RAT You know I don't usually subject you folks to forwards...

[KRWoolly@aol.com]

The following is Kurt Vonnegut's recent address to the graduating class of 
1999 at Agnes Scott College...I loved this.

Enjoy.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

"Hello. I hope you are all wearing sunscreen. 

We must be close to a very powerful transmitter for CNN, right? Anybody know 
where it is? Anybody know where Jane Fonda is?

In the early days of radio, I remember, people living too close to the 
transmitter of station KDKA in Pittsburgh used to hear soap operas in their 
bridgework and mattress springs.

And now CNN News plays such a big part in the lives of so many Americans, 
including mine, that we might as well be hearing Wolf Blitzer and Christiane 
Amanpour in our bridgework and mattress springs.

And I won't lie to you: The news from CNN can be really bad these days.

But I also give you my word of honor that you before me, the Class of 1999 at 
Agnes Scott College, are near the very top of the best news I can 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.

God bless you and the faculty of this college, and those who made it possible 
for you to go from strength to strength here. Thanks to all of you, the 
forces of ignorance and brutality have lost again.

Not that there hasn't been a lot of good news, along with the bad, long 
before you got here. I am talking about the birth of works of art, music, 
paintings, statues, buildings, poems, stories, plays and essays, and movies, 
(you bet), and humane ideas - which make us feel honored to be member of the 
human race.

What can you yourselves contribute? You've come this far anyway, and it 
wasn't easy. And I now recite a famous line by the poet Robert Browning, with 
one small change. I have replaced his word "man," which in his time was taken 
to mean "human being," with the word "woman."

May I say, too, that his wife Elizabeth Barrett was as great a poet as he 
was: "How do I love thee, Let me count the ways?" and so on.

While I'm at it, get a load of this: The atomic bomb which we dropped on the 
people of Hiroshima, was first envisioned by a woman, not a man. She was, of 
course, Mary Wollstoncraft Shelley. She didn't call it an "atomic bomb" She 
called it "the monster of Frankenstein."

But back to Robert Browning, and what he said about anyone who hopes to make 
the world better. Again, I've changed his word "man" to "woman" for this 
occasion:

        "A woman's reach should exceed her grasp, or what's a heaven for?"

And of course the original "A man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's 
a heaven for?"

Speaking of women: Pollyanna is not your graduation orator here today. 
Pollyanna is bound to be speaking somewhere - irrespressibly optimistic, 
seeing good in everything. So I will comment, as briefly and efficiently as 
possible, on the perfectly horrible news CNN has been giving us about the 
Balkans and that high school in Colorado.

I won't go on and on about it. We're here for a good time and we are darn 
well going to have one.

Others with axes to grind are playing the blame game: blaming the National 
Rifle Association, the movies, TV, pop music, video games, no prayers in the 
public schools.

I myself have an axe, which I have ground as sharp as a razor. What would I 
like to do with it, if I could? I would like to plant it in the forehead of 
the Babylonian King Hammurabi, who lived almost four thousand years ago.

Hammurabi gave us a code which is honored to his very day by many nations, 
including my own, and by all heroes in cowboy and gangster films, and by far 
too many people who feel they have been insulted or injured, however 
slightly. However accidentally:

        "An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth."

        Revenge is not only sweet - it is a must!"

What antidote can there be for an idea that popular and poisonous? Revenge 
provides revenge, which is sure to provide revenge, forming an endless chain 
of human misery.

Here's the antidote:

"Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us."

Amen.

Some of you may know that I am a Humanist, not a Christian. But I say of 
Jesus, as all Humanists do, "If what he said was good and so much of it is 
absolutely beautiful, what can it matter if he was God or not?"

If Christ hadn't delivered the Sermon on the Mount, with its message of mercy 
and pity, I wouldn't want to be a human being.

I would just as soon be a rattlesnake.

OK, now let's have some fun. Let's talk about sex. Let's talk about women. 
Freud said he didn't know what women wanted. I know what women want. They 
want a whole lot of people to talk to. What do they want to talk about? They 
want to talk about everything.

What do men want? They want a lot of pals, and they wish people wouldn't get 
so mad at them.

Why are so many people getting divorced today? It's because most of us don't 
have extended families any more. It used to be that when a man and women got 
married, the bride got a lot more people to talk to about everything. The 
groom got a lot more pals to tell dumb jokes to.

A few Americans, but very few, still have extended families. The Navahos. The 
Kennedys.

But most of us, if we get married nowadays, are just one more person for the 
other person. The groom gets one more pal, but it's a woman. The woman gets 
one more person to talk to about everything, but it's a man.

When a couple has an argument nowadays, they may think it's about money or 
power or sex, not how to raise the kids, or whatever. What they're really 
saying to each other, though, without realizing it, is this:

        "You are not enough people!"

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 is was, or handsome.

Wouldn't you have loved to be that baby?

I sure wish I could wave a wand, and give every one of you an extended family 
- make you an Ibo or a Navaho - or a Kennedy.

The least I can do is give you health tips. I've already mentioned sun 
screen. And don't smoke cigarettes, which are as evil as Slobodan Milosovic.

