“The patron saints of the counterculture idea are, of course, the Beats, whose frenzied style and merry alienation still maintain a powerful grip on the American imagination. Even forty years after the publication of On the Road, the works of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs remain the sine qua non of dissidence, the model for aspiring …
That Wholesome Glow
“The critic of Thomas Kinkade paintings, where all the puddles on the ground have their eerie radioactive glow, and all the bungalows look like the living room has just caught on fire, is assumed to be a critic who is hostile to home, hearth, and wholesome family values. But the actual object of his hostility …
Revolution Through Consumption
“What we thought was really eerie, though, was the way mass culture reflected the high critics’ priorities. While they spoke proudly of their own subversiveness and turned out account after account of the liberating potential of each act of consuming, the culture industry itself grabbed with both hands at the golden promise of rebellion-through-consumption. The …
Adjectives Don’t Exist
“Abstractions like truth, beauty, and green are necessary in order for us to communicate at all. But we must be careful here because our entire problem rests in what we have thought we are allowed to do with abstractions. The lack of ‘existence’ is true of all adjectives, including those adjectives we call numbers. One, …
Modernism and Plato
“But Western culture needed more time in the detox center than was actually spent there, and the temptation to go back to realist assumptions has been constant and unrelenting. This has been particularly the case with mathematics and its cousins — theoretical physics and symbolic logic in particular. Many modern fads and fashions — the …
Honky Tonk Piccolo
“Far more is involved in learning how to do this than just making a list of words that can be used — whether never, occasionally, or all the time. Someone who has a generally pietistic cast of mind cannot just throw a word in here or there — that would be like trying to play …
Hip Off the Rack
“The sixties are more than merely the homeland of hip, they are a commercial template for our times, a historical prototype for the construction of cultural machines that transform alienation and despair into consent. Co-option is something much more complex than the struggle back and forth between capital and youth revolution; it’s also something larger …
To Win Christ
[Speaking of Phil. 3:8] The King James is better than most, translating one particular word here as dung. The word is skubalon, and means in the first place some kind of animal excrement. And this verse helps show the problem we are in–Paul does teach elsewhere that we are to avoid filthiness in our speech, …
Urged to a Life of Love
“The truly astonishing thing for many modern readers (were we to notice) is how Paul continues. Right after he says that he wishes his theological opponents would overachieve and cut off more than they were currently advocating, he then goes on, in the next breath, to urge the Galatians to a life of love. The …
The Un-Ad
“Bernbach was the first adman to embrace the mass society critique, to appeal directly to the powerful but unmentionable public fears of conformity, of manipulation, of fraud, and of powerlessness, and to sell products by so doing. He invented what we might call anti-advertising: a style which harnessed public mistrust of consumerism-perhaps the most powerful …