For the 40th consecutive year, I've not been invited to address a Utah high school graduating class.
This is the speech I always never give.Mr. Superintendent, Ms. Principal, members of the faculty, fellow students and scholars, as I look out across this august body of May graduates, I'm alarmed to see how easily you've been convinced to wear such funny hats in public.
But then a graduation ceremony is like Grand Opera. It only works if you don't think too much about it. If you see it with too much of a dry eye, you run the risk of seeing the emperor as he really is. Not without clothes, but dressed up in a silly-pants outfit.
I say that to you, students, because I am allowed to say such things. I am a child of the '60s: Box Elder High Class of '67. We '60s graduates were the ones who coined the term "anti-establishment." We were the first to say "Tune in, turn on, drop out."
We gave your generation the Grateful Dead.
We gave you drug abuse.
We gave you macrame.
In 1967 I played Bob Dylan's anti-establishment songs on the stereo so often I ran a needle through the album. Now, 23 years later, I am a respected columnist for a respected, establishment daily. The kids today who remind me of my 1967 self do not like or respect me. They tell me I've sold out, that I've become just another small cog in the great, mindless machine.
Some days I suspect they may be right.
Unriddle that.
At any rate, I was asked to speak to you tonight for one reason. I have lived longer than you have. And because I've logged more conscious hours on Earth I'm thought to be smarter and wiser. I'm supposed to say many smart and wise things to you tonight so you don't spend the next 20 years having to learn them for yourselves.
But I'm sorry to report the plan has a flaw. I seldom listen to people who are 20 years older than I am, so how can I expect you to listen to me?
The truth is, I can't. And I don't.
About all I can hope is that you'll remember the speaker at your high school graduation sounded rather sane and coherent for an old coot. And although the world had left him behind, he didn't sound too bitter about it.
I can only hope you remember a grownup didn't try to force-feed you stuff that's supposed to be good for you.
Years ago the novelist Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was asked to address a group like this one. He wrote about the experience in the preface to one of his books. This is how he described it:
I was seasick with dread before I gave the speech. I was seated between a famous old architect and the president of the Academy. We were three skinny, blank-faced human beings, in full view of the audience. We spoke as convicts in motion pictures do, when planning a break under the eyes of guards.
I told the architect how frightened I was. I expected him to comfort me. But he replied pitilessly, and in a voice the president could hear, that the president had read my speech and detested it.
I asked the president if this was so.
"Yes," he said. "But don't worry about it."
I reminded him that I still had to deliver the detestable speech.
"Nobody is going to listen to what you say," he assured me. "People are seldom interested in the actual content of a speech. They simply want to learn from your tone and gestures and expressions whether or not you are an honest man."
I don't know if any insight I've offered tonight is the gospel truth. I'd like to think so. But if the only thing that stays with you is that the speaker at your graduation tried his best to be honest, well, that will be enough. The time and money have been well spent.
Congratulations to you.
May I sincerely wish you all good luck.
Thank you.