rant · moment 17 of 23
The Homeless Vietnam Vet Commencement Speech Bit
from #198 - I'm A Hero | The Tim Dillon Show · #198
4 min
Tim proposes replacing celebrity graduation speeches with a harrowing, graphic monologue from a fictional homeless Vietnam veteran, delivering a long dark story ending in "onward and upward."
- Graduation speeches have never meant less in American society, with information democratized and college becoming a scam.
- Celebrity commencement speakers like Jimmy Fallon aren't equipped to prepare kids for the world that's actually coming.
- Colleges should hire a homeless Vietnam vet to give the real talk—a dirty, exhausted man asking for a cigarette before he starts.
- The homeless vet tells the graduates his actual story: Vietnam, returned home, married a hooker who was molested by her deacon father.
- His wife had a psychotic break due to lack of mental healthcare and burned their house down in the middle of the night.
- He was on a three-day coke bender and drunk when the flames woke him; he pulled his kids out but his wife died in the fire.
- Running into the street half-naked with his kids while their mother burned, the fire department ignored the Bronx house for hours.
- His Christian neighbor took the kids in that night, but the state put them in foster care and destroyed their lives—one's in jail, one's homeless.
- The vet's closing message to the class of 2020: just say fuck it, onward and upward, brighter things ahead—then he lights a cigarette and leaves.
- The graduation ends with stunned, soulless silence from the tick-tock youth watching in their rooms.