Dr. Limiter: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Shaft

Abstract

THIS IS A SPEECH ABOUT SPEECHES like this. Every year about this time, the rains come, the ground thaws, and educators recite orations on the state of learning in the land. Right now, in cloistered banquet halls across the country, other faculty members are re-assuring the faithful that they have chosen wisely. The world may worship false gods, but humanists speak of true gods and their duty is to go forth and deliver the people. This liturgy will be performed after last suppers for another month until the calendar of higher education celebrates the most holy of its holy days, commencement. On that solemn day, the laity, the clergy, and the novitiates, all in appropriate vestments, will doze peacefully in the mid-morning sun as some bishop of the academy or the state sanctifies the ordination of yet another class of disciples, many of whose diplomas say B. S. On such honorable occasions, I am reminded of the impulse to giggle that used to attack me as I sat bolt upright in the front pew of my father's church. I knew that to giggle in worship was wicked and that to do so would invite the wrath of both my earthly and heavenly fathers. But oh how I did giggle. That impulse attacked me again as I began preparing my remarks for this evening. Instead of Goethe, I thought of Groucho; instead of honorifics, I thought of horsefeathers. Rather than stifle this impulse I decided to make it my subject. That is, rather than speak to you tonight about the seriousness of our calling, I decided to cop a title from Kubrick to suggest why such speeches may have gotten us into the mess we are in. According to reliable sources, the present outbreak of seriousness began after we learned that the Russians also possessed a Doomsday machine. As Vice appeared ready to destroy Virtue, we Americans dug in for the apocalypse. We built interstate highways to facilitate the movement of troops, bomb shelters to guard our families against the poison of radiation, and walls of conformity to protect ourselves from our fears and uncertainties. When the fifties became the sixties, the morality play became a tragedy. The early years of the decade could have been plotted by Aristotle as good men and good deeds were destroyed by the bullets fired in Dallas, Memphis, and L.A. In the aftermath of assassination, flawed extremists insisted that a righteous reckoning was imminent and that the chosen had to declare their com-