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The best thing Vonnegut didn't write |
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Written by Chelsea J. Carter, asap
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Monday, 16 April 2007 |
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The news, I thought, was huge: Kurt Vonnegut was dead.
I called a friend — to talk to someone about a man I admired, to share the loss of a great literary voices.
“Who?” she asked.
Kurt Vonnegut. The author. The guy who wrote “Slaughterhouse-Five.”
Silence.
And there it was: The man whose darkly humorous books were embraced by the Vietnam anti-war movement appeared to have been forgotten by a new generation in death, if not in life.
I struggled to understand. So I started to ask the question: What do people know about Kurt Vonnegut?
The answers ranged from the facts to blank stares to the stranger-than-fiction: Wasn’t he the man behind the graduation speech-turned-song, “Everybody’s Free to Wear Sunscreen?”
After publishing more than 19 books and countless essays, he’ll forever be remembered by some for one of the original viral hoaxes — a speech, attributed to him in its spread across the Internet, that he never gave.
Oh, you’ve no doubt read (or heard it, since it became a hit song):
———
“Ladies and Gentlemen of the class of ’99, wear sunscreen ...
If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it. The long term benefits of sunscreen have been proved by scientists whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience. I will dispense this advice now. Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth. Oh never mind. You will not understand the power and beauty of your youth until they have faded.”
———
Vonnegut didn’t write it, didn’t deliver it. It appeared initially as a column in the Chicago Tribune, written by Mary Schmich. Later, it was put to music by Australian director Baz Luhrman.
But why was it so easy to remember Vonnegut for a speech/song he had nothing to do with?
Is it the growth of the Internet generation — a movement to give everything an answer?
Perhaps it’s more simple than that: It just sounded like something Vonnegut might say.
The answer is more complicated, I’m sure.
I wonder what Vonnegut thought: Did he hear the speech? The song? Would he ever say something like that?
I don’t know. I wish I did.
These are the things I know:
— Vonnegut published 19 books. Some were banned by schools. Some were burned. He challenged censorship. His last book was “A Man Without A Country,” a collection of essays published in 2005.
— He often delivered lectures to students, writers, activists — always pushing for people to think for themselves and taking aim at actions and institutions he found dehumanizing.
— He said the villains in his books were never individuals, but culture, society and history, which he said were making a mess of the planet.
— He once said that of all the ways to die, he’d prefer to go out in an airplane crash on the peak of Mount Kilimanjaro.
— He died Wednesday, April 11, 2007.
Those are the things that you should know. Those are the things I will remember — not a speech-turned-song that he didn’t write.
———
Watch a video of the song version here: http://tinyurl.com/39soe6
Here’s a link to Vonnegut’s work: http://www.vonnegutweb.com/
————
asap’s Chelsea J. Carter is based in Los Angeles.
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