Speech at Clowes Hall

Mayor Bart Peterson

Vonnegut was commissioned to give a speech at Clowes Hall at Butler University, Indianapolis on April 27, 2007. Indianapolis mayor Bart Peterson had earlier proclaimed it the city's "Year of Vonnegut". Its writing was completed shortly before Vonnegut death on April 11 and the speech was ultimately given by his son Mark. It was first published in the posthumous collection Armageddon in Retrospect in 2008 and reprinted in the fourth volume of the Library of America's Vonnegut set in 2016.

Summary

The Athenæum, formerly Das Deutsch Haus

Now declared a role model by mayoral proclamation, Vonnegut reflects that "if this isn't nice, I don't know what is." Actually a "junior", he encourages the Indianapolis audience to think of his father, Kurt senior, who designed important city landmarks like the Ayers clock while working with his fellow architect father, Bernard, who designed, among other things, The Athenæum (formerly Das Deutsch Haus and clearly renamed "to kiss the ass of a bunch of Greek-Americans"), and founded The Orchard School and The Children's Museum. Now 84 years old, Vonnegut plans to sue the makers of Pall Mall cigarettes for failing to kill him as their packaging promised. While studying at the University of Chicago, physical anthropologists in his department, using evidence from skulls over thousands of years, argued that humans generally didn't live past 35 due to wearing out their teeth. Now with dentistry and health insurance, Baby Boomers will live to be one hundred. He suggests that perhaps dentistry and the curing of pneumonia should be outlawed.

Mona Lisa, by Leonardo da Vinci

Not looking to depress—especially in this politically, economically, and socially divisive time in American history—Vonnegut seeks a universally agreeable sentiment, such as "sugar is sweet". Division in the United States, however, is nothing new. When he was a child, Indiana was home to the national headquarters of the Ku Klux Klan and the site of the last lynching of an African-American north of the Mason-Dixon line. However, it was also the home of labor leader Eugene Debs of Terre Haute, which now houses of "a state-of-the-art lethal-injection facility". Vonnegut next proposes agreement that the Mona Lisa is a perfect painting, but rejects that since, despite her face being tilted, it has no foreshortening. In terms of religion, he claims membership with a "disorganized religion" called "Our Lade of Perpetual Consternation", but says he is in fact a humanist who does not fear death and loves science instead of superstition, "which could never have given us A-bombs". Science has also given humans the ability to destroy the Earth, which Vonnegut doesn't particularly like anyway, and answered important questions like how did the Universe begin and how did animals develop the bodies they have. The Hubble Telescope has tried to peer back to the edge of space and time, finding that once there was nothing when all of a sudden there was a big bang and "that's where all this crap came from". Animals, it turns out, comes from millions of years of natural selection by means of sex and dying. With all this information, humans now seem to be living in an age of apocalypse, with the United States as the last advanced nation with a death penalty. We should remember that if we're ever executed to remark that this will surely teach us a lesson. If Jesus were alive, he too would be executed yet again and for the same reason he was before, namely having ideas that are too liberal.

Karl Marx, 1875

Karl Marx is commonly believed in the United States to be one of the most evil people in history, since he invented Communism and Americans are in love with the Wall Street gambling of Capitalism. Communism, in theory, was meant to be a way for modern nations to take care of people—especially children, the elderly, and disabled—as families and tribes did before the Industrial Revolution. It might be wise to stop criticizing Communism, not so much because it is such a good idea, but because the United States is massively in debt to Communist China, who also have a large and advanced army, unlike the American military which just wants to bomb everyone. Many people think Marx's most evil thought was his attack on religion, calling it the opium of the masses, but in his era opium was the only effective painkiller in use. People from China seem to be smarter and much better at business than Americans, although Communism may have nothing to do with this. Vonnegut's son Mark, on the Admissions Committee of the Harvard Medical School, said if students were admitted purely on ability, half the class would be Asian women.

As to Marx and morality, while he was writing such evil things about religion, the Christians of the United States had legal human slavery and prevented women from voting or holding public office. After receiving a letter from a 42 year old man who was due to be released from a prison system which held him since he was 16, Vonnegut suggested he join a church when he got out, advice he thinks Marx would also give. The most important spiritual contribution of the United States to humanity was not defeating the Nazis or godless Soviets, but how African-Americans have maintained their dignity and self-respect in a nation run by people who despise them purely on the basis of their skin color. Religion surely helped make this possible. They also provided the United States' most important global cultural contribution, jazz music, which Vonnegut calls "[s]afe sex of the highest order". To him, the greatest Americans of his lifetime were Martin Luther King, Jr. and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and the latter probably would have been a "ruling-class Ivy League horse's ass" had he not been afflicted with polio, which gave him empathy for the lower classes.

Booth Tarkington, 1922

Although he can do nothing about global warming, Vonnegut says he can fix one thing about the world this very night—a new university recently opened in Indianapolis has been named I.U.P.U.I. Finding this absurd, with his newly granted powers this year, he proposes renaming it Tarkington University, which is much classier. However, soon no one will know or care who Booth Tarkington was, nor Butler or Clowes, families whose members Vonnegut actually knew. Tarkington—a writer of plays, novels, and short stories, once known as "The Gentleman from Indiana"—was an influence on Vonnegut and as part of his powers, he also demands that a production of his play Alice Adams be produced in Indianapolis. By coincidence, this was also the married name of his sister Allie, now buried in Crown Hill Cemetery along with their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents, as well as James Whitcomb Riley, "The Hoosier Poet", and at one time the highest-paid writer in America. People were once so delighted by his poems that he could make money reciting them in theaters and lecture halls.

When the French writer Jean Paul Sartre was awarded the Nobel Prize, he refused. Vonnegut says he could never be that rude, since he was "raised right" by his family's African-American cook, Ida Young, a great-grandchild of slaves, who was "intelligent, kind and honorable, proud and literate, articulate and thoughtful". He was also brought up by the teachers at School 43, "The James Whitcomb Riley School", as well as Shortridge High School at a time when "great public school teachers were local celebrities". Grateful students, such as Vonnegut himself, would visit them for years afterward, but now all of them have died. Teaching is the best thing one can do with life, provided the teacher loves what they teach and there are eighteen or fewer students, who can feel and act like a family. When Vonnegut graduated, he had to say what he hoped to do as an adult. He thought he would work for Eli Lilly and cure cancer with chemicals. His son, Mark, wrote a book about his mental breakdown and subsequent attendance and graduation from Harvard Medical School, called The Eden Express. Once Vonnegut asked his son what life was about, since he didn't know. Mark replied that the point was "to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is". Now that we are all living in a shared apocalypse, we should be as kind as possible to each other, not take things so seriously, and joke often. Each of us should also get a dog. Vonnegut himself recently got a new crossbreed of a French poodle and Chinese shih tzu, which he calls a shit-poo. With that, he remarks "I'm out of here".