[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 81 (Thursday, June 23, 1994)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: June 23, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
               ``V.P. GORE SPEAKS OF CYNICISM AND FAITH''

                                 ______


                           HON. GEORGE MILLER

                             of california

                    in the house of representatives

                        Thursday, June 23, 1994

  Mr. MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, I want to share with my 
colleagues the recent commencement speech given by Vice President 
Albert Gore, Jr., at Harvard University on the occasion of his own 25th 
graduation anniversary.
  The Vice President's speech is one of the most cogent and insightful 
addresses ever delivered by a member of our political generation, one 
that came to maturity at a time of great skepticism and cynicism about 
many issues, including politics.
  Our former colleague notes that while he, like many of us, have 
overcome that cynicism, much of America remains highly suspicious and 
hostile toward Government and towards those of us who serve. Public 
service, which has always been subject to humorous criticism, 
nevertheless has sunk so deeply in the public's esteem that this 
institution and other agencies of Government, and those who occupy 
them, are treated with scorn and derision by many of those we spend our 
lives trying to serve. In the last 30 years, the percentage of 
Americans who thought Government generally tried to do the right thing 
has plummeted from 60 percent to just 10 percent.
  The Vice President rightly views that loss of trust in our leaders 
and our institutions as highly destructive of the essential framework 
of our democracy. And he offers insightful reasons why, individually 
and as a nation, we must purge ourselves of this crippling cynicism and 
replace it once again, with the sense of community and patriotism that 
has long characterized this Nation.
  I hope every Member of this body will take the time to read Vice 
President Gore's commencement address.

       A Harvard commencement is a special occasion. How could 
     anyone not have been thrilled by this morning's assembly--
     25,000 people packed into Harvard Yard to celebrate one of 
     the great occasions of life. I loved it all. And I have 
     especially enjoyed my 25th reunion. I'm so proud of my class. 
     It has been wonderful to have an opportunity to visit with so 
     many friends.
       I remember the 25th reunion class when they came in 1969 
     walking around the Yard with their children. They seemed 
     like ordinary people. I remember that they seemed older to 
     us then than we seem to ourselves now. But in fact they 
     were responsible for one of the saving triumphs of modern 
     civilization.
       That was the class of 1944. They were part of the 
     generation President Clinton commemorated this week in 
     Normandy, the group that went from Harvard to boot camp and 
     basic training and from there were transfused into the weary 
     divisions battling across Europe. Only 11 members of the 
     class were present at graduation; all the rest had by then 
     already left to enlist. Some did not come back to their 
     reunion. Their names are carved in stone in Memorial Church 
     just behind me. Many did come back and some of them are here 
     again today for their 50th reunion. We salute you.
       Back in 1969 our graduating class was in no mood to salute 
     or to celebrate your sacrifice, your achievement. But we 
     understood then and understand now ever more clearly that 
     without any question because of your service, the world 
     changed in 1944. Indeed, our world a half century later is 
     still shaped by the events of that tumultuous and triumphant 
     year.
       I want to describe today the reasons why I believe the 
     world also changed in important and enduring ways because of 
     the events of 1969, a year of contradiction and contrasts, of 
     glory and bitterness.
       In July 1969 one-quarter of the population of the world 
     watched on live television while Neil Armstrong brought his 
     space module Eagle down to the Sea of Tranquility, slowly 
     climbed down a ladder and pressed his left boot into the 
     untrod surface of the moon.
       But 1969 was also the year Charles Manson and his followers 
     made the innocent words Helter Skelter symbols of a 
     bloodbath. It was the year of music in the rain at Woodstock 
     and the year of the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam.
       While we went to class and heard lectures and wrote papers 
     and listened to music and talked and played sports and fell 
     in love, the war in Vietnam was blasting that small country 
     apart physically and ripping America apart emotionally. A 
     dark mood of uncertainty from that tragic conflict clouded 
     every single day we were here.
       The year 1969 began with the inauguration of Richard Nixon, 
     a ceremony that seemed to confirm for many of us the finality 
     of a change in our national mood and ratify the results of 
     a downward spiral that had begun with the assassination of 
     President Kennedy 5 years, 2 months, and 2 days earlier.
