Pulitzer Prize Winning Cartoonist and Alumnus Delivers College Commencement Address

Cartoonist, author, illustrator, director, screenwriter and alumnus Berkeley Breathed (BJ ’79) delivered the College of Communication spring 2009 convocation address. Following is the text from his speech.

Good glorious afternoon graduates of Communication on your first official day as fully-educated Communicationistas.

Communi-cats.

Communicables.

Bloggers.

And by the look of all of you at this particular moment: blogging twittering sweaty shiny Galapagos Flat-head penguins. You rock.

Welcome also to you parents: you and your soaring offspring are in this together. Today, with halting breath and emotions mixed in the tangle of joy and despair, you watch the fruit of your loins start off on their longest journey.

But in a sense, you—the parents—have a new journey to begin yourselves, unburdened as you now are of the anxieties allied with hatchlings still under wing. The RVs with the Bon Jovi cassettes await in the driveway. The carnal campgrounds of Canada beckon … as do the cozy cabins of Caribbean cruise ships. Like the secret mating grounds of Africa calling forth the elephants.

So Godspeed, tired and spent parents: rekindle that flame of passion smothered 21 years ago with poopy Pampers.

Two brave and hopeful journeys, two very separate paths, two shining destinations. Alas, one is doomed to end stalled and snoring on the offramp to Afternoon Nappy Town.

But it is a joyous day and I will not say which.

And thank you Dean Hart for that introduction. I would also thank you for the honorary degree … if you had actually given me one. I and President Obama understand completely. Me especially, given my personal history during the five years I spent at this very college. This included but was not limited to my experiments in pre-digital enhancing of Daily Texan news photos… the use of a the F bomb in one of my Texan cartoons that shut down publication for 48 hours… and most notably, my cover story that ran in the long defunct University magazine “Utmost” in the Fall of 1980. A story detailing the illegal dumping of 300 baby alligators into Lake Travis by an unnamed student… a courageous bit of reporting by me earning headlines in papers around Texas, a mention on the CBS evening news and ultimately six Federal game agents surrounding my apartment on Bee Caves Road, there to arrest me in hopes that I would give up the name of the anonymous gator terrorist.

All in vain, I am proud to say, for I had been well coached in Griff Singer’s superb course “Excellence in Media Ethics”: I knew well how to protect a source. Made easier in this case by the fact that he didn’t exist and I’d made it all up.

Property values around Lake Travis plummeted over $115 million dollars within a week, which I am tired of people mentioning to me.

Not to put too fine a point on it… I was run out of town in 1981. This is the first time I have been back in 28 years. Honestly, given your gun laws, I thought I’d be spotted on The Drag and plugged like a 12 point buck.

In fact, if anyone on this stage actually HAS my Bachelor of Journalism degree, I’d be happy to receive it now. But then, I suspect we’d all risk my robe erupting into flames, like a vampire hitting sunlight.

And thank you Dean Hart for whispering to me a few seconds ago that the expected length of a proper commencement speech is FIFTEEN minutes long. And not—as I had apparently misheard you three weeks ago… (hold up speech) …FIFTY.

Okay then…

(Tear off 3/4 the speech and drop to floor)

Now that’s the sort of editing they don’t teach in them fancy pants yankee colleges. This is Texas, baby.

(Examine remaining pages)

Actually, the rest of this doesn’t make a lick of sense now. A shame. This was quite good. It was titled “Reach for Your Dreams and Hug ‘em ‘till They Squeal Like a Javelina.”

I have another idea.

While I was writing this doomed classic, I got a bit wistful about the coming commencement of my own children from college in a future that might see me absent due to the rising ocean level catching me while I sleep in Santa Barbara.

So on the plane over here, I wrote and then gave my nine year old Sophie the letter I might NOT be able to give her personally at the time of HER college Commencement a dozen years from now….maybe right here under this roof. She was to open and read it then, but if you don’t mind, I think I’ll read it now here instead…because it’s short and you’re sweating in black nylon and your new tattoos are running and she happens to be here and has it in her school backpack.

Sophie Breathed, could you bring me your letter, please?

(Sophie delivers)

So.

My message to you, daughter, on your graduation day:

Today is your moment… and 2021 is your year and I am sorry I couldn’t make it there to share it with you. I don’t know for sure but I’m fairly certain that you will be soon looking up at some boring fossilized nitwit know-it-all that’s giving a speech presuming that he or she knows how you feel facing the world that awaits outside the doors, as mysterious and unknowable and oxygen-free as the dark matter of space.

