Incisive analysis about “the power of culture to inflame our emotions” and render reasonable debate inert.
A movie is more than just a movie in this exploration of the symbiotic shifts of politics and popular culture.
In a country that once prized pluralism and consensus, the center will no longer hold, as superheroes, zombies, and apocalyptic action flicks have pushed popular culture both toward the far left (Avatar) and the far right (Clint Eastwood). “Eastwood begat Reagan and Rambo, who came and went,” writes Vanity Fair contributing editor Biskind (My Lunches with Orson: Conversations between Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles, 2013, etc.), “but the culture continued its rightward drift, arriving at Steve Bannon, who famously said, ‘Darkness is good.’ ” The author shows how the standard tropes of popular narrative—the good guys vanquishing the bad guys who spread crime and chaos—have been subverted by both the left and the right. Biskind’s analysis tends to reduce popular culture into ideological tracts, regardless of entertainment value, and to become mired in plot summaries. However, he convincingly demonstrates how movies and TV have softened—or hardened—audiences toward an embrace of the extreme, past the point where reason, pragmatism, and conventional morality hold sway. Emphasizing attitudes on authority and on aliens, monsters, or anything that poses a threat to humanity by being different, the author maintains that today’s blockbusters “have normalized the extremes so they have become the new mainstream….Reason and science are on the defensive, while behavior that was once beyond the pale…has become the new norm as the public good is replaced by self-interest.” Though the popular shifts help account for the rise of Donald Trump, Biskind shows how both parties invoked the apocalypse to appeal to voters inflamed by the endgame scenarios of popular culture. “No longer,” he writes, “are we fighting for our way of life, or, as Superman put it, for ‘truth, justice and the American way.’ Now the stakes are considerably higher. We are fighting for life itself.”
Incisive analysis about “the power of culture to inflame our emotions” and render reasonable debate inert.Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-62097-429-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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