       Throughout our four years at Harvard the nation's spirits 
     steadily sank. The race riot in Watts was fresh in our minds 
     when we registered as freshmen. Though our hopes were briefly 
     raised by the passage of civil rights legislation and the 
     promise of a war on poverty, the war in Vietnam grew steadily 
     more ominous and consumed the resources that were needed to 
     make good on the extravagant promises for dramatic progress 
     here at home.
       The year before our graduation, our hopes were once again 
     briefly raised by the political insurgency we helped inspire 
     and that we hoped might somehow end our national nightmare. 
     Then, months later, those hopes were cruelly crushed by the 
     assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., renewed race 
     riots--this time nationwide--and then the assassination of 
     Robert Kennedy, and what seemed like the death of any hope 
     that we might find our way back to the entrance of the dark 
     tunnel into which our country had wandered. All of this cast 
     a shadow over each of our personal futures.
       My personal attitudes toward the career I have chosen 
     changed dramatically during that time. I left Harvard in 1969 
     disillusioned by what I saw happening in our country and 
     certain of only one thing about my future: I would never, 
     ever go into politics.
       After returning from Vietnam and after seven years as a 
     journalist, I rekindled by interest in public service. Yet I 
     believe the same disillusioning forces that for a time drove 
     me away from politics have continued for the country as a 
     whole.
       After all, the war raged on for five more years and the 
     downward spiral in our national mood reached a new low when 
     the Watergate scandal led to the growing belief that our 
     government was telling lies to our people.
       The resignation of President Nixon, his subsequent pardon, 
     the Oil shocks, 21 percent interest rates, hostages held 
     seemingly interminably and then swapped in return for weapons 
     provided to terrorists who called us ``the Great Satan'', a 
     quadrupling of our national debt in only a dozen years, a 
     growing gap between rich and poor, and steadily declining 
     real incomes--all of these continued an avalanche of negative 
     self-images which have profoundly changed the way Americans 
     view their government.
       A recent analysis of public opinion polling data covering 
     the years since my class came to Harvard demonstrates the 
     cumulative change in our national mood. When my class entered 
     as freshmen in the fall of 1965, the percentage of people who 
     believed that government generally tries to do the right 
     thing was over 60 percent. Today it is only 10 percent. The 
     percentage believing that government favors the rich and 
     the powerful was then 29 percent. Today it is 80 percent. 
     And it is important to note that these trends hold true 
     for Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and liberals.
       In fact, this may be an apocraphyl story, but someone 
     actually claimed the other day the situation has gotten so 
     bad that when they conducted a new poll and asked people 
     about their current level of cynicism, 18 percent said they 
     were more cynical than 5 years ago, 9 percent thought they 
     were less cynical, and 72 percent suspected the question was 
     some kind of government ploy, and refused to answer.
       Democracy stands or falls on a mutual trust--government's 
     trust of the people and the people's trust of the governments 
     they elect. And yet at the same time democratic culture and 
     politics have always existed in a strange blend of credulity 
     and skepticism. Indeed, a certain degree of enduring 
     skepticism about human nature lies at the foundation of our 
     representative democracy. James Madison argued successfully 
     in the Federalist Papers that the United States Constitution 
     should create a protective balance of power among the 
     factions that were bound to rise in any society.
       Democracy did not mean unity in the body politic. People do 
     have reasonable differences. Human ignorance, pride, and 
     selfishness would always be with us, prompting inevitable 
     divisions and conflicting ambitions.
       Yet, freedom and order could be protected with safeguards 
     insuring that no one branch of government and no one group or 
     faction would be able to dictate to all the rest. We were the 
     first large republic to build a nation on the revolutionary 
     premise that the people are sovereign and that the freedom to 
     dispute, debate, disagree and quarrel with each other created 
     a fervent love of country that could hold us together against 
     the world. It is still a revolutionary premise. And it is 
     still built on a skeptical view of human nature that refuses 
     to believe in perfection in intellect, logic, knowledge, or 
     morals in any human being.
