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| Lileks: "dyspeptic souls who masked their hatred of humans with high-flown concern for humanity" |
| 2009-07-27 |
| ... from his review of The Watchmen: One exchange stuck out - by which I mean, it made me roll my eyes so hard I almost tipped the couch over. "What happened to the American Dream?" Owl-guy says to the Comedian, after they've dispatched a late-night demonstration demanding more police, instead of masked vigilantes. "It came true!" grins the Comedian, meaning, all the violence and oppression and fear and war. The dream was always a nightmare. It wasn't about a family and a place of your own and a car and a plot of land where your kids could play; it was really about pedophiliac murderers in filthy apartments and Nixon's third term and the repression of alternative energy, and other inevitable consequences of the fascist model masquerading as liberal democracy. It's all very deep when you're in high school and the 'rents are being total Nazis. At this point, though, no one's used the term "American Dream" without scare quotes since the second episode of "Laugh-In," so any piercing insight may ping off the skins of viewers who don't stamp around the mall glowering at the Phonies. It's an artifact of the 80s counterculture, an echo of the dyspeptic souls who masked their hatred of humans with high-flown concern for humanity, a bizarre example of reality denial: the war they insisted was an inevitable outcome of the US posture in the 80s never happened, so they remake the era with Nixon at the helm and kill millions to force us to come to our senses so we won't do the thing . . . that we didn't do. "... dyspeptic souls who masked their hatred of humans with high-flown concern for humanity" -- I had a Constitutional Law professor at the time who fit that description perfectly. He was the "international human rights" advocate who admired Mao Zedong, treated his research assistants like dirt, and spent half the class in Castroesque political rants. Kind of like Bill Ayres without the bombs. |
| Posted by:Mike |