It seems that no college will dare ask Burt to deliver its commencement address because Academia is controlled by a liberal cabal, but who really cares anyway, because those speeches are composed entirely of tin-eared platitudes and stunningly dull advice, which Burt could totally supply if you’d just ASK him!
But he’d still turn you down, because kids today want to be coddled, and flattered, and told they have a future and a chance to do great things with their lives, rather than hear the hard, bitter truth that they’re all vapid morons who just wasted four years of their lives and $100,000, when they’d be better off dying right out of high school and thus reduce the surplus population.
How could I, in good conscience, promote such nonsense when so many of them have squandered their parents’ hard-earned money majoring in such kiddy fare as black studies, Hispanic studies, lesbian studies and binge-drinking?
But if Burt did deign to address the graduates, he’d discard the vapid congratulations and phony uplift in favor of some tough, real world wisdom:
First, I would advise the grads to always slow down when leaving their phone numbers on answering machines. It’s at the very moment when people should be speaking slowly and distinctly that they usually turn into motor mouths. I can’t tell you how often I have had to replay messages eight or nine times while trying to decode something that sounds like seventhreefoureightsixninefive.
But young people nowadays won’t swallow the castor oil of cruel, but helpful home truths like this. They just want to sit there “gazing goo-goo eyed at Barack Obama as he utters endless banalities about hope and change.” Meanwhile, at that very same moment, all over the country, millions of people are having to hit the Rewind button on their answering machines. Oh, Irony, you are indeed a harsh taskmistress.
Next, when giving someone directions, don’t just say “Take Sixth Street to Lipton Drive, turn left and go south to Main. Then take a right on Main until you reach Harper. It’s on the southeast corner. You can’t miss it.” At least until the great come-and-get-it day when everyone has a navigational system in his or her car, you must learn to indicate the distances the person is going to have to drive on Sixth, Lipton and Main.
GPS is just a fancy way of saying socialized cartography!
And, finally, as I gazed out over those fresh, young faces, I would advise them to have nothing whatsoever to do with people who insist on using their computers to send Instant Messages.
If you can’t take the time to write your Instant Message out in Fortran, then mail the punch cards to your pal so he can load them into his IBM 704, then you don’t know the meaning of the word “friendship.”
I never believed Al Gore when he claimed to have invented the Internet, but I never doubted for a moment that he had a lot to do with foisting IMs on the rest of us. It has his carbon fingerprints all over it.
“That’s called ‘closing with a joke.’ Yale, Harvard? I await your offers.”
Death to life