The immigrants had a work ethic that made Trollope look like a simian

RE: the recent canonization of Kurt Vonnegut. It’s not hard to find the expected honorifics in the various obits and Vonnegut-centered features, likewise in the comments appended to them. If you poked around long enough, you might find a few people who took his death as inducement to symbol-searching, which often resulted in dismally serious “we live in dark times” pronouncements. These are dark times, as, I would assume, most times are, and though the era lacks a distinguishing mark1, one recurring theme is clear: our unerring need to carve the recent present into discrete, disposable parts.

Today’s events are rendered significant, labeled and packaged in rhetorically bloated clothing, then left to calcify on the sidelines until tomorrow’s news cycle arrives and become assimilated again. Our appetites hold us steady in the process by which we think we might become satiated. Righteous indignation quickly becomes pussified through sheer hubristic repetition, consecratory gestures turn out to be all shadow when put on public display, and at odd intervals it becomes obvious that the mass of opinions we wade through on a daily basis have fucked with, if not wholly infantilized, our ethical sense, whatever exactly that may be.

The edge to Vonnegut’s work – or what I recall of Vonnegut’s work – lingered on the question of what comforts can be derived from an effort to be decent, which I’ll proffer as the thing the ethical sense is calibrated to recognize and pursue. In Vonnegut, decency is the necessary but elusive salve that can lessen the pain of loneliness, the unalterable wound afflicting the modern, mostly American types that populate his fiction. Accumulated wisdom, housed in historical documents and examples and in the teachings of prophets and soothsayers, braces the effort to be decent but is generally lost in the shuffle. Good-hearted but essentially fallible characters make attempts to do some good and prevail over loneliness. Over and over, they fail, except in brief instances when they don’t. Before too long, the human aggregate, forever limping toward the finish line, catches up to them and off they go again, trying to right themselves.

And so on, with variations that enlarge and enliven each other from novel to novel, adding up – in my view – to something rich and American and worthy of celebration if you can stomach celebrating something that bears traces of a complete and unbroken fidelity to sadness.

I had pretty much forgotten about Mr. Vonnegut prior to his death. The media swell suggested he was an inveterate pessimist, and he may have been. The interviews and profiles I read made it seem like he viewed pessimism as a direct consequence of seeing things with as much as honesty as he could muster. An ethos, then: the world is broken and our efforts to fix it are at best ineffectual. You add to the problem if you suggest otherwise or avert your eyes completely. You can leaven your ineffectuality with curiosity, bemusement, and an appreciation of the good in whatever form you find it.

It seems like Vonnegut’s large scale response to this set of circumstances was to depict stories that would entertain people (maybe make them more expansive in the process) and to call bullshit on hypocrisy as he perceived it. By all accounts his small scale response was to be as gracious, kind, and decent a person as he possibly could be. The weave of personality that connects the artist (to whom we still have access) and the persona presented to the world (to whom we probably never did) doesn’t work through the large and small scales in a clearly defined pattern.

As a result, synecdoche has little purchase when applied to Vonnegut if all it does is make his death an occasion for sorrowing. There’s little evidence that he thought his death an occasion for sorrow. Simply put, he was an octogenarian who died after protesting in interview after interview that he was (RIP B.I.G.) ready to die. I’d rather Updike die than he (for me, the difference between the death of Updike and the death of the wooly-legged spider crawling across my ceiling is negligible at this point), but any keening worth the effort seems more appropriately directed at the clusterfuck tragedies parading around in our collective consciousness right now.

1. What, literally, are these times called? The Aughts? The Zeroes? And what do we call the progeny of the Boomers? Am I one of this unnamed generation? Is this confusion a direct consequence of the fragmentation of media and lifestyle choices that began in the 80s and continues today to an ever greater degree? Once we weren't shackled to ABC, NBC, and ABC and the big three newspapers, did it become impossible to harness an entire demographic within a given term? Or is it that we're not trying hard enough? You tell me.