Vonnegut dead at 84

So it goes.

For some reason, MSNBC placed the obit in the "Entertainment" section. While Vonnegut was most certainly entertaining, he was also writer, philosopher, critic, theorist and teacher. Just because all of those things happened to happen in books that became popular does not mean that he should be relegated to the same page as "Paris vs Lindsay." When Derrida died, it was international headline news. Vonnegut dies, and we get a cheeky pic of him and some of his best quotes.
Of course, Vonnegut might have liked it better this way. Very postmodern, very attuned to the tensions in today's world (is war really "television"?) Criticism via book is now entertainment; how else could we read his bleak novels but as "dark humor"? Only two of his novels could be classified as "dystopian fiction" but all of his writing has dystopian rhetoric. Entertainment? Maybe. If it's just entertainment, the impetus to act on his criticism falls elsewhere. Mere diversons. Not a call to action. A good story. Nice for a high school curriculum because the F word is used, but thinking is required to follow the plot.
Vonnegut and Burke would have gotten along swimmingly. Sometimes they blend into the same man in my head: the same wild white-grey hair, the same humanist tendencies, the same purification of war always in the back of their heads. Burke, however, had a lot more faith in the human race than Vonnegut did--or at least than Kilgore Trout did. I don't think Vonnegut would have bothered writing about how fucked up we are if he was truly fatalistic. His narrative voice is fatalistic, but the fact that he put the energy into narrating says something else: There's hope, somewhere, in some people.
God Bless You, Dr Kevorkian. Vonnegut finally is experiencing the hallucinagenic novel about the afterlife. Poo Tee Weet. Don't worry, Kurt. We'll take over from here.
"You were sick, but now you're well again, and there's work to do." Kilgore Trout, Timequake.