If This Isn't Nice, What Is? Read online

  If you determine that that really is what they’ve been yelling at each other about, tell them to become more people for each other by joining a synthetic extended family—like Hell’s Angels, perhaps, or the American Humanist Association, with headquarters in Amherst, New York—or the nearest church.

  I met a man in Nigeria one time, an Ibo who had six hundred relatives he knew quite well. His wife had just had a baby, the best possible news in any extended family.

  They were going to take it to meet all its relatives, Ibos of all ages and sizes and shapes. It would even meet other babies, cousins not much older than it was. Everybody who was big enough and steady enough was going to get to hold it, cuddle it, gurgle to it, and say how pretty it was, or handsome.

  Wouldn’t you have loved to be that baby?

  Here is a fact: This wonderful speech is already more than twice as long as the most efficient, effective oration in American history, Abraham Lincoln’s address on the battlefield at Gettysburg.

  As I speak, the very air we breathe is vibrant with words and images from CNN. In the early days of radio, I remember, people living too close to the transmitter of KDKA in Pittsburgh used to receive soap operas in their bedsprings and bridgework.

  And nowadays, surely, TV is such a pervasive part of so many Americans’ lives that they might as well be hearing Wolf Blitzer in their bedsprings and bridgework. And I have a son-in-law who has been swallowed by his computer. He disappeared into it, and I’m not sure we can ever get him back out again. And he has a wife and kids!

  There was a time when a graduation speaker, looking out at a sea of beauty and innocence such as this one, would warn you about all the sewer rats you will meet as you flow out of here and into the gutters of the real world. I mean lascivious, untruthful men, tinhorn Casanovas and sociopathic Lochinvars. But Cosmopolitan and Elle magazines have told you all about them—and told you how to protect yourselves.

  If somebody says he loves, you check it out.

  And your State and Federal Governments, thank goodness, have told you not to smoke cigarettes, which are evil incarnate…. Who in his or her right mind doesn’t hate evil with a passion?

  Cigarettes are very bad for you—but cigars are very good for you. Cigars are so healthful that there is a magazine devoted to them, with pictures of cigar-smoking celebrities on the cover.

  Cigars, of course, are made of trail mix—of nuts and raisins and granola. Why don’t you all eat a cigar at bedtime tonight?

  No cholesterol.

  Firearms are also good for you. No fat, no nicotine, and no cholesterol.

  Ask your Congressperson if this isn’t true.

  And God bless the State and Federal Governments for taking such good care of the public health.

  I hope you know that television and computers are no more your friends, and no more increasers of your brainpower, than slot machines. All they want is for you to sit still and buy all kinds of junk, and play the stock market as though it were a game of blackjack.

  And only well-informed, warm-hearted people can teach other things they’ll always remember and love. Computers and TV don’t do that.

  A computer teaches a child what a computer can become.

  An educated human being teaches a child what a child can become.

  Bad men just want your bodies. TVs and computers want your money, which is even more disgusting. It’s so much more dehumanizing!

  Given a choice, wouldn’t you rather have somebody like your body more than your money?

  Forbes magazine asked me recently what my favorite technologies were, and I said a corner mailbox, my address book, and the Encyclopedia Britannica. The Britannica is arranged alphabetically, so you can find out all kinds of stuff, if you know your ABC’s.

  And putting a letter in a corner mailbox is like feeding a great big bullfrog painted blue.

  I thank you for becoming educated. By becoming reasonable and informed persons, you have made this a more rational world than it was before you got here. I give you my word of honor that you graduates are near the very top of the best news I ever hear. By working so hard at becoming wise and reasonable and well-informed, you have made our little planet, our precious little moist, blue-green ball, a saner place than it was before you got here.

  Thanks, and God bless those who made it possible for you to improve your minds and souls in the company of students from every part of this country, and foreign nations besides.

  What fun, eh? I should say.

  Most of you are preparing to enter fields unattractive to greedy persons, such as education and the healing arts. Teaching, may I say, is the noblest profession of all in a democracy.

