NYT Book Review of New Yorker's mammoth cartoon book
I can't decide if this guy is for real...:
Now that America's urbane sophisticates have had to acknowledge their status as a fringe group so out of touch with mainstream moral values, tournament bass fishing, Nascar and Christian rock that their electoral and cultural clout is marginally less than that of Casper, Wyo., legions of self-doubting highbrows are asking themselves how this decline into decadence occurred.And then later:
Because of what enfeebling bad habit did the proud and potent thinking class that gave us F.D.R. and J.F.K. fade into a cynical, ironic, smirking bunch of spiritual weaklings headed up by Al Franken and Michael Moore? Was the problem attending movies instead of church? Deserting Burger King for Whole Foods Market? No, I've concluded. The blame lies elsewhere. The seduction of America's elites by the vices of humanism and skepticism can only be blamed on the New Yorker cartoon, an agent of corruption more insidious than LSD or the electric guitar.
And though it would be foolish to suggest the medium has run its course and that renaissance and revival aren't still possible (America might elect another Democratic Senate someday, too) one does sense that the cartoons have done the job they first set out to do: purging any lingering puritanism from their relatively well-heeled audience and replacing it with a smart-aleck self-awareness that suddenly -- just look around -- feels useless, lonely and crippling.Wow. So, since I find Roz Chast funny, I am probably a smart-aleck who feels useless, lonely, and crippled in Bushite America.
Oh dear god, he's right! What to do?
posted by AmyN @ 12/28/2004 09:02:00 AM
2 comments
2 Comments:
One of the things I find extremely alarming about our lurch to the far right in the US in any arena -- cultural or political -- is that it recalls the surreal flavor around the growth of European fascism (and other facsimile fascisms like in Brazil) in the 1930s, where "realists" saw fascism as the inevitable future, whether or not they liked it.
Max is certainly onto something. Once people conclude that something unpleasant - fascism, say - is inevitable, they facilitate its onset by making what arrangements they can to deal with it.
Speaking of cartoons in The New Yorker, there's a really weird one in the current issue (cats and mice on the cover) involving, I think, two slices of bread wearing suits and sitting on sofa in front of a big toaster that's tipped to face them. One asks the other if the kids are in bed. Woah!
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