But cigars are good for you. They are so healthful that there is even a 
magazine devoted to their enjoyment, with cigar-smoking role models on its 
cover - athletes, movie stars, rich guys. Why not the Surgeon General?

Cigars, of course are made of trail mix, a blend of raisins, cashews, and 
Granola, which has been soaked for a week in maple syrup. To celebrate the 
end of your graduation day, why not eat a cigar at bedtime?

No cholesterol!

Guns are also good for people. No nicotine and no cholesterol. Ask your 
Congressperson if that isn't so.

Incidentally, if somebody asks you whether you are a Liberal or a 
Conservative, tell'em this:

"Listen, Buster - I'm a graduate of Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia, 
zipcode, 30030. They taught me to think for myself there. You want to know if 
I'm a Liberal or a Conservative? I'm both of those, and neither one.

"Go jump in the lake. Go climb a tree."

I have so far quoted Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Hammurabi and 
Jesus Christ. I now give you Sir William Gilbert, of the team of Gilbert and 
Sullivan:

        I often think it's comical
        How nature always does contrive
        That every boy and every gal,
        That's born into the world alive,
        Is either a little Liberal,
        Or else a little Conservative.

What the heck. While I'm at it, why don't I give you Eugene Victor Debs, the 
great labor leader who ran for President three times on the Socialist ticket, 
and who died in 1926, when I was four.

"As long as there is a lower class, I am in it. As long as there is a 
criminal element, I am of it. As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not 
free."

That's worth repeating: "As long as there's a lower class, I'm in it. As long 
as there is a criminal element, I am of it. As long as there is a soul in 
prison, I am not free."

Wouldn't you like to say that when you get out of bed every morning, with the 
roosters crowing: "As long as there is a lower class, I am in it. As long as 
there is a criminal element, I am of it. As long as there is a soul in 
prison, I am not free."

Excuse me. I beg your pardon. I'm receiving signals from CNN in my bridgework 
- Wolf Blitzer and Christiane Amanpour.

Wolf Blitzer and Christiane Amanpour say CNN's military consultants are 
unanimous in feeling that our revenge on the Serbs for their revenge on the 
Kosovars has gone about as well as could be expected.

The Code of Hammurabi, revenge, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, 
always works that way -about as well as could be expected.

Wait a minute. Somebody else is speaking, not Wolf, not Christiane. Whoever 
it is, and I'll bet she's blond - she's saying I can lose thirty pounds in 
thirty days, and never once feel hungry.

OK, she's gone now, thank goodness. My bridgework has fallen silent of its 
own accord. I thought for a minute there, I was going to have to ask somebody 
for dental floss. High tech! How would that have been for high tech: tuning 
out CNN with dental floss?

How I love high tech! Forbes Magazine asked a bunch of us a while back to 
name our favorite technologies. I said the Encyclopedia Britannica on a 
shelf, because it's alphatetical, my address book, also alphabetical, and the 
mailbox on the corner. Putting a letter in that mailbox is like feeding a 
great big bullfrog painted blue. You know what its lid says to me when I 
close it? "Ribbit," it says.

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 whether what our hands are 
touching is good or bad for us. Any brain worth a nickel knows books are good 
for us.

Computers are insincere. Books are sincere.

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.

All right - let's stop kidding around, and get down to the nitty-gritty.

You know what you are, Class of 1999? You are a bunch of Eves, and this is 
Eden, and now that you've eaten the apple of knowledge you're getting kicked 
out of here.

Many of you intend to become teachers, which is the noblest of all 
professions in a democracy. Teachers can be so good for this country, but 
only if their classes can be cut to eighteen. Teaching is friendship, and 
nobody can deal intelligently with more than eighteen friends at any one time.

And only well-informed, warm-hearted people can teach others things they'll 
always remember and love. Computers and TV's can never do that.

A computer teaches a child what a computer can become.

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

Some of you will be mothers. These things happen. If you should find 
yourselves sidelined in that fashion, remind yourself of these lines by the 
nineteenth century white male poet William Ross Wallace: "The hand that rocks 
the cradle rules the world."

That being the case, you might teach the kid a couple of things it should say 
every day. "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass 
against us," and, "As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free." 

Ideas too unattainable? Class of 1999, let me impress on you that ideas, by 
their very definition, can never be too high - for children or anyone.

A child's reach should exceed its grasp, or what's a heaven for?

This wonderful speech is already nearly twice as long as the most efficient, 
effective oration in American history, Abraham Lincoln's address on the 
battlefield at Gettysburg. Lincoln was killed by a two-bit actor exercising 
his right to bear arms, but his truth goes marching on.

Up to now, most of what I've said has been a custom job for this Dixieland 
rite of passage. But 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 also 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 adorable women before me 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 the Agnes Scott College Class of 1999: "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, including President Mary Brown 
Bullock. I'll want a show of hands after I ask this question, and keep your 
eyes on Dr. Bullock:

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

Hold up your hands, please.

        [Nearly everyone in attendance then raises their hands.]

Now take down your hands and say the name of that teacher to someone sitting 
or standing near you.

All done?

If this isn't nice, what is?

I thank you for your attention."