Why Kurt Vonnegut's advice to college graduates still matters today
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Friday, April 28, 2023
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Kurt Vonnegut didn’t deliver the famous “Wear Sunscreen” graduation speech published in the Chicago Tribune that was often mistakenly attributed to the celebrated author.
Key Points:
- Kurt Vonnegut didn’t deliver the famous “Wear Sunscreen” graduation speech published in the Chicago Tribune that was often mistakenly attributed to the celebrated author.
- I don’t even remember who gave my class’s graduation speech, much less a single word the speaker said.
- During the early and mid-1960s, he commanded an avid and devoted following on campuses before he had produced any bestsellers.
- Why was a middle-aged writer born in 1922 adored by a counterculture told not to trust anyone over 30?
Their parents’ generation
- A cultural touchstone, the novel changed the way Americans think and write about war.
- Like Andy Warhol’s soup cans, “Slaughterhouse-Five,” with its jokes, drawings, risqué limericks and flying saucers, blurs the line between high and low culture.
- Cited as one of the top novels of the 20th century, “Slaughterhouse-Five” has been transformed into film, theatrical plays, a graphic novel and visual art.
- He continued to believe all his life in the civic virtues he learned as a student at Shortridge High School in Indianapolis.
Fool or philosopher?
- Vonnegut had the look – sad, kind eyes under that mop of uncontrollable hair, the full droopy mustache.
- Looking like a cross between Albert Einstein and a carnival huckster, Vonnegut had his contradictions on full display.
- A fool or a philosopher?
A forceful defense of art
- He used his own experience in World War II to destroy any notion of a good war.
- “For all the sublimity of the cause for which we fought, we surely created a Belsen of our own,” he lamented, referencing the Nazi concentration camp.
- The military-industrial complex, he told the graduates at Bennington, treats people and their children and their cities like garbage.
- Instead, Americans should spend money on hospitals and housing and schools and Ferris wheels rather than on war machinery.