       And so the ceaseless American yearning for the ideal life 
     has always stumbled uneasily over a persistent American 
     skepticism about the parties and leaders who claim to have 
     the wisdom and ability to guide us to our destiny. We revere 
     our institutions, and at the same time we watch our leaders 
     as though we were hawks circling overhead, eager to dive with 
     claws extended on to any flaw or failure that we see.
       Even our most beloved president, George Washington, wrote 
     in his last letter to Thomas Jefferson, on July 6, 1796: I 
     had no conception, that every act of my administration would 
     be tortured, in such exaggerated form and indecent terms as 
     could scarcely be applied to a Nero, a notorious defaulter or 
     even a common pickpocket?
       Our feelings about ourselves as a people are mixed. We 
     Americans have often been proud to the point of cocky 
     arrogance. But we have never been able to hide indefinitely 
     from what we do wrong. Our failures eat at our conscience, 
     and our sins itch under the showy garb of our achievements 
     and prevent us from being complacent.
       Faith in the future, and skepticism about every person or 
     group who offers to lead us there. These conflicting forces 
     work together to shape the American character.
       And yet these forces must remain in a rough balance of 
     emotional power. If we receive too heavy a dose of 
     concentrated self-doubt and too many repetitive injuries to 
     our confidence in self-government, then our normal healthy 
     skepticism can fall into a mire of cynicism and we start to 
     question the ability of any human community to live up to the 
     democratic ideals that we proclaim.
       Once it is widely accepted, cynicism--the stubborn, 
     unwavering disbelief in the possibility of good--can become a 
     malignant habit in democracy. The skeptic may finally be 
     persuaded by the facts, but the cynic never, for he is so 
     deeply invested in the conviction that virtue cannot prevail 
     over the deep and essential evil in all things and all 
     people.
       The last time public cynicism sank to its present depth may 
     have been exactly 100 years ago, when Mark Twain said, 
     ``There is no distinctly native American criminal class 
     except class Congress.'' That was a time when Americans felt 
     the earth moving under their feet. Debt and depression forced 
     farmers off the land and into cities that they found cold and 
     strange and into factories where human being became scarcely 
     more than the extensions of machines. Cynicism was soon 
     abroad in the land.
       We are now in the midst of another historic and unsettling 
     economic transformation. Now the information revolution is 
     leading to a loss of jobs in many factories, as computers and 
     automation replace human labor.
       After World War II, 35 percent of America's employment was 
     on the factory floor. Today fewer than 17 percent of our 
     labor force works in manufacturing. Just as most of those who 
     lost their jobs on the farm a hundred years ago eventually 
     found new work in factories, so today new jobs are opening up 
     in new occupations created by the information revolution--but 
     this time the transition is taking place more swiftly and the 
     economic adjustment is, for many, more difficult and 
     disorienting.
       In this respect we are actually doing better than most 
     other nations. Every industrial society in the world is 
     having enormous difficulty in creating a sufficient number of 
     new jobs--even when their economies heat up. So, not 
     surprisingly, public cynicism about leadership has soared in 
     almost every industrial country in the world.
       History is a precarious source of lessons. Nevertheless, I 
     am reminded that similar serious economic problems prevailed 
     in Athens in the 4th century B.C., when the philosophical 
     school we now know as Cynicism was born. The Cynics were fed 
     up with their society and its social conventions and wanted 
     everybody to know it. The root of the word ``cynic'' is the 
     same as the Greek word for ``dog,'' and some scholars say the 
     Cynics got their name because they barked at society. Sounds 
     almost like some of our talk radio shows.
       In a time of social fragmentation, vulgarity becomes a way 
     of life. To be shocking becomes more important--and often 
     more profitable--than to be civil or creative or truly 
     original. Given the vulgarity that fragmentation breeds, 
     cynicism seems almost irresistible. Sometimes it even looks 
     like a refuge of sanity, a rational response to a world 
     seemingly driven by the fast hustle, the pseudo-event, the 
     rage for sensationalism.
       In any event, cynicism represented then and represents now 
     a secession from society, a dissolution of the bonds between 
     people and families and communities, an indifference to the 
     fate of anything or anyone beyond the self.
