Vonnegut celebrates his own hometown, and hopes that some graduates will become the kind of “saints” who make life worthwhile.
Hello, and congratulations.
And thank you. You have made our nation stronger and more admirable by becoming educated at great expense.
At great expense, God knows, God knows.
If I had it to do all over, I would choose to grow up again at Forty-fourth Street and North Illinois in Indianapolis, Indiana. I would be born again in one of this city’s hospitals, again be a product of its public schools.
I would again take courses in bacteriology and quantitative analysis in the summer school of Butler University.
It was all here for me, just as it has all been here for you: the best and the worst of civilization, if right here you can find music, finance, government, architecture, painting and sculpture, history, medicine, athletics, and books, books, books, and science.
And role models and teachers.
People so smart you can’t believe it, and people so dumb you can’t believe it.
People so nice you can’t believe it, and people so mean you can’t believe it.
The funniest wise man in the world when I was growing up wasn’t in London or Paris or New York City. He was here in Indianapolis. His name was Kin Hubbard, and he wrote an elegant joke a day for the Indianapolis News under the pen name “Abe Martin.”
Kin Hubbard said he didn’t know anybody who’d be willing to work for what he was really worth.
He was funnier and wiser than David Letterman.
I went to high school with at least thirty people who were as funny as David Letterman.
There’s something about the air here.
One woman I went to high school with, Madeline Pugh, became the head writer on the I Love Lucy show.
Mr. Letterman grew up here, in what show business people, which now includes our best-known politicians and so-called journalists, often call “flyover country.”
We are somewhere between television cameras in Washington, DC, and New York, and Los Angeles.
Please join me in saying to the undersides of their airplanes, “Go to hell.”
The greatest of American presidents, Abraham Lincoln, came from Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois.
Arguably the greatest poet and the greatest playwright of this century, T. S. Eliot and Tennessee Williams, came from St. Louis.
Arguably the greatest friend the working people in this country ever had, Eugene Debs, was from Terre Haute.
He said, “As long as there is a lower class I am in it, as long as there is a criminal class I am of it, as long as there is a soul in prison I am not free.”
It used to be admirable for Americans to talk that way.
Will some educated person here tell me what went wrong?
What I’m saying is that this is very fertile soil here.
I’m not talking about corn and pigs.
I’m talking about growing important souls and intellects.
The people I choose to celebrate today, though, aren’t those Middle Westerners who became world famous.
Do you know, incidentally, that one of the most impossibly sophisticated, worldly persons ever to grace the planet, the composer and lyricist Cole Porter, the toast of New York and London and Paris, came from Pee-ru, Indiana?
Pee-ru, for heavens’ sakes.
Can you beat it? How close is that to Brazil and Kokomo?
The people I admire the heck out of today are those who built cities like this, with universities like this one, with symphony halls like that one, with art museums like the one over there somewhere, with libraries in every neighborhood. And the churches and hospitals. And the factories and stores. Utopia.
I’m talking to TV celebrities in airplanes again:
Hey, you monstrously overpaid electronic twerps:
“Down here” is where the real lives are led.
“Down here” is where the real work gets done.
The airplane itself was invented in Ohio.
So was Alcoholics Anonymous. The rear-view mirror.
Yes, and wonderful dancers all over the world have come or will come from Butler University in Naptown. Are some of them here?
Some of you won’t stay home. But please don’t forget where you came from. I never did.
Notice when you’re happy, and know when you’ve got enough.
As for throwing money at problems: that’s what money is for.
My Uncle Alex Vonnegut, an insurance salesman who lived at 5033 North Pennsylvania, taught me something very important. He said that when things are going really well we should be sure to notice it. He was talking about very simple occasions, not great victories. Maybe drinking lemonade under a shade tree, or smelling the aroma of a bakery, or fishing, or listening to music coming from a concert hall while standing in the dark outside, or, dare I say, after a kiss. He told me that it was important at such times to say out loud, “If this isn’t nice, what is?”
Uncle Alex, who is buried in Crown Hill along with James Whitcomb Riley, and my sister, and my parents, and my grandparents, and my great-grandparents, and John Dillinger, thought it was a terrible waste to be happy and not notice it.
So do I.
You have been called “Generation X.”
You’re as much Generation A as Adam and Eve were.
As I read the book of Genesis, God didn’t give Adam and Eve a whole planet.
He gave them a manageable piece of property, for the sake of discussion let’s say two hundred acres.
I suggest to you Adams and Eves that you set as your goals the putting of some small part of the planet into something like safe and sane and decent order.
There’s a lot of cleaning up to do.
There’s a lot of rebuilding to do, both spiritual and physical.
And, again, there’s going to be a lot of happiness. Don’t forget to notice!