If This Isn't Nice, What Is?

by Kurt Vonnegut

  At about that time there appeared in The New Yorker a series of stories by Ludwig Bemelmans about a busboy who assisted a waiter in a grand hotel in Paris. The waiter was named Mespoulets, “my little chickens.” Mespoulets’s specialty was serving persons the management didn’t want to come back again.

  Every academic department has a sort of Mespoulets, I think. We certainly had one in the Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa when I taught there. The Mespoulets in the Anthropology Department in my time I will call Dr. Z, who is no longer among the living.

  Dr. Z was lacking in the charm and stage presence fundamental to the reputation of a great cultural anthropologist. He was also having trouble getting published. So he was made thesis advisor for those of us the department’s stars did not care to work with. He also gave a course in the summertime, when the rest of the department was on vacation or on a dig or whatever. The course could be about anything, since its real purpose was to entitle returning veterans to continue to receive living allowances from a grateful government. In order to make ends meet, I was working as a police reporter for the Chicago City News Bureau, practicing what might nowadays be called “urban anthropology.”

  Becoming one of Dr. Z’s little chickens was one of the most fortunate things which ever happened to me, second only, perhaps, to my having been in Dresden when it was firebombed. He died a long time ago now, but many of his ideas live on with me. He died several years after I left. He was a suicide. He had great big ideas about science, about art, about religion, about evolution, and on and on, which he expressed in his cockamamie summer course. Many of these, and surely the grandeur of his dealing with the biggest issues imaginable, are elements in my works of fiction.

  I don’t know if he left a suicide note. My guess is that he found it impossible to put his great big ideas on paper.

  He had so many great big ideas that he gave me one for my thesis. I was a candidate for a master’s degree, mind you, for the rank of Corporal in Academia. He said my dissertation should deal with the sort of leadership required if a radical change in a culture was to be effected. Why mess around?

  So I did it. He told me to compare the leadership which inspired a peaceful Indian tribe to fight the United States Army, the so-called “Ghost Dance,” with the leadership of the Cubists, who found brand-new things to do with surfaces and paint. He didn’t say so, but he had already done this. And, thus directed, I reached a conclusion he must have reached.

  But my thesis was rejected by the department, as both grandiose and non-anthropological. And I was out of time and money, and I accepted a job in what was then arguably the most prosperous and compassionate socialist state in history, the General Electric Company in Schenectady, New York.

  For whatever it may be worth, and it may be worth no more than “a pitcher of warm spit,” as we used to say in the Army: The leadership of both the Ghost Dance and the Cubist movement had these elements in common:

  A charismatic, gifted leader who described cultural changes which should be made;

  Two or more respected citizens who testified that this leader was not a lunatic, but was well worth listening to;

  A glib, personable explainer, who told the general public what the leader was up to, why he was so wonderful, and so on, day after day.

  Turns out that such a table of organization worked pretty well for Adolf Hitler, too, and maybe for Robert Maynard Hutchins, when he turned this place inside out and upside down sixty years ago.

  I was in Chicago a couple of years back on business, and visited my old department. Professor Sol Tax was the only teacher from my time still on the job. I asked after some of my old classmates, kibbutzniks whose theses had been acceptable. One he said was practicing urban anthropology in Boston, and I allowed as how I had worked for a couple of years in an ad agency there.

  I told him what I’ve told you, how much I owed Dr. Z. I didn’t comment on Z’s having been low man on the department’s totem pole, the Mespoulets. I would be very happy, incidentally, if that word, “Mespoulets,” became a part of academic conversations, identifying that faculty member stuck with being mentor to all the nobodies going nowhere. In ad agencies it is common to start out in the mail room. On faculties it is common to start out as a Mespoulets.

  Use a new word three times in conversation, I read in the Reader’s Digest when I was a juvenile delinquent, and it becomes a permanent part of your vocabulary. Dr. Z was a Mespoulets, and died without having risen above that rank. Sol Tax may have been a Mespoulets at one time, but he certainly wasn’t one when I got here. I find it hard to believe that the head of the department, Dr. Robert Redfield, who made his reputation, and the department’s reputation, too, with an extended essay called “The Folk Society,” had ever been a Mespoulets. There: That’s three times, I think.

  Dr. Tax, recalling the department’s dead and gone Mespoulets of long ago, said that Dr. Z had written well about the controversial Native American religion, the Peyote Cult.

