Free Palm Sunday by Kurt Vonnegut Page B

3, 1980. The
Sun
, by the way, a corporation entirely separate from the university, will be one hundred years old when this book is published—in 1981.
    This doddering alumnus, who drinks no more, had this to say above the raiding of the ice cubes:
    “Good evening, fellow Americans.
    “You should have invited a more sentimental speaker, I think. This is surely a sentimental occasion, and I am sentimental about faithful dogs sometimes, but that is as far as it goes.
    “The most distinguished living writer who was also a
Sun
man is, of course, Elwyn Brooks White of the class of 1921. He will be eighty-one on July eleventh of this year. You might want to send him a card. His mind is as clear as a bell, and he is not only sentimental about dogs but about Cornell.
    “I myself liked only two things about this place: the
Sun
and the horse-drawn artillery. Yes—there was horse-drawn artillery here in my time. I suppose I should tell you how old I am, too. I will be fifty-eight in November of this year. You might want to send me a card, too. We never hooked up the horses to caissons, because we knew that was no way to frighten Hider. So we just put saddles on the horses, and pretended we were at war with Indians, and rode around all afternoon.
    “It was not Cornell’s fault that I did not like this place much, in case some alumni secretary or chaplain is about toburst into tears. It was my father’s fault. He said I should become a chemist like my brother, and not waste my time and his money on subjects he considered so much junk jewelry—literature, history, philosophy. I had no talent for science. What was infinitely worse: all my fraternity brothers were engineers.
    “I probably would have adored this hellhole, if I had been allowed to study and discuss the finer things in Ufe. Also: I would not have become a writer.
    “I eventually wound up on academic probation. I was accelerating my course at the time—because of the war. My instructor in organic chemistry was my lab partner in biochemistry. He was fit to be tied.
    “And one day I came down with pneumonia. It is such a dreamy disease. Pneumonia used to be called ’the old people’s friend.’ It can be a young person’s friend, too. All that you feel is that you are sleepy and that it is time to go. I did not die, so far as I know—but I left Cornell, and I’ve never come back until now.
    “Good evening, fellow Cornellians. I am here to congratulate
The Cornell Daily Sun
on its one-hundredth anniversary. To place this event in historical perspective: the
Sun
is now forty years younger than the saxophone, and sixty years older than the electric guitar.
    “It was a family to me—one that included women. Once a week we allowed coeds to put together a woman’s page, but I never got to know any of them. They always seemed so burned up about something. I never did find out what it was. It must have been something over at the sorority house.
    “I pity you
Sun
people of today for not having truly great leaders to write about—Roosevelt and Churchill and Chiang Kai-shek and Stalin on the side of virtue, and Hitler and Mussolini and Emperor Hirohito on the side of sin.
    “Oh, sure, we have another world war coming, andanother great depression, but where are the leaders this time? All you have is a lot of ordinary people standing around with their thumbs up their ass.
    “Here is what we must do, if glamour is to be restored to those who lead us into catastrophes, out of catastrophes, and then back into catastrophes again: We must oudaw television and set an example for our children by worshiping the silver screens in motion picture palaces every week.
    “We should see moving and talking images of leaders only once a week in newsreels. This is the only way we can get leaders all balled up in our heads with movie stars again.
    “When I was a freshman here, I didn’t know or care where the life of Ginger Rogers ended and the life of General Douglas MacArthur