Ouch…
CJR Daily’s Gal Beckerman torches James Rosen for his Kurt Vonnegut obituary piece on FNC…
Rosen’s idea of the “CliffsNotes version” included the following: a selective rendering of Vonnegut’s life (”by the late seventies, Vonnegut was rich and irrelevant, the subject of other people’s books, a sacred cow of the New York literary scene”); a focus on his politics, bound to rouse the base, and none on his philosophy or art (”Vonnegut thought Richard Nixon was not evil, just mean, and that Ronald Reagan was old-fashioned, ignorant, provincial and dangerous”); and only one other voice besides Rosen’s own disparaging one, that of the great literary critic, John Podhoretz (yes, J-Pod), whose assessment of Vonnegut amounts to this: “He drew explicit parallels between his experience in WWII witnessing the German city of Dresden bombed by allied forced and the American involvement in Vietnam. It’s one of the reasons it was so popular and it’s also the reason why it was a very, very radical book in its time.”
Do Vonnegut’s astute observations about our national life make it through, even just a single sound bite? Well, there is this piece of his, in Rosen’s words, “despondent leftism,” clipped from a speech presumably around the time of the Republican National convention in New York: “The bad news is that the Martians have landed in New York City and have checked in at the Waldorf. The good news is that they only eat homeless men, women and children of all colors. And they pee gasoline.”
To put a nail in the coffin of this smear, Rosen, in full gravitas, tops himself and leaves no doubt about how he feels: “Vonnegut, who failed at suicide twenty-three years ago, said thirty-four years ago that he hoped his children wouldn’t say of him, when he was gone, that he made wonderful jokes but he was such an unhappy man. So I’ll say it for them.”
I appreciated Rosen’s “CliffsNotes version”. I also knew Vonnegut (though I would not claim well), and I think he would have - at the least - not disliked the tribute.
Regardless, the only smear is that article…..
Comment by daubermaus — April 17, 2007 @ 6:51 pm
I heard it on Special Report last week. I have to admit I was taken aback by what seemed to be harsh criticism. But daubermaus is right. Vonnegut was a sarcastic, bitter, troubled old man. If he had written his own obituary, it probably would have sounded exactly like Rosen’s piece. He would be pleased with it.
Comment by erljr — April 17, 2007 @ 7:43 pm
I actually cringed when I heard it. I doubt he’d be pleased with Rosen’s piece. It was as bad as Beckerman describes.
Comment by RC — April 18, 2007 @ 1:38 pm
It’s available on Fox.com now. I showed it to my husband who was a bit closer to Vonnegut, and I asked a friend who was professionally and socially close to the man to view it. They both agreed that it was a good tribute and that Vonnegut would probably have gotten a chuckle from it.
Those who are offended, I suspect, are veiwing it from the strictly political lense of left vs right without understanding the man or his writings.
Comment by daubermaus — April 18, 2007 @ 4:10 pm