  So far as Dr. Tax was aware, Dr. Z hadn’t done much writing since then. Only those of us who took Z’s freestyle summer course were aware of the scale of the ambitions of our mentor. Each seminar, we came to realize, was an airing and testing of ideas in a chapter of a book about the human condition he was writing or planned to write. I didn’t share that information with Dr. Tax, but I did ask him if he had the address of my dead mentor’s longtime widow. He did.

  She had long since remarried. I wrote to her, wanting to tell her how stimulating I had found her first husband, and how useful his wide-ranging speculations had been to me in my career in fiction. I must have reminded her of utterly ghastly unhappiness which she had hoped to put behind her. We had never met, and never will meet, for there was no reply.

  If there had been one, I would have asked her if he got any of his big ideas on paper, and where, if anywhere, some pages were. Ah me.

  Long term, I am as indebted to the head of the department in my day, Dr. Robert Redfield, as I am to its Mespoulets. Dostoyevsky suggested that one sacred memory from childhood was perhaps the best education. I say to you that one plausible, romantic theory about humanity is perhaps the best prize you can take away from a university. And Dr. Redfield’s theory of the Folk Society was that for me. It has been the starting point for my politics, such as they are.

  My politics in a nutshell: Let’s stop giving corporations and newfangled contraptions what they need, and get back to giving human beings what we need.

  Long before I got here, all theories of cultural evolution had been proposed and discarded, for want of evidence to support them. Cultures were not describable, predictable rungs on a ladder societies were bound to climb, from polytheism to monotheism, for example, and so on.

  But Dr. Redfield said, in effect, and I condense and paraphrase or worse: “Wait a minute. I think I can describe in some detail one stage many, many societies have reached or left behind, neither higher or lower than any other.” It might be worth thinking about because it was or had been so common. Dr. Redfield’s course in the Folk Society, which he gave every year, was enormously popular, drawing auditors from all over the university. Is his theory much discussed here or anywhere nowadays?

  A Folk Society, he said, was a relatively small number of persons bonded by kinship and a common history of some duration, with a territory uncontested or easily defended, and sufficiently isolated so as to be little influenced by the cultures of other societies.

  There can’t be many such societies nowadays. There were still quite a few when I first came here. I recall the testimony of some people who had lived in one to the effect that the isolation, the like-mindedness, the routines and so on were suffocating.

  I can believe it. I myself never visited one, unless you want to count the Anthropology Department itself.

  But I had certainly read about a lot of them in the library here. It seemed to me that they, because of their simplicity and isolation, might be regarded as petri dishes in which human beings
might demonstrate certain apparently basic human needs other than food, shelter, clothing, and sex. For want of a better word, I will call such needs spiritual, by which I mean only that they are invisible, un-smellable, inaudible, intangible, and inedible.

  Was it possible, I wondered, that certain features common to all of them not only revealed spiritual needs of all human beings, including those of us in this auditorium? Might not those features also show us methods for satisfying those needs, theatrical performances, if you will, which human beings, by their nature, can ill-afford to do without?

  I think of the British Navy, whose sailors, although filling the world’s oceans, felt lousy all the time, until they started sucking limes. A vitamin deficiency, of course! And here we are in the post-industrial, post-Cold War whatchamacallit, feeling lousy all the time. We get all the minerals and vitamins we need. Is it conceivable that we are suffering from a cultural deficiency which we can remedy? Friends and neighbors, I say YES to that:

  Let’s give everybody a totem at birth. What proof do I have that even highly educated people need nonsensical, arbitrary symbols which will relate them to other people and the Earth and the Universe? I am a Scorpio. Would those of you who are also Scorpios please hold up your hands? Lookee there! Dostoyevsky was one of us!

  Yes, and let’s find a way to get ourselves and others extended families again. A husband and a wife and some kids aren’t a family, any more than a diet Pepsi and three Oreos is a breakfast. Twenty, thirty, forty people—that’s a family. Marriages are all busting up. Why? Mates are saying to each other, because they’re human, “You’re not enough people for me.”

  Yes, and let’s make sure every American gets a puberty ceremony, an impressive welcome to the rights and duties of grown-ups. As matters now stand, only practicing Jews get those. The only way the rest of us can feel like grown-ups is to get pregnant or get somebody else pregnant, or commit a felony or go to war and then come back again.

  I only want to say in closing that it’s nice to be home again.

  HOW VONNEGUT LEARNED FROM A TEACHER “WHAT ARTISTS DO”

  And how we can do it!15

  There are three things that I very much want to say in this brief hail and farewell. They are things which haven’t been said enough to you freshly minted graduates nor to your parents or guardians, nor to me, nor to your teachers. I will say these in the body of my speech, I’m just setting you up for this.