       Cynicism is deadly. It bites everything it can reach--like 
     a dog with a foot caught in a trap. And then it devours 
     itself. It drains us of the will to improve; it diminishes 
     our public spirit; it saps our inventiveness; it withers our 
     souls. Cynics often see themselves as merely being world-
     weary. There is no new thing under the sun, the cynics say. 
     They have not only seen everything; they have seen through 
     everything. They claim that their weariness is wisdom. But it 
     is usually merely posturing. Their weariness seems to be most 
     effective when they consider the aspirations of those beneath 
     them, who have neither power nor influence nor wealth. For 
     these unfortunates, nothing can be done, the cynics declare.
       Hope for society as a whole is considered an affront to 
     rationality; the notion that the individuals has a 
     responsibility for the community is considered a dangerous 
     radicalism. And those who toil in quiet places and for little 
     reward to lift up the fallen, to comfort the afflicted, and 
     to protect the weak are regarded as fools.
       Ultimately, however, the life of a cynic is lonely and 
     self-destructive. It is our human nature to make connections 
     with other human beings. The gift of sympathy for one another 
     is one of the most powerful sentiments we ever feel. If we do 
     not have it, we are not human. Indeed it is so powerful that 
     the cynic who denies it goes to war with himself.
       A few years ago Shelby Steele wrote about his pain as a 
     child, when he was mistreated by a teacher who called him 
     stupid. He said that the teacher's declaration created a 
     terrible reality for him. If the teacher told him he was 
     stupid, he thought he must be stupid. Let me quote what he 
     says: ``I mention this experience as an example of how one's 
     innate capacity for insecurity is expanded and deepened, of 
     how a disbelieving part of the self is brought to life and 
     forever joined to the believing self. As children we are all 
     wounded in some way and to some degree by the wild world we 
     encounter. From these wounds a disbelieving anti-self is 
     born, an internal antagonist and saboteur that embraces the 
     world's negative view of us, that believes our wounds are 
     justified by our own unworthiness, and that entrenches itself 
     as a lifelong voice of doubt.''
       I believe that in a similar way, our nation's attitude 
     towards itself can be and is shaped by national experiences. 
     For example, the heady and triumphant victories of 1944 
     enlarged our confidence and helped us build the postwar 
     world. And by contrast, during the years when my class was 
     here at Harvard, America's capacity for insecurity was 
     expanded and deepened by wounds to our national confidence. 
     For example, an unnamed classmate of mine said in today's 
     Boston Globe, ``I lost faith in the United States as a force 
     for good in the world.''
       We are still trying to help those wounds burned into our 
     body politic by assassinations, the Vietnam war, the riots, 
     the cultural conflicts and by the terrible conviction that 
     people sworn to uphold our constitution were not telling us 
     the truth.
       F.J. Dionne, recently wrote, ``Just as the Civil war 
     dominated American political life for decades after it ended, 
     so is the cultural civil war of the 1960s, with all its 
     tensions and contradictions, shaping our politics today. We 
     are still trapped in the 1960s. The country still faces three 
     major sets of questions, left over from the old cultural 
     battles; civil rights and the full integration of blacks 
     into the country's political and economic life; the 
     revolution in values involving feminism and changed 
     attitudes toward child-rearing and sexuality; and the 
     ongoing debate over the meaning of the Vietnam War, which 
     is less a fight over whether it was right to do battle in 
     that Southeast Asian country than an argument over how 
     Americans see their nation, its leaders, and its role in 
     the world.''
       Dionne also argues that both conservatives and upper 
     middle-class liberals have--for separate reasons--kept this 
     cultural civil war alive. Partly for this reason, our 
     national political conversation has been dominated by 
     increasingly mean-spirited efforts to attack our leaders' 
     motives, character and reputation.
       As the public's willingness to believe the worst 
     increases--that is to say--as cynicism increases--the only 
     political messages that seem to affect the outcome of 
     elections are those that seek to paint the opposition as a 
     gang of bandits and fools who couldn't be trusted to pour 
     water out of a boot if the directions were written on the 
     heel.
       This fixation on character assassination rather than on 
     defining issues feeds the veracious appetite of tabloid 
     journalism for scandal. And now wets the growing appetite of 
     other journalistic organizations for the same sort of fare.
