Coming February 6, 2024 . . .
MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE
by Michael Wolraich
Pre-order at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop
Coming February 6, 2024 . . . MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE by Michael Wolraich Pre-order at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop |
Apparently I was more right about the Alternative Right than I ever thought.
Comments
I think it is, actually.
It's small and nascent, but there's a bunch of legitimate anger out there about the public discourse and, well, these guys (mostly guys) are satirizing a bunch of stuff in an effective way.
Fortunately, there's an alt left out there and it's been doing stand up comedy for a long time. We should make it more prominent.
by Michael Maiello on Thu, 05/05/2016 - 9:07pm
It's a bit like Weimar "stabbed in the back" mentality - you can always raise people's ire if you seem to be on the defrauded outside rather than a connected mover-and-shaker. A faux war against "establishment" from people who are already establishment. I've seen it where I live in Europe, where the traditional 2 parties were replaced by "outsider" parties with better connections than the originals - purely kabuki, a shell-game. The guys with the money are still pulling all the strings.
Sometimes it's better with the son-of-a-bitch you know than the one you don't know. Especially if the new son-of-a-bitch is completely unhinged with truly violent mood swings. But even that's kabuki. People come for a reality show and he gives them one. Politics is deathly dull, especially for a year+ run for President. The first 6 months, journalists are pulling stuff out of thin air. I remember taking advantage of this one time, as a magazine reporter came to interview me in a 3rd world country and look around, and I basically dropped the whole story in his lap with lede and all. It was a good story, for the most part true, and he ran with it. But I could have told him cows are birthing chimpanzees and he would have been tempted to write it, as he had to have something to fill the space on a feature story.
And Trump's done that. The journalists come to promote Fight Club, not "see, nothing's happening here", and they'll make any unlikely contender a possibility just to create more ink. Only thing is, this balloon's not so easy to pop once it's full.
In the case of the alt-right man-behind-the-curtain, yeah, not the first time a paid shill has gotten tired of being the beard. But it's also a question whether the rich guys directing the show aren't a bit too complacent - sometimes trains are runaway trains. It seems unlikely that the "revolution" will become a true revolution, as discussed several times on this site, but stranger things have happened. Wikileaks precipitated the Arab Spring by revealing the corruption that was going on. Occupy Wall Street gave us some memes without too much success, and Sanders has built on those - but at some point there can be critical mass, dam burst, even some kind of unlikely allies scenario. We try to talk about reason and logic and all, but there's nothing logical once Chaos hits. Caveat Vendor.
by PeraclesPlease on Fri, 05/06/2016 - 3:04am