Sore Winners
American Idols, Patriotic Shoppers, and Other Strange Species in George Bush's America
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Politics and culture, culture and politics. They’ve never been normal in America, but today they’re weirder than ever. Millionaire populists like Bill O’Reilly and Michael Moore dominate a political scene spinning ever further from the real world; meanwhile, we look to bizarre experiments like “Survivor” for our daily dose of reality.In this wonderfully acerbic tour through our increasingly unhinged culture, John Powers takes on celebrities and evangelicals, pundits and politicians, making sense of the mess for the rest of us. He shows how we have come to equate consumerism with patriotism and Fox News with objective journalism, and how our culture has become more polarized than ever even as we all shop at the same exact big-box stores. Insightful, hilarious, and critical of both liberals and conservatives, this is one of the smartest and most enjoyable books on American culture in years.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
From Bush's infamous "how dare you ask Chirac a question in French" press conference to Colin and Condi as tokenism writ large, L.A. Weekly deputy editor Powers marshals a host of sometimes obvious, media-based critiques in portraying Bush & co. as "sore winners," the products of a populist, social Darwinist culture where doing what you want because you can is OK. Episodic chapters veer in too many directions, incorporating pre-cooked chunks of presidential media history, myriad literary and pop culture allusions (everything from Robert Musil and Preston Sturges to Alice Sebold and Courtney Love) and even Powers's decidedly layman's assessment of what he deems (sore winner) Rumsfeld's lack of planning for postwar Iraq. But Powers's deconstructions of Bush-era political coverage, though too predictable when dealing with the right, have marked range and subtlety when discussing the left's attempts at fighting back. He's best, though, on the sore winner effect writ large, describing a kind of flip side of the late '90s Bobos in Paradise: a mean-spirited, you-deserve-it mentality that Powers finds in everything from American Splendor to American Idol. Powers can be very funny (as when advocating an "irony enema" for commentator Roger Rosenblatt), but scion Bush as sore winner isn't news, and the book is too thick with kitchen-sink ruminations to work as a whole.
