The Hitchhikers' Guide to Commencement

Sometimes I get so perplexed at the rubbish job being done by the mainstream U.S. news media on any number of serious issues that I think about following the advice of Slartibarfast, the Magrathean planetary designer in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: "Perhaps I'm old and tired, but I always think that the chances of finding out what really is going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say hang the sense of it and just keep yourself occupied."

At dark times I think that the choice is either that or else try and find out everything, realize I can't and in any case I can't do a thing about it, and stay depressed all the time - just like Marvin the Paranoid Android. Marvin's favorite quote is "What's the use?"

Oh dear.

(Incidentally, the movie version of Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy, a US-UK co-production, has been doing rather well in the States - in its second week of release it was number 3 at the U.S. box office, having held the number 1 spot in its first week of release. I suppose the Brits can still sell sci-fi and comedy as a package in the U.S.)

I bring this up here and now because last weekend, at Geneseo's 139th Commencement, our Commencement speaker - retiring Physics professor David Meisel - actually incorporated H2G2 (what the fans call the Hitchhikers' Guide) into his talk to the grads - and in a very interesting way.

In his address, titled "The Answer is 42" he noted that one of the themes of H2G2 is that of most people's predilection for simple answers and the endless search for them (e.g., to "life, the universe and everything"), when in fact they would better serve themselves by trying to figure out the appropriate questions. Meisel pointed - in a barely disguised fashion - to President Bush's escapades in Iraq as an example of what happens when we base our actions on the search for simple answers (Good versus Evil, Weapons of Mass Destruction, Us and Them, You're With Us or Against Us, all that stuff) instead of taking the time and effort to consider the very complex questions involved.

Now I liked Meisel's speech and I liked the H2G2 analogy and its application to current events. He didn't mention the media directly, but I'm sure if he thought about it he'd recognize that the mass media, and especially television news, are all about easy, bite-sized, one-dimensional answers rather than complex, considered questions. That's why Bush got away with what he did in the court of public opinion. Now I know that, even as a college professor, the chances of my finding out what really is going on are so absurdly remote that perhaps I should just try to keep myself occupied. But the difference between my job and that of most other poor working schleps of the world is that it's my job to keep myself occupied by thinking about the hard questions! (Well, that and grading exams and papers.) And maybe, if I and others like me could just persuade enough people around us to do that one thing - to consider the hard questions rather than always be seduced by easy answers - then things like the Iraq invasion wouldn't happen quite as often, and we'd all be better off. Now can that ever happen in a TV and visual-saturated world?
Hmmmmmmmmm . . .

Hang the sense of it.