  Some of you will become mothers. I don’t recommend it, but these things happen.

  If that should fall your lot, you may find compensation in these words by the poet William Ross Wallace: “The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world.”

  And keep that kid the hell away from computers and TV sets, unless you want it to be a lonesome imbecile, who steals money from your purse so it can buy stuff.

  Don’t give up on books. They feel so good—their friendly heft. The sweet reluctance of their pages when you turn them with your sensitive fingertips. A large part of our brains is devoted to deciding what our hands are touching, is good or bad for us. Any brain worth a nickel knows books are good for us.

  And don’t try to make yourself an extended family out of ghosts on the Internet.

  Get yourself a Harley and join Hell’s Angels instead.

  Every graduation pep talk I’ve ever given has ended with words about my father’s kid brother, Alex Vonnegut, a Harvard educated insurance agent in Indianapolis, who was well-read and wise.

  The first graduation at which I spoke, incidentally, was at what was then a women’s college—Bennington, in Vermont. The Vietnam War was going on, and the graduates wore no make-up, to show how ashamed and sad they were.

  But about my Uncle Alex, who is up in Heaven now.

  One of the things he found objectionable about human beings was that they so rarely noticed it when they were happy. He himself did his best to acknowledge it when times were sweet. We could be drinking lemonade in the shade of an apple tree in the summertime, and Uncle Alex would interrupt the conversation to say, “If this isn’t nice, what is?”

  So I hope that you will do the same for the rest of your lives. When things are going sweetly and peacefully, please pause a moment, and then say out loud, “If this isn’t nice, what is?”

  Let that be the motto of your class: “If this isn’t nice, what is?”

  That’s one favor I’ve asked of you. Now I ask for another one. I ask it not only of the graduates, but of everyone here, parents and teachers as well. I’ll want a show of hands after I ask this question.

  How many of you have had a teacher at any level of your education who made you more excited to be alive, prouder to be alive, than you had previously believed possible?

  Hold up your hands, please.

  Now take down your hands and say the name of that teacher to someone else and tell them what that teacher did for you.

  All done?

  If this isn’t nice, what is?

  HOW TO HAVE SOMETHING MOST BILLIONAIRES DON’T HAVE

  And learn to love your destiny!3

  Hello.

  I have not calculated how much your diplomas cost in time and money. Whatever those ballpark figures are, they surely deserve this reaction from me today: Wow. Wow. Wow.

  Thank you, and God bless you and those who made it possible for you to study at an American university. By becoming informed and reasonable and capable adults, you have made this a better world than it was before you got here.

  Have we met before? No. But I have thought a lot about people like you. You men here are Adam. You women are Eve. Who hasn’t thought a lot about Adam and Eve?

  This is Eden, and you’re about to be kicked out. Why? You ate the knowledge apple. It’s in your tummies no
w.

  And who am I? I used to be Adam. But now I am Methuselah.

  So what does this Methuselah have to say to you, since he has lived so long? I’ll pass on to you what another Methuselah said to me. He’s Joe Heller, author, as you know, of Catch-22. We were at a party thrown by a multi-billionaire out on Long Island, and I said, “Joe, how does it make you feel to realize that only yesterday our host probably made more money than Catch-22, one of the most popular books of all time, has grossed worldwide over the past forty years?”

  Joe said to me, “I have something he can never have.”

  I said, “What’s that, Joe?”

  And he said, “The knowledge that I’ve got enough.”

  His example may be of comfort to many of you Adams and Eves, who in later years will have to admit that something has gone terribly wrong—and that, despite the education you received here, you have somehow failed to become billionaires.

  Well-dressed people ask me sometimes, with their teeth bared, as though they were about to bite me, if I believe in a redistribution of wealth. I can only reply that it doesn’t matter what I think, that wealth is already being redistributed every hour, often in ways which are absolutely fantastic.

