Countercultural?

The Drudge head at the news of the death of Kurt Vonnegut, "Kurt Vonnegut, Writer of Classics of the American Counterculture, Dies at 84... "

Thing is, who amongst us who graduated high school after 1975 hasn't been assigned Slaughterhouse Five in at least one class before their graduation?

I was assigned that book 3 times between 9th and 12th grade.

It's an anti-war, morally relativistic, generally nihilistic portrayal of the human condition. Those are all MAINSTREAM values since the mid-70s.

When it was written, it could be called 'countercultural', but the 'counterculture' is so deeply entrenched (also tired, reactionary, and conservative in the strictest sense of the word), that to still call his works 'countercultural' is to miss the point of what it means to be 'countercultural'.

I liked Kilgore Trout's novel better than any of Funny Guts works, but that's just me.