Vonnegut: The Sacred Cow

The conservatives couldn’t even keep their hands off Kurt Vonnegut ’44. Fox News’ obit of Our Man in Heaven (which you can see yourself at politicstv.com) was too smoothly executed to be a hatchet job. So let’s just call it a job.

The yokels over at Fox knocked the life’s work of one of the most famous Sunnies ever as “sci-fi mumbo jumbo” and “left-wing screeds.” They said he could never hope for “induction into the great pantheon of American writers.”

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“By the late ’70s,” they said, “Vonnegut was rich and irrelevant, a subject of other people’s books, a sacred cow of the New York literary scene.”

As far as I can tell, Bokonism, KV’s fictional religion, doesn’t have a sacred cow.

But the worst was Foxy James Rosen’s sign-off:

“Vonnegut, who failed at suicide 23 years ago, said 34 years ago that he hoped his children wouldn’t say of him when he was gone, ‘He made wonderful jokes, but he was such an unhappy man.’”

“So,” Rosen said, “I’ll say it for them.”

I’ll say it for them? Special Correspondent Shit-for-Brains, have you no decency? The guy practically died yesterday.

The fact is, Fox’s shameless smear-job is characteristic of the concerted rhetorical campaign by the Christian Right and the national GOP to label their opponents as godless, effeminate intellectuals.

It’s not in the least surprising that the same nudniks who brought us the Culture Wars, the War on Christmas and, most recently, the War on Kurt, also brought us the War in Iraq.

Which is why, when the campus right clamored for “intellectual diversity” after Poor Jem Rabkin announced his departure, I couldn’t help but be skeptical.

In its characterization of liberals as godless Volvo-driving, Birkenstock-wearing, latte-drinking (Vonnegut-reading?) college professors, the right promotes a dangerous, religiously charged brand of anti-intellectualism, one that conflates intellect not only with sinfulness, but also with a sort of locker-room pansy-ism. When rightwing spin doctors slam John Kerry, for example, for drinking wine instead of beer (failing, conveniently, to mention that the current president is practically part of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union), the message is supposed to be that “these people don’t share our values.”

Perhaps the message is one of class, a twisted sort of framing of the issues that allows southwestern oil-men to point to northeastern patricians as the “true” representatives of the rich elite. But what the right is really saying of their opposition is that they are a bunch of wimps who don’t believe in God and think they’re smarter than everybody else. When Dick Cheney gets up and says the country might not have “the stomach” to continue the war, he’s really suggesting the left is lacking in another piece of anatomy. When Ann Coulter calls John Edwards a faggot — no explanation is necesssary.

Since the beginning of American history, the opponents of intellectuals have engaged in what Paul Krugman recently called the “little lies,” the smears that, bit-by-bit, erode opponents’ moral standing. The right wants to equate belief in God with being a good American. It also tries to roll intellectualism and effeminateness into the “ungodly” bundle. The right accused Kerry, as they did Thomas Jefferson, of being “French.” They were trying to compare him to a society that, in their mind, is anti-religious, overly intellectual and oversexed.

The American right and the Christian Right combine forces to dishonestly smear their opponents as being against an “American virtue” that they get to define. It’s how Vonnegut goes from being one of the nation’s great literary minds to being a screed-writing sacred cow — and a New Yorker to boot. The right defines “American virtue” as one that is God-fearing, masculine and neither overly sensual nor overly intellectual.

So when the “intellectual diversity” pardoners come knocking, it’s a hard sell. Is this the kind of “dialogue” the Republicans want to bring to campuses? Is the semiotic smearing and politicization of everything academic really a worthy goal? Somehow, I’m not quite convinced.

And frankly, it’s time for the left to play just as hard as the right. Just because we’re liberals doesn’t mean we need to stand there while we get screwed with our pants on. This is Sharks and Jets. Red Sox and Yankees. Justice League and Superfriends. Hatfields and McCoys.

It’s time we said enough to the right’s insistence that liberals play by the rules while conservatives run wild. Forget the national GOP. The Cornell Republicans are the party of Ann “John Edwards is a faggot” Coulter ’84 and Paul “I gave my girlfriend a raise and invented the Iraq War” Wolfowitz ’65.

So what if Poor Jem Rabkin wants to retreat to the comforting bosom of the Bush-strokers at George Mason Law School?

Who cares if the campus right is all in a tizzy about intellectual diversity?

I say, forget ’em. Next, please.

David Wittenberg is a Senior Editor at The Sun. He can be contacted at daw49@cornell.edu. The Scoop will appear alternate Thursdays.