  Nobel Prizes are peanuts when compared with what a linebacker for the Cowboys makes in a single season nowadays.

  For about a hundred years now, the most lucrative prize for a person who made a really meaningful contribution to the culture of the world as a physicist, a chemist, a physiologist, a physician, a writer, or, God bless him or her, a maker of peace, has been the Nobel Prize. It is about a million dollars now. Those dollars come, incidentally, from a fortune made by a Swede who mixed clay with nitroglycerine and gave us dynamite.

  KABOOM!

  Alfred Nobel intended that his prizes make the planet’s most valuable inhabitants independently wealthy, so that their work could not be inhibited or bent this way or that way by powerful politicians or wealthy patrons.

  But one million dollars is only a white chip now—in the worlds of sports and entertainment, on Wall Street, in many lawsuits, as compensation for executives of our larger corporations.

  One million dollars in the tabloids and on the evening news is “chump change” now.

  I am reminded of a scene in a W.C. Fields movie, in which he is watching a poker game in a saloon in a gold-rush town. Fields announces his presence by putting a one-hundred-dollar bill on the table. The players barely look up from the game. One of them finally says, “Give him a white chip.”

  But the cost of a college education, a minor fraction of a million dollars, is anything but chump change to most Americans. Have academic degrees been a way to become famous and rich in the past?

  In a few cases. You can no doubt name a handful of celebrities who came from here. But most graduates, any place you care to name, have been of use locally rather than nationally, and have commonly been rewarded with modest amounts of money or fame—or sometimes, more’s the pity, with utterly undeserved ingratitude.

  In time, this will prove to have been the destiny of most, but not all of you. You will find yourselves building or strengthening your communities. Please love that destiny, if it turns out to be yours—for communities are all that’s substantial about the world.

  All the rest is hoop-la.

  And for your footloose generation, that community could as easily be New York City or Washington, D.C., or Paris, or Houston—or Adelaide, Australia, or Shanghai, or Kuala Lumpur.

  Mark Twain, at the end of a profoundly meaningful life, for which he never received a Nobel Prize, asked himself what it was we all lived for. He came up with six words which satisfied him. They satisfy me, too. They should satisfy you:

  “The good opinion of our neighbors.”

  Neighbors are people who know you, can see you, can talk to you—to whom you may have been of some help or beneficial stimulation. They are not nearly as numerous as the fans, say, of Madonna or Michael Jordan.

  To earn their good opinions, you should apply the special skills you have learned in college, and meet the standards of decency and honor and fair play set by exemplary books and elders.

  It’s even money that one of you will get a Nobel Prize. Wanna bet? It’s only a million bucks, but what the heck. That’s better than a sharp stick in the eye, as they say.

  WHY YOU CAN’T STOP ME FROM SPEAKING ILL OF THOMAS JEFFERSON

  Vonnegut tells why the Bill of Rights is “more than just a bunch of amendments,” but protects our most important liberties—like freedom of speech, and a lot more. He supports the Second Amendment and explains how “man-killing devices and live ammunition” can best serve us.4

  There is something you are entitled to know about me—something I’m not proud to confess. This is it: I was born into a society as segregated as Biloxi, Mississippi, except for the drinking fountains and the buses. And I am the product of a lily-white public high school in Indianapolis. It had a faculty worthy of a university. Our teachers there, again lily-white, weren’t just teachers. They were their subjects. Our chemistry teachers were first and foremost chemists. Our physics teachers were first and foremost physicists. Our teacher of ancient history, who was Minnie Lloyd, should have been wearing medals for all she did at the Battle of Thermopylae. Our English teachers were very commonly serious writers. One of mine, the late Marguerite Young, went on to write the definitive biography of Indiana’s own Eugene Victor Debs, the middle-class labor leader and socialist candidate for President of the United States, who died in 1926, when I was 4. Millions voted for Debs when he ran for President.