Don’t listen to him. He’s just some successful schmuck roped in to spew forth the path to professional success. Eminence being the basic qualification for commencement speakers, be suspicious precisely because he’s successful. Timothy Noah in Slate.com pointed out recently that successful people have no earthly clue why they were so. Ask Bill Gates for a key to success and he’ll shrug and say “quit school and con IBM into running your operating system. Then buy some yachts.” I hope that works out for you.

No, failure is the crucible for wisdom, young graduate. And in this way, I have, I hope, earned the right to offer some advice on your day of days. No, do not be fooled: Those things that Dean Hart described about my career, even the stuffed cartoon animal cat named Bill that vomits hairballs—all those things are not the expected bonus of a disciplined life well-executed. On the contrary, they are cosmic anomalies: proof that if a judicious God exists, he’s kidding.

For in any measure of professional behavior, I was a staggering failure in practice, if not on paper. I could and should have written a dozen books during the many Iowa years I spent playing arcade video games. Specifically, “Galaga” and “Spy Hunter”.

Over my 30 year cartoon career, I had 1,956 deadlines. Out of those, I made… (calculating) … none .

Ronald Reagan called me on the phone one Iowa City morning in 1984, just as I had just stepped dripping from the shower. After he complimented me on that previous Sunday’s strip, my response to the President of the United States was “I should put on some underwear.”

Thank God, dearest daughter, nobody but you will ever hear me admit any of this.

So despite my apparent success, in my heart I’m really a screw up and I hereby claim right to bestow some life wisdom. If you don’t buy that theory, ask Donald Trump for some advice. He’s a wholesale idiot.

Daughter, I know that you—like your fellow graduates of 2021, are filled with fear and dread about the state of your world. Why wouldn’t you be? Vice President Palin is now Commander and Chief and I know you’re surprised… but let me tell you, no more than President Limbaugh was in his last seconds on Earth as he choked on that baby seal dumpling.

And I know that you worry that a golden civil age of journalistic responsibility is fading away with the imminent death of the Internet. The implants of celebrity news injected into your brain via cerebral wi-fi during the night and projected onto the inside of your eyeballs while you drive to work appear as a threat to the traditions of accountable journalism …. Like that of media mogul Sean Hannity and his FOX/New York Times Online that have been the nation’s watchdog for your generation.

So you look for words of wisdom to guide you into this terrifying new age.

You are left with me.

I have but three suggestions. And I have license to submit them because they are the only three that I have mastered in a life so sullied by procrastination and poorly house-trained dogs that I’ve been blackballed from membership in The Union of United Austin Drag Worms.

But in these three rules, my conviction is unmoved.

Listen to me. I am old. I am flawed. I am correct:

Rule #1:

Have children. Bear them, adopt them, buy them from Costco, but have them. Do not rush them, nor wait to long. But get thee into your hair at the right time.

They are the Golden Parachute of Life: even if you screw it up and the whole thing goes down the can, your child’s hand will still be there and you will hang on and you will not let go because they need their lunch packed before 8. Like the presidents of our banks, you will walk away from your self-made mess filthy rich anyway.

The cosmos is terrifying. It’s meaning and mysteries are unsettling and grow more so as you age. God would be more comforting in this area if he didn’t play peek-a-boo so damnably well: save this sick child over here, crash that plane there: he can be too flighty for many to soothe ever growing doubts about life’s purpose.

Not so a child’s love. In times past, dear daughter, when my late-night questions of life’s meaning and purpose in the face of mortality and suffering and thinning hair and missed deadlines all threatened to suffocate me like an existential blanket… I had only to go to your bedroom as a tonic. Watching you sleep, your arms and legs twisted into a Wetzel Pretzel, I would cup my hand before your gaping mouth and feel the warmth of your breath… and if my hand brushed yours, to feel your fingers close upon mine reflexively, like your precious Venus fly trap springing shut upon touch, instinctively, without hesitation.

…and I would whisper “Ah. That’s it.” And I would sleep.

You will need to do the same one day.

Rule #2:

The most powerful force within you to speed and achieve your goals is neither greed nor ambition nor religion nor love, hate, music, art or—stay with me here—sex.