       A few years ago, the Czech leader Vaclav Havel wrote these 
     prescient words, ``They say a nation has the politicians it 
     deserves. In some sense that is true: Politicians are truly a 
     mirror of the society and a kind of embodiment of its 
     potential. At the same time, paradoxically, the opposite is 
     also true. Society is a mirror of its politicians. It is 
     largely up to the politicians which social forces they choose 
     to liberate and which they choose to suppress, whether they 
     choose to rely on the good in each citizen, or on the bad.''
       But it is crucial for us, especially those of us in public 
     service, to understand that cynicism also can arise when 
     political leaders cavalierly promise to do good things and 
     then fail to deliver. The inability to redeem glib and 
     reckless promises about issues like education, race 
     relations, and crime can add to the disturbing and growing 
     doubts among the American people about our ability to shape 
     our destiny.
       Over the long haul sustainable hope is as important to 
     the health of self-government as sustainable development 
     is for ecological health. Dashed hopes poison our 
     political will just as surely as chemical waste can poison 
     drinking water aquifers deep in the ground.
       When hopes are repeatedly dashed and a nation's instinct 
     for self-government is repeatedly injured, national cohesion 
     can dissipate. The results are for all to see. At home and 
     abroad the weakening of bonds between the individual and the 
     larger society creates a vacuum quickly filled by other group 
     identities--based on race, or clan, or sect, or tribe, or 
     gang. Some distinguishing quality, often physical, is used to 
     demarcate group identity. These differences become standards 
     raised to summon the group to war against others slightly 
     different from themselves. It is one of the strange 
     perversities of this process that the smaller the difference, 
     the more ferocious the hatred and the more hideous massacres 
     that follow.
       Look at our bleeding world! Hutus versus Tutsis, Bosnian 
     Serbs versus Bosnian Croats and Bosnian Muslims, all of whom 
     seem often to others indistinguishable, but who themselves 
     are driven to mindless ferocity by what Freud called the 
     narcissism of slight difference? What St. Augustine called 
     pride, the mother of all sins, and about which William Butler 
     Yeats said in a famous poem:

     ``Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold;
     Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
     The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
     The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
     The best lack all conviction, while the worst
     Are full of passionate intensity.''

       Make no mistake: just as repeated injuries to our national 
     esteem can seriously jeopardize our ability to solve the 
     problems which confront us, so the convergence of too much 
     chaos and horror in the world--of too many Bosnias and 
     Rwandas--can seriously damage the ability of our global 
     civilization to get a grip on the essential task of righting 
     itself and regaining a measure of control over our destiny as 
     a species.
       Where then do we search for healing? What is our strategy 
     for reconciliation with our future and where is our vision 
     for sustainable hope?
       I have come to believe that our healing can be found in our 
     relationships to one another and in a shared commitment to 
     higher purposes in the face of adversity.
       At the 1992 Democratic Convention, I talked about a 
     personal event that fundamentally changed the way I viewed 
     the world: an accident that almost killed our son. I will 
     not repeat the story here today except to say the most 
     important lesson for me was that people I didn't even know 
     reached out to me and to my family to lift us up in their 
     hearts and in their prayers with compassion of such 
     intensity that I felt it as a palpable force, a healing 
     reaching out of those multitudes of caring souls and 
     falling on us like a mantle of divine grace.
       Since then I have dwelled on our connections to one another 
     and on the fact that as human beings, we are astonishingly 
     similar in the most important parts of our existence.
       I don't know what barriers in my soul had prevented me from 
     understanding emotionally that basic connection to others 
     until after they reached out to me in the dark of my family's 
     sorrow. but I suppose it was a form of cynicism on my part. 
     If cynicism is based on alienation and fragmentation, I 
     believe that the brokenness that separates the cynic from 
     others is the outward sign of an inner division between the 
     head and the heart. There is something icily and unnaturally 
     intellectual about the cynic. This isolation of intellect 
     from feelings and emotions is the essence of his condition. 
     For the cynic, feelings are as easily separated from the 
     reality others see as ethics are separated from behavior, and 
     as life is cut off from any higher purpose.
