If This Isn't Nice What Is? (Much) Expanded by Kurt Vonnegut

Author:Kurt Vonnegut
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: RosettaBooks
Published: 2016-03-09T05:00:00+00:00

7.

Don’t Forget Where You Come From

Butler University, Indianapolis, Indiana,

May 11, 1996

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

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