  I never met Debs, but I was old enough after World War II to have lunch in this city with another middle-class Indiana labor leader. He was Powers Hapgood. Although he was a Harvard graduate and from a well-to-do family of business people, Powers Hapgood worked as a coal miner to get close, both spiritually and physically, to those he wished to help to help themselves. He then became an officer in the CIO here in Indianapolis.

  Not long after our lunch, there was some kind of dust-up on a picket line, and he landed in court as a witness. The judge, Judge Claycomb, in fact the father of my Shortridge classmate Moon Claycomb, knew of Hapgood’s history, and interrupted the proceedings to ask why such a privileged person would spend his life as he had. And Powers Hapgood replied: “Why, the Sermon on the Mount, sir.”

  And if I am asked why anybody should support their local and national Civil Liberties Unions, I will say that it takes a powerful private organization to compel those who govern us to not to violate the crystal clear laws in the Bill of Rights, just as we would not want them to drive when drunk or park by a fireplug. Given the humane and fair and merciful intent of the Bill of Rights, what I would actually be saying, though, subliminally, is, “The Sermon on the Mount, sir or madam.”

  If you don’t know what the Sermon on the Mount is, ask your kid’s computer. If you don’t know what the laws in the Bill of Rights are, look ’em up, look ’em up. And yes, I know about the Second Amendment, and I’m for it. It doesn’t say people who disagree with a President should shoot him, which is what John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald did. It says in effect that civilians interested in playing with man-killing devices and live ammunition can best serve the rest of us in the National Guard, as long as they don’t shoot unarmed college students5.

  To come back to my lily-white high school, which had a daily paper. It had such a stunning faculty because the Great Depression was going on, so teaching was a plum job for some of the smartest men in town. But even before the stock market crash of 1929, when I was 7, it had great teachers because teaching high school was virtually the only way brilliant and informed women could make effective use of their warmth and intellectual enthusiasm and giftedness. Most of my best teachers were women, and holy smokes, were they ever bright.

  Why were women barred then from so many jobs they now hold with distinction? Because of what was then believed to be a law of Nature, a Natural Law. Otherwise
, why would Nature have made women such lousy fighters? Most of ’em, with a very few strikingly unattractive exceptions, couldn’t fight their way out of a paper bag.

  Why were there no African-Americans in my high school?

  African-Americans had their own high school, of course. It was Crispus Attucks. And because of the peculiar name of our black high school, people of all colors in Indianapolis were unusual Americans for knowing who Crispus Attucks was. He was an African-American free man, not a slave, who stopped a British bullet at the Boston Massacre in 1770, only six years before our nation became a beacon of liberty for the whole wide world. In one book of mine, I nicknamed Crispus Attucks High School “Innocent Bystander High.”

  Again: Why were there no African-Americans in Shortridge High School? Because of what was then believed to be a law of Nature, a Natural Law. Nature had obviously color-coded people for a reason. Otherwise, what the hell were all these different colors for?

  And why was Thomas Jefferson, possibly the most beloved of our founding fathers after George Washington, able to write “all men are created equal,” while meaning only white males, not women, God knows, and while owning slaves? Because of what was then believed to be a law of Nature. Jefferson’s slaves were mortgaged, by the way. What a shame that you can no longer take the cleaning lady, along with the saxophone, down to the hock shop, if you’re short on cash. Those were sure the good old days.

  In quite a few ways though, it was still the good old days for white males when I was growing up. I could still feel superior, even in the view of law-enforcement agencies, to half my own race and one hundred percent of all the others. That was comforting! Not only that, but I could get away with all kinds of crap because I was from a good family. But that’s another story.

  In our all-white sandlot football games, I remember—“Jeffersonian games,” you might call them—the ad hoc captain of the side preparing to kick off would call out. “Are you ready, Crispus Attucks?” And the captain of the receivers would inevitably reply, “We are ready, Ladywood6.” Come to think of it, that “Ladywood” business had an anti-Catholic ring to it. Come to think of it, we were not only male and white, but also Protestant. So that “Ladywood” insult was a kind of two-fer.