In Response to James Franco

When I graduated from Stanford University in 1971, veteran CBS journalist Eric Sevareid gave a commencement address that still haunts me today.

It was a time of deep divisions, driven by vicious racism and an unpopular war.

Sevareid spoke of those divisions, and of how easily we can be led to disregard the complexity and humanity of those outside our circle. He said:

Many now see human beings as symbols. It is enough, for them, to characterize those of whom they disapprove as pigs or hippies, or Bolsheviks or capitalists or bourgeoisie. By this mental exercise their enemies are automatically dehumanized and can, with a clear conscience, be executed, imprisoned, exiled, or shouted down. Since they are unhuman, they are presumed not to bleed when stabbed.

This is perhaps the profoundest corruption of our time.

This profound corruption — the mental violence that reduces living, breathing human beings to symbols and stereotypes — is, if anything, more pervasive today. It is, beyond any doubt, used more consciously and cynically than ever by the frauds and flatteners of reality who now dominate our media.

I believe Sevareid saw it as a corruption of truth as well as ideology, and saw the culture of inquiry as a powerful antidote to this lethal poison.

The arts have a powerful part to play in delivering that antidote.

Today, our society is still at war. Some battles are new; some are as old as human history.

Make no mistake — while some have the nerve to deny it, there is a war on women being waged in this country and across the world, from the councils of the Taliban to the halls of Congress.

It must end. We all have a role to play in ending it.

Recently, a certain “conservative radio host” took it upon himself to lead a public shaming of a 30-year-old law student. Why? She had the audacity to suggest that in the institutions of our democratic government, women’s voices should be heard on the issue of women’s reproductive health.

The language of his tirade was extreme and revealing, and his contempt could not have been more clear — contempt for women; for language, logic, and evidence; and for honest discourse.

I won’t repeat the vile language used — which, in any case, says more about the speaker than the person spoken of.

But I will say what should be clear to anyone who heard it: the language chosen was meant to shame, demean, intimidate, and exclude women from the debate — just as they had been excluded from the congressional hearing that started the whole mess. It was a hearing on women’s reproductive health whose witness list consisted entirely of men — male religious leaders at that. Shades of 17th-century Salem.

Somewhere, Arthur Miller was smiling a wry smile.

Now, I say it should be clear because in a few notable cases, it clearly wasn’t. To hear a presidential candidate who clearly can’t afford to alienate any members of his party say that “it’s not the language I would have used,” makes me wonder what the right language would have been. When a politician comments that “an entertainer can be absurd,” I have to ask in what universe pornographic slander counts as “entertainment.”

On the other hand, there were people like David Frum, former assistant to President George W. Bush, who called the rant “brutal, ugly and deliberate” — making it plain, as did thousands of others, that this was a matter of decency, not party.

But the most admirable response was that of Sandra Fluke herself — who, despite her understandable shock, “tried to see this for what it is,” and succeeded.

Looking past the grotesque language and vicious tone, she zeroed in on its purpose: to bully and intimidate her and women like her into shutting up and stepping back. It was, she said, “an attempt to silence me, to silence the millions of women and the men who support them who have been speaking out about this issue.”

She would not be silenced. She refused to be distracted by vile comparisons and twisted logic. She brushed off the cheap insults, cartoonish fantasies, and locker-room language. She kept her wits about her, kept it classy and stuck to her guns.

And she kept speaking out — not to defend herself against this crazed pornographic rant (its delusional logic made that unnecessary) — but to turn our attention back to the question at hand. To insist that a reasoned dialogue is necessary and that women will not be excluded from the debate.

As a result, an amazing thing happened. He lost.

The would-be shaming failed, boomeranging back on the would-be assailant. In the end, he humiliated only himself and lost millions of dollars for good measure.

Why does this matter here?

Because it demonstrates the power of the question.

It illustrates what can happen when you have the courage and conviction to follow wherever inquiry and inspiration lead — in politics or art, in science or society. Refusing to submit to the sound-bite culture of fragmentation, segmentation, disconnection and division, Sandra Fluke spoke honestly, with integrity, in her own voice — and found that millions of people had her back.

You could do worse than to follow her example.

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Now allow me to offer a few words of advice:

People will warn you against taking chances. Ignore them.

People will offer you a life with no room for your vision. Refuse them.

People will seek to smother your curiosity in a plush bed of certainty. Resist them.

As an artist, you will always be questioning and testing your own practice of your art. The arts are driven by a spirit of inquiry and exploration — by a willingness to try new things, a passion for the unknown, a fascination with boundaries and what lies beyond them. You are possessed by a restless inventiveness, a love affair with what’s true and new, a conviction that together, honesty and talent will lead to something unique and irreplaceable.

Sometimes these questions lead you into places that are uncomfortable, for you and for others; to inconvenient truths; to visions that aren’t on anyone’s wish list; to realities that are a bit too real.

But not for you, because you’re wired like that. You were born this way. And your craft has given you the tools that will take you from passion through exploration to realization.

As Rilke wrote to a young poet: “Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language.”

Now, I’m going to ask you to imagine for a moment what I see today as I look at you.

And although this is your day, I’m going to ask you, for just a brief moment, to turn your thoughts from the lives upon which you are about to embark.

Imagine the generation that will come after you.

Imagine the children who will be born on this day — your day; or this week; or this month. The children the summer will bring. The children of 2012, the year you start taking on the world’s challenges and making them your own.

My son will be one of those children. God willing, he will be with us in July. And I wonder, in a couple of decades, when he’s sitting where you are seated now, what world will he see?

Since the odds may not be in my favor, and I may not have the opportunity to share this wonderful day with him, I entrust the future to you, so the answer is up to you.

So go now from this place, on this glorious day, with all of the love, support and blessings that we can give you.

Do what you do.

Enrich the world. Connect hearts and minds. Multiply voices and perspectives. And endlessly, relentlessly, joyfully: question, question, question.

For yourselves and for all who come after you, throw open that door and make us proud.