it could.
You know, four years ago we went through the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Millions of jobs were lost. The auto industry was on the brink of collapse. The financial system had frozen up. And because of the resilience and the determination of the American people, we've begun to fight our way back.
Here Obama uses logic to convince the audience that things were worst before and has the facts to prove the financial mishaps that have happened.
I want to thank Governor Romney and the University of Denver for your hospitality.
Here Obama is showing his opponent that he is willing to put the politics to the side and thanks his opponent