Casual
BARNES, FRED
Casual GRAD RULES I was the commencement speaker at my son Freddy's graduation from high school a few weeks ago. The night before, my daughter Grace informed me she remembered only one thing I'd...
...Get the little things right and you'll be asked to do bigger things...
...Go to class, every class, I advised solemnly...
...I'll do the term paper over vacation...
...FRED BARNES...
...That'll happen naturally...
...Oddly enough, Barone says, American kids grow up fast after 18 and become amazingly competent...
...You'd be surprised how unfunny the vast majority of these addresses are...
...But then they're parachuted into Hard America, where folks play for keeps...
...They were stuck with me...
...Still, it /\ was not encouraging to find out my remarks had been as superfluous as the lyrics in a rock song...
...But instead, I am here with you, the nation's future air conditioning repairmen...
...A number of students graciously said they liked it, but not one mentioned anything specific...
...Funny isn't so hard since you can steal jokes...
...Their school, St...
...The time limit was 10 minutes, and I intended to honor it...
...Of course one also has to give advice in a commencement address...
...I was leery of using his joke, Franken not being my cup of tea...
...News & World Report, for years...
...The same would be true for my words, I told my son's graduating class...
...I had finished in 10 minutes...
...Okay, okay, I shouldn't have expected anything more...
...I cited a few more excerpts from graduation speeches, then told the kids the bad news...
...When I was first asked to speak at Hartford State Technical College, I jumped at the opportunity," Franken said...
...That's Soft America...
...I got an early tipoff that my whole speech was soon to be forgotten, despite my best efforts...
...And don't worry about keeping in touch with your friends...
...It turned out Barbara was right...
...Here I seized on political writer Mike Barone's brilliant insight about Soft America and Hard America...
...Stephen's and St...
...Agnes in Alexandria, Virginia, has a wonderful tradition of having commencement speakers who both graduated from the school and have a kid in that year's class...
...I had, however, passed the first test of giving a good commencement speech...
...There are also two seat-of-the-pants rules I have for such occasions: Be funny and don't embarrass yourself or your child who is graduating...
...That's one more than I remember from either my high school or college graduation and one more, I'd guess, than most people recall from theirs...
...But my wife Barbara insisted it was very funny...
...There's one rule for graduation speeches: Be brief...
...Now, funny may be easy, but it's rare...
...Because, you see, I thought I had been asked to speak at Harvard, which would have been quite an honor...
...But then again, I hadn't been chosen to speak at my son's or my daughter's graduation because I'm a powerful orator or a great thinker...
...I didn't ask if she has taken the advice, but I did feel chagrined that this was all she recalled...
...I suspect I was the only person who qualified this year...
...I'll study over the weekend...
...John, your words will be remembered long after Shakespeare's are forgotten," Zuckerman said...
...The answer is as little as possible...
...Perhaps I should have been flattered that she recalled even this one nugget...
...Shamelessly, I swiped another bit of advice from my friend Brit Hume of Fox News...
...The occasion was a bachelor party for John McLaughlin, the TV show host, who was getting married for the second time...
...The night before, my daughter Grace informed me she remembered only one thing I'd said three years earlier when I delivered the address at her graduation...
...How much of this speech, you may be wondering, did I actually write myself...
...He then added, "But not until then...
...I had laboriously checked out commencement speeches given by others for comments to pilfer...
...I repeated it in my speech, giving Franken full credit...
...None of those got a rise, nor did my theory of college...
...Let's try to make the best of it...
...And then you can scrape by even if, like many students, you don't study a lick or read any of the required books...
...But do pay attention to your friends' parents, who'll be able someday to give you internships, jobs, introductions, or letters of recommendation...
...And we'll study together...
...The crowd was laughing before I reached the punch line...
...But not the one I found by Al Franken, the crazy liberal comic...
...Here I shifted gears and went with some of my own material, most of it counterintuitive...
...That was my advice to look for courses in college that don't require papers...
...College students should be alert to the four big lies about studying: I'll get up early and study...
...Kids up to 18 are pampered and shielded from the world's stormy blast by their parents...
...I've been milking one by Mort Zuckerman, publisher of U.S...
...Do sweat the small stuff, I said...
...Perish the thought...
Vol. 8 • June 2003 • No. 41
