…on writing a Kurt Vonnegut remembrance, what with all the verbal tonnage that gets generated whenever a “Sixties Generation Icon” (SGI) dies.

But note must be made of a particularly vile obit segment on the Fox Pseudo-News Channel. As you watch the linked clip, remember: This was a taped “actuality” piece, not a live rant by a commentator. This is from the part of the channel’s output that’s still billed as fair-n’-balanced.

If you can’t stomach watching it, I’ll tell you what you already suspect: James Rosen totally trashes the beloved author and everything he stood for, dismissing Vonnegut as a morose loser whose refusal to conform to right-wing ideological obedience sealed his pathetic, irrelevant fate.

Now: What I have to say about Vonnegut. His SGI status seemed odd to me. Vonnegut was well past 30 by ’68. He was an old-school Eugene Debs socialist. His novels and stories were sad/angry/brutal, not mellow or fluffy or self-aggrandizing. He never set himself up as anybody’s guru.

Like Stephen King, Vonnegut learned his craft selling short stories to mass entertainment magazines, back when fiction was still a big part of most big mags’ menus. It was there that he learned all the little details of comic timing, of repetition, of strong characterizations and brisk plots. He learned how to be both populist and popular.

The “So it goes” fatalism pinned on him by some obit writers was actually an attitude he’d been reacting against in his work. No, Mr. Rosen, Vonnegut wasn’t a defeatist cynic. He was an angry young man who stayed angry in his old age, and deservedly so.

He was also an artist who, in his wit and his inventiveness and his unbending adherence to moral principles, provided an aesthetic vision of how the world ought to be, even as his plots revealed/symbolized the sorry state of the world as it was.