…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.

…in the ol’ reality-based commuity, folks. Columnist Molly Ivins has succumbed to cancer at 62. The Texas tornado was among Bush’s earliest and strongest observers/opponents, and never veered from her well-spoken progressive populist stance. She’s already missed.

…Here’s a ’40s-era abridged and illustrated version of Friedrich A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. The original book was an American “free market” economist’s thesis on how “centralized planning” would always lead to one or another flavor of fascism. Hayek (no relation to Salma) clearly intended an anti-liberal (specifically anti-New Deal), pro-libertarian statement. But, at least in this condensed version, it’s eerily prescient about modern pseudo-“conservative” ideology.

…points out exactly where the American left made its big wrong turn, in learning “to love ‘identity’ and ignore inequality.”

The longtime P-I consumer-action and trivia columnist really was the total embodiment of the trenchcoat-and-fedora newspaperman, and a perfect gentleman to boot.

…Jim Emerson really needs to get a better picture of himself on his site, but the content makes up for it–a veritable cornucopia of film-related fascinations. Chief among his current obsessions: the opening shots of favorite films.

…one of the most explicit yet poetic sets of reasons for “Why I love women.”

Weeks after art critic Regina Hackett quoted Dale Chihuly saying “pig shit,” theater critic Joe Adcock quotes playwright Ki Gottberg referring to two of her characters as “hairy muthafuckas.”

…the art of fiction in the U.S. is stagnating; particularly the short story, a “dead form” which has “exhausted the conditions for its existence.” Her Rx: “Write long novels, pointless novels. Do not be ashamed to grieve about personal things. Dear young writers, write with dignity, not in guilt.”

Remember when we told you about Adele Ferguson, the troglodyte local political columnist who returned to infamy with a little piece about the goodness of slavery? Thanks to negative national publicity spread by weblogs, her editor has announced her contract won’t be renewed.

…always been one of those pundits with whom I agree but whom I don’t like to read. His usual schtick is to proclaim there’s a Big Truth out there the mainstream media won’t tell you, but then to pontificate about the media’s failings rather than just tell us this supposed hidden Truth.

But now, for once, he’s gone ahead and told us the Truth as he believes it to be. Specifically, that the Iraq War would still be the wrong thing to do even if it weren’t so incompetently waged.

…the fake memoir schtick has indeed merged with the older fake Native American schtick.

…big business and its wholly-owned politicians have so thoroughly and deliberately disassembled America’s social and economic infrastructure that we’re not a “superpower” anymore. That might actually be a positive thing. Let Time founder Henry Luce’s “American Century” pass into history, along with the “We’re Number One” chants, those expensive and bloody crusades on behalf of “democracy” (i.e., oil), the trashing of everything noble and hopeful about the human species in the name of shareholder value, and the glut of special-effects-leaden sequel movies in the world’s cinemas. Let’s go back to being one country among many.

Weaving Women’s Words: Seattle Stories isn’t about weavers.

…currently touring in Ireland submits its list of “bands and their corresponding authors.” Nirvana paired up with Wm. Burroughs is appropriate, since Cobain and Burroughs collaborated on a spoken-word CD single. Public Enemy/Langston Hughes and The Doors/Jack Kerouac also seem right, even though Kerouac was more of a jazz fan. Some of the other pairings, though, seem a bit odd, such as AC/DC with Julia Child and Tori Amos with Alice Walker.