It is imagination. To imagine what others don’t see. Its presence or lack thereof has toppled empires, changed the course of history, and ruined or completed lives. Leave it absent from yours, beloved daughter and you will, I guarantee, achieve mediocrity. Whether you write ad copy for Google, compile a book, make a film or report on the shenanigans at City Hall… or even start a dress store with ready-to-wear fashion made from tin foil as you did back in 2009… imagination will take you farther than even the expensive education that you conclude on this day.

Like a passionate hobby, I have for all my adult life been preoccupied with how a small and simple but unique notion popping forth within even a modest mind can lead to marvelously, grotesquely improportionate effect.

A truly unique idea. It is the holy grail and nuclear fission of thinking. Here’s just one:

Many years ago, in the spring of 2009, I had watched 600 people gather to film and make a movie in Los Angeles and northern California. Hundreds of millions of dollars would be spent getting this story told around the world in thousands of theatres in every corner of the globe. Movie stars were hired. Corporate fortunes would be on the line. Careers would be made, others ruined. Children in most every country would soon be watching a parable about love… and a little boy whose mother saves his life on the surface of Mars by sacrificing hers.

None of that—any of it—would have happened if not for the evening of September 10th, three years before, in the living room of your house, dear daughter… when your 5-year-old brother, Milo, erupted in a fit and wondered aloud at 90 decibels whether his life might not be better without his mother in it.

At that moment, an idea—a spare shred of fanciful flotsam alighted into my head: if mothers were kidnapped by Martians, kids might not think such things.

An hour later I wrote a small book called “Mars Needs Moms!”

Three years later, Chinese families across the steppes of Asia would have their fortunes brighten as they were hired in the factories to provide the action figure of my hot-tempered Milo for the world’s Happy Meals.

Yet it started with three words on a September evening…none particularly unique:

Moms. Martians. Kidnap.

The atom-splitting, world-shifting trick of releasing the energy of those three mundane words—was just to put them in the right order.

Here’s a few more that just needed the proper assembly before exploding:

Computer. Personal.

Opera. Epic. Space.

Equals. Squared. Speed of light. Energy. Mass.

Sorcerer. Orphan. Boy.

But here’s the darker side of that powerful coin: In 1945 the planet was reeling from the worst mass slaughter and orgy of destruction it would ever see. Vast stretches of Europe lay smoldering, littered with 50 million dead. Empires collapsed and new ones had sprung up.

And not a single moment of this planetary firestorm would have happened if not for a shabby, bedraggled 20 year-old vagrant in a lice-ridden overcoat, freezing while squatting on a Vienna street selling his hand-painted postcards to tourists, December 1909. He too thought of a few very ordinary words that cold Austrian Christmas and put them in the same sentence for the first time:

“Germany. World. Conquer. Jews.”

If that pathetic little wretch in a Vienna flophouse named Adolph had never thought that oddly unique idea… never imagined it… the world would not have almost ended 35 years later.

Think about that for a moment.

Search and embrace the terrible destiny-changing power of a single simple unique notion. But use it for good. In your work, in your dreams, in the arc of your life.

But handle ideas with care, gentle graduate. What would the world look like today if a certain governor of Texas hadn’t leaned back in his leather chair one Austin spring day twenty-two years ago, just down the street from here... and imagined that in America, truly, anyone can grow up to be president.

And finally Rule #3:

One of the better traditions in sending off a graduate is the telling of a didactic little parable-ish story. To illustrate my final rule, let me, dear daughter, tell you a wistful tale about your late Grandpa Burton. In 1984, he was delivered to a Houston emergency room, nearly dead from having been struck across the skull with a five iron. As the story he would often tell goes, he’d been playing a quiet round of golf with your grandmother, when they’d both managed to slice their shots into the same field, which was filled with cattle. While they were both rooting around in the long grass looking for their balls, he spotted something white wedged in one of the cow’s backsides. He looked closer and sure enough, there was your grandmother’s monogram on a golf ball stuck square in the cow’s bottom.

Fatefully, that is when he lifted the cow’s tail and called out “Ruth, this looks like yours.”

He woke up from the coma several days later. But he was laughing.

All to say that there will be no time—not a day, not a moment in the coming maelstrom of your bright, hopeful, troubled, trampled, tangled and triumphant life… that a well-swung five iron wrapped around a head isn’t easily worth the liberating power of a healthy sense of humor … or a soaring imagination.

… or the trusting, grasping fingers of a sleeping daughter. I shall miss yours. Do not forget mine.

(looking out to the kids and parents)

Or all of you, theirs.

Have fun. Life is short. Get a dog. Good luck.