Posts tagged `America`
Blood, Class and Empire Blood, Class and Empire by Christopher Hitchens
Publisher: Nation Books
Year: 1990/2004
Pages: 432

Nowadays, Christopher Hitchens is usually known either for his antitheist views or his staunch support for the war in Iraq; it’s often forgotten that The Hitch has been a journalist for a long time, is fiercely intelligent, and his total output spans a variety of topics, not just his most recent polemical choices. I read some of his collected essays, Love, Poverty, and War, which was fabulous (and only switched to Iraq-related topics late in the book).

Blood, Class and Empire was published originally in 1990, though it reads as though written in 1988, at the beginning of George H.W. Bush’s term in office. Though the book in its republished form sports a preface by Hitchens that ties the book into the recent events, it’s important to remember that the book has no knowledge of anything that’s happened in the last 20 years, which somehow strange and unsettling when reading about geopolitics.

Read more…


It’s the most wonderful time of the year: Buffalo Beast, a scathing satirical people, has finally published their annual “50 Most Loathsome People In America” article for 2008.

As always, here are three of my favorites, and a link to the full article.

35. Dina Lohan

Charges: Fame isn’t the only thing that screws up child stars; it starts with self-obsessed, psychopathic parents living out their failed ambitions through their hapless offspring (Dina has been telling false stories of her days as a Rockette and Broadway actress for years). Her college-aged daughter may be a rehab veteran and serial drunk driver, but that’s no reason for mom not to televise the warping of daughter number two, a pre-rhinoplasty 14-year-old with no discernible talent or personality who calls the absent Lindsay her “role model,” and an 11-year-old boy whose future mugshot will no doubt become iconic. You may think your parents sucked, but at least they didn’t do it on TV.

Exhibit A: Rarely has a person’s life been so succinctly synopsized by real events as when Lohan’s house caught fire with her minor children alone inside while she was busy accepting—no shit—a “Mother of the Year” award.

Sentence: Age, ugliness, poverty, obscurity.

31. Stephenie Meyer

Charges: She’s the unforgivably perky Mormon mom who wrote the Twilight Series of books, currently draining IQ points from Western Civilization. This silly wank-off vampire fantasy for teenage girls has been embraced by legions of sad, middle-aged women who fight for access to their daughters’ sticky copies of the books. It’s an embarrassing spectacle for all Americans who aren’t actively participating in it. Meyer admits she can’t handle the better class of vampires and has never watched a whole vampire movie, even the more anemic kind: “I’ve seen little pieces of Interview with a Vampire when it was on TV, but I kind of always go YUCK! I don’t watch R-rated movies, so that really cuts down on a lot of the horror. And I think I’ve seen a couple of pieces of The Lost Boys, which my husband liked, and he wanted me to watch it once, but I was like, ‘It’s creepy!’”

Exhibit A: The hit movie version of Twilight, featuring Meyer’s dreary characters, a tiresome teenage girl and the pathetic “vegetarian” vampire who loves her, mooning around on first base for two hours and giving vampires everywhere a bad name.

Sentence: Meyer encounters a non-vegetarian vampire, who kills her immediately and gruesomely in front of an appreciative audience of horror film fans.

17. Rod Blagojevich

Charges: Some things are worse than being bald—Blagojevic [sic] should have given that senate seat to John Edwards’s barber. A sad truth about Blago is that he’s not really in trouble for corruption, abuse of power or favor-trading, all of which are routines practices in just about every elected official’s office across the nation; he’s in trouble for being so damn rude about it, and for not being smart enough to realize what “appreciation” means to more careful favor-traders.

Exhibit A: “[O]ur recommendation is fire all those fucking people, get ‘em the fuck out of there and get us some editorial support.”

Sentence: Flesh removed a pound at a time and used as topping on deep dish pizza, which he is force-fed while his wife spews obscenities at him and Eugene Robinson writes scathing editorials about it.

§3539 · January 12, 2009 · (No comments) · Tags: , ,

Great. Now expect the U.S. to be five years behind Sweden and Japan and most of the the other established countries in the world.

§2034 · April 6, 2008 · (No comments) · Tags: , , ,