From the cultural critic "Wired" called "provocative and cuttingly
humorous" comes a viciously funny, joltingly insightful collection
of drive-by critiques of contemporary America where chaos is the
new normal. Exploring the darkest corners of the national psyche
and the nethermost regions of the self--the gothic, the grotesque,
and the carnivalesque--Mark Dery makes sense of the cultural
dynamics of the American madhouse early in the twenty-first
century.
Here are essays on the pornographic fantasies of "Star Trek"
fans, Facebook as Limbo of the Lost, George W. Bush's fear of his
inner queer, the theme-parking of the Holocaust, the homoerotic
subtext of the Super Bowl, the hidden agendas of IQ tests, Santa's
secret kinship with Satan, the sadism of dentists, Hitler's
afterlife on YouTube, the sexual identity of "2001"'s HAL, the
suicide note considered as a literary genre, the surrealist poetry
of robot spam, the zombie apocalypse, Lady Gaga, the Church of
Euthanasia, toy guns in the dream lives of American boys, and the
polymorphous perversity of Madonna's big toe.
Dery casts a critical eye on the accepted order of things,
boldly crossing into the intellectual no-fly zones demarcated by
cultural warriors on both sides of America's ideological divide:
controversy-phobic corporate media, blinkered academic elites, and
middlebrow tastemakers. Intellectually omnivorous and promiscuously
interdisciplinary, Dery's writing is a generalist's guilty pleasure
in an age of nanospecialization and niche marketing. From
Menckenesque polemics on American society and deft deconstructions
of pop culture to unflinching personal essays in which Dery turns
his scalpel-sharp wit on himself, "I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts"
is a head-spinning intellectual ride through American dreams and
American nightmares.
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