I am reading a book, and I am fascinated by it. It is "What is the Matter with Kansas?" by Thomas Frank. A few facts are worth mentioning:
1. The book is the most thorough and brutal critique of declining American values and savage capitalism I have read for a long while. I have been resisting reading it for god knows what stupid reason, and I am so glad I picked it from the B&N shelf! I truly regret not having any litteratis and geeks around me, pointing wisely to the well-written books as soon as they appear on the bookstore shelves. Instead, I have friends who are desperate housewives and/or political/literary ignoramuses (very much like myself, as you may have noticed)
2. The writer is from Kansas. This, too is very significant. No, not because I want to defend my rural 'shady' links to red state Kansas, but because the book showed me very convincingly (I lived there, I have a first hand experience of what he is talking about) that Americans are capable of rigorous, academic self-criticism, and they are very good at it. This is a very challenging argument to come from someone like me, who had lost hope in this 'culture'. It can even be extended to another side argument: that critical theory exists in America. This, for me, in itself and for itself, is a major discovery but about this, later. I liked the book much better than Baudrillard's l'Amerique, for the simple reason that the American writer is not simply "observing" and passively "hating" the place - instead, he is observing with a melancholy that I can emphatize with, with compassion for a place that once was so liberal: and he has a goal: to make this place a better place. I don't see how Baudrillard's book can make this place-any place-better. This may be the difference between a constructive critique and destructive critique - while I truly emphatize with French critical theorists, their muddling through and extreme anti-Americanism is sometimes hard to digest, and much can be said about the American liberals who are trying to do something in conditions much more difficult than their French colleagues. Waiter, a hot kudos to Thomas Frank. Make it double...