  First, I will say thank you. Second, I will say I am truly sorry—now that is the striking novelty among the three. We live in a time when nobody ever seems to apologize for anything; they just weep and raise hell on the Oprah Winfrey Show. The third thing I want to say to you at some point—probably close to the end—is, “We love you.” Now if I fail to say any of those three things in the body of this great speech, hold up your hands, and I will remedy the deficiency.

  And I’m going to ask you to hold up your hands this early in the proceedings for another reason. I first declare to you that the most wonderful thing, the most valuable thing you can get from an education is this—the memory of one person who could really teach, whose lessons made life and yourselves much more interesting and full of possibilities than you had previously supposed possible. I ask this of everyone here, including all of us up here on the platform—How many of us, how many of you, had such a teacher? Kindergarten counts. Please hold up your hands. Hurry. You may want to remember the name of that great teacher.

  I thank you for being educated. There, I’ve thanked you now; that way I don’t have to speak to a bunch of nincompoops. For you freshly minted college graduates, this is a puberty ceremony long overdue. We, whose principal achievement is that we are older than you, have to acknowledge at last that you are grown-ups, too. There are old poops possibly among us on this very day who will say that you are not grown-ups until you have somehow survived, as they have, some famous calamity—The Great Depression, World War II, Vietnam, whatever. Storytellers are responsible for this destructive, not to say suicidal, myth. Again and again in stories, after some terrible mess, the character is able to say at last, “Today, I am a woman; today I am a man. The end.”

  I apologize. I said I would apologize; I apologize now. I apologize because of the terrible mess the planet is in. But it has always been a mess. There have never been any “Good Old Days,” there have just been days. And as I say to my grandchildren, “Don’t look at me. I just got here myself.”

  So you know what I’m going to do? I declare everybody here a member of Generation A. Tomorrow is another day for all of us.

  Having said that, I have made us, for a few hours at least, what most of us do not have and what we need so desperately—I have made us an extended family, one for all and all for one. A husband, a wife and some kids is not a family; it’s a terribly vulnerable survival unit. Now those of you who get married or are married, when you fight with your spouse, what each of you will be saying to the other one actually is, “You’re not enough people. You’re only one person. I should have hundreds of people around.”

  Now, I’ve made us an extended family. Does our family have a flag? Well, you bet. It’s a big orange rectangle. Orange is a very good color and maybe the best one. It’s full of vitamin C and cheerful associations, if one could forget the troubles in Ireland.

  Now this gathering is a work of art. The teacher whose name I mentioned when we all remembered good teachers asked me one time, “What is it artists do?” And I mumbled something. “They do two things,” he said. “First, they admit they can’t straighten out the whole universe. And then second, they make at least one little part of it exactly as it should be. A blob of clay, a square of canvas, a piece of paper, or whatever.” We have all worked so hard and well to make these moments and this place exactly what it should be.

  As I have told you, I had a bad uncle named Dan, who said a male can’t be a man unless he’d gone to war. But I had a good uncle named Alex, who said, when life was most agreeable—and it could be just a pitcher of lemonade in the shade—he would say, “If this isn’t nice, what is?” So I say that about what we have achieved here right now. If he hadn’t said that so regularly, maybe five or six times a month, we might not have paused to notice how rewarding life can be sometimes. Perhaps my good Uncle Alex will live on in some of you members of this graduating class, if, in the future, you will pause to say out loud every so often, “If this isn’t nice, what is?”

  Now, my time is up and I haven’t even inspired you with heroic tales of the past—Teddy Roosevelt’s cavalry charge up San Juan Hill, Desert Storm—nor given you visions of a glorious future—computer programs, interactive TV, the information superhighway, speed the day. I spent too much time celebrating this very moment and place—once the future we dreamed of so long ago. This is it. We’re here. How the heck did we do it?

  A neighbor of mine, I hired him—he was a handyman—to build an “L” on my house where I could write. He did the whole damn thing—he built the foundation, and then the side walls and the roof. He did it all by himself. And when it was all done, he stood back and he said, “How the hell did I ever do that?” How the hell did we ever do this? We did it! And if this isn’t nice, what is?

  There was one thing I forgot to say, and I promised I would say, and that is, “We love you. We really do.”

  DON’T FORGET WHERE YOU COME FROM

  Vonnegut celebrates his own home town, and hopes that some graduates will become the kind of “saints” who make life worthwhile.16

  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 quantitat
ive 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, D.C., 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.