       Having felt their power in my own life, I believe that 
     sympathy and compassion are revolutionary forces in the world 
     at large and that they are working now.
       A year after the accident, when our family's healing 
     process was far advanced, I awoke early one Sunday morning in 
     1990, turned on the television set and watched in amazement 
     as another healing process began, when Nelson Mandela was 
     released from prison. Last month, I attended his inauguration 
     when he was sworn as President of the new South Africa in 
     what was a stupendous defeat for cynicism in our time. Many 
     were moved to tears as he introduced three men who had come 
     as his personal guests--three of his former jailers--and 
     described how they had reached across the chasm that had 
     separated them as human beings and had become personal 
     friends.
       Nine months ago, I witnessed the healing power of a 
     handshake on the South Lawn of the White house as Yitzhak 
     Rabin and Yassir Arafat began the tentative process of 
     reconciliation and peace in a relationship hitherto 
     characterized by only hatred and war.
       Less than 5 years ago, the world watched in amazement as 
     the Berlin Wall was dismantled and statues of dictators 
     were toppled throughout East and Central Europe and as 
     authoritarian communist governments were replaced by 
     market democracies alert to the needs of their people.
       Less than 3 weeks ago, for the first time in almost 50 
     years, nuclear missiles were no longer targeted on American 
     cities--a small but important step in the continuing reversal 
     of the nuclear arms race that long served as the cynics' ace 
     in the hole. There is, in other words, a respectable argument 
     that the cynics who are barking so loudly are simply wrong.
       For my part, in the 25 years since my Harvard graduation, I 
     have come to believe in hope over despair, striving over 
     resignation, faith over cynicism.
       I believe in the power of knowledge to make the world a 
     better place. Cynics may say: Human beings have never learned 
     anything from history. All that is truly useful about 
     knowledge is that it can provide you with advantages over the 
     pack. But the cynics are wrong: we have the capacity to learn 
     from our mistakes and transcend our past. Indeed, in this 
     very place we have been taught that truth--Veritas--can set 
     us free.
       I believe in finding fulfillment in family, for the family 
     is the true center of a meaningful life. Cynics may say: All 
     families are confining and ultimately dysfunctional. The very 
     idea of family is outdated and unworkable. But the cynics are 
     wrong: it is in our families that we learn to love.
       I believe in serving God and trying to understand and obey 
     God's will for our lives. Cynics may wave the idea away, 
     saying God is a myth, useful in providing comfort to the 
     ignorant and in keeping them obedient. I know in my heart--
     beyond all arguing and beyond any doubt--that the cynics are 
     wrong.
       I believe in working to achieve social justice and freedom 
     for all. Cynics may scorn this notion as naive, claiming that 
     all our efforts for equal opportunity, for justice, for 
     freedom have created only a wasteland of failed hopes. But 
     the cynics are wrong: freedom is our destiny; justice is our 
     guide; we shall overcome.
       I believe in protecting the Earth's environment against an 
     unprecedented onslaught. Cynics may laugh out loud and say 
     there is no utility in a stand of thousand year old trees, a 
     fresh breeze, or a mountain stream. But the cynics are wrong: 
     we are part of God's earth not separate from it.
       I believe in you. Each of you individually. And all of you 
     here as a group. The cynics say you are motivated principally 
     by greed and that ultimately you will care for nothing other 
     than yourselves. But the cynics are wrong. You care about 
     each other, you cherish freedom, you treasure justice, you 
     seek truth.
       And finally, I believe in America. Cynics will say we have 
     lost our way, that the American century is at its end. But 
     the cynics are wrong. America is still the model to which the 
     world aspires. Almost everywhere in the world the values that 
     the United States has proclaimed, defended, and tried to live 
     are now rising.
       In the end, we face a fundamental choice: cynicism or 
     faith. Each equally capable of taking root in our souls and 
     shaping our lives as self-fulfilling prophecies. We must open 
     our hearts to one another and build on all the vast and 
     creative possibilities of America. This is a task for a 
     confident people which is what we have been throughout our 
     history and what we still are now in our deepest character